Read the book: «Holy Sister»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Story So Far

Prologue

Chapter 1. Holy Class: Present Day

Chapter 2. Three years earlier: The Escape

Chapter 3. Holy Class: Present Day

Chapter 4. Three Years Earlier: The Escape

Chapter 5. Holy Class: Present Day

Chapter 6. Holy Class: Present Day

Chapter 7. Three Years Earlier: The Escape

Chapter 8. Holy Class: Present Day

Chapter 9. Present: Holy Class

Chapter 10. Holy Class

Chapter 11. Three Years Earlier: The Escape

Chapter 12. Three Years Earlier: The Escape

Chapter 13. Present: Holy Class

Chapter 14. Three Years Earlier: The Escape

Chapter 15. Present: Holy Class

Chapter 16. Three Years Earlier: The Escape

Chapter 17. Holy Class

Chapter 18. Three Years Earlier: The Escape

Chapter 19. Present: Holy Class

Chapter 20. Holy Class

Chapter 21. Three Years Earlier: The Escape

Chapter 22. Present: Holy Class

Chapter 23. Holy Class

Chapter 24. Holy Class

Chapter 25. Holy Class

Chapter 26. Holy Class

Chapter 27. Holy Class

Chapter 28. Holy Class

Chapter 29. Holy Class

Chapter 30. Holy Class

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Also by Mark Lawrence

About the Publisher

The Story So Far

For those of you who have had to wait a while for this book I provide brief catch-up notes so that your memories may be refreshed and I can avoid the awkwardness of having to have characters tell each other things they already know for your benefit.

Here I carry forward only what is of importance to the tale that follows.

The people and places in the brief summary I start with are expanded on further down, so if it means nothing to you, skip the next paragraph then come back to it.

Grey Sister ended with Nona, around fifteen years old, escaping Sherzal’s palace with troops in pursuit. She had friends with her, including Zole, Ara, Regol, Abbess Glass and Sister Kettle, and assorted other survivors. Zole had the Noi-Guin’s shipheart, stolen from the assassins’ headquarters beneath the palace. Clera helped Nona escape but went back to Sherzal’s service. Nona’s enemy from the convent, the novice Joeli Namsis, was still in the palace and her actions led to the death of Nona’s friend Darla during the escape. Nona and her companions are in the mountains on the border with Scithrowl and a long way from the convent. The story does not begin with this scene but will return to it presently.

Abeth is a planet orbiting a dying red sun. It is sheathed in ice and the vast majority of its people live in a fifty-mile-wide ice-walled corridor around the equator.

An artificial moon, a great orbiting mirror, keeps the Corridor free of ice by focusing the sun’s rays into it each night.

When, thousands of years ago, the four original tribes of men came to Abeth from the stars they found the ruins of a vanished people they called the Missing.

The empire is bounded by the lands of the Scithrowl to the east and by the Sea of Marn to the west. Across the sea the Durns rule. At the end of Grey Sister Scithrowl hordes under their Battle-Queen, Adoma, were amassing on their side of the mountain range that borders the battle lines.

The emperor’s sister, Sherzal, commands the defence against Scithrowl from her palace in the mountains. She was going to betray the empire and let Queen Adoma’s forces through the Grand Pass. The deal included combining the shipheart held by the Noi-Guin assassins and the shipheart stolen from Sweet Mercy Convent by the ice-triber Yisht, with the two shiphearts Queen Adoma has, thereby making the quartet of shiphearts believed necessary to open the Ark. The Ark lies beneath the emperor’s palace and was built either by the Missing or the first humans and is said to allow control of the moon.

Shiphearts are objects of disputed origin that may have powered the ships that brought the tribes of men to Abeth. The closer a person gets to one the more enhanced their natural talent for magic is. Get too close, though, and the shipheart’s power begins to break your mind apart. Undesirable pieces of your personality like anger or greed or malice split into sentient fragments called devils and exert greater influence over you.

As the sun weakens, the ice continues a slow advance despite the warmth of the moon’s nightly focus. As the Corridor is squeezed, nations look to their neighbours for new territory.

The empire’s nobility are the Sis. The suffix is attached to the names of ennobled families (e.g. Tacsis, Jotsis etc).

The four original tribes that came to Abeth were the gerant, hunska, marjal, and quantal. Their blood sometimes shows in the current population, conferring unique powers. The gerant grow very large, the hunska are fantastically swift, the marjal can manifest all manner of minor to medium magics, including shadow-weaving, sigil-writing, and mastery of elements. The quantal can access the raw power of the Path and manipulate the threads that are woven to create reality.

