Red Sister

In the village mothers cut their children’s hair to a fuzz whenever the weather turned. When the ice-wind surrendered to the Corridor wind and the cold grew less bitter the knives came out. They did it to reduce lice, fleas, and nits to a manageable level, but Nona had always felt it marked the start of something new: new growth, new possibilities. Her last thoughts before dreams stole her were that if a shaved head were the worst thing to have happened to Arabella Jotsis so far then she had lived a charmed life. Also, Nona thought, annoyingly the loss of that golden mane had done nothing to mar the girl’s beauty. If anything she looked somehow more perfect.

Folded in the soft hubbub of voices and with the warmth of her bed drawing her down into sleep Nona let the contest with Ghena play across the back of her eyelids. The whole thing had lasted only moments, moments in which Ghena had thrown a dozen or more punches, a well-practised dance on her part, instinct and reflex on Nona’s. Memory of one fight slipped into memory of another, returning Nona to the sawdust and sweat of the Caltess, watching the apprentices spar. Partnis Reeve’s fight-masters taught discipline but left room for aggression.

A week or two after Nona’s arrival Raymel Tacsis had strolled into the great hall where the apprentices were training. Nona, Saida and two other attic children engaged in sweeping the floor paused their labours and leaned on their brooms to watch the fighter. Up close his size was intimidating. Nona realized that her head wouldn’t even reach the man’s hip and that with the strength of one arm he would be able to toss her, Saida, and the other two sweepers across the room, not separately but together.

‘I’ve a better lesson for these puppies.’ Raymel climbed over the ropes into the ring where two gerant apprentices had been wrestling, both of them enormous but lacking more than a foot on the older man. He stood huge, blond, and glorious between them, somehow wearing his wealth though all that covered him was a loincloth and a sheen of oil.

The fight-master stepped forward, an objection on his lips, but Raymel boomed across him, ‘And the rest of you.’ He beckoned another three apprentices from across the hall. Two hunskas holding nets and a gerant girl with a ponderous brow that looked as if it would break the fist of anyone foolish enough to punch her in the head.

As the girl clambered in behind the two swifter apprentices Raymel drove an elbow into the throat of the gerant behind him. ‘Don’t ever wait to attack.’ The apprentice fell, clutching his neck. The rest stood, too stunned or nervous to act. Raymel slapped the girl, his huge hand covering half her face and sending her back into the ropes, spitting blood. His grin was an ugly thing, corrupting the good looks he’d been born with.

Beside Nona, Saida covered her eyes, turning to reach for her broom.

‘Aren’t you going to watch?’ Nona couldn’t look away. The hunska apprentices had launched themselves at Raymel, two blurs of fists and feet.

‘I hate it.’ Saida resumed her sweeping. ‘It makes my stomach feel bad, seeing people hurt.’

‘But …’ Nona winced as Raymel trapped one hunska against the ropes and snatched him up by the leg. ‘Partnis bought you to fight. You’re going to have to.’

She sensed rather than saw Saida’s broad shoulders shrug. ‘I’d rather mend people than break them. Is that a thing in the city? Mending people?’

‘I don’t know.’ Nona watched Raymel swing the hunska apprentice against the ring post. Part of her wanted to be unleashed within the roped enclosure. Another part wanted Saida’s hope to be true, wanted there to be people who put as much passion into healing as Raymel did into hurting.

‘Raymel!’ the fight-master barked. ‘Ease up.’

Raymel continued to choke the apprentice in his hands, still seemingly impervious to the attacks of the last hunska remaining on her feet.

Nona found herself turning away too, the undirected anger that built in her whenever she saw a fight now dissipating. ‘You won’t have to fight, Saida. They’ll see you’re no good at it and give you a different job. Regol said the old man who comes to the horses can sew up wounds like a seamstress. Perhaps he’ll need an apprentice soon. He is very old.’

Saida managed a shy smile. ‘I’d like to help. I don’t want Partnis to give me away. I would miss you.’

‘I’d miss you too.’ Nona found her chest aching at the thought. ‘So I won’t let it happen!’ She said it with such fierce confidence that Saida’s smile had widened into something that made her blunt face suddenly beautiful.

The dream turned darker, colder, shadows invading the Caltess hall. They were alone now, Saida and Nona, a sense of profound unease stalking between them.

‘Don’t hurt me!’ Saida was suddenly backing away from Nona, terrified.

