Red Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  Hessa stumped in a moment later, looking surprised not to be the first.

  “What’s the convent’s most valuable treasure?” Nona surprised herself by asking but Sister Rule always took kindly to questions and asking had become a habit.

  “The shipheart.” No hesitation.

  “And it’s stored below Heart Hall?”

  “Yes indeed.” Sister Rule closed the book she had been reading from and narrowed her eyes at Nona. “Planning on stealing it?” She maintained the stare long enough for Nona to think she might be serious, then laughed.

  The rest of Grey Class came in more or less together, Ara looking tired, Clera slumping dramatically over her desk, Jula setting her quill, scroll, and slate out with her usual precision, Darla hulking over her work and managing to spatter ink as she opened the pot. Head-girl Mally at the front. Alata and Leeni side by side, each finding the other’s fingers beneath the desk with accurate devotion. Zole took her customary seat at the middle of the room, looking serene, as if she never left the trance.

  “Today.” Sister Rule slapped her yardstick down. “We will discuss the ice.”

  The faintest of frowns creased Zole’s brow.

  “In Red Class we discussed the thickness of the ice, its advance, both historically and contemporaneously. And the cause—the waning of our own dying sun. Today we will address the peoples who make it their home.” She turned her head towards Zole and gave a friendly smile. “Which is something Novice Zole knows far more about than anyone in the room. So perhaps she would like to tell us something of the ice-tribes?”

  “No.” Zole’s lips barely moved but the word came out loud and clear.

  Sister Rule pressed her own lips into a flat line that managed to convey surprise, amusement, and disapproval all at the same time. “And why might that be, novice?”

  “The ice must be experienced. You have no words in your books that capture it. Journeying the ice is the price for such knowledge.”

  “Well . . .” Sister Rule rapped her yardstick against the desk. “We have our first observation—the tribes of the deep ice have their own codes of behaviour which can be quite at odds with our own. You would have to travel hundreds of miles east to Scithrowl or west across the sea to Durn to experience significant cultural differences in the Corridor, but a journey of less than thirty miles to the north or south will set you face to face with peoples whose ways are more alien to ours than those of any Durnishman.” She looked around the class. “I’m sure you’ve been curious about your new companion and her guardian. Ask me some worthwhile questions and I’ll share what . . .” her eyes flicked towards Zole “. . . meagre information I have.”

  “What do they eat?” Nona’s hand shot up but she’d already blurted out the question.

  “Good!” Sister Rule banged the desk. “To the heart of the matter. They eat fish.”

  “But how? The ice is miles thick!” Nona had seen the walls of the Corridor and even there just behind the margins the ice lay hundreds of yards deep.

  “It is.” Sister Rule reached for the glittering white globe on her desk with its belt of colour almost vanishingly thin, kept clear by the passing heat of the focus moon. “But there are places above the ocean where the sea lies open, the ice melted by warmer water upwelling from the ocean depths. In some cases the sea is accessible year round. Further north and south, where seasons rule, the ice only clears in high summer. In all cases the open water is limited to patches no more than a mile across but thick with ocean life. The ice-tribes either centre their existence on a permanent spot or range nomadically with the seasons from one temporary oasis to the next. In their travels they explore tunnel systems wherever they are to be found, looking for routes to the bedrock and any of the undercities abandoned by the Missing.”

  Nona’s thoughts wandered to the stories her father told about the ice tunnels. The memories of him telling her had escaped, leaving just an impression of being bounced upon his knee, awed by the strangeness of his tales. The stories themselves she knew from her mother’s retelling of them when she was still very young.

  She watched the class with eyes that saw nothing except dark, glistening tunnels worming their way ever deeper, filled with old night and new possibility. When Bray sounded and shook her from her adventures Nona was startled to find that the whole session had passed and all around her girls were rising from their chairs.