The Missing left behind structures called Arks. Three exist within the Corridor. The emperor’s palace is built on one. There are no reliable records of anyone being able to open the Ark, but a faked prophecy predicts the coming of a Chosen One who will be able to. Others believe that four shiphearts used together can open an Ark.

Nona Grey was a peasant child from a nameless village. She was given to the child-taker Giljohn who sold her to the Caltess where ring-fighters are trained and pitted against each other. She ended up at the Convent of Sweet Mercy where novices are trained in service to the Ancestor. Novices take orders as one of four classes of nun. Holy Sister (entirely religious duties), Grey Sister/Sister of Discretion (trained in assassination and stealth), Red Sister/Martial Sister (trained in combat), Holy Witch/Mystic Sister (trained to walk the Path).

Nona has proven to be a triple-blood, an incredibly rare occurrence. She has hunska, marjal, and quantal skills. Nona has wholly black eyes, a side effect of taking a dangerous antidote. She has no shadow, having cut it free while fighting Yisht.

Yisht is a woman of the ice-tribes and is in the employ of the emperor’s sister Sherzal. Yisht stole the Sweet Mercy shipheart and killed Nona’s friend Hessa.

Nona is hated by Lano Tacsis because she killed his brother and also left his father, Lord Thuran Tacsis, bound to his own torture device.

Joeli Namsis is the daughter of a lord with close ties to the Tacsis family. She is skilled at quantal thread-work and poisoning. She became Nona’s enemy at the convent.

During the theft of the shipheart Nona was betrayed by her friend and fellow novice Clera Ghomal. Among Nona’s remaining friends are novices Ara, Zole, Ruli, and Jula. Arabella Jotsis is from a powerful family and a rare two-blood, having both hunska and quantal skills. Ruli has minor marjal skills. Jula is very studious and hopes to become a Holy Sister.

Zole is a significant novice. She is from the ice-tribes and came to the convent at Sherzal’s insistence, used as an unwitting distraction to help in the theft of the shipheart. She is the only known four-blood with access to all the skills of the original tribes. Many consider her to be the Chosen One from prophecy. Under the prophecy Zole is the Argatha, and Nona is her Shield.

The Convent of Sweet Mercy has been led by Abbess Glass, a woman whose connections in the Church and beyond reach further than expected.

Most senior among the nuns are the Sisters Superior, Wheel and Rose. Sister Wheel teaches Spirit classes. Sister Rose runs the sanatorium. Other important figures are Sister Tallow, who teaches Blade, Sister Pan, who teaches Path, and Sister Apple who teaches Shade. Sister Kettle is a Grey Sister based at the convent. She and Apple are lovers.

There are four classes/stages that novices move through as they train to take holy orders as nuns. Red Class, Grey Class, Mystic Class, and Holy Class. Grey Sister ended with Nona in Mystic Class.

Novices take new names when they become nuns. Nona will become Sister Cage. Ara will be Sister Thorn.

Prologue

The roar of a crowd invades you like a living thing, reverberating in your chest, taking its answer from your lips without permission. The press of bodies overwhelms barriers and unknowingly the many become something singular, the same emotion bleeding from the skins of different people, the same thought echoing in a hundred skulls, or a thousand. For a marjal empath it can be a thing at once both terrifying and glorious, expanding their control, making it easier to reach into the minds around them, but also allowing the possibility that in such a storm of humanity they may lose themselves, may be lifted out of their flesh, never to find it again.

Markus watched the defeated fighter being helped from the ring beneath the jeers and complaint of the crowd. The victor still stalked the perimeter of his raised battleground, arms lifted, sweat running down his ribs. But already the crowd were losing interest in him, turning to their neighbours with speculation, observation, or jest, turning to the odds-mongers to lay new wagers, turning to the counter in the far corner to fill their cups with wine. And some, seeking new thrills, now faced the second ring at the far end of the hall.

The gerant fighter waiting behind the ropes threatened nine foot in height and Markus didn’t believe that he had seen a larger man. The fighter was still young, in his early twenties perhaps, and his muscles crowded along his bones, the battle for space heaping them up in great, veined mounds. He watched the world from pale eyes beneath a thicket of short red hair.

At the Caltess the gerant contests were the most popular. The sight of enormous fighters pitting their strength against each other never failed to draw the masses, and on nights with an open ring the folk of Verity loved to see that strength turned upon hapless challengers. Bouts between hunska ring-fighters had a strong following among the more experienced watchers but the speed of the combatants often left the common crowd bewildered. Mixed matches were a rarity but the contest of speed against strength was always interesting.