‘Saida! I won’t let anyone—’

‘Don’t hurt me!’ Saida pointed at Nona, cowering.

Nona tried to reassure her but found instead that she towered over Saida, holding her friend’s arm in a massive fist. The grey hall around her became the walls of Raymel’s apartment, Saida dangling above the thick luxury of a bearskin rug.

Nona tried to let Saida go. ‘It’s not me. I’m not like him. I’m not!’

‘No, please! I didn’t mean to.’

Anger flared somewhere deep in Nona’s chest. She was trying to help the silly girl. Why was she scared? Did she think Nona had anything in common with a creature like Raymel Tacsis? ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ She found to her horror though that she was shaking Saida, the fist on her friend’s arm emphasizing her points as she spoke.

‘Let go!’

‘I am letting go …’ But the fist gripped tighter, twisted, and Saida’s screaming began.

Nona drew a sharp breath and opened her eyes. The colours of her nightmare vanished leaving only black. It took a moment to realize where she was. The soft sounds of sleeping surrounded her on each side. At the back of her mind the dream carried on as if it neither wanted her attention nor required her permission to proceed. She had been following something, a line that ran its narrow path with danger to either side, on one flank a dark and consuming hunger, on the other a blindness, fierce as staring at the sun. And somehow she had been following someone else at the same time, black-clad, swift, certain, moving through a starless night, plotting a sure path between high buildings. The figure had found what it sought, looked up, reached out to find cold stone walls, and had started to climb.

Nona strained her ears, hunting beneath the novices’ gentle snores and sighs, the soft turning of a body in sleep, the whisper of the wind … a scrape, a sudden movement … hard to judge at what distance in the unbroken night. Without warning, surprising herself, Nona jolted upright, as swift a motion as she had ever made, the blanket pulled from her. Perhaps some new sound had sat her up, perhaps nothing, just one of those twitches that comes out of nowhere and jerks your body as if by a string. Somewhere else in the dark a muffled impact, the sound of air leaving lungs fast and without orders …

‘Wuh-what?’ At the end of the row Ketti, the eldest of them, unhooded the lantern that sat beside her bed for anyone needing to make the trip to the Necessary in the dead of night.

Just below the rolled blanket where Nona’s head had lain a small black object stood proud of the bed. She blinked, trying to focus – the hilt of something? Close by, Clera rose groggily from her own bed. ‘Can’t be morning already?’ Her voice thick with sleep. A figure stood between them, revealed in the light of the unhooded lantern – Arabella Jotsis, her face a mask.

Nona took hold of the hilt – leather-bound, the pommel a ball of iron the size of an eye – and tugged. It took most of her strength to free the point from the boards, and when she saw the gleaming blade start to slide out from the slot it had put in her blankets she quickly covered it. Only Arabella noticed, her eyes moving from Nona’s hand on the hilt to Nona’s face as their eyes met.

‘Get back in bed! It’s the middle of the night.’ Ketti closed the lantern’s cowl until just a glow remained.

Arabella hurried towards Ketti and moments later left the room holding the lantern.

‘Shut the window. It’s cold in here.’ Clera from her bed, the words all running together. Nobody replied.

Nona lay back, pulling the blankets over her. It had grown cooler – the wind must have caught the window and pulled it wide – even so, if Clera called this cold then she had never known what it was to face the ice-wind, hungry and with only wattle walls for shelter.

She drew out the knife from under the covers. The blade reached for about two widths of her hand, narrow as two fingers, all of it cold steel. Nona could only think that Arabella must have stolen it from the stores at the training hall. The real question though, was had she meant to stab Nona to death or just to leave her a pointed warning? At the core of her something red and primal snarled at the blade’s challenge, demanding blood, demanding the weapon be returned with a hard lesson. Nona fought the impulse to go after Arabella. She could catch her before she reached the Necessary hunkering on the edge of the cliff. How would that encounter end? Nona with a sharp knife in her hand and blunt accusations in her mouth? Anger had its place, it was a weapon not to be neglected, but so did patience, and Nona decided that control lay in deciding which to use and when.

She stayed in her bed. It was cold outside and dangerous in all manner of ways. The knife must have been meant to scare her. Even someone as high-born as Arabella Jotsis couldn’t expect to murder people in their sleep in a crowded dormitory and get away with it … Unless she really did think a village girl was no more than a cow or pig compared to someone who had been invited to the emperor’s palace?

