Red Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  “We will continue with the eighteenth part of the catechism. Later I will be examining you on the names of the saints, the dates of their name-days, and the services and traditions particular to each— New girl! Get your parchment and quill out! Or do you not consider my remarks worthy of record?”

  “No . . .” Laughter on all sides, Arabella’s a musical peal. “I mean yes, Sister Wheel.”

  “Sister Wheel? There’s no Sister Wheel in this class, girl. You will address me as Mistress Spirit. Now get your scroll out!”

  “But— I don’t . . .” Nona patted her habit as if the items she required might somehow have been stowed in one of the interior pockets without her knowledge.

  “Quickly!” Sister Wheel slapped an iron hand on Jula’s desk in the front row and began to advance on Nona, weaving her path between the desks, the girls head-down as she passed.

  Nona felt a familiar anger starting to boil deep down where her thinking never ventured. Even if she had been given such things as quill and parchment she had never held either in her life and could no more make the required marks with one upon the other than she could fly.

  “Well?” Sister Wheel, now looming above Nona, her pale and watery eyes meeting Nona’s stare.

  Nona stood up, sharply.

  “Novice Nona’s entry to the convent was . . . non-standard.” Abbess Glass had entered without being noticed and now settled a hand on Nona’s shoulder, returning her to her seat. “This precluded the usual correspondence regarding the supplies an entrant is expected to bring with them, Mistress Spirit.” The abbess laid a grey-plumed quill and fat scroll of parchment on the desk. “Nona will, however, be a listening pupil rather than a writing one until such time as Sister Kettle pronounces her sufficiently advanced in her extra-curricular studies. She will—”

  Sister Wheel’s pale face reddened. “I know exactly what kinds of extra-curricular activity Sister Kettle gets up to, and with whom, and I—”

  “Sister Kettle will improve Nona’s reading and writing to the standard required in Red Class.” The abbess fixed Sister Wheel with a stare. “The matter is now closed.”

  Sister Wheel scowled and stumped off towards the head of the class.

  Abbess Glass rolled out the top portion of Nona’s scroll and produced an inkpot to hold it in place. She dipped the quill and in what seemed one flowing motion left a beautiful confusion of lines upon the parchment, black and glistening, coiling like a vine. “Your name,” she said. She dipped again, and beneath it placed three very different lines, interlocked squiggles, careless where the name had been precise. The abbess produced a blotter and patted the design. “And there is you.”

  Nona stared at the pattern, furrowing her brow.

  “And since I am here,” the abbess continued, “I shall address the novices.” She followed Sister Wheel, smiling at the girls to either side. “Some here may not yet have heard my welcome to the faith—certainly Arabella and Nona will not have—and it will do no harm to refresh those that have.”

  Nona reached out a finger to trace the lines of her name, and as she did so the larger pattern beneath her name suddenly made sense . . . her face, caught in three black squiggles. A face that had last stared at her from a mirror on Raymel Tacsis’s wall. She blinked and stifled a laugh, wondering how she could ever not have seen what the lines meant. Perhaps writing would reveal its meaning to her in the same manner one day.

  Abbess Glass reached the front and shooed Sister Wheel aside to take centre stage. “Sister Wheel teaches the important details of our veneration of the Ancestor. The mechanics of the thing, if you like. The hows and the whens. She does it well and we thank her for it. It falls to me though to remind us all of the whys.

  “Nona, for example, was a follower of the Hope before she came to us, and whilst the Hope is a sanctioned heresy that falls within the framework of the Ancestor we— Yes, Nona?”

  Nona had raised her hand like the bigs did when they wanted to ask a question in Nana Even’s seven-day class in the village. Few of them ever did actually ask because the answer was generally: because I say so. “My mother went to the Hope church in White Lake but I never said the words. One star is white and the others red . . . why should I kneel to it?” That’s what her father had said. “In my village they pray to the gods who are many and have no names.” The novices tittered as if this were funnier than their dome and golden statue.