  • • •

  IN BLADE AFTER lunch they practised with throwing stars. The novices spent the best part of two hours aiming at target boards. Sister Tallow had set up a dozen of the seven-foot boards on which man-shapes had been drawn in sufficient anatomical detail to amuse girls. The first four boards she placed just three yards in front of the throwing line, the next four six yards further back, the last another six yards out.

  “If you wish to hit an opponent further away than that you really should have brought a bow with you. Throwing stars are less encumbering and less obvious, ideal for urban situations and use inside buildings. The price paid is that they are less accurate and do less harm.” Sister Tallow paced behind the ranks of novices lined for their turn to throw.

  They threw until their arms grew tired and their hands bled from a dozen small nicks. Then they threw some more.

  “You think this is difficult?” Sister Tallow continued her pacing, pausing here and there to correct the position or action of a novice. “You’ll be lucky if you ever get a real target standing still and facing you. Aim for the eyes. Anywhere on the head gives you a decent chance of a hit that will take the fight out of someone, but the eye—now that’s a guaranteed stop for anyone.”

  Next to Nona, Ruli, who had proved annoyingly good with the throwing star since their first lesson, cracked her arm out and with a flip of her wrist put one into the eye of the nearest target, the point bedded in the black pupil.

  “Show-off,” Clera said to her right. The target before Clera had three of her stars studding it, one in the forehead, one near the ribs and a third hanging about a foot from the man’s neck, having missed completely. “Do it again.”

  Ruli sent another star spinning from her fingers, putting a point into the pupil of her target’s other eye.

  “That’s not even fair! You can’t judge where the point will land!” Clera flung her next star and nearly missed the board entirely.

  Ruli shrugged. “If the target were any closer and I had a spear I could practically lean forward and poke it.”

  Nona threw her four stars in quick succession. All four thunked home in the head, two into the eyes.

  At the end of the line Darla took her last throw and all four of them moved up to retrieve their stars before the next rank had their turn.

  “You didn’t get the pupils,” Clera said, still raging over Ruli’s feat.

  “When a sharp piece of metal hits you in the eye you’re going to have a really bad day whichever part it strikes.” Nona shrugged.

  “Keep telling yourself that.” Ruli grinned. “One day you’ll meet an enemy with really tiny eyes and you’ll wish you had me with you!”

  • • •

  IN THE BATHHOUSE after Blade Nona hung in the hot water while the class splashed and chattered around her or sat on the pool’s edge recovering in the steams. She put her head back, floating, embraced by heat, nothing but whiteness above her, the steam’s slow swirl echoing in her mind. Tomorrow the Academy would show off its students before Sister Pan and some grand audience. Hessa would show them the subtleties of thread-work in return, and Ara the channelled power of the Path gathered over as many as three or even four steps and released in controlled bursts of destruction. And Nona . . . the peasant girl from the Grey . . . the would-be murderer spirited from beneath a descending death sentence . . . what had she got to show them that they wouldn’t smirk behind their hands at?

  And when she came back she would still be poisoned, sti
ll face the dilemma of whether to confess her attack on Raymel or risk the black cure in an attempt to solve her own problems. And on top of all that—or rather, beneath it—there was Yisht, burrowing into something secret like a worm at the convent’s heart.

  Nona sighed and realized that sometimes even a hot bath couldn’t help.

  • • •

  THE CONVENT HIRED a cart to take Sister Pan and the three novices to the Academy. The rest of the class saw them off outside Path Tower. The girls, with the exception of Zole, clustered around, variously slapping shoulders or swapping hugs, dependent on their nature.

  “Make us proud!” Darla sent Nona staggering with a semi-affectionate shove.

  “Show those Academy brats something new!” Clera mimed an explosion.

  “Ancestor watch over you.” Jula smiled and held Nona’s hands in a brief clasp.

  “Be careful!” Ruli hugged her.

  “Don’t lose.” Alata with a warning look.

  Ara and Nona helped Hessa up into the cart.

  “You’re lucky,” Clera said, leaning in as Sister Pan took her place beside the driver. “The church seems to think nuns should walk everywhere. Seriously. Even Sister Cloud didn’t get a horse! If Hessa wasn’t a hop-along and Pan wasn’t a hundred and nine you’d be walking to the Academy.”

  The driver twitched his whip over the two horses and the cart lurched into motion. Nona clutched the side and remembered Giljohn’s cart. Another journey beginning . . .

  The cart rattled on along the track that led around the back of the piggeries and “the chicken house,” a long hall far too grand for its current purpose. To the track’s left the cliff edge lay just yards away over bare rock. Clera claimed a novice’s prank had once startled the supply wagon horse and sent it back down to the plains below by the most direct route, along with the supply wagon and the driver. Fortunately on this occasion no such prankster came forward and the cart survived to thread a path through the stone forest. Nona lay back to watch the pillars reaching for the sky as the driver wove his way around them. Even Sister Rule had no idea who had set them there. No book in the library spoke of it. As they broke clear Nona wondered how long the ripples she left behind would last before they faded and Abeth forgot her. Even if she built a thousand stone pillars taller and thicker than the biggest trees, the world would roll on and remember her no better than it did the mysterious founders of the stone forest.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” Hessa shifted across to join Nona watching the pillars retreat into the distance.

  “You do not.”

  “I don’t think there’s enough time left for us to be forgotten. Not if we do extraordinary things. If we burn bright enough we’ll be remembered until the moon falls and the Corridor closes.”

  “That’s not so bad then.”

  “It will be if we’re still alive to see it!”

  Sister Pan eyed them darkly. “It is never a good idea for two novices to become thread-bound. That experiment of yours was ill-advised, Novice Hessa, even if you didn’t know that Novice Nona had the blood.” She rubbed absently at her stump. “And now you share idle thoughts as well as dreams and pain . . . The lives of any so closely bound tend to become mirrors of each other, their rhythms coming into time until there are no coincidences, only a sharing in the patterns of crisis and peace.”

  Hessa looked down, ashamed. Nona reached out a hand to her shoulder, tentative. “It doesn’t sound so bad. If we stick together it just means we’ll share our troubles.”

  • • •

  THE CART TOOK the Vinery Stair, a longer descent to the plains but less treacherous than the Seren Way, and despite its name, stairless. Once clear of the plateau they curved back past the convent vineyards nestled in the arms of the cliffs, and took the Rutland Road into Verity.

  The grand gates of the city stood open, with as many people seeming to have urgent business inside as had urgent business in the world beyond, leading to a great press of humanity, many employing elbows and whips to forge a path, and all of them shouting.

  Nona sat hunched about her knees as the cart inched through.

  “I’d forgotten the smell,” Hessa said. She’d been the only member of Grey Class not to come to watch the forging at the Caltess.

  Ara wrinkled her nose, watching the crowd with fascination. “You should come down on a holy-day! There’s so much to . . .” She trailed off, remembering that while she was trapped on the rock by Sherzal’s avarice Hessa was trapped by her leg just as effectively. “Sorry.”

  The abbess kept Ara in the convent at her uncle’s request, the Jotsis lord still concerned that Sherzal planned to abduct his niece. Practically all of Ara’s anger at Zole could be laid at the feet of this fact that loomed over every seven-day. Ara literally ached for Verity. Shopping, she said, was the greatest of pleasures. Nona, having never purchased anything or owned money, had no opinion on the matter, but judging by the street stalls jammed along the high street leading from the gates, it seemed to be one of the more popular contact sports in the city.

  Once past the gate the crush eased and within a hundred yards they were moving at walking pace along the broad, cobbled street. To either side grand-looking establishments towered to three and four storeys, restaurants below, guest rooms above. Blacksmiths, wheelwrights, leatherworkers, saddle-makers, tack shops, and all manner of hostelries crowded the side roads. Later the high street gave over to tailors and jewellers, silversmiths and goldsmiths, with luxurious apartments above, occasionally with one of their balconies occupied by some wealthy tenant sipping wine and watching the world go by, literally beneath their attention.

  The colours fascinated Nona’s eye. In the convent everything was grey or black or the faint yellow-green of limestone. When a Red Sister wore her official habit it was a vivid splash on an otherwise dull palette. In Verity’s crowds a Red Sister would scarcely give the eye pause as it swept across the scene.

  The driver turned at a main junction and carried on up a gentle gradient into areas given over to private homes. Nona began to get a sense of having already visited the streets they were passing. She turned to see Hessa glancing her way. Hessa looked suddenly very young, her bony body too small for her habit, her face so thin and angular that she might pass as one of the forest nixies that Nana Even used to tell stories about. The sun, still low in the eastern sky, made something ethereal of the wispy curls of her blonde hair, turning it into a kind of halo. It seemed for a moment that Hessa hadn’t changed from their journey with Giljohn years ago, not even a little bit.

  “My memories.” Hessa leaned forward, steadying herself against the cart’s swaying with one hand and touching Nona’s arm with the other. “You’re remembering my memories.”

  A shadow passed over them and Nona looked up to see a tall brick tower with a great bell hanging above it, open to the elements. She’d seen it before. But with different eyes. By the time they drew near to the Academy Nona could have instructed the driver where to turn left and where to turn right.

  They drove around the great hall where Hessa and the others had been tested, past a range of other school buildings, and across a great paved courtyard. A squad of soldiers passed in front of them, twenty men in chain armour, spears across their shoulders, their tunics gold and green, the device across their chests a great tree, black against a red sun rising.

  “The emperor’s troops,” said Sister Pan. “And those, novices, are the walls of the emperor’s palace.” Sister Pan gestured with her stump to the broad curtain wall stretching in both directions off into the distance. A round keep rose just behind the wall, as sturdy a fortress as Nona could imagine, looking as if it belonged to a different age where giants had built it out of vast blocks of bedrock. Seeming small in the shadow of the wall, but still every bit as large as the Caltess, and far grander, lay another hall. “And that, poking above the emperor’s wall, is the
Ark-Keep. And the building we’re aimed at is Academy Hall. All these buildings are the Academy, but that hall’s the heart of it.”

  “Why is it up against the emperor’s wall like that?” Nona asked. It looked strange, as if the emperor and Academy had been arguing over some disputed boundary.

  “To be as close to the Ark as possible.” Sister Pan waved her hand in the air as if trying to collect something from the empty space before her. “Can you feel it?”

  Nona could, though the sensation had crept up on her so slowly that it had passed beneath her notice. The same fullness, the same sense of sleeping power laced the air here as laced the air towards the back of the Dome of the Ancestor. It pulsed with a slow rhythm. “It’s the same . . . like in the convent.”

  Sister Pan gave her a sharp look then glanced to the others. “Hessa? Arabella? Can you feel it?”

  Both shook their heads, looking puzzled.

  “Very few can,” Sister Pan said. “Even among the quantal.” She turned her pale eyes back on Nona. “It’s the same aura that the shipheart has, only stronger, and richer.”

  “But . . .” It was Nona’s turn to frown. “The shipheart is beneath Heart Hall and—”

  Sister Pan held her hand up, silencing Nona. “The shipheart is beneath Heart Hall. Yes. And Academy Hall is positioned as close to the Ark as possible, allowing the Academics to work greater magics here than anywhere else within the empire.

  “Without our shipheart Sweet Mercy would be like any other convent. Its presence makes it a hundred times easier to train Mystic Sisters or to let those with a touch of marjal learn shadow-work. The shipheart doesn’t just keep us warm. It’s the heart of our community. A gift from the Ancestor.” She pointed to the palace walls rising above the Academy’s roofs. “The Ark is the same, but different. Stronger still. In fact you would have to follow the Corridor for many thousands of miles to find an equal to the magics worked here—to one of the other two Arks still said to stand free of the ice.”

  “How many are beneath the ice?” Hessa asked.