From the baying press of humanity around the base of the giant’s ring a challenger emerged. A powerfully built man who stood head and shoulders above those pressing him on all sides. In normal circumstances Markus would have been impressed by the fellow’s physique and backed him against any three bar-room brawlers.

An undercurrent of whispers and speculation flowed around the hall. The man was a refugee from the port of Ren, which now lay within the Durnish incursion. He had some reputation from pit-fights in the frost towns along the north margins.

‘Five says he doesn’t last the round against Denam.’ Someone behind Markus seeking a private wager.

The roar as the newcomer climbed into the ring drowned out further conversation. Markus hadn’t ever been inside the great hall of the Caltess, though years ago he had spent hours waiting in the compound with the other children from Giljohn’s cage. The child-taker had never intended to sell Markus to Partnis Reeve though. He’d suspected Markus of marjal blood and had taken him on to be offered where such talents would fetch a richer price. The great hall had stood silent and dark on that midnight long ago, and as the night had shaded into morning young Markus had shivered and clutched himself and never suspected that he would one day stand within, part of a sweating, heaving mass baying for blood.

Even though it was Markus’s first time before the rings he knew Denam’s name. Despite his tender years the young man was the new champion among the gerant ring-fighters, famed for his brutality. For Denam open-ring night often proved to involve nothing more than glowering at the sea of resentful faces before him. Finding no one to answer his challenge he would cede his place to another fighter and once more the crowd would discover its courage.

‘Milos of Ren!’ the fight-master called out.

Milos raised his arm in acknowledgement and walked to his corner to await the bell.

Markus didn’t hear the chime above the roar but the two men closed, Milos dwarfed by Denam. The gerant full-blood kept his hands down and let Milos take a punch. It was as if he had swung at a tree. Denam’s head moved slightly to the left with the blow. Milos clubbed him two-handed across the other side of his face and Denam’s head lurched to the right. Denam returned his gaze to his opponent and grinned, his teeth bloody. Milos didn’t appear to understand. He looked down at his fists as if there might be something wrong with them.

Denam slapped the man, brushing his arms away. Blood sprayed from Milos’s mouth and he staggered as if drunk. Denam caught him in two great hands, one wrapped around his neck, the other encompassing his thigh, and lifted him four yards above the boards before slamming him down, full-bodied, face first.

Milos did not rise. An apprentice scrambled in to scatter sand across the crimson smear left behind when they dragged him out beneath the lowest rope.

Markus wasn’t alone in thinking that Denam was finished for the night, but the flow of the crowd indicated another challenger coming to the fore. The newcomer appeared, climbing clear of the throng. From behind, Markus saw only a dark cloak and black hair. This challenger stood even shorter than Milos, little more than six foot and of considerably lighter build. The audience hushed in surprise.

‘Hunska?’ the whisper went round.

‘Fool!’ came the reply.

The challenger might not be a giant but even so hunskas were never this tall or broad-shouldered. Denam fixed the newcomer with a stare so murderous that Markus felt the need to run boiling up inside him. As an empath he was used to swimming in the currents of others’ emotions but the ring-fighter’s anger ran swifter and more deep than anything he’d felt before and at each moment threatened to overwhelm his senses.

The challenger ducked beneath the top rope.

‘Drunk,’ someone speculated.

Markus tried to imagine how drunk a person would have to be to think this a good idea. Too drunk to stand, probably. This one didn’t move as if inebriated though.

The hush fell to silence as the challenger’s cloak fluttered from the ring. The woman wore the same as the ring-fighters, just a white loin-cloth and a white band of cloth bound tight around her chest, her pale skin accentuating the redness of Denam’s complexion.

The fight-master didn’t approach to learn the challenger’s name. Instead he raised his voice, ‘Nona of the convent.’

Nona didn’t lift her arm to acknowledge the crowd’s roar but she did make a slow turn, and when the black orbs of her eyes swept across him Markus knew that he had been seen.

‘Fight!’

Denam came slowly to meet the novice, fists raised to protect his throat and eyes, his stance closed to defend his groin. Markus watched Nona intently, trying to see anything of the girl he’d known over those weeks in Giljohn’s cage. She was two years his junior so she would be around seventeen, but she looked every inch a woman. Long-limbed, lean, an athlete’s body, each muscle chiselled in hard relief, flat belly above the jut of her hipbones. Even frightened for her as he was, Markus couldn’t deny she drew his eye in ways unbecoming to a Holy Brother.