  Abbess Glass pursed her lips. “Such practices are unusual in Verity, Nona. In the wild lands to the east and across the border into Scithrowl there are remnants of many faiths and the emperor is tolerant of them, at a distance, but the Ancestor—”

  “My father hunted on the ice and even in the tunnels that go beneath.” Nona remembered almost nothing of her father save the stories he told. None of those tales had stuck with her quite so strongly as the ones that told of the tunnels. River-carved, they ran beneath the ice, drained when the waters found some better path or froze at the source. In those stories her father and his clan had hunted beasts from every tale she’d ever heard. But the best of his stories told of the Missing, those who were not men and who lived on Abeth before the four tribes descended from the stars. No man had ever set eyes upon the Missing but their servants remained, a remnant now, haunting the dark places beneath the ice where sites holy to the Missing lay exposed once more. Such ruins could be found here and there where the tunnels ventured across the cities that the Missing had carved deep into the very rock itself. “My father said that the Ancestor might watch over us in the Corridor but in the dark places of this world it’s the gods that the Missing left behind who matter.”

  There was no laughter at this, only the silence of held breath, waiting for the hammer to fall.

  Abbess Glass pursed her lips as if she had tasted something particularly sour. She studied Nona a moment, raising one hand towards Sister Wheel as the nun seemed about to get her first word out around her outrage. The abbess relaxed her face into a smile.

  “The emperor has forbidden worship of false idols, Nona. Much of our own history—ten thousand years and more of it—lies buried beneath the ice. A record of triumphs, follies, and a slow defeat beneath a dying sun. There are enough heresies and heathen gods of our own devising without pursuing the mysteries of creatures less like you and me than a dog is like a fish.”

  The same anger that had boiled out of some red place within Nona when Raymel hurt Saida began to bubble through her again. She stood up so fast that her chair would have fallen but for Clera’s quick hands. “My father—” The words, hard and angular, stuck in her throat. She bit down on them—anger had lost Nona her place in the village, then the Caltess . . .

  “I am here to address the why.” Abbess Glass continued smoothly as if a small girl weren’t standing in defiance before her, fists balled at her sides. “We venerate the Ancestor because in doing so we connect with what is holy in the human spirit, what is holy in us—”

  “You’re not holy!” Nona couldn’t stop the words. Warm beds and good food were too great a treasure to be sacrificed, but with them came knives in the dark and laughter behind hands and this woman calling herself holy. “You watched Saida die! You watched her strangle and choke!”

  “Sister Wheel!” The abbess raised her voice to a shout, drowning whatever the nun had to say. “Bring me a wire-cane from the Blade stores.”

  A sharp intake of breath sounded all around the room. Sister Wheel’s face split with an uncustomary grin. “Yes, Abbess Glass, yes indeed. A good choice. A fine choice for a beating.” And she hurried from the room, her speed surprising.

  The abbess waited for the door to close. She pulled up one of the chairs from an unused desk and sat on it, presenting a slightly comical image, portly abbess perched on child’s seat. “I’m not holy? What is holy? Nona? Anyone?” Silence. Nona would have answered but found that she didn’t know. “I believe in the Ancestor—in t
he spirit of the Ancestor.”

  “Believe? Like Sister Wheel believes?” Nona couldn’t keep the venom from her words—when she looked at Wheel it seemed that something had been left out in the making of the woman. Nona felt the same way about herself most of the time—as if some part had been omitted in her construction, so wholly absent that she couldn’t even say what it was, only that a void lay where it should be. “I hate Sister Wheel.” It’s harder to forgive someone else your own sins than those uniquely theirs. Much harder.

  “You don’t know Sister Wheel, Nona. You’ve only just met her.”

  Nona scowled. “I know plenty. I’ve seen plenty. More than you can see from up here in your nice warm convent, paid for by all the people working down there in the city and out in the Corridor growing your food from the mud. What good is holy if it can’t feed and clothe itself? This is a place to turn children into old women, praying for the sins of the world and never seeing them.” Some of the words were her father’s but she owned all the anger. “What good is holy if it watches my friend die—not because she did something wrong but because her blood wasn’t good enough?”

