Mark Lawrence - Holy Sister

‘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.’