Red Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  I got a few miles along the trail before the gloom thickened past the point that I could find my way. Hungry and cold, I crouched with my back to an old tree and waited. A light rain started to fall, the sort that’s half ice and hits the leaves with a splat, gathering in wet clumps before it drops to ground.

  When you’re moving in a dark and haunted forest the urge is for every step to be taken more quickly than the last. There’s a pressure between your shoulder blades. Each creak and groan is a hunter stalking you, each flutter of wind its breath, close against your neck. You want to break and run, in any direction, just so long as it’s fast.

  When you’re still the urge is to be stiller. The knowledge that eyes are turned your way quietens the air inside your lungs. You make yourself small. You hold every muscle tight. And you listen. Above all you listen to the woods as they close about you.

  I stayed there, cramped and shivering and terrified, until the moon’s focus found me. The light filtered down, slow at first, making the impenetrable gloom penetrable once more, re-creating the forest around me, resolving monstrosities into chance alignment of unconnected branches. Within minutes I could see the trail. I started to run. For all that time walking the path I had wanted to break and run, but that way lies madness: you don’t run from terror, not if you ever want to stop again. Now though, with the red light shafting down all around me to dapple the ground in bright patches, I ran.

  Soon the focus reached its height, boiling through the clouds. The leaves began to steam, the icy rain now a warm fog. I ran, and I ran, and I ran, and I saw him.

  “Amondo!” Just a darker blur in the fog but I cried out and raced towards him.

  The man who turned and caught my arm was taller than Amondo, tall as any man in the village, all hard muscle, dirt, and the stink of old sweat. A beard tangled to the base of his neck.

  “Take her!” He passed me to another behind him and drew his sword. Even in the fog the focus moon found dull glints among the iron plates on his leather shirt. “How many more of you?” he asked.

  There were four or five of the men. They all had the same iron-plated leathers, the same dark and heavy capes, red under the grime, rich cloth, the colours of some army perhaps. Some had helms, the guards around their eyes lending a strange owlish cast to their faces. Strong hands seized me, hard and pinching.

  “Amondo, she said?” The tall man turned slowly in the steaming mist, sword before him. “I told you that weasel would be around here somewhere.” He made something thin and high-pitched of his voice. “Amondo! Amondo! Help me, Amondo!”

  One of the men holding me chuckled into his hand.

  “Make her sing,” the tall man hissed. “That’ll bring him if he’s close.”

  One of them twisted my arm behind me. I ground my teeth together and grunted. He tugged it harder and the pain lanced through me. It’s easy enough to make a body hurt past the point of any resolve. Within a few more seconds I was screaming, and screaming was all I knew about. I don’t know how long it took. It seemed like half a lifetime. It stopped suddenly. The man doing the twisting let go and sat down, clutching his neck. The focus had nearly passed, the mists glowed crimson with the last of the light.

  “What are you playing at?” The man holding my other arm.

  Blood, dark as wine, leaked between the fingers his friend had clasped around his throat.

  “He’s here!” My captor drew his sword, still holding me. “He’s—” The handle of a knife appeared under his chin, blade hidden in his neck.

  “Get among the trees!” The tall man barked the order and followed it in the same moment.

  The man holding me released my arm and wrenched the knife from his neck, as if that might save him. He stood for three or four heartbeats, blood spraying from the wound, warm, the salt of it on my lips, then sank to his knees, using his sword as support. He didn’t look angry or scared, just disbelieving, eyes staring into the mist.

  “Run, Nona!” Amondo’s shout.

  I saw a dark shape moving among the trees, cries, curses, the light dying moment by moment. A scream. A wet thunk. Low branches snapping. My legs wouldn’t take me anywhere. I had nowhere to go.

  Darkness. No noise but the creak and moan of the Rellam once more, as if it had just bitten its tongue, waiting for the light to move on. I held my breath, and somewhere in the distance, just audible above the night sounds, the broken stumble of someone limping away, or dragging themselves through the undergrowth.