  Around her the novices’ faces had frozen into a range of expressions, from horror and shock on Jula and Ruli, to amazement on Clera, and on Arabella a smile that could mean anything. Nona wanted to take back what she’d said—even now she wanted to apologize and beg to stay—but she couldn’t get the words past her locked jaw.

  “You’re right, Nona.” The abbess nodded to herself, her attention resting for the moment on her only ring, set with a large amethyst.

  Nona blinked, she’d been tensing for the blow, or the condemnation.

  “If we spent our whole lives here we would have little to offer the world and know little enough of the world to have context for our prayer . . .” Seeing Nona’s frown she spoke more simply. “We wouldn’t understand what we’re praying for. Without knowing the chaos and confusion that washes all around this plateau, our Rock of Faith, we could not appreciate the serenity we seek.” Abbess Glass paused and fixed Nona with dark eyes. It seemed important to her that Nona understand . . . that Nona believe. “I wasn’t always a nun. I had a son and I breathed for him. When we buried him my sorrow consumed me. Was my grief holy? Was it unique? All our hurts and follies are repeated time and again. Generation after generation live the same mistakes. But we’re not like the fire, or the river, or the wind—we’re not a single tune, its variations played out forever, a game of numbers until the world dies. There’s a story written in us. Your parents—your father and his ice tunnels, your mother and her Church of Hope, both of them, whether they loved you or left you, are in you bone-deep, remembered in your blood. The hunska has risen to the surface in you, the quickness of some relative dead these past ten thousand years—you think your mother and father are less present?”

  Nona found her teeth clenched too tight for reply. Anger over her mother seethed through her and her hands twitched for violence.

  “There’s a story written in us, added to with each conception—it remembers and it changes us—we move to something from something.” Abbess Glass held her two hands before her side by side, palms out, thumbs folded in, very close together so that the narrowest of gaps stood between the index finger of both. “Life.” She raised one hand a fraction. “Death.” She raised the other to match it. “We spend all our years on the short journey across this gap. But look—the gap is narrow if you cross it, but follow it and it’s long. As long as you like. You and I journey across the gap, but as a people we follow it. The Ancestor stands at both ends. The Ancestor watches us from before the flight—before the shiphearts first beat their rhythm. That is the Ancestor of singular form, the origin, the alpha. Along our journey we have become many and varied. The Ancestor watches us from the start and from the end, from beyond the death of stars, in the cold dark of beyond. That is the Ancestor of singular mind, the destination, the omega.

  “The Ancestor is meaning in chaos, memory in time, and that is holy. The ritual that Sister Wheel teaches is part of that memory—our connection to it, and it is important, whatever you think about the person who delivers the message. But what I really care about is the knowing behind it. We are many parts of the one. We are the steps, the Ancestor is the journey.” She stood and reached for Nona’s hand. “Come on, we’d better go.”

  Surprise loosened Nona’s tongue. “Why? Where?” She stepped back, suspicious.

  “By now Sister Wheel will have found the Blade Hall locked, gone in search of Sister Tallow, found her in the sanatorium and recovered the key. Do you want to be here when she gets back with that wire-cane?” She reached the door and opened it, pulling Nona after her. “Behave yourselves, girls. Mistress Spirit will be looking to use that cane and won’t require much excuse.”

  “Sister Wheel will calm down soon enough.” The abbess crossed the foyer to open the main doors. “At least as calm as she gets. Though I won’t pretend that she’s not the sort to hold a grudge. She carries her passion for the faith in both hands, does Sister Wheel, and any disrespect to me, real or assumed, is to her an attack on that faith, Nona. Stay on her good side and pay attention: you need to know what she teaches.”

  They approached the abbess’s house, where her cat, Malkin, lay sleeping on the steps. Abbess Glass paused. “You can always speak your mind to me, Nona, but it will go easier on you with Sister Wheel and others if you’re seen to be punished for disrespect for the office I represent. Today you will spend an hour in contemplation at the sinkhole instead of joining your class for the evening meal.”