At some point, with one thought chasing the next in endless circles, Nona fell asleep and though she tossed and turned she didn’t wake until Bray spoke the waking hour and all across the dormitory grey shapes started to move beneath their covers, grumbling at the day.

‘Path and Spirit today,’ Clera groaned. ‘Worst of the lot.’

‘Breakfast first!’ Ruli with a grin, pulling off her nightcap and shaking down her hair.

‘Spirit is what we’re all here for.’ Jula gave a sniff, patting her head and finding her hair hadn’t returned overnight.

‘I’m here because I was sent here,’ Clera said. ‘When I’m a Red Sister if anyone asks me to repeat the catechism I’ll stab them in the eye.’

‘If you paid closer attention in Spirit, you would know that stabbing people in the eye is frowned upon.’ Jula straightened her habit and started to make her bed. ‘Anyway, it’s Path first.’

‘Yawn!’ Clera tugged her habit over her underskirts. ‘I hope Pan lets us pathless go play again.’

Nona slid from her covers and started to dress. She reached beneath her pillow, to touch the knife one more time to reassure herself it hadn’t been a dream. Still there, warm from her body now, a hard, sharp, and undeniable truth. She wanted to take it with her, strapped to her body, the blade wrapped in a strip of linen, but she lacked both time and privacy. She would have to leave the weapon in her bed and hope that Arabella had no chance to reclaim it.

Nona found herself one of the last out of the dormitory, hurrying with Clera to the refectory for breakfast. The pair of them clattered down the front steps, finding an unusually still day, a cloudless sky, and a rare warmth on offer.

By the dormitory wall a plump, red-faced sister attacked an area of the flagstones with a stiff brush, pausing to slosh down more water from her bucket. She glanced up at the girls. ‘Hurry!’ And returned to her task, scrubbing furiously at a dark stain. ‘Away with you.’

Clera stuck her tongue out at the woman’s back and ran off towards the refectory, giggling. ‘That’s Sister Mop. She thinks novices only have two aims in life: to get stuff dirty and to get in her way.’

‘She called herself Mop?’ Nona running behind.

‘No, but everyone else calls her that. She chose some flower name, Crysanthe-something, but nobody can pronounce it or remember it.’

A hundred yards on they passed Sister Tallow, coming from the abbess’s house. She looked away towards the eastern sky as they ran by but not before Nona saw the abrasion across the left side of her face and the bruise darkening around it.

Nona waited until they were out of earshot around the corner of the refectory. ‘What happened?’

‘Don’t know. Can’t imagine anyone getting the best of old Blade,’ Clera panted. ‘Maybe the abbess slapped her!’ She laughed, then more serious, ‘Did you see she had her arm hidden inside her habit?’

Nona hadn’t and once through the doors the sight of food bowls, full and steaming, pushed any questions from her mind. Breakfast was a hasty affair but Nona still made a valiant attempt at leaving nothing edible behind by the time she left the table.

‘Come on!’ Clera turned and beckoned as Nona jogged to keep up, one arm over her over-full stomach. Fortunately the Path cloisters came into view soon enough, past the beehives lined in the lee of the abbess’s house. Four arms of the building reached towards the compass points from a round central tower. Each arm was a framework of ornately-worked stone, open to the elements, with delicate corner pillars and trellised masonry reaching between them to complete the structure. The central tower stood dark against the sky, defying the years with the arrogance of stone, seeming in one moment foreboding and in the next beautiful. Four doors gave onto the ground floor, one for each arm of the surrounding structure.

Ahead of Nona and Clera a novice laboured towards the tower in limping steps, a crutch under her left armpit.

‘Someone must have got kicked a bit hard in Blade yesterday!’ Nona slowed her pace as they caught the girl up. No one had been limping in the dormitory, and yet there was something familiar about the novice.

‘Ha!’ Clera shouted, ‘That’s just Stumpy!’ She raced past, jostling the girl enough to make her stagger.

Nona came to a halt, almost level with the novice, reaching to catch her, then pulling back her hands as she saw it wasn’t needed. The girl was hardly taller than her, hair the colour of straw set about her head in a hundred tight curls. ‘Nona,’ she said, without turning.

Nona knew the voice. ‘Hessa?’

Hessa pivoted on her crutch. The length of the habit hid her withered leg, but only the tip of her shoe touched the ground on that side. ‘We’ve come a long way from Giljohn’s cage.’

