Red Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  “Show me the hilt.”

  Nona opened her hand, revealing a slim hilt wound with a narrow strip of leather and ending in an iron ball.

  The novices about them remained dead silent for fear of being noticed and sent away. Sister Wheel noticed them even so. “Class dismissed! Go and pray. Pray you don’t find yourself in this much trouble! Go!”

  “Practise your blade-path. Return your practice knives to stores first,” Sister Tallow overruled. And with reluctance the girls began to retreat to the tunnel. “Novice Arabella, remain.”

  Ara came running back. Sister Tallow motioned for her to stand off to the side.

  “That’s a throwing knife.” Sister Tallow returned her attention to the weapon. She held out her hand and Nona gave it over. The old nun held it to the light. “The Noi-Guin take their blades from those they kill. So there is no tell-tale make or style to identify their work.” She returned the knife, her fingers leaving clean steel where they rubbed the lamp-black from its blade. “But I have seen the twin to this knife before. And its triplet. In the belt of a woman I pulled from the wall of your dormitory on the second night you spent in this convent.”

  “A Noi-Guin!” Nona looked at the knife in her hand. She’d had little opportunity to inspect it between retrieving it from her bed and hiding it in the stores the next day. That had been more than two years ago. She wasn’t sure why she had hidden it beneath the storage shelf—it had meaning to her, and having it mixed with the other knives and lost had seemed wrong. So she had stabbed it into the shelf support beneath the lowest shelf. That way she obeyed the abbess by returning it, but kept it hers. “What did a Noi-Guin want here?”

  “I opened that discussion with her.” Sister Tallow narrowed her eyes at the memory. “But a second assassin from her order interrupted us. By the time I’d dealt with the interruption the first of them had fled . . . and the second, well he was in no condition to answer questions. So I ask you again—where did you get it?”

  “It was in the storeroom . . .”

  Sister Tallow raised a brow. “I inventory the weapon stores on a regular basis. The novices in Holy Class clean and maintain all the blades daily. I’ve not seen this weapon or its like in two years.”

  “It was in the storeroom.” Nona gritted her teeth.

  Sister Tallow’s narrowed eyes became gimlet. She drew breath for what might have been harsh words, but Sister Kettle spoke first. “Do you know how it got there, Nona?”

  “The abbess told me to put it there.” Nona knew what they wanted but something deep inside her had always kept tight hold on every secret she owned. She found she could no more easily volunteer such truths than she could lie.

  “When did she tell you this?” Kettle asked.

  “On my second night at the convent.”

  “And where did you first get the knife?”

  “It was in my bed.” Nona frowned. “I sat up in the night, and when I looked back at where I had been lying the knife was there, sticking into blankets as if it had been stabbed there.”

  “Or thrown there.” Sister Tallow glanced across at Sister Wheel. “We thought the assassins came for Arabella, but it looks as though they were here for Nona. The Noi-Guin are anything but cheap but perhaps Thuran Tacsis found their prices more reasonable than those of the high court judge whose arrival followed their failure. Ancestor knows what funds Tacsis put behind the visit of our own high priest and archons after that . . .”

  Sister Wheel cast a sour eye over Nona then made a sickly smile for Arabella. “Our priority should be the Chosen One, the emperor’s sister made her interest clear there. A Shield should be able to look after herself or what use is she?”

  Sister Tallow made a small sound that might have been all of a long-suffering sigh that escaped her discipline. “Sherzal is certainly not known for letting slip anything on which she has designs . . . But these titles are unhelpful. Chosen One? The abbess herself revealed the truth to us, sister.”

  Sister Wheel moved behind Arabella and set a bony hand to each shoulder. “It is called ‘faith’ rather than ‘reason,’ sister. The Argatha comes to us out of stories, and even if the stories about those stories differ, they all agree that they came from the mouths of the holy. A nun? A priest? For this purpose, or that purpose.” She lifted a hand as if to wave away smoke. “The story exists. It was born within the church and many have faith in it. I have faith in it. That is enough.”

