Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

Sister Wheel’s pale face reddened. ‘I know exactly what kinds of extra-curricular activity Sister Kettle gets up to, and with whom, and I—’

‘Sister Kettle will improve Nona’s reading and writing to the standard required in Red Class.’ The abbess fixed Sister Wheel with a stare. ‘The matter is now closed.’

Sister Wheel scowled and stumped off towards the head of the class.

Abbess Glass rolled out the top portion of Nona’s scroll and produced an inkpot to hold it in place. She dipped the quill and in what seemed one flowing motion left a beautiful confusion of lines upon the parchment, black and glistening, coiling like a vine. ‘Your name,’ she said. She dipped again, and beneath it placed three very different lines, interlocked squiggles, careless where the name had been precise. The abbess produced a blotter and patted the design. ‘And there is you.’

Nona stared at the pattern, furrowing her brow.

‘And since I am here,’ the abbess continued, ‘I shall address the novices.’ She followed Sister Wheel, smiling at the girls to either side. ‘Some here may not yet have heard my welcome to the faith – certainly Arabella and Nona will not have – and it will do no harm to refresh those that have.’

Nona reached out a finger to trace the lines of her name, and as she did so the larger pattern beneath her name suddenly made sense … her face, caught in three black squiggles. A face that had last stared at her from a mirror on Raymel Tacsis’s wall. She blinked and stifled a laugh, wondering how she could ever not have seen what the lines meant. Perhaps writing would reveal its meaning to her in the same manner one day.

Abbess Glass reached the front and shooed Sister Wheel aside to take centre stage. ‘Sister Wheel teaches the important details of our veneration of the Ancestor. The mechanics of the thing, if you like. The hows and the whens. She does it well and we thank her for it. It falls to me though to remind us all of the whys.

‘Nona, for example, was a follower of the Hope before she came to us, and whilst the Hope is a sanctioned heresy that falls within the framework of the Ancestor we— Yes, Nona?’

Nona had raised her hand like the bigs did when they wanted to ask a question in Nana Even’s seven-day class in the village. Few of them ever did actually ask because the answer was generally: because I say so. ‘My mother went to the Hope church in White Lake but I never said the words. One star is white and the others red … why should I kneel to it?’ That’s what her father had said. ‘In my village they pray to the gods who are many and have no names.’ The novices tittered as if this were funnier than their dome and golden statue.

Abbess Glass pursed her lips. ‘Such practices are unusual in Verity, Nona. In the wild lands to the east and across the border into Scithrowl there are remnants of many faiths and the emperor is tolerant of them, at a distance, but the Ancestor—’

‘My father hunted on the ice and even in the tunnels that go beneath.’ Nona remembered almost nothing of her father save the stories he told. None of those tales had stuck with her quite so strongly as the ones that told of the tunnels. River-carved, they ran beneath the ice, drained when the waters found some better path or froze at source. In those stories her father and his clan had hunted beasts from every tale she’d ever heard. But the best of his stories told of the Missing, those who were not men and who lived on Abeth before the four tribes descended from the stars. No man had ever set eyes upon the Missing but their servants remained, a remnant now, haunting the dark places beneath the