Mark Lawrence - Holy Sister

More tentacles insinuated themselves across the barren ground, one thin as leather and broad as a hand sliding noiselessly over the top of the church wall just yards from Kettle’s head. Even at that distance her skin sang with echoes of the agony its touch would bring.

Nona woke sweat-soaked and alone, her body hunched, arms tight around her. She lay in the darkness of the Holy Class dormitory trying to still a racing heart. Kettle had kicked her out, requiring her whole concentration.

Sleep did not return that night. They were coming to the sharp end of things. The peace of the convent, seemingly eternal, would not last. Idle days, bickering among friends, the rivalries of children, all of it was passing into memory. A black tide was coming from the east and all the empire hadn’t the strength to stand before it.

‘We don’t even know the book exists. It’s not as if the high priest posts a list of forbidden books on his door.’ Ara stood with Jula and Nona in the lee of the Dome of the Ancestor, watching Path Tower, a dark finger of stone.

‘The Inquisition burned my History of Saint Devid ,’ Nona said.

‘It wasn’t yours, and Kettle shouldn’t have allowed it in the scriptorium library,’ Jula said primly. ‘And that was a banned book, not a forbidden one. Banned books are burned, forbidden ones are just … forbidden.’

‘So how come Sister Pan has one, if it even exists?’ Ara asked.

‘We know it exists because there are references to it that they forgot to remove from other books by Aquinas. And we know that Sister Pan has a copy because she quotes from it when talking about the lost cities.’

‘You haven’t read it! How do you know she’s quoting from it?’ Ara rolled her eyes.

‘Aquinas has a very distinctive prose style.’ Jula folded her arms.

‘That’s it? We’re breaking into Sister Pan’s secret room based on distinctive prose style ?’ Ara asked.

‘How do you know she hasn’t memorized the quotes?’ Nona demanded.

‘She still calls you Nina sometimes.’ Jula grinned.

‘Fair point.’ Nona nodded slowly. ‘So I just have to get into the Third Room …’

‘Or I do,’ Ara said.

‘Do you know how?’ Nona asked.

‘No, but you don’t either.’

Nona started towards the tower. ‘We’ll both try, then.’

Nona narrowed her eyes at Path Tower, black against the wash of the sky. Sister Rule taught that it was the oldest building on the Rock of Faith, predating the convent by centuries. Given that all save the top and bottommost rooms lacked doors or windows, Nona supposed it had been built for a powerful Path-mage though no records remained to name the first occupant. She approached the east entrance, apprehension rising. It wasn’t as if they were about to attempt the impossible. Every novice with ambitions to be a Mystic Sister had to enter the Third Room unaided. It was part of the Path-test. Maybe all of it. Nona would choose the red habit, not the sky colours of the Mystics, but she wanted to pass the Path-test even so.

Ruli followed Nona in through the east door, Ara entered by the north. They met at the bottom of the stairs in the room of portraits. Two dozen or more Mystic Sisters regarded them from wooden frames. Each woman was pictured amid abstract representations of their magic, the variety remarkable. Nona’s favourite was a young red-headed Holy Witch whose hair became flames. When you looked closer at her you could see that in the darkness of each pupil a tiny star burned crimson.

‘We know two things,’ Nona said as Ara joined them.

‘What?’

‘Firstly it’s all about Path. Otherwise Joeli would have cracked it months ago.’ Ara and Nona had been waiting an age for the individual training Sister Pan gave candidates for the Path-test. The old woman liked to instruct one novice at a time and whatever lessons she had been trying to teach hadn’t been getting through Joeli’s skull. ‘Joeli Namsis couldn’t take two steps on the Path if you threw her at it.’

‘True …’ Ara nodded.

‘And secondly we know that it must be different for each person, otherwise Pan would just have trained the three of us together.’

Ara began to climb the stairs, Jula and Nona on her heels. They went up in silence, stopping just below the classroom.

‘Should we really be doing this?’ Jula asked for the tenth time that morning.

‘No,’ said Ara.

‘We’re not doing this. At least you aren’t, Jula. And it was your idea! Forget whether we should be doing it. Will the book get us into the high priest’s library? Will the library have Aquinas’s Book of the Moon ? And will the moon save the empire?’ Nona watched the girl’s face, pale in the daylight that filtered down from the trapdoor to the classroom.

‘The moon’s the only hope,’ Jula said, her voice small.

Nona nodded. Jula had real faith in Aquinas and his book. Kettle had shown Nona the conflict’s horrors through their thread-bond. The empire was losing on both fronts. It would not be long before those horrors arrived at Verity’s walls, and if the emperor fell then the empire was lost, the Ark taken. Kettle had said the end would come in months rather than years. The Grey Sister scouted for the emperor’s armies both east and west. Adoma’s hordes seemed to be endlessly replaced, ready to spend their lives for the Battle-Queen, and she ready to spend them. Sherzal had all but filled the Grand Pass with Scithrowl corpses and still they had flooded over the Grampains.

The ferocity of Sherzal’s defence and the cleverness of her stepped retreat had been what forced the emperor to overlook reports of her planned treason. Sherzal had organized and directed the ongoing attacks in the mountains to continually disrupt Adoma’s supply lines. That and a scorched earth withdrawal had slowed Adoma’s advance from a charge that would have reached Verity in weeks to a crawl that had taken almost two years to get just over half way, but like with thin ice, a slow creaking could become a sudden plunge into freezing death, and the empire’s defence had started to fracture weeks ago. Emperor Crucical needed his sister.

The Durns to the west were a different breed, not fanatics these, and given to quarrelling among themselves, but blood-hungry and backed by the magics of their priests. They had crossed the Marn Sea in their barges, coming in force once news of the Scithrowl victories reached them. Their holy men came to war wielding sick-wood staves and wreaking havoc with both marjal fire-work and water-work. Nona had seen too many towns aflame, too many families strewn across the fields from which they tried to feed themselves.

The emperor kept the Red and the Grey close, and the Mystics as a last reserve, but soon he would unleash them all. Whether that would turn the tide of war, push the Scithrowl back beyond the mountains, drown the Durns in a red sea, Nona didn’t know. She only knew that in the land left behind such a conflict the dead would outnumber the living.

Sister Pan always led the way when she took novices to the sealed rooms. She had taken Nona and Ara to the first two rooms. The third they knew to exist only because the tower held space for it and because every novice knew that the Path-test required you to reach the Third Room unaided. Nona turned and walked down the spiral stair, squeezing past Ara and Jula. She defocused her vision as she always did when she followed Sister Pan to the sealed rooms. Normally that gaze would be fixed between the ancient’s shoulder blades. She focused her thoughts on the Third Room, the place where it should lie, the shape of it, the wall where a door would likely be set.

Nona was so deep in her search it was a shock to find someone on the stairs blocking her way as she followed the spiral down. ‘Abbess …’ The abbess rarely came to Path Tower.