  Sister Tallow returned her dark gaze to Nona. “Did the knife in your bed look as if it could have been thrown there?”

  Nona screwed her eyes shut, bringing back the image she had played through her mind so many times before. She’d imagined the knife stabbed there, Arabella Jotsis’s hand about the hilt . . . but the angle . . . “The window! It could have been thrown from there—it was open that night.”

  “What honest reason would anyone have for keeping a thing like that secret?” Sister Wheel discarded Ara and moved in closer, leaning to be level with Nona, watery eyes studying her face as if a lie might be discovered there.

  “She didn’t keep it secret,” said Sister Tallow. “The abbess knew: she told Nona to put the blade in stores . . . Though that and her silence on the subject are both very strange.”

  “The abbess told us Thuran Tacsis pledged to the emperor himself that it was over!” Ara spoke up from the side, perhaps to stop Tallow brooding over Nona’s story. She offered everyone a bright smile. “My father saw him say so, before the whole court. Why should we still be worried about assassins?”

  Tallow and Wheel exchanged a glance at that. Sister Tallow answered. “It pays to be cautious, novice. The Noi-Guin do not like to fail and they are patient. Besides, now Thuran Tacsis has sworn on this matter, Nona is a liability to him and his enemies might have an interest in seeing her harmed, thinking to bring the emperor’s wrath on the House of Tacsis. And so this blade . . .”

  “How did you all come to be here?” Nona asked, not wanting the conversation to return to her silence on the matter of the knife and to reveal the strong suspicions she’d held regarding Ara’s part. “And . . .” She turned around to look up at Kettle. “How did you . . . you just came from nowhere!”

  “I’m a Sister of Discretion.” Kettle offered a tiny grin, just enough to show the whiteness of her teeth. “You see me when I want you to.”

  “Threads brought us here, Nona.” Sister Flint, peering down from her grave heights. “Mistress Path will teach you about threads soon enough, now you’re in Grey Class.”

  22

  SISTER TALLOW SET Ara to instructing Nona in the basics of knife-work. With the other novices all busy at blade-path the pair of them had Mistress Blade’s full attention: never a comfortable thing. They circled, working in a silence cut by the sharpness of drawn breath and punctuated by the distant wails of girls falling from the blade-path.

  “No.” Sister Tallow took Nona’s wrist and shoulder, moving her arm into the block she had been shown.

  After thirty more repetitions of the same block and same cut Nona tried another variation.

  “No.” Sister Tallow adjusted Nona’s arm again. “The muscles need to learn it, not the mind. There need to be patterns your body can fall back on when there’s no time for thinking. Once those are bedded into you then you start to improvise.”

  Nona fell back into the rhythm: circle, cut, block, circle. From the frequency of the distant cries even the novices with most practice were finding the blade-path particularly difficult in their heavy blade-habits. Of the girls who trained on the path in their free time the majority were hunska, half-bloods and primes. Though given that just getting to the end of the blade-path proved a major challenge, speed really wasn’t a requirement. Nona guessed that the competitive element just appealed more strongly to those with their eyes on the martial habit; though of late the studious Jula had demonstrated quite a talent for it, co
mpleting the whole path, albeit achingly slowly, a feat that of the recent graduates from Red Class only Clera had managed before moving up.

  A moment’s lapse of concentration and Ara had slashed a black line across the pale leather of Nona’s blade-habit.

  “Again!” Sister Tallow barked.

  Circle, slash, block, circle, slash. Block.

  “When you stab you may find the opportunity to mortally injure your opponent, but to sink your blade you must come in closer than to cut with it. When you stab and find flesh your blade may become trapped by the bones of a twisting opponent. Both the necessity of stepping closer and the danger of a trapped blade open you to retaliation. There is almost no stab you can make that is so swiftly fatal that it will prevent the counter-blow.”

  Circle. Slash, block. Circle, slash. Block.

  “Even the whisper of a well-honed knife can cut through cloth, skin, and the muscle beneath. Knife fights are a war of attrition. Your foe is brought down by the combination of blood loss and the lost mobility due to various wounds, allowing an eventual coup de grâce.”