Nona stepped in with a swift confidence, striking Denam just below the ribs on his left side, five or six blows landing with the rapidity of a woodpecker hammering at a tree. She punched with her whole body, swivelling at the waist. Denam laughed the blows off and swept a hand at the novice. She evaded him with ease, landing three or four more punches in the same spot. Hard as she must be hitting the man, Markus couldn’t see what hope Nona had of victory. The muscle covering Denam’s bones lay inches thick and the bones beneath must be like those of a draught horse. She might as well try to punch a bear into submission.

Denam squared up against Nona, his hatred for her obvious even as he tried to laugh at her efforts. Nona stood her ground and the crowd drew in its breath. Denam swung with an arm that looked as thick around as Markus’s chest. The fist he drove at Nona was the size of her skull.

She took the punch in the face, her head snapping to the right. The follow-up came from the left, snapping her head back the other way. Markus imagined those fists would shatter a skull, leave cheekbones in fragments, break a neck …

Nona looked up at the fighter towering above her and smiled, her teeth unbloodied. Denam seemed astonished, the crowd roared in wonder. Magic? But Markus had sensed no enchantment, not the slightest crackle of it. He could only imagine that she had moved her head at the same speed as the fists seeking it, allowing only a gentle contact.

Again Nona peppered the same spot below Denam’s ribs with half a dozen blows in the space of a heartbeat or two. She leapt back, rolling under a sweeping hand, rising in the same motion, kicking at her target, evading a second questing hand and spinning to land another kick in the same spot.

Denam came towards her, his own roar louder than the mob. As he advanced he favoured his left side. A small thing that could easily pass unnoticed. Nona twisted clear, bounced off two sets of ropes and landed a flying kick, just below his ribs.

For long minutes the fight continued, Denam’s attacks almost brushing Nona’s pale skin but never quite finding it. Nona landing a score of punches and kicks on her target, perhaps two score. Denam’s rage grew, his face crimson, spitting and foaming, howling threats and promises. But he crouched over the injured side now, the bruised lower ribs, covering them with his elbow. He leaned against the corner post, hitching in a breath.

‘Come on, big boy.’ Nona’s first words in the fight.

They worked like a spark to flash-powder. Denam threw himself forward with a scream. Nona dived beneath his outstretched arms, rolled head over heels between his legs, through the opening left as fury overcame caution, and drove her heel into his groin with all the speed and strength she possessed.

Denam made it two more strides before he realized that Nona was no longer in front of him, and a further stride before the pain hit home. The gerant’s legs forgot whatever orders they had and dropped him to the planks where he curled around his agony, blind to the world.

Nona sprang to her feet, the fight still in her face, teeth bared. With the awful gale of Denam’s hatred subsumed into his wordless agony, Markus could now feel Nona’s emotions and found himself rocked back upon his heels by the raw animal aggression bleeding off her. He had experienced something similar when a wrong turn had taken him to the dog-pits beyond the walls of Old Town. A bloodied mastiff with its jaws locked around the throat of another hound had given off the same explosive violence that the novice did. Markus fully expected Nona to fall upon her prey, gouging Denam’s eyes from their sockets or stamping his face to pulp. But instead, in the space of five deep breaths, she drew it all back in, every piece, until there was nothing he could read above the mixed sea of emotion all around him. Of all that he’d seen that night it was this quenching of fury that was the most remarkable to him.

Ignoring the cheers, and the fight-master coming to question or reward her, Nona vaulted the ropes and dropped into the crowd. Within moments she was at Markus’s side, vibrant, sweat-soaked, alive, the alien blackness of her eyes level with his.

‘You came,’ she said.

Markus shrugged. ‘You asked me to.’

1
Holy Class
Present Day

Markus had grown beyond Nona’s expectations. She remembered a fierce spiky-haired farm-boy who had welcomed her to Giljohn’s cage by demanding her age and had appeared to find comfort in establishing his seniority over her. A bad beginning, but his affection for the child-taker’s mule had softened her opinion of him by the end of their journey. Now he stood a solid six foot two, handsome in a friendly way, a face that would laugh with you. The black hair had been tamed with oil and lay flat to his skull in the way of monks. The only sign of the boy from the cage was a sharpness to his features and a quickness in the dark eyes that studied her.

Nona had wrapped her cloak around her once more. Sweat stuck the material to her back, making her uncomfortable, or perhaps that was just the frankness of Markus’s regard. She offered a smile in return for his and hugged her hands under her arms. Her knuckles ached from repeatedly punching Denam. Nona was sure she’d punched practice timbers that were softer than the gerant’s side. She felt good though, her body glowing, her step so light that with a little effort she might just shrug off gravity entirely.