Nona had her arms about her before she had time to blink. ‘They killed Saida.’

‘I’m sorry for it.’ Hessa lifted a hand uncertainly to pat Nona between the shoulders.

‘How are you here? Why haven’t I seen you?’ Nona released her and stepped back.

‘I’ve been in the sanatorium. Sister Rose wanted to keep me in until I got rid of this cough.’ Hessa thumped a fist against her narrow chest. ‘I’ve been here for weeks. Giljohn tried to sell me at the Academy but I failed their tests. They said I was the wrong sort, quantal maybe, but definitely not marjal. He tried to sell me to three different mages. Their houses are so big, Nona! I thought we were going into the emperor’s palace—’

‘NooooOOOooona!’ Clera hollering from the north door. ‘We’ll be late!’

‘Coming!’

‘We’d better hurry.’ Hessa shifted her weight and set her crutch forward.

A bony hand closed on both their shoulders. ‘The heathens have found each other, I see!’ Sister Wheel pushed between them. ‘The peasant and the cripple, plotting together. We’ll soon clear out those muddy little minds. Scrub away heresy and falsehood so the Ancestor may find you worthy. Even simple clay can be moulded and fired into something of worth.’

Nona opened her mouth to say something sharp. ‘I—’

‘Yes, Sister Wheel! I’m looking forward to our Spirit class.’ Hessa smiled up at the nun so sweetly that Nona almost believed she meant it. ‘But we’d best go now or Mistress Path will be cross with us.’

Sister Wheel made a sound of disgust and released both of them, wiping her hands on her habit. ‘Quickly then!’

Hessa showed a fair turn of pace with her crutch, her withered leg swinging beneath her skirts. Nona matched her speed, glancing back at Sister Wheel, now making for the dome. ‘I don’t like that old woman!’

‘Hah, Wheel’s all right once you know her ways.’ Stump, swing, stump, swing. ‘Just wait till you meet the Poisoner. Now she is scary!’

Nona entered the Tower of the Path with Hessa, using the east door. Novices were supposed to be drawn to a particular door but none of them called to her. All four doors led into the same room – an echoingly empty one with a stone spiral stair at the centre, and around the walls the strangest pictures Nona had seen, though in truth until she entered the ring-fighters’ rooms at the Caltess she had never seen paintings. While Hessa laboured up the stairs Nona took a moment to glance around at the two dozen or so portraits, nuns all of them, but with their hair uncovered and the most peculiar flights of fancy added. One lacked half a face, with tatters extending across the gap out over a night-black background. Another in place of one eye had a red star, its rays reaching in all directions. Another still had no mouth and in her hair flowers of a kind Nona had never seen, the deep blue of evening sky.

‘Nona!’

She sped up the stairs after Hessa. The stairway seemed long enough to reach the tower top but offered no doors into any rooms along the way before emerging into the middle of a classroom. At least Nona assumed it to be a classroom – it looked more like a church. Apart from the chairs on which Red Class sat, and a large iron-bound chest at the front, the room was completely bare. Even so, it had a beauty to it. Four tall and narrow windows broke the light into many colours. Scores of stained-glass panels made each window into a glowing, abstract picture that threw reds, and greens, and blues, across the walls and floor. For a moment all Nona could do was gape at the alien wonder of the place.

The nun standing before the chest was the oldest Nona had seen. Quite possibly the oldest woman she had ever seen. Nana Even’s older sister, Ora, had died a year back. Nona’s mother claimed the woman had seen eighty years come and go. Yet lying there on the pyre in the square before Grey Stephen’s stone-built home old Ora had looked young compared to Mistress Path.

‘Take a seat, Hessa.’ The ancient nun had a surprisingly young voice. ‘You too, novice …?’

‘Nona.’ Nona took a chair, little more than a stool really, the back a single narrow plank.

‘Knower?’ Mistress Path came a step closer, leaning in.

‘Nona!’ Clera all but shouted it.

‘Ah, Nona.’ The nun clapped her hand to Nona’s shoulder. ‘Like the merchant-queen?’

Nona wasn’t alone in offering this last question a blank look, though she caught Clera nodding.

‘No matter – no matter.’ Mistress Path moved off, shaking her head. ‘It was long ago and her sons are all gone to dust.’

‘We’re all gathered now?’ Mistress Path looked around the room, her eyes so pale as to be without colour, the whites creamy with age. ‘Two new girls, yes?’

