Holy Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  “So you can die somewhere more familiar?” Clera shrieked. She turned to go.

  “The ring’s a gate. A magic gate. This is the key!” Nona tried to speed up but her body seemed unwilling to listen to her.

  Clera held back, waiting for them. Too terrified to stand still, her nervous energy had her bouncing off the walls. “Hurry! Hurry!”

  Nona drew close to Clera with Ara a few yards behind. The girl started to back away. It said a lot for the shipheart’s aura that even knowing it was the key to her salvation, Clera didn’t seem in the least bit tempted to snatch it and run off.

  The distant thunder had definitely become less distant. An intensifying roar echoed their way, punctuated by a series of booms. The air rushed past them so fast now that it seemed to push them along, almost lifting them off the ground.

  Ara’s breath grew ragged, drawn in in great despairing gasps. Nona felt the knife in her leg every time she set her weight upon it, and hot blood trickled down her back. Clera danced ahead of them, wild with fear, screaming at both of them to hurry up. Nona retreated into her core, her world reducing to a monotony of pain and running, one agonizing step after the next. Back along the tunnels Lano Tacsis had died. A sudden death and better than he deserved, but Nona’s spite had burned itself out on the father, Thuran. The cruel end she had given that old man, who lingered even now, was a stain on her soul. She knew that. One that all the rushing water aimed in her direction would not clean away. With death so hard upon her heels she wished she could have been a better person, wished she could have saved her friends.

  “Which way?” Clera waited for her where the tunnel split.

  “Here!” Nona forced the shipheart to burn bright and turned a corner into the holothour’s cavern. The creature that they had banished long ago had been one of the few things to have scared Nona more than what was currently rushing up behind them.

  As Nona turned she saw something. At the far end of the long passage they’d run down a white wall was rushing towards them. And halfway between Ara and the fury of that flood something dark and terrible raced forward, almost as fast as the water. One black figure whose lack of definition somehow suggested things far worse than any detail could.

  “The Singular!” Clera tore into the chamber ahead of Nona.

  Of all their pursuers somehow the dark heart of the Noi-Guin had kept ahead of the deluge and was now within moments of catching them. The shadows that surged ahead of the Singular carried a new terror with them, a threat that made the white fury behind seem a kindness.

  “Ara!” Nona started to sprint, working her wounded leg, careless of what new damage the knife embedded in her thigh might wreak upon her. “Run!”

  The great ring loomed ahead of them. Clera reached it first and turned, howling at them, “Run, you bitches!”

  The Singular broke into the chamber, a dark fury of shadow boiling around a void, nightmare shapes reaching forward to rend flesh and slice souls. Ropes of darkness lashed out to coil around Nona, sinking midnight teeth through her habit. She staggered on as if dragging a laden wagon behind her. She found herself screaming and every devil in her screamed just as loudly. The Singular’s anger beat at her like hammers.

  “Run!” Clera howled from the ring.

  Just yards remained between Nona and Clera. She heard the whoosh as the Glasswater’s untold gallons hammered around the corner, jetting out into the cavern. She slapped a hand to the ring, crashed into its side, and turned. Ara was a spear’s length behind her, snared and flailing, a red froth around her gasping mouth, the Singular the length of three spears behind her, the talons of his shadows closing around her legs. And behind him, the first surging wave of the flood.

  “Run!” Clera screamed again, her speed breathtaking as she unleashed a barrage of throwing stars into the void where the Singular should be.

  Somehow Ara tore free of the Singular’s shadows and launched herself headlong at the ring. Nona leapt forward in the same moment, knocking Clera through ahead of her. The flood’s roar swallowed their screams. The coldness of the water as it hit them was shocking.

  * * *

  • • •

  SUDDENLY THERE WAS only Clera screaming. She drew another breath, cried out, and fell silent. All that remained was Ara’s gasping and rattling, and Nona’s own panting, barely audible over the deafening pounding of her heart. As she had stepped through the gate Nona had felt the Singular battling her for control of the shipheart, his mind reaching for it. Somehow she had torn free, though, and sealed the gate in the instant she fell out into the emperor’s palace.

