Mark Lawrence - Holy Sister

‘Where’s Pan?’ the abbess snapped, eyeing the girl before her with evident distaste.

‘Mistress Path is in the scriptorium, Abbess.’ Nona met the hostility of the old woman’s stare.

‘Hmmph.’ The abbess turned away, evidently unable to find fault with Nona’s reply, her bad temper further inflamed by this failure. She glanced over her shoulder, new suspicion in her pale eyes. ‘What are you doing here, girl? Stealing?’

‘No, abbess.’ Nona had stolen from the abbess that morning, and she would be stealing from Path Tower this afternoon with any luck. But right now she wasn’t stealing.

‘Praying, in the dome, that’s where you should be.’ Shaking her head, the abbess stamped off back down the stairs, thumping her crozier on every step.

Ara came into view behind Nona, smoothing her palms over the stonework. ‘Was that Abbess Wheel?’

‘Yes.’ Nona returned to her own search.

‘Ancestor’s blood!’ From behind Ara. As close as Jula got to an oath. ‘We really shouldn’t be doing this.’

Nona searched more quickly than her friends, leaving them behind her. About halfway down her vision shook for a moment. After that, nothing. Not even a tingle. She returned to the spot and studied it with thread-sight. Nothing. She visualized the Path and tried to see past it into the wall. Nothing. She placed both hands upon the stone and exerted her will, pressing as hard as she could. ‘Open, damn you!’ At the same time she set one foot upon the glowing glory of Path, the river of power that joins and defines all things. Nona felt something give, a lurch within her as if she had fallen through thin ice. The cry of victory died on her lips though. She was still standing on the stairs, her hands against the cold stone. Feeling foolish, she reached for her serenity and tried again. Nothing, not even a twinge. She wiped her palms on her habit and continued down the stairs, calling on her clarity trance to reveal any faint trace that might indicate a place to exert her magics.

One of the others stumbled behind her. ‘Keep it quiet,’ Nona hissed without looking back. ‘Abbess Wheel might still be lurking downstairs.’

Nona reached the bottom step without finding any further hint of an entrance. The abbess seemed to have decided against waiting for Pan and to have taken her leave of the tower. Nona sighed and turned to climb the steps again. Something caught her eye. A new portrait hanging amid the others. Just to the right of the door that the abbess must have left by. She walked across to the painting, marvelling that she had never seen it before. It seemed impossible that she had simply missed it in the past given that she had visited the tower almost every day for the best part of a decade. Perhaps Sister Pan had hung it recently. There was something familiar about the woman, her face pinched but friendly, high cheekbones, blue eyes. She had pale hair, curling close to her skull but with wisp after wisp trailing off into the air to create a faint haze of threads that filled the space all around her.

Nona cocked her head. The nun looked thirty at least. And yet …

‘Hessa?’ Nona’s eyes blurred with tears. ‘How—’ She bowed her head, wiping at her face. Hessa had died as a child and Nona had missed her friend every day since. Her death at Yisht’s hands had taught Nona many of the bitter lessons that stand as milestones along the road between girl and woman. Her own fallibility wasn’t the least of those lessons. How many times had a friend died because she lacked what had been necessary to save them? How often had her own faults tripped her up? Her pride, her anger … Losing Hessa taught her the hollow lie of vengeance, a conceit to distract oneself with, an addiction that offered no cure.

‘I miss you.’ But as she looked up again the world lurched, a new layer of ice breaking, and somehow the room was a different room and she was on her knees beside a bed.

‘Nona?’ Abbess Glass lay in the bed, grey-faced, the comfortable weight wasted from her, leaving skin on bones. ‘Don’t cry, child.’

Nona snapped her head up, looking wildly around. The abbess’s bedroom in the big house. This was where she had died. This was how she died. Taken by disease, something that ate her from within and that neither Sister Rose nor Sister Apple could touch with all their pills and potions.

‘I don’t understand …’

‘Meaning is overrated, Nona.’ A cough convulsed the abbess for a moment, rattling in her chest. She had said exactly that, meaning is overrated , Nona remembered it, but not the question she had asked to prompt it. ‘There might not be a meaning to the world, or in it, but that does not mean that what we do has no meaning.’ Glass fell silent and for the longest minute Nona thought she would not speak again. When she did it was weak, faltering. ‘The Ancestor’s tree is something humanity planted and that we have watered with our deeds, our cares, with each act of love, even with our cruelty. Cling to it, Nona. Cling …’ And then she did stop, as Nona remembered, and the gleam had gone from her eyes.

Nona stood, an old sob shuddering through her. Sister Rose had been sleeping in the chair by the window when the abbess died, the sleep that crept in behind too many nights without rest. She had woken at Nona’s sob and sucked in a huge breath of her own. Now though, the chair lay empty and at the door it was Sister Pan who stood, her eyes bright and wet.

The old nun spoke, her voice strangely distant. ‘You’re getting further from the door, Nona.’

‘What?’

Sister Pan turned towards the window. Out beyond the rooftops of the refectory Path Tower rose like the line of darkness offered by a door beginning to open, or almost closed.

Nona frowned, torn between confusion and grief. She knew this for a memory of that awful day but it seemed more real than all those days that had queued between her and it. Glass had been taken by a foe Nona couldn’t stand against and the heart of Sweet Mercy had broken. She had thought when the shipheart was stolen and the convent left cold, its magic gone, that no greater blow could be struck against it. But the abbess had always been the true heart of Sweet Mercy and the emptiness she left behind was more profound than any Nona had known.

‘You’re getting further from the door.’ Sister Pan stood in the doorway but her single hand pointed at Path Tower. And in an instant the tower raced into the distance, becoming tiny, almost lost to sight. The room had gone, Abbess Glass and Sister Pan with it, and instead Nona stood in sunshine gazing out across a formal garden. She staggered, seized by vertigo, but prevented herself from falling.

She took a step forward, focused on a ficus tree in full bloom. The sound of a heavy blow hitting flesh arrested her. A second blow and an agonized cry turned her around.

Standing before the grand colonnade of his mansion High Priest Jacob swung his staff again. The wood thunked into Four-Foot’s side, a dull sound like a hammer hitting meat, and the mule grunted his pain.

‘No!’ The horror of the moment pinned Nona to the spot. Another blow descended and her flaw-blades shimmered into being around both hands. ‘No!’

Nona tensed as the high priest raised his staff, Four-Foot snorting bloody foam about his muzzle. She knew it was memory or dream but it seemed more real than her life, more solid, more important. Losses like Hessa and Abbess Glass, horrors like Four-Foot’s death, were nails struck into her life, pinning those moments to her forever, the punctuation of sorrow. She could no more tear herself from the scene before her than rip the skin from her body.

Markus, impossibly young, struggled at the limit of his strength to escape the grip of the high priest’s guard, wild in his passion. Giljohn stood at the cart, held by bonds of the sort that no child can see, the kind made of debt and of a bitter understanding of the world’s truths, the kind that tear at a life as you struggle against them and leave wounds that won’t heal.