She leaned in. ‘Let’s talk outside.’

Markus nodded. They pushed a path towards the main doors. Already the Caltess’s patrons were flocking back to the second ring. A couple of hulking apprentices were helping Denam over the ropes of the first.

‘I’m surprised the convent lets novices come down here to fight,’ Markus said behind her.

‘They don’t.’ Nona slipped between the doors as they opened to admit more thrill-seekers.

‘Why did you—’ Markus broke off to draw his robes around him, the black habit of a Holy Brother. He followed her out into rain-laced wind, a loud brrr escaping at the cold shock of it.

‘An old dispute that needed settling,’ Nona said. It was partly true. Mostly she had wanted to hit someone, hard, again and again. Markus probably knew that already; classified Church reports named him as one of the most effective marjal empaths currently in the Ancestor’s service.

Nona led Markus around the corner of the great hall where they would be sheltered from the gale. The walls loomed dark above them, the sky crossed with tatters of cloud beneath the crimson spread of a thousand dying stars.

‘Why did you want me? Send the message, I mean?’ Markus seemed less sure of himself than she had expected. Someone who could read her like a book should be more confident? She certainly wished her own empath skills would tell her more of his mood than she could glean from the intensity of his stare or the tight line of his lips.

‘That day at the Academy.’ The words blurted from her. ‘Did you make that girl attack me?’ Nona forced her mouth closed. She had had it all planned out, what she would say, how, when. And now her idiot tongue had cut through all of it.

‘She … she was already attacking you.’ Guilt came from him in waves.

‘She was using the darkness to scare me. Or trying to. But then she went mad.’ Nona remembered how an animal fury had risen across the girl’s face. ‘You did that!’

‘I did.’ A frown now, his brow pale and beaded with rain.

‘She tried to shadow-rend me. I could have been torn apart!’

Markus raised his hands. ‘I made her angry. I didn’t know she could do that.’

‘Well, she could!’ Nona felt her own anger rising from the well she thought emptied in the ring.

‘I’m sorry.’ He looked down.

‘But …’ It felt like honesty, but Nona supposed he could fake that better than anyone she’d ever known. ‘Why?’

‘Abbot Jacob told me to.’

‘Jacob?’ A chill ran through Nona. ‘High Priest Jacob? I mean the one who used to be?’

Markus nodded, still looking down.

‘But … he’s not … you don’t have to …’

‘He was appointed to St Croyus as abbot a year after Abbess Glass had Nevis replace him as high priest.’

‘St Croyus? But Jacob’s a monster!’ Nona couldn’t see how the former high priest could have risen from disgrace so swiftly.

‘A monster with friends in high places. Including the Tacsis.’ Markus shrugged. ‘And he’s not a stupid man, just a cruel and greedy one.’

‘So he bought you from Giljohn, sent you to St Croyus, and followed you there to take over?’ Nona had seen the high priest beat Giljon’s mule to death and leave Markus broken. And that was just on the day he’d purchased him as a frightened boy of ten. How must it have been to grow up under that man’s command?

‘I’m sorry.’ Markus looked up and met her eyes. She gave him points for not using his power to try to influence her. She would know. At least she hoped she would know. He couldn’t be that good, could he? Markus coughed. ‘So, did you ask me down here to beat me senseless? Kick me in the groin? Or is my apology enough?’

A man hurried around the corner before Nona could answer. He approached them, hunched against the rain.

‘Regol?’ Nona asked. She’d looked for the ring-fighter in the crowd before she took on Denam but not spotted him.

‘At your service, my lady!’ He made a sweeping bow, managing to keep both eyes on Markus.

Nona couldn’t help but smile. ‘I’m not your lady, or anyone else’s.’

‘A remarkable victory, novice.’ Regol straightened. ‘Our ginger friend can be a stubborn fellow.’ His eyes held a certain distance, a reassessment perhaps.

‘You saw?’ She had wanted him to.

‘The whole thing. And did you hear the newest recruits cheering in the attic?’

Nona flexed her hands, grimacing. ‘I thought he wasn’t ever going to go down.’

Regol winced. ‘The real question is whether he’s going to get up again, and what he’ll sound like.’ He squeaked the last part then turned his gaze on Markus as if noticing him for the first time. ‘I would ask if this monk is bothering you, but I guess if he was he’d be on the ground looking for his teeth.’ Again that look, as if he saw a different person before him tonight.