  Relief hit Nona, not as a striking of bonds but as a constriction of her throat, a sob, the grief for Ara’s and Clera’s deaths escaping only now that they were saved. She forced herself to hands and knees, crawling clear of the others, taking the shipheart away before collapsing again. Clera stopped screaming and even Nona’s devils were quiet in the moment of silence that followed.

  All three of them lay sprawled in several inches of freezing water in the small square chamber from which Nona had departed Crucical’s basement.

  Clera patted weakly at the water, now running out into the corridor. “Sorry, probably my mess. I think I wet myself.” She levered herself up. “What in all the hells was that? And where are we?”

  Nona rolled over, groaning. “The emperor’s palace.” She pushed herself into a sitting position, her back to the wall, injured leg stretched out before her. Blood clouded the water around the knife hilt. “Ara?”

  “Aren’t I dead yet?” Ara didn’t move a muscle, just lay on her front in the draining flood, her chest heaving.

  “Sorry,” Nona said, “no time for that. I have things for you to do.” She tapped out the code that activated and deactivated the blade-wall outside. “You need to learn this.” She tapped it out again. As her fear, exhaustion, and pain started to subside from the heights reached in the extremes of the escape Nona began to feel Ruli’s distress again, echoing down their thread-bond.

  “One question.” Clera got to her feet, dripping. “Wouldn’t it have been better to start your flood once we got to the ring?”

  “Nearly cracked my skull trying it from the vault. I don’t think I could have done it from the holothour cave. Too far.” Nona drew in a breath, trying to undouble her vision. “Have you got the pattern?”

  “Yes.” From Clera.

  “No.” From Ara.

  “Good enough. I have to go.”

  “Go?” Clera splashed towards the doorway, wanting more distance between her and the shipheart. “Go where?”

  “Don’t leave!” Nona added a layer of marjal coercion to the alarm in her voice. “Check the trap’s not on first.” She pulsed instructions to Ara along their bond. It was easier than talking.

  “Got to . . . got to help Ruli . . .” Nona let out a sigh and dropped her chin to her chest. A moment later the thread-bond took her.

  * * *

  • • •

  RULI’S SCREAMS WERE so loud that Nona couldn’t imagine how they hadn’t heard them in the corridor less than a hundred yards away. The agony was worse than anything Nona had endured that day and yet somehow she knew the girl hadn’t said a word about what she’d seen in the book.

  The pain slackened and as Ruli drew breath Nona heard Jula’s sobs. The novice had been far less closemouthed than her friend. In between her tears she had been telling Sherzal everything she remembered from Aquinas’s Book of the Moon. Which, given it was Jula, was pretty much everything that lay between the book’s covers. Clearly Sherzal’s guards were better educated than most because one of them was making extensive notes as Jula spilled her guts.

  “Stop hurting her! You said you would!”

  “I said I might. When you’ve told us everything.”

  Ruli unscrewed her eyes and brought Sherzal into hazy focus. The emperor’s sister was paci
ng in front of Jula, who sat nearby against the wall. In addition to the note-taking guard two others flanked the girl.

  “Shall we try that again?” A gentle voice close by Ruli’s ear.

  Ruli shivered and tried to turn away but strong fingers gripped her chin and steered her face towards Safira, crouched at her side. Behind Kettle’s former lover stood Joeli Namsis, looking slightly sick.

  Give me your body, Ruli.

  Nona? Sweet Ancestor, I thought you’d abandoned me!

  Give me your body.

  I thought you’d never ask, dear. And with that Ruli fled to the sanctum Nona offered her, surrendering all control.

  One of Ruli’s arms had been bound to her side. The other was in Safira’s grip, the hand flopping uselessly on a broken wrist. But the broken wrist wasn’t the main source of Ruli’s pain and it didn’t stop what Safira was doing to her fingers from reaching her. Safira took another black needle and prepared to push it under one of the only two of Ruli’s fingernails that didn’t yet have one bedded beneath it. Nona supposed they must be coated with something like Red Asp venom. Just needles beneath the fingernails on their own surely couldn’t account for the monstrous agony coursing through Ruli’s hand?