  Nona’s blade slipped past Ara’s block and wrote a black line across her stomach. An immediate flood of guilt washed through her. She had spent two years thinking her friend could have stabbed her in her sleep, or at the least threatened to do so.

  “Of course, against untrained opponents combat may often be concluded within moments. A slash to the throat and swift advance to the next target is recommended, though a stab to the heart, the eye, or up under the jaw are possibilities if the opponent’s blade is controlled.”

  Circle-slash-block. Circle-slash-block.

  “Break! You can join the others for ten minutes before next bell.”

  Nona straightened, blinking sweat from her eyes. Time had escaped her, but the blisters on her knife hand and the circle of floor kicked free of sand had kept a more accurate measure than her mind.

  “Yes, Mistress Blade.” Ara nodded and hurried off towards the changing room.

  Nona pushed her wet hair back across her forehead, blinked again, and gave chase.

  • • •

  “IT’S GREAT YOU came up.” Ara finished with the last tie and stripped off her blade-habit in one fluid motion. “I was getting worried we wouldn’t range together.”

  “We’ve still got three months for that.” Nona wriggled into her day-habit and brushed her hands through her hair, a short thick shock of it. She wanted to grow it long but it went wild if she let it get past a hand span and brushing wouldn’t tame it. When it got long Sister Wheel stopped calling her peasant and called her harlot instead—which made it almost worth it, but not quite.

  “I hope more of the others make it up before then too.” Ara picked up her stockings and shoes, ready to go.

  “We need Ruli and Jula at least.” Nona nodded. Grey Class went on the ranging every year, the novices sent on a long journey across open country. It was an important part of the year’s lessons. Without resources they had to live off the land and pass several convent challenges on the way. On the previous ranging two girls had been injured, one failing to reach the target in the allotted time. The abbess wouldn’t throw novices out for failing on the ranging—though her predecessor had—but it was certain that nobody who failed a ranging would ever take the grey or the red. “It’ll be the first time I’ve got off this rock in . . . since I arrived here.”

  “Come on!” Ara pulled Nona’s arm, shaking her out of her contemplation of the fact that she hadn’t ever passed back through the pillars outside the convent. “Race you.”

  Nona and Ara scrambled barefoot up the stairs to the platform in the blade-path chamber, Ara bursting through well in the lead and almost knocking a girl over the edge. About half the novices had already abandoned practice in favour of an early bath, but they still had some competition. Ketti sat with her back to them, legs dangling out into space, and two older novices stood waiting their turns. Taller of the two, whom Ara had nearly pitched into the net below, was Alata. Her dark eyes narrowed in disapproval at Nona’s arrival. The girl had ink-black hair so tightly curled it seemed to float about her head; her dark skin had been patterned with darker scars, their raised bumps looking as if they spelled out a message whose meaning lay just beyond comprehension. The other novice was Leeni, a red-haired girl with skin so pale that her veins showed in blue webs across her bare legs and arms.

  Out on the path itself Clera, still in her blade-habit, wobbled dangerously as she attempted the first rise of the spiral.

  “Watch your back foot!” Ara called out.

  Clera twitched, flailed at the air, and fell with a furious shriek, dark hair streaming up to shroud her face. Ara turned to Nona with a guilty look, raising her hands. “Well, she did have it placed wrongly.”

  Nona said nothing, though to be fair, Clera had been poorly positioned.

  Alata gestured to the pipe with a broad hand. “See what you got, new girl.”

  “You.” The pale girl pointed at Nona. “I want to see if the Shield drops faster than the rest of us.”

  Nona shrugged. She and Clera were the only acknowledged hunska full-bloods in the lower classes, though Ara might also be, and she was certainly very fast for a prime. Full-bloods always got jealousy and awe in equal measures but Nona’s showing at the ordeal had pushed the reaction to greater extremes.