  I stayed there, small and silent in the restless dark, waiting for the ghosts of the dead to leave their flesh and find me like they did in all the stories. But in the end the dawn made its way among the trees and with it James Baker and Willum Streams. They weren’t searching for me, they were thinking to catch up with Amondo—Baker’s hoard of coin went missing the day the juggler left. They were lucky only to find me, all bloody and surrounded by corpses.

  • • •

  NONA DREW A deep breath and looked up. “The rest is as I told you before. They called me a witch, and a thief, and gave me to the child-taker.”

  “Only your mother wasn’t dead,” said Clera, almost a whisper.

  “No.”

  “She let them do it,” said Ruli, without surprise as if perhaps her mother had done the same, albeit wrapped in different circumstances.

  “She said I’d helped Amondo steal from the Bakers.” Nona bowed her head.

  “And that’s why the judge came . . .” Clera said. “Because of the dead men. And the missing money. Were they soldiers? Or some local lord’s men?”

  “I don’t know.” Nona got off the bed and went to her own, weighed down with memories and the lies she had told.

  “How did Amondo throw his daggers?” Jula, still on the other bed, frowning. “You said the mist was—”

  “I’m going to sleep now.” Nona fell headlong onto her bed, and lay silent and unmoving until the lanterns were extinguished and the sounds of sleeping rose around her.

  11

  THE FOCUS WOKE Nona. Every crack in the shutters wrote itself red upon the dormitory walls, snaking over the novices in their beds, describing each in as few lines as Abbess Glass had used to capture Nona’s face. She watched the lines move with the moon’s passage, flowing over the sleeping forms about her. The building creaked and groaned as the heat penetrated. Somewhere, far away, the great walls that stepped up to the White would be weeping, shedding rotten ice, losing the slow gains they had made during the day. That battle ebbed and flowed of course. For a century the Grey and all its towns and villages had been swallowed by an advance before the focus finally wore the ice back. Even now the topsoil lay thin, poor stuff that only the desperate would farm and the wild hunt upon. The glaciers had pushed the good black earth of millennia thirty miles into the Corridor and made the Hernon territories the garden lands of empire.

  Nona lay back and thought of her village, the people scraping their living from the shallow ground. Even after just a few months it was hard to imagine it—hard to imagine that their world rolled on without her.

  “Nona.”

  Nona sat up. Looked around.

  “Nona.”

  Nothing. Nobody.

  “Nona.”

  For a moment the moon’s light, caught in bright lines upon the floor, seemed to align into a single thread, leading from the room. Nona slipped from her bed, barefoot on the cold stone. She wrapped a blanket around herself and followed, with the hall whispering all about her and her sisters sleeping.

  • • •

  “YOU CAME!” HESSA sat on the steps of the scriptorium across the square from the dormitory block, wrapped like Nona in a thin convent blanket. The heat from the focus moon made the puddles steam and set Nona sweating beneath her cover.

  Nona looked up. The line she had been following was gone. She wasn’t sure now that there had ever been one. “
Why are you up?”

  “I don’t sleep well.” Hessa patted her bad leg. “Not since the cage.” She frowned. “Not since ever.”

  Nona sat beside her on the steps. “It’s a strange place, this convent.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t trust them.”

  Hessa shrugged. “I like most of the nuns.”

  “I don’t trust the Ancestor either,” Nona said. “But I’m not running away. Not yet, anyhow.”

  “The faith is one thing, the church and its people are another.” Hessa shifted her leg and leaned back to bathe in the moonlight. “You can believe in the Ancestor, or not. But the church is just people, some good, some bad.”

  They sat in silence for a long minute, then another, the focus reaching its peak and starting to slide.

  “I had a bad dream,” Hessa said.

  Nona looked around at her.

  “About Markus.”

  “Markus?” Nona hadn’t thought of the boy since she cut down Raymel Tacsis. “Where did Giljohn sell him? Did he have to throw Four-Foot into the bargain?” She smiled, remembering Markus’s bond with the child-taker’s mule.