‘Yes, Mistress Path.’ A loud chorus.

‘I’ll do my introductions then. I am Sister Pan. Within these walls, Mistress Path is my name.’ She paced towards the front of the class and, with an exaggerated sigh, settled herself upon the great chest. Nona noticed that the woman’s right hand, that she had thought lost in the sleeve of her habit, was more lost than that, the arm ending at the wrist in an ugly mess of scar tissue.

Sister Pan lowered her head and tapped her fingers on the lid of the chest. She was quiet for so long that Nona wondered if she had dropped into a doze, but a moment later she looked up, eyes bright. ‘In these lessons we study the Path. For most of you this will be a journey to serenity, to states of mind that can help you with patience or with concentration. Or perhaps they may help quiet your fears, or put sorrow aside for a while until you have time for her visit. For those few of you who might have it in your blood to see the Path clearly rather just sense it as an idea these lessons are the first steps to discovering hidden worlds, the boundary between them, and the power that may be won by those who dare to venture in such places.’

Clera leaned across to Nona, speaking in a low voice. ‘If any of us do go there we’ll be doing it alone. They say the old girl hasn’t put a toe on the Path for thirty years.’

Nona pressed her lips together, gesturing with her eyes towards Mistress Path.

‘She’s deaf as a post, silly.’ Clera grinned and raised her tone a fraction. ‘Those that can, do – those that can’t, teach. At least in Path. The doers are too valuable to waste on us.’

Sister Pan paused and frowned at Clera, who dutifully faced front and centre. ‘Now, we have … Arabella.’ The nun focused on the Jotsis girl, whose shaved head was spattered with coloured light. ‘A bold stare she has. Hmmm. But what can she see?’ Sister Pan approached and leaned in close. ‘Don’t look away, dear. Keep your eyes on mine. In this place the world sings for us. Can you hear it?’ She took Arabella’s wrist in the gnarled claw of her hand. The nun’s skin was the black of a dusty slate, darker than her habit: Arabella’s fingers looked white as bone in that grip. ‘A three-part song. Life.’ She lifted their joined hands. ‘That which has never lived.’ She moved her stump into a pool of deep red light and followed the shaft of it up towards the window. ‘And death.’ A quick glance back towards the chest. ‘The notes of the song …’ Sister Pan intoned three notes, pure but somehow sad, the start of a melody that Nona wanted to hear more of. The nun released Arabella’s wrist and started to pace before the seated novices. ‘There’s a boundary between what lives and what does not. It runs through all things, and around them. It’s a path that is hard to follow but each step taken is a holy one. When you walk the Path you approach the divine. The Path flows from the Ancestor and the Ancestor waits at the end of it. At the end of all things.

‘We are mortal though. We are flawed. Poor vessels for divinity. Each step is harder than the last, the Path twists and turns, it is narrow and in motion, the power that it gives is … difficult to contain. Sooner rather than later everyone slips from the Path no matter what their heart desires, no matter how pure their faith.

‘Our knowledge of the Path is the gift of the fourth tribe – the last to beach their ships on Abeth. Among the stars the quantal built their lives around the Path, generation upon generation, until it lived in their veins. That blood was mixed to meet the challenges of a new world – but in some few it shows, even now after so many years have passed.

‘Have you seen the Path, child?’ Sister Pan, at Arabella’s shoulder once again, took the girl’s chin, angling her eyes back to her own.

‘I … Sometimes I see a bright line, like a crack running through my dreams …’

‘Have you touched it?’ Sister Pan asked.

‘A-almost. One time. I reached out for it …’ Arabella looked away, towards one of the glowing windows. ‘It felt as though I were running … my heart … and my head filled with angles. All sharp and wrong …’

‘And then what happened?’ Sister Pan released the girl’s chin.

‘I fell out of bed and woke up with a headache.’

Laughter rippled, half amused, half nervous.

‘And what about …’ Sister Pan blinked and looked around until she found Nona, sitting on the far side of the class. ‘… our other new girl?’

‘She’s hunska, Mistress Path!’ Clera called out, slapping Nona on the shoulder. ‘One of us reds!’

‘Hmmm …’ Sister Pan turned her gaze back to Arabella and started to ask more questions.

‘She’ll leave you alone now,’ Clera said in an undertone. ‘Only cares about the mystics.’

‘The what?’ Nona whispered.