  “Ready?” Safira asked.

  “You’re right to think that Aquinas’s book is the key.” Nona struggled to keep her voice steady, hissing her words past Ruli’s teeth.

  “What?” Safira narrowed her eyes.

  “The book was the key. But you never understood what it was the key to.”

  Safira studied Ruli’s eyes, suspicious. “What are you saying?”

  “Yes, child, do explain yourself.” Sherzal loomed over them both, still smiling. Ruli’s lack of screaming and pleading had drawn her interest. Even Jula’s sobs had fallen silent.

  “Wh . . . who do you think you’re fighting here?” Nona forced a smile onto Ruli’s lips. “The Scithrowl? Your brother? A handful of novices?”

  The smallest frown rippled Sherzal’s brow just above her nose. “Adoma. It’s always been Adoma. At least since Shella Yammal passed to the Ancestor.” Sherzal stepped closer to peer at Ruli’s face. “I knew her of old, you know. Before this silliness of convents and abbesses.”

  Nona spat blood from Ruli’s mouth and forced herself to look at her fingers. The pain was unreal but somehow with the shipheart burning through her nothing else could quite seem to feel more important. “If you had truly known Abbess Glass then you would have known death would not stop her.”

  Sherzal’s eyes widened and she took an involuntary step back. Nona felt Ruli’s surprise too, along with a sudden shock of betrayal. Nona hadn’t told any of them the truth. Not all of it.

  “When the abbess set us hunting for that book she wasn’t after something that held the secrets of the moon . . . just something that you would want very badly. Abbess Glass always played the long game. I thought you knew that?” Nona spat again. “She wanted us to take something that would have you bring us here, past all the emperor’s secrets and defences, right to the gates of the Ark. Why do you think we left it so late? There were years to take that book in. Why do you think we hid our plans so poorly? We couldn’t make it too easy, though. Was it Joeli who found out what we were doing and told you?” Nona drew a breath and locked Ruli’s eyes on Sherzal’s. “Or Markus? Or both?” A pang ran through Nona at the unintended admission on Sherzal’s face. The others had thought including Markus was a stupid move. That he would betray them all in a heartbeat. But they had trusted Nona’s judgment in the end. And while Nona had chosen to include Markus so that there was yet another way Sherzal would know what they were after and want to take it from them . . . deep down Nona had believed Markus would be true, that the fellowship forged in the cage would endure . . .

  “This is nonsense!” Sherzal pulled herself together. “The girl’s just trying to buy time. Get on with it, Safira. And you!” She turned towards Jula. “Every detail, or I will cut this child’s nose and ears from her face and drop them in your lap.”

  Safira leaned in with another needle.

  “Sorry, Kettle,” Nona muttered, and Safira paused, momentarily puzzled. Nona drew on the shipheart’s power and as Safira came into line with the finger intended for her needle Nona drove out a single flaw-blade, twice as long as her usual ones. Safira froze, skewered. The blade entered beneath her chin and emerged from the back of her skull.

  “Safira!” Sherzal stepped forward, impatient with the delay.

  Safira twitched, then slumped. Nona vanished her blade and the woman fell, pinning Ruli and her injured arm to the floor.

  Nona bit down on the pain and continued to address Sherzal as if nothing of consequence had happened. “You brought us here, under pressure, in haste, careless, and you showed us the way in, showed us each trick and trap and secret.”

  “Kill her!” Sherzal barked the words at Joeli and ran for the door by which they had entered.

  “I wouldn’t advise it, Joeli.” Nona locked Ruli’s eyes on the Namsis girl. “I’m waiting for you and there’s no place I won’t find you if you hurt another of my friends.”

  Sherzal halted by the door. “Show me the corridor.”

  What looked like a clear window opened in the middle of the door, but the view shifted as if the window were moving swiftly along the corridor outside.

  “Stop!”

  The image fixed upon three figures. Three dirty, wet, bloodstained figures advancing towards the door. Nona was in the lead and in her arms she held Ara’s limp form, the girl’s eyes glittering through slits. Clera walked ten paces behind Nona, nervous, glancing back along the brightly lit hall.