  “I had a bad dream,” Hessa repeated herself, staring over the rooftops, a tremble in her voice, “but the real thing was worse.” She turned to Nona. “I can show you, I think. Sister Pan said I had a gift for stories, for the path they take. And memory is its own story with its own path . . .”

  “Show me.”

  Hessa reached out her hand, cupped and ready, her eyes on Nona’s. And Nona, having nothing else to give, placed her own there. Hessa turned Nona’s hand palm up. “I’ve only tried this with Sister Pan. You might get a sort of fuzzy idea, or nothing. Nothing is probably better . . .” She set her index finger so that the edge of her nail bit against the base of Nona’s palm. “I might have to do this several times.” She started to trace a line across Nona’s palm, scoring hard enough to make her want to fold her hand up.

  “What—” Hessa’s story swallowed Nona’s voice first, then took the rest of her.

  • • •

  THE ACADEMY PURCHASED Willum and Chara. Like the Caltess it kept a reserve of young potential, but while Partnis Reeve stored his children among the sacks and boxes in his attic the Academy had a school for the purpose, a sprawling range of buildings that looked to Hessa more like a fairy castle than a place to teach ragged peasants plucked from Giljohn’s cage.

  Four-Foot’s hooves clattered on the cobbles as he brought them in under a great sandstone arch, every inch of it carved with sigils, some that seemed to fold the world around them, and others that made her smile, laughter bubbling up from places Hessa had forgotten even before the journey. A strange energy suffused the air, tingling on Hessa’s skin, pricking along her cheeks, singing in the marrow of her bones.

  “You’re as close now to the emperor’s palace as you’re ever likely to get.” Giljohn seemed nervous—worry looked as out of place on him as kindness or sentimentality might. “Closer than most ever get. The Academy Hall lies behind this school, and it practically backs against the Ark.” He brought Four-Foot to a halt before a complex of buildings, under the watchful eyes of stewards in spotless black uniforms. “Get out.” Giljohn ushered them from the cage. “Quick about it!” He aimed a half-hearted swipe at Markus. “And try to look valuable, damn you!”

  They had been examined, all four of them, Markus and Hessa too, in a hall as grand as any church. Each of them in turn, inspected across the width of a polished ebony table. Hessa sat in the uncomfortable chair that Giljohn had carried her to, on a cloth that the Academic’s assistant had laid atop smooth wood. The assistant had wrinkled his nose as he retreated.

  In this place Hessa supposed even Giljohn looked like a beggar. He stood ill at ease among the gleaming marble columns, watching as Markus took his turn at the table.

  The Academic sat in a high-backed chair, itself a work of turned pillars and ornate turrets, her fingers steepled before her, thin arms emerging from sleeves of lustrous purple fabric embroidered with the same sigil repeated time and again. Her neck seemed too long and thin to support her head, and all across one side of it a stain spread, a dull scarlet thickening of skin, like a hand reaching up to choke her.

  She spoke to each of them at length, looking down from her elevation with coldly curious eyes. Hessa came away confused and drained, as if each answer had taken something from her.

  When it came to the sale Giljohn had none of the banter that he’d shared with Partnis. Rather he spoke more like a stall-keep at a peasant market faced with some high lady wandering through for a moment’s diversion. He stated his price and the Academic either paid or enquired after the next child. For Chara and Willum she handed over twelve crowns apiece, more for each of them than Partnis had given for all eight that he took.

  “The dark boy, he’s likely to show some marjal blood, but his aura is too wild for Academy work. He’ll end up a hedge-mage or turn native. If that happens, better he end up a forestling than take to the tunnels, mark me.” The Academic turned away, down the long gallery of pillars, and Giljohn pushed her purchases after her, his hands to their shoulders. “And the girl?”

  “Nothing. Perhaps she sees the Path . . . perhaps someone taught her what to say so that she might get fed. Take her to the sisters, or Caiphus, if he’ll see you. Or one of the rogues. I don’t really care—the Path is not Academy business.”

  • • •

  AFTER THE ACADEMY Giljohn drove his cart along the smaller streets, muttering to himself. The tenements had a sour smell and tall chimneys behind the houses pumped out a dark, almost green, smoke that even the wind didn’t seem to want.

  “Damned if I’m taking you to the witch, girl!” Giljohn raised his voice without warning, turning in his seat. “I don’t like the way she looks at me. ’Sides, it’s a steep haul to the convent and the mule ain’t up to it.”

  Hessa shrank back into the far corner of the cage, raising her hands. Witch, mage, Academic, it made no difference to her—they all sounded terrifying.

  “I’ll take the boy to church first. The priest knows his business. Not a judger, that one.” Giljohn shook the reins and Four-Foot picked up the pace. The sky lay sullen overhead, the air heavy with the kind of heat that makes a body sweat.

  They passed through the dour streets of the eastside and came by rising and tree-lined avenues to a more opulent quarter where, over a sea of tiled roofs, the spires of some great cathedral challenged the sky. Hessa felt as uncomfortable passing by the good-folk of Verity as she had beneath the Academic’s scrutiny.

  “They don’t look like they’re real people . . .” Markus whispered beside her.

  Hessa nodded. All of them, whether old or young, whatever their shade or blood, seemed a different breed, glowingly clean, full-fleshed, their clothes both strange and costly. Hessa had seen the major of Morltown once, back in the Grey, as he passed by on his horse. Here even he would look shabby, his colours dull.

  Giljohn drew up beneath a large tree and jumped out into the road. “Covering you up. Stay hid.” He pulled out the hides he hung when the rains came and pushed them through the bars. Hessa and Markus hunched down beneath them.

  They rattled along in stifling darkness for a while with only the change from cobbles to paved road and back again to mark their passage.

  “I didn’t like that woman,” Markus said.

  “The Academic? She was . . . strange.”

  “My great-nan was a hedge-witch. She said that the marjals who work with the land don’t twist like the rest. That’s why they hate us.”

  “Twist?” Hessa lifted the edge of the hide for enough light to see Markus’s face.

  “Twist.” He put a hand to his neck where the woman had borne a livid mark. “The marjal tribe learned the deepest secrets of their world, tasted its blood, knew it down to the bedrock and
beyond—it let them work it with their minds, draw on its strength, understand its beasts and draw its fire. But this isn’t that world, it belongs to someone else. You take too much here and Abeth takes back. This place still belongs to the Missing.”

  Giljohn drew up again. “Wait here.”

  An age later, or perhaps a couple of minutes, Giljohn returned and drove the cart around a corner into some echoing space. He halted and pulled the hides clear, leaving Hessa blind in the daylight.

  First she saw that they were in a high-walled garden on the gravel between house and grounds. Next that the house was as grand as any she had yet seen, the windows beneath huge sandstone lintels boasting sheets of glass bigger than her head, held within a criss-crossing of wooden frames.

  “Priest’ll be out in a minute,” Giljohn said. “Show him what he’s looking for, boy. He’s not a man you want to disappoint.”

  Hessa shuffled along to sit on the tailgate while Markus clambered out and went to stand beside Giljohn up by Four-Foot. The garden walls seemed to hold back what little wind the day had to offer, the air hanging close and wet around them.

  “He’s a priest?” Markus asked.

  “Of the Ancestor, so mind your heathen mouth.”

  “I’m not a heathen—”

  The main door to the house opened, a tall and exquisitely dressed man stepping through. He took in the cart and three travellers with a disapproving eye, as if mere proximity might sully the dark blue of his velvets. A moment later the priest walked out, a broad-chested guardsman behind him. Hessa stared, lips parted. The servant had been more richly dressed than anyone she had ever seen, but the priest wore a robe of dark material that seemed to glisten even as it ate the light, so thick and so folded that stretched out it might cover the cage that for months had been her home. Gold chains gleamed on both his wrists, an amethyst the size of a hen’s egg hung from the rope of woven gold about his neck, and in his right hand he held a sick-wood staff, the end stamped with the alpha and omega of the Ancestor, each letter inlaid in silver.