‘I’m sure Nona can have a disagreement without punching anyone in the face.’ Markus returned Regol’s stare. ‘Not everyone who climbs out of the ring just steps into a bigger one.’

Regol shrugged, that mocking smile of his firmly in place. ‘The whole Corridor is a ring around Abeth, brother. And when the ice squeezes, everyone fights.’

‘Go away,’ Markus said.

Regol opened his mouth with some reply but a puzzled look overtook him. He turned to go, then spun back as if he had forgotten something.

‘You would rather be watching the fights.’ Markus spoke without emphasis but the waves of power bleeding from him shocked Nona with their intensity. It was as if someone had opened a furnace door and an unexpected wall of heat had broken across her.

Regol turned back and walked off without comment.

‘He won’t be pleased when that wears off,’ Nona said.

‘No.’ Markus nodded. ‘But it would have been worse if he’d stayed longer. He didn’t like me at all, and we both know why.’

‘Oh.’ Nona laughed, though it came out wrong. ‘Regol’s not like that. He flirts with all the girls. The ladies of the Sis practically worship—’

‘It’s you he wants, Nona. You don’t have to be an empath to know that.’

‘No, he’s just …’ She trailed off as Markus shook his head, his smile half-sad. ‘Anyway, you got rid of him easily enough.’ A twinge of disappointment had run through her at that.

‘Easily?’ Markus leaned back against the wall. ‘He put up a hell of a fight. I would never have suspected it of a Caltess brawler.’ He put his fingers to his temples. ‘I’ll probably have a headache all night …’

Nona said nothing, only glanced towards the corner. After Joeli had made Regol abandon Darla mid-fight at Sherzal’s palace the ring-fighter had asked Nona to help him. He hadn’t wanted to be manipulated like that ever again. Nona had spent hours training him to erect barriers against that kind of thread-work. He would take this defeat badly.

Nona defocused her vision and looked at Markus amid the glory of the threads, the Path’s halo. Marjal empathy was essentially thread-work that concentrated only on living threads and manipulated them more intuitively, based around emotional clusters. It was, in many senses, a tool designed for a specific job. Whereas a quantal thread-worker had ultimately more potential and flexibility, the task was always more fiddly and harder work. The threads around Markus formed a glowing aura, brighter and more dynamic than any she had seen before. The host of threads that joined him to her – some years old, some freshly formed – ran taut, shivering with possibility, unvoiced emotions vibrating along their length. Markus would read it better than she could, but he would feel the answer rather than seeing it before him in the complexity that filled the space between them.

In fact, Sister Pan had revealed that all marjal enchantment was simply the power of the Path and the control of thread-work, but collected together into useful tools in the same way that iron and wood may be turned into many different implements, and many of those are of more immediate use than a log and a bar of iron and the option to shape both.

‘Nona?’

Nona realized that Markus had said something she missed. She looked back.

‘You asked me here …’

‘I did.’ She stepped closer and he pressed his shoulders to the wall, every thread he had bent towards her, like the reflex of a river-anemone to touch. ‘I need your help.’

Markus frowned. ‘I can help you?’

‘I need to do something dangerous and illegal.’

Markus’s frown deepened. ‘Why would you trust me? Because we rode together for a few weeks in a cage when I was ten and you were eight? I nearly got you killed two years later.’

‘I trust you because you didn’t ask me why I thought you would help, just why I would trust that help. And also because you didn’t lie about what happened at the Academy.’

‘All right.’ He met her eyes. ‘Why would I help you? It’s dangerous and against the law.’

‘You’ll help me because when they put us in that cage we never really came out of it again. And because your Abbot Jacob is still tied to the Tacsis name and so are his plans for further advancement. Doing this will help make sure that never happens. Hessa told me what happened to Four-Foot when Giljohn took you to Jacob’s house.’

‘I suppose you think me weak, serving a man who did something like that? I suppose you would have beaten him to death?’ Markus didn’t try to hide the mix of anger and shame bubbling through him.

‘Maybe I would have killed him, but you’re a better person than I am. I’m not proud of my temper.’

Markus twisted his lips into half of a doubtful smile. ‘So, you need me, and you trust me. What is it that you need me for, and trust me not to betray you over?’

Nona glanced over her shoulder into the night. From inside the Caltess the crowd’s roar swelled. Another bout coming to a bloody end, no doubt. ‘I have to break into the Cathedral of St Allam and steal something from High Priest Nevis’s vault of forbidden books.’