  “You think the guards you have here will stop us?” Nona asked. It felt very strange to see herself walking towards them. Ara was controlling her flesh just as Nona was controlling Ruli’s.

  “What I think is that the blast doors outside can only be opened from in here,” Sherzal said. “That’s what I think.”

  “If you leave now you might still escape,” Nona said. “You know ways out of this city, tunnels beneath the walls. You have money, contacts, followers. You could buy your way along the ice and come down somewhere where Scithrowl and Durn are half a dozen kingdoms away.”

  “There’s no ‘might’ about it,” Sherzal sneered. “I have sleds that would take me to Reemarla, so far west that Durn is just a rumour. But why should I run? I have everything I want here.”

  Out in the corridor Nona stopped, put Ara down awkwardly, and produced the Noi-Guin shipheart from inside her habit.

  “Lano Tacsis is dead. The Noi-Guin Singular is dead. The Noi-Guin he took with him to Sweet Mercy Convent are dead. We have the shipheart.” Nona said it with Ruli’s mouth, but the smile was all her own.

  “Those girls out there are barely able to walk. Clera is the only one of them who couldn’t be knocked over by a strong breeze.” Sherzal returned the smile. “And she’s mine.”

  “Would you bet your life on it?” Nona asked. “Because I would bet mine that she isn’t.” With Ruli’s good arm bound and the other arm trapped beneath Safira’s cooling body Nona had little to use now but bluff, and she had never been a good liar. The only advantage she had was that she believed what she was saying.

  “If I open the blast doors, why would you let me go? If Clera’s on your side, what would stop her from killing me?”

  “I swear by the Ancestor that we will make no move to stop you from leaving.”

  Sherzal snorted. “The Ancestor?”

  “You have your button. Let Clera and the two nuns past. Show Jula how to raise the blast doors again. If any of them come anywhere near you or try to stay on your side of the doors . . . make your explosion and have your grand end,” Nona said.

  “And if the Scithrowl are already in the palace?” Sherzal demanded.

  “Life is full of gambles,” Nona sa
id. “But my sisters are defending this place and they are not the kind to be overcome easily.”

  “It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size,” Jula quoted, and offered a bloody grin from among Sherzal’s guards.

  “She’s right,” said Nona. “And I’ve seen how many Adoma brought, and frankly I don’t think it’s enough.” Without the shipheart Nona held, Sherzal had nothing to bargain with when Adoma came. Nona and her friends could bottle her in the Ark and leave via the travel-ring as the battle-queen arrived.

  The eyes Sherzal narrowed at Nona sparkled with fury. “This isn’t over. You know that? It won’t ever be over for any of you while I live.” She took the short rod from her gown and wrapped a hand around it, thumb on the button. She folded her arms before her to shield the hand holding the rod. She raised her voice and started towards the exit. “Lower the blast doors.” Turning back, she called to Joeli. “Come, girl.” She waved to the guards with Jula. “Leave her.”

  “No.” Nona said. “They all stay. Someone has to pay.”

  “Vindictive little novice, aren’t you?” Sherzal allowed herself a smile. “At least we have that in common.” She shrugged. “I’ve plenty of guards upstairs. And Joeli’s never really had the stomach for all this, have you, girl? A pity. I thought you might have more of your father in you, but once it got to be more than a few convent games you went to pieces.”

  Joeli shook her head. “No! No! I can do it. Take me with you!”

  Sherzal laughed and strode away. “Perhaps you can change my mind, thread-worker.”

  Nona saw Joeli’s fingers twitching as she tried, but Sherzal had never seemed like someone who would be easily swayed . . . even if every article of her jewellery weren’t worked with sigils to absorb destruction and to anchor her threads.

  At the door Sherzal paused. “Abbess Glass really was a remarkable woman. I underestimated her too many times.” She spoke loud enough for the room to hear but didn’t look up from her hand upon the door. “But if it’s the long game that impresses you, then don’t start to relax. This isn’t over.”