  “Yes, abbess.” Nona had eaten a week’s worth of food in two days: she could miss dinner and hardly notice it. She had known hunger before. True hunger.

  A figure came running towards them across the ground between the dome and the forest of pillars. The abbess stared at the approaching nun. “You need to learn what Mistress Spirit teaches. Once it is given over you can make it your own. You can order and prioritize the tenets of the faith to your own liking, as do we all. But first you need to know what they are . . .” She trailed off distractedly as the runner drew close, sleeves and skirts flapping, and came to a halt before them.

  “Sister Flint?” Abbess Glass tilted her head.

  The etiolated nun inclined her head, seemingly untroubled by her long sprint. “Visitors approach, abbess. A judge of the high circuit and nine men-at-arms.”

  “Curious.” The abbess pursed her lips. “Not by the Seren Way, nor the Vinery Stair, or we would have had warning. Is Sister Oak still patrolling the Cart Way?”

  Sister Flint nodded.

  “Then our visitors have either flown here on the backs of eagles or taken a very long walk in order to come upon us unannounced . . .”

  “Eagles?” Nona asked.

  “A joke, dear.” The abbess frowned and looked up at Sister Flint. “When will they arrive?”

  “A few minutes.”

  “Hmmm.” Abbess Glass lowered herself, with a little difficulty, to sit upon the steps of her official residence. “Fetch my crozier, Nona, will you? Just behind the front door. It’s open.”

  Nona hurried up the steps and pushed through the panelled door into a dim hallway tiled in black and white. Her footsteps echoed in the vaulted space above her as she entered. A rack of five identical croziers stood against the wall a little way in, hefty staves bound with iron hoops, the top coiling like a shepherd’s crook, the flat spiral covered in plates of very thinly beaten gold, each one embossed with scenes from the book of the Ancestor. She took the first, surprised at its weight, and hurried back to the abbess.

  “Thank you.” Abbess Glass took the crozier and patted the step beside her. “Sit.”

  Nona sat, and Malkin stalked away. Sister Flint waited at the bottom of the steps, the wind wrapping her habit tight about her painful thinness.

  Before too long they saw the visitors making their
way through the pillars, ill at ease among the forest of stone. “Did you know, Nona, that the stone from which those pillars are made can’t be found anywhere in the Corridor? It’s all beneath the ice now. Lost to us.”

  Nona started to reply then let the words fall. Abbess Glass knew she knew nothing.

  The approaching men wore long red cloaks and breastplates of burnished steel, their helms gleaming and ornate. They flanked a grey-haired man in a thick black robe riding an enormous horse, one built for endurance rather than speed. A second man, also in a black robe, but a thinner one, tossed by the wind, followed, leading a mule with laden saddlebags.

  By now half a dozen nuns watched from the doorway of the Ancestor’s dome, Sister Wheel among them, having paused on her return to Spirit class with wire-cane in hand.

  The nine guardsmen arrayed themselves before Abbess Glass’s steps and the old man dismounted from his giant horse. He held himself with a degree of confidence and dignity that would put Grey Stephen to shame. Nona wondered if he was a lord or some close relation to the emperor. A thick circlet of twisted gold strands held a white mane from his patrician’s face. He regarded the abbess from beneath neatly trimmed eyebrows, channelling a slight air of distaste down either side of a prominent and angular nose.

  “Those are quite the grandest city guardsmen I’ve ever seen,” Abbess Glass murmured. “I smell money here, and lots of it.”

  The younger man came forward clutching a heavy book bound in black leather. Nona had watched him tugging it from the mule’s saddlebag.

  “Judge Irvone Galamsis offers the Abbess of Sweet Mercy Convent his greetings and felicitations on this the birthday of Emperor Hedral Antsis, fourth of his name.”

  Abbess Glass bent towards Nona, her voice low and carrying a smile. “Almost every day is the birthday of some emperor or other if you dig deep enough.” With a grunt she got to her feet, using her crozier to lever herself up. “Irvone, a delight to see you again. Will you be staying to dinner? The novices would be so excited! A judge visiting us, and not just some common sort but one third of the highest jury in the land!”