2
Three years earlier
The Escape

In the dark of the moon by the side of the Grand Pass two dozen citizens of the empire huddled away from the wind. Dawn would show them an unparalleled view of that empire, spread out before them to the west, marching between the ice towards the Sea of Marn.

Nona stood close to the rock wall, pressed between Ara and Kettle. Her leg ached where the stump of Yisht’s sword had driven in, pain shooting up and down as she shifted her weight, the whole limb stiffening.

Abbess Glass had gathered the survivors in a bend where the folds of the cliff offered some shelter. There were among their number men and women who owned substantial swathes of the Corridor, who had been born to privilege and to command. But here in their bloodstained finery, with flames from the palace of the emperor’s sister licking up into the night behind them, it was to Abbess Glass they turned for direction.

‘It will take Sherzal’s soldiers a while to navigate around Zole’s landslide but they’ll come. It won’t take long then to alert the garrisons and send riders down the road to Verity. There’s no chance of making the capital that way.’

‘We don’t need to reach Verity.’ Lord Jotsis spoke up. ‘My estates are closer.’

‘Castle Jotsis is formidable,’ Ara said, looking between her uncle and the abbess.

Abbess Glass shook her head. ‘Sherzal will bottle us up anywhere but the capital. She might not be insane enough to lay siege to your castle, my lord, but she would likely encircle your holdings to prevent word reaching the emperor. And besides, I fear that closer is not close enough.’

‘So we’ve escaped only to be hunted down on the road?’ One side of old Lord Glosis’s face had swollen into a single bruise but she still had enough energy to be temperamental. ‘Unacceptable.’

‘It’s the shipheart that Sherzal wants above anything else.’ The abbess nodded to where Zole waited, some thirty yards closer to the landslide, her hands dark around the glowing purple sphere she had recovered from the Tetragode. ‘If we give her good reason to think that it has gone in another direction she won’t spare many soldiers for chasing us. Maybe none.’

‘And how,’ Lord Jotsis asked, ‘can we make her think we haven’t taken the shipheart with us?’

Abbess Glass turned to stare at the darkness of the slopes rising above them. ‘By making them think it has gone south, towards the ice.’

‘How can we make them think it’s been sent south?’ Lord Glosis asked, leaning on the arm of a young relative.

‘By actually sending it south, to the ice,’ the abbess said. ‘Zole will take it and let them see the glow upon the slopes.’

‘But that’s madness.’ Lord Jotsis drew himself to his full height. ‘You can’t entrust a treasure like that to a lone novice!’

‘I can when it’s the lone novice who somehow stole that treasure from the heart of the Noi-Guin’s stronghold in the first place,’ Abbess Glass replied.

‘She won’t be alone.’ Nona limped forward.

Ara hobbled to stand beside Nona. Kettle put her hands on their shoulders. ‘In our state we’re going to be slowing the abbess down on the road. None of us will be any use to Zole trying to outdistance soldiers across the mountains.’

Kettle was right. Nona gritted her teeth against the pain in her thigh and refused to let the admission out.

The abbess advanced on them, windswept, grey hair straggled across her face. ‘The Noi-Guin’s shipheart is a marjal one. It’s said that in the hands of a marjal healer it can mend any wound but that it can also bring harm.’

‘Well, I don’t want to go near it.’ Nona shuddered. She knew what harm the shipheart could bring. It had even squeezed a devil out of Zole, the most tightly bound person she had ever met. ‘And we don’t have a marjal healer.’

‘We have Zole,’ the abbess said, and raising her voice she called to the ice-triber. ‘Zole, time to show us what Sister Rose has been teaching you.’

Zole beckoned them rather than approach and bring with her the awful pressure of the shipheart’s presence. Nona took a few uncertain steps towards the girl, Ara behind her, then Kettle, all of them limping, the novice because of the arrow wound in her calf, the nun because of a knife wound in her thigh.

‘We shouldn’t be doing this, Abbess.’ Nona looked back. ‘The Sweet Mercy shipheart did terrible things to Yisht.’

‘And yet Zole is untouched.’ The abbess and the others were black shapes now, with just edges picked out here and there by the deep purple light of the shipheart.

But Zole was not untouched …

‘Find your serenity.’ Zole’s voice resonated through the night. ‘Serenity will preserve you.’

Nona didn’t feel serene. She felt scared and in pain, but she reached for her trance, running the lines of the old song through her head, imagining the slow descent of the moon and the children of her village chanting in a circle around the fire. And with the moon’s fall a blanket of serenity settled upon her, setting the world apart, her pain not gone but no longer personal, more a curio, an object for study.