  It took a moment to brush the sand from her feet and apply resin. Ara had made her a gift of a small tub of the stickiest blend Nona had seen. The tub itself was silver, embossed and worked, by far the most valuable thing Nona had touched, and yet passed to her as if it were no more than an apple-core.

  “Remember, take your time, think!” Ara spoke as Nona set foot on the pipe, arms out for balance. “You always go too fast.” Ara’s first completion was less than a month old and her enthusiasm for giving advice had yet to wane. She had taken a little over four hundred beats compared to Clera’s best of two hundred and ninety, and failed to improve on it in her two completions since.

  Nona edged out, having to pull to free each foot from the traction that would prove vital in the steeper sections. She still had yet to pass the halfway point. Something never felt quite right, as if the whole shifting shape of the blade-path had been designed just to throw her, Nona Grey, into the net below, as a personal insult. Some elusive part of the puzzle escaped her every time, a sour note in the song, the wrongness of someone else’s shoe on her foot.

  “You’re doing well!” Ara from the platform, already far above Nona’s head as she finished the long slow curve of the initial descent and approached the sharp rise of the spiral’s first turn.

  “The net wants you, little girl.” The pale novice.

  “Darla wants you too!” Alata called.

  Laughter and hoots rose from below where other novices watched at the doorway.

  Nona started the climb, making sure that her back foot held a better position than Clera’s had. She rose with slow steps, stuttered corrections here and there as she made the difficult transfer from the inner surface of the spiral to the outer. The structure rocked and swayed on its supporting cables. She drew a slow breath and crossed the vertex of the first loop.

  Click. The pendulum swung past its midpoint and the dial advanced another notch, counting out Nona’s sloth. The leap to the top of the next spiral tempted her, but the rules of the game said the whole blade-path must be walked. She started her descent, relying on the resin to stop her slipping. Click.

  Some yards ahead a heavy section of the blade-path rotated on a joint, reacting to the shifting of Nona’s weight on the spiral. Every part of the blade-path levered some other part: the smallest step could set some section in motion, the whole path flexing and reconfiguring.

  Nona dropped into the moment, slowing the world to a crawl, the novices’ laughter crashing through the registers until it reached the deep rumble of a mud-o
x. She reached for support, shifting her own weight to counter the motion beneath her feet. A slow hunt for balance in the space between heartbeats.

  Somehow it ended as it so often ended, with Nona understanding that she had passed the point of no return, knowing that no lunge could save her now, and letting gravity take her. She fell without sound, just a silent snarl across her lips. The impact with the net, the bounce, the scramble to the side, all passed without notice: she knew she could walk the blade-path, knew it blood to bone, and yet . . . and yet . . .

  “Bad luck!” Clera wrapped an arm around Nona. “You’re getting better, though.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Let’s watch Ara fall.” Clera grinned. “Or just get old watching her finishing it.”

  A novice, nearly as tall as Darla but half her width, pulled the lever on the wall, trapping the pendulum at the end of a swing and setting the dial back to zero.

  23

  “TOUCHING THE PATH is the second most dangerous thing a person can do.” Sister Pan stalked the classroom with an energy wholly at odds with her ancient frame. “These games you play with swords and knives, poisons and acids . . . you think this is danger? You girls don’t even know the hurt that a sharp edge can do—a slip of the wrist and you’re opened to the world, blood, bone, nerves, guts, all the soft wonder of a body cut through. If you live the pain can last a lifetime, the loss . . . if you live.” She raised her right arm and gazed at the stump where her hand should be, tilting her head as if perhaps she could still see the missing fingers moving to her will. A moment later the old woman spun on her heel to face Nona. “I’ve told these girls a hundred times—it doesn’t stick. It’s small matter if they haven’t the blood for it. But you . . . you, little Nona, you might yet do it. This ill-advised connection Novice Hessa forged with you is a possible sign. Not a proper thread-bond, but an echo of one.” Sister Pan leaned in and tapped Nona’s forehead with a finger as dry and dark as a charcoal stick. “There might be a touch of quantal locked in there . . . and all we need to do is find a way to set it free.”