Holy Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  Nona let the empire soldiers advance around her. She saw little Ghena hurry past, a bloody spear gripped in both hands, looking both fierce and exhausted at the same time.

  For a moment Kettle’s weakness overwhelmed her and Nona found no strength of her own to replace it. So much death and hurt lay before her. So much blood that the storm drains would soon overflow. Murder, murder, and more murder. What else could they expect when the ice kept closing? All of mankind reduced to wild animals in an ever-shrinking cage.

  “The moon is coming.” Nona used Kettle’s mouth to speak words for Kettle’s benefit. “Be ready to get out of its way.”

  28

  HOLY CLASS

  NONA JERKED HER head up. Only she and Zole remained in the chamber. Nona lay slumped against the wall. The others stayed outside, watching from the passage.

  Zole could be seen only indistinctly, a dark figure orbited by four balls of light, four shiphearts, one attuned to each of the tribes that had come to Abeth in the long ago, plunging from the darkness amid a galaxy of dying stars. They had come seeking the warmth of a sun that burned hotter than those they left behind. Whether it was desperation or miscalculation that had beached them on Abeth’s shores the stories could never agree upon. Perhaps they could travel no farther, but they had found a world already abandoned by those who had settled it. Scant millennia passed before the continued retreat of Abeth’s star from the red fury of its expansion began to see Abeth freeze. The world started its return to the ice-bound sphere it had always been before the sun’s death throes briefly thawed it.

  Zole had said the Old Stones were things of the Missing, just as the Arks were. The Church taught that they were shiphearts, the vital force that had driven the vessels that brought the four tribes across the blackness of infinity to Abeth, and that the Arks were the work of Nona’s ancestors too. Perhaps that story was simple pride, though, claiming some wonder for the Ancestor rather than having all of humanity’s tribes be painted as savages living within the ruins of a greater race. Now as Zole advanced towards the great round door at the chamber’s centre Nona could easily imagine her a creature very different from any that walked the Corridor.

  Zole reached the vault door, light and shadow in constant motion around her as the shiphearts continued on their slow trajectories. Nona had thought that the door would fight her, that the earth would shake around them, that the ceiling would crack and the dust sift down. Instead the huge circular slab of silver-steel rose without noise or drama until it stood vertical, revealing a flight of stairs. Zole raised her arms and the shiphearts shot outwards to the four points of the compass, embedding themselves in the walls about halfway between floor and ceiling. Nona couldn’t tell if there had already been structures to receive them or if they had made their own holes.

  “How do you feel?” She limped across to Zole, who looked like a statue. Now that she could approach her Nona realised how tall her friend had grown. She lacked the thick muscle of a gerant but she had the height, making Nona feel like a child beside her and dwarfing the others. Zole’s skin had turned greyish, as if the shiphearts’ power had burned her to fine ash, awaiting just the lightest touch to fall apart. Nona wouldn’t have been surprised to find on closer inspection that Zole’s flesh was polished to a high shine or just gently smoking. “Are you . . . Are you . . . still you?”

  Zole’s eyes had turned a steel grey and Nona tried to see something of her friend within them. “I am shriven.”

  “I . . .” Nona reached along their thread-bond but found nothing. “Zole . . .” Her heart hurt. She wished in that moment she had known the woman who stood in front of her before she had ever touched an Old Stone, before the imperfection was burned from her. She would have held her friend but the devils in her own flesh refused to move any closer.

  “Hurry up!” Clera arrived at Nona’s shoulder, with Ara and Ruli coming along behind. Tarkax and Jula had hold of Joeli and were bringing her too. The rest of the ice-tribers remained to guard the corridor. “Quickly!”

  Clera’s urgency was born of the desire to get farther from the shiphearts but it re-ignited Nona’s own. Outside her sisters were still dying.

  “Lights on,” Nona ordered, and the dark steps beneath the door were illuminated just as the corridors outside had been when Sherzal demanded light. She led the way down, cursing each time her damaged leg had to take her weight.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE ARK PROVED completely different from anything Nona had anticipated, and her imagination had painted dozens of possible scenes. The stairs led down some fifty feet to a small circular chamber, a room, dirty and bare of anything save a single curving chair of some unfamiliar material, lying on its side near the wall.

  “Aquinas said there would be levers, a machine . . . He saw them in a holy vision!” Ruli pushed in past Nona. “I kept that bastard’s lies secret when that bitch was wedging needles under my fingernails!”

  Jula stumbled in with Joeli. It was getting crowded. “There are supposed to be four dials, each within the other . . .”

  “There’s nothing here.” Even Joeli sounded disappointed.

  “How would you have worked such an engine, even if it hadn’t been stolen centuries ago?” Clera spat on the ground and sent the chair skittering across the floor with a kick. The years had turned it brittle and it shattered against the far wall.

  Nona frowned, staring furiously at the broken pieces. “Aquinas’s book was the key to get us in. A lie. I never expected it to help once we were inside. Though it would have been nice if it had.” She looked slowly around the chamber, hunting any clue. “The abbess told me that the goal of any design is simplicity.” She spoke the words haltingly, gathering certainty as fragments of the day’s events came together. “What makes our most complex devices hard to use is that we lack the understanding to make them easy to use.”

  All of them watched her.

  “Lights off.” The room plunged into darkness. “Lights on.” The illumination returned, soft, pervasive, casting no shadows and having no source. “When Sherzal closed the blast door . . . she just asked for it to close. Why would you think that the builders of an Ark where that happened would require levers and dials to command the moon? Sherzal’s first instinct was right. The abbess just made her doubt herself, made her think she needed a book full of secret knowledge.”

  “Show us the Corridor,” Zole said. She spoke it to the air.

  Instantly a ring of light appeared before them, hanging in the air, crowded with tiny features in shades of green and brown, fringed with white. A shadow divided it into night and day.

  “Show me the moon’s focus.”

  A wide red circle appeared, wider than the Corridor, maybe half as wide again. A much broader pinkish region extended around it within an elongated ellipsis.

  “Show us where we are,” Nona said.

  The ring turned and grew steadily larger, the bulk of it fading from view as a closer and closer look filled the space before them.

  “The Grampains,” Jula whispered, “and the Marn Sea.”

  “Closer!” Nona said. And in moments she saw forests and rivers spread before her as if Sister Rule’s precious maps had joined hands and unfolded themselves for inspection. All washed with a faint pinkish tinge.

  “Closer!”

  They saw Verity, the Rock of Faith, and the farmlands all around. Tiny fires twinkled. Smoke streaks followed the wind.

  “Closer!”

  They saw the city walls, the streets, individual rooftops, the flicker of flames, the dark mass of Adoma’s army, the palace itself.

  “What does the pink mean?” Jula asked.

  “There is sufficient angle and resource to centre the focus at any point within the pink zone.”

  All of them save Zole jumped at the unexpected voice. Like the light, the voice seemed to have no source,
and like the light there was nothing about it that was natural. Clera glanced around nervously. “Who are you? Show yourself!”

  “I am Taproot.”

  Jula’s eyes went wide and she made the sign of the arborat, a single finger rising to trace the taproot that began with the first ancestor, then all fingers spreading to show the branches of the Ancestor’s tree. Ruli and Ara exchanged shocked glances.

  “Are you—”

  Nona cut across Clera’s question. Outside the palace the last of their friends were dying. “How small can that focus be made?” Nona asked.

  A red dot appeared at the centre of the image of the palace. It looked to be about ten yards across.

  “Can you make the focus here?” Nona reached out to touch the spot in front of the palace where the King’s Road opened onto the plaza. “And have it follow between my finger and thumb?”

  “Yes. It would consume one third of one percent of the remaining propellant to institute and later correct the major attitude changes.”

  “What would that do?” asked Clera, leaning in. The image’s light patterned fascination on her face.

  “I think it would burn through the ground and melt the rocks themselves,” Nona said.

  “Adoma has a hundred thousand Scithrowl out there.” Jula peered at the image. Individuals at the edge of the horde appeared like motes of dust. “Could you kill so many with a touch?”

  “In a heartbeat!” Clera swept her hand along the King’s Road, finger and thumb set to its width, widening the span as she reached beyond the wall to encompass the whole mass of the invaders. “Wait! Nothing happened!”

  “Focus is already at authorized minimum. Narrower focus is deemed hazardous to flora and fauna.”

  Nona thought she understood. The focus had narrowed as the Corridor narrowed, increasing intensity as the cold intensified. But it had reached the maximum safe intensity years ago and the ice kept coming. Any narrower and the focus would scorch the crops, blind the animals.

  “How can we authorize it to narrow further?” Nona asked. Could you do it? Jula’s question repeated itself over and again in the back of her mind, though her devils all but drowned it out with their shout for blood and fire. Could you do it?

  “Only the Purified has clearance.”

  “The Purified?” But Nona knew the answer before the words left her. The silent stranger in their midst, burned clean of humanity by the combined fire of four shiphearts. Had the shiphearts themselves ever been needed, or just someone stripped of all flaws by them? Was Zole more than human now, or less than human? And this voice that claimed to be Taproot, was that human? An ancestor who travelled to Abeth on the ships that sailed between the stars, or one of the Missing who had left before they even arrived?

  “Will you do it, Zole?”

  Zole stood statue-still, only her head turning to meet Nona’s gaze. “Do you ask it of me?”

  Even with her friends dying outside Nona didn’t want to ask to have that power in her hands. The devils in her screamed yes, but somehow their voices failed to dominate her. In a battle, in a fight, to take the lives of those raising their weapons against her had always seemed her right. Though even that certainty had weakened as her skills and powers grew, making the contest more and more uneven. Now, in this place, she could take the lives of more people than she could properly imagine, even with their image floating before her. She could do it in a heartbeat, with no effort or risk. Do it without them ever seeing her face or knowing the blow was coming . . .

  “Would you do it if I asked?” Nona asked.

  Zole reached out to the light before she answered, letting the images of Verity flow across her grey hand. “I feel . . . different, Nona.” She spoke as if the two of them were entirely alone. “As if I were falling away.”

  “Falling away from what?” Despite the death unfolding in miniature all across Zole’s palm, it was the faint sadness in Zole’s voice that made Nona’s eyes prickle and fill with tears.

  “From everything. I see a wider existence. As though all of Abeth were just like your Corridor, a slice through something bigger.”

  “Would you do it, Zole?” Nona spoke above the hunger of her devils even as she felt them rising, reaching up across her neck. “How many would you kill to save how few?”

  “Nona!” Ara grabbed her shoulder. “The empire is burning!”

  “There is no empire!” Nona replied. For a moment she managed to block out her devils and speak with the voice of the Nona who had been left behind when they were broken from her. “Scithrowl meets Durn now. The battles are all but over!” She shook her head. “Aren’t all of us brother and sister? Should I murder them for the sake of pride, or should I accept that the ice has narrowed and that there is a new order now?”

  “Look!” Clera pointed at Nona’s neck. “She’s like Yisht!”

  Jula and Joeli stared at her in horror. Even if they hadn’t known Yisht’s story, a convent education breeds a terror of possession.

  “It’s true.” Nona turned to face them. “I can’t make a decision like this. Half of me wants to burn a path a mile wide right through every Scithrowl city . . . The louder half says that we should burn it all . . . I am unfit to judge. Sister Thorn should do this if Zole will allow her.” She stepped aside to let Ara speak with Zole, and found her missing. “Ara?”

  “Here.” Ara was behind the others. She had slid down the wall to sit at its base, blood on her lips, her face almost as grey as Zole’s. She looked unsurprised by news of Nona’s devils, but then she had already inhabited the tainted flesh in question herself.

  “I can take the raulathu from you.” Zole stepped forward, her hand raised towards Nona’s neck.

  “What?” Clera demanded. She looked from Nona to Zole as if ready to fight them both or run. “What the hell is she talking about?”

  “She means the devils,” Nona said. “My devils.”

  “The Old Stones break them from us. As a sculptor chips away ice to reveal their creation.” Zole reached for Nona.

  Nona stepped back, pressing against Ruli. “No.”

  “No?” Zole cocked her head, curious.

  “They’re devils, Nona!” Jula sounded on the edge of hysteria.

  “They’re me,” Nona said. “Pieces of who I am.”

  “Terrible pieces,” Ruli said. “I felt them through the thread-bond but didn’t understand.” She fell quiet, confusion on her face.

  “If you divide the ingredients of the black cure into two halves, both make a poison that will kill you. Together they are something different.” Nona set her fingers to the rough skin along the side of her neck, finding it hot to the touch. “Can you put them back, Zole?”

  “I can draw them out and give them to the fire.”

  “But can you put them back as they were?”

  “It would make you less pure, further from the Ancestor.” Zole watched her without judgment.

  “Even so.” Nona leaned her head to expose her neck to Zole. “You’ve burned away all your sins and weaknesses, and it’s left you so distant from us you hardly care who lives and who dies. I can’t make a decision like this with my head full of broken pieces, but I can’t make it with those pieces gone either.” She met Zole’s grey eyes. “Please.”

  Zole set her palm to the first of Nona’s devils. The feeling as it fell apart and unwound beneath her touch, beneath Nona’s skin, was something both bitter and sweet. Something lost and something gained.

  Zole found the second and third of Nona’s devils without needing to look for them, even though they fled from sight. In moments Nona’s anger, her thirst for revenge, and her capacity for hate were no longer screaming at her from separate sources but woven back into the fabric of who she was, the good with the bad.

  Nona took a deep breath and addressed the air. “Won’t the focus burn up the whole city as i
t narrows, or have to burn a path in from outside?”

  “The moon’s albedo can be rapidly varied between zero and one.”

  “What?”

  “The moon will go dark until it is pointed and focused.”

  “You can turn the moon on and off at my request?”

  “Yes.”

  Nona stood for a moment in blank amazement before finding her voice again. “Zole, tell this thing to obey me.” She approached the image. The counterattack had faltered and the remaining defenders were pressed against the walls. At points around the palace the Scithrowl were unopposed, deploying ladders and scaling chains against the battlements where the guards fought to throw them back.

  “Why would I put such a power in the hands of one who has yet to be shriven of a single raulathu? You are unformed clay, Nona Grey.”

  “At least I care. At least it will hurt me, whatever decision I make. At least I’m terrified!” Nona defocused her eyes to see the thread-scape. She had learned to look far deeper than when she had tried that first day in Path Tower and declared that Zole had no threads. Sister Pan had been right to correct her. Everything had threads. Even now the water that comprised the bulk of Zole’s body had countless threads joining it to the world. But the threads that really mattered, the brightest ones that Nona had been unable to see on her first attempt, the threads that both described Zole and bound her to the people around her . . . those threads were more completely absent than they had ever been.

  “In the end none of this will matter, Nona Grey.” Zole spread her hands. “Who will know our names in a hundred years? Who built the forest of stone upon the doorstep of Sweet Mercy? Change runs through everything. Perfection is the only constant.”