Zole held the shipheart out towards them, a sphere the size of a child’s head, resting on both palms, dark purple, almost black, but somehow glowing with a violet light that seemed to shade beyond vision. Nona advanced. She felt the pressure of the thing, as if she had fallen into deep water. She had plunged into the black depths of the Glasswater sinkhole before, and this was no less terrifying. The need to breathe built in her and threatened her serenity, before, with a gasp, she remembered that there was no reason not to draw breath.

With just a yard between them Nona’s skin began to prickle then burn, as if the devils were there already just waiting for their true colours to be made known. Nona had shared her skin with a devil before, Keot, not one of her own making but one that had infected her when she killed Raymel Tacsis. The rocks around the man’s corpse had been stained black beneath the crimson.

‘Hold to yourself.’ Zole closed the remaining distance that Nona’s feet proved unwilling to cross. Zole had seen Nona’s old devil and kept the secret. Zole said they called them klaulathu on the ice. Things of the Missing.

Without preamble, Zole pressed the heart’s orb to the wound above Nona’s knee. Nona had expected her flesh to sizzle, the blood in her veins to boil like the water in Sweet Mercy’s pipes, but instead icy fingers wrapped around her bones and a black-violet light stole her vision. For a moment she saw strange spires silhouetted against an indigo sky, swept away in the next beat of her heart as if by a great wind. The Path opened before her; not the narrow and treacherous line that had to be hunted, but broad, blazing, so wide that its direction became uncertain, a place one might wander, drunk on power until the end of days. Voices began to sound within Nona’s head, all of them hers but speaking from different places, some raging, some jealous, some whispering secret fears or wants, a babble at first but each taking on a separate identity, becoming clearer, more distinct.

‘Done.’ Zole pushed Nona back, the base of her palm against Nona’s sternum.

Nona staggered and Ara kept her from falling with help from Kettle. The heart-light caught their faces, making something alien of them both.

‘Are you all right?’ Kettle asked.

‘I …’ Nona stood straight, stamped her leg. It still ached but the flesh had been made whole, a white line of scar tissue marking the passage of Yisht’s blade. ‘Yes.’ The voices that had filled her mind became jumbled together once more, fading back into the shadows.

‘Go on.’ Kettle sent Nona back towards the abbess and the rest of the group, giving her shoulder a small shove to get her going.

By the time Nona reached the ruins of the carriage that they had escaped the palace in she was calm again, her serenity intact.

‘How do you feel?’ The abbess watched Nona’s eyes with an uncomfortable intensity.

‘I don’t know,’ Nona said. ‘Tired. But full of energy. If that makes sense.’ She looked back down at her leg, the scar visible through the tattered smock. The cold no longer touched her. ‘I don’t know how Zole can stand it.’ Part of her wanted to tell the abbess about the devil she had seen at Zole’s wrist when she first arrived with the shipheart. She bit down on the impulse. She had lived with Keot for years and Zole hadn’t informed on her. Zole would have to deal with her own demons. The abbess probably couldn’t help in any case. And the inquisitors with her would want to burn the devil out of Zole.

Abbess Glass took Nona’s hand and led her back to the main group. ‘You’re mended? You can walk the distance now?’

‘I could run it!’ Ara caught them up, her hair rising around her head as if backcombed, a blonde confusion defying the wind. She had a wild look in her eye. Nona met her gaze and a grin broke across both their faces, a shared understanding, and something more complex that perhaps neither understood. Nona wanted to run with her, to chase her. Wanted her friend.

The three of them turned to see Kettle silhouetted against the shipheart’s glow, Zole on one knee, applying the heart to the nun’s inner thigh. Kettle broke away with a cry after just a moment’s contact. She came hurrying down the road, not glancing back. She moved quickly, though still with a slight limp.

‘Sister Kettle?’ The abbess stepped forward to meet her.

‘Mother …’ Kettle’s wide eyes sought the abbess as though she were night-blind.

‘Here.’ Abbess Glass took the nun’s hands. ‘You’re safe.’

Nona raised her brows at the enormity of that lie but said nothing.

‘I can’t go near it again. I can’t.’ Kettle shot a glance over her shoulder as if Zole might be approaching with the shipheart even now.

‘It’s all right, sister.’ The abbess led them further away. ‘I need you to protect us as we journey west. Even if all Sherzal’s forces follow the shipheart towards the ice the empire roads are no longer a safe place for the vulnerable. And unguarded Sis lords are likely to be a tempting prize to any bandits we might pass.’

‘But Zole …’

‘Zole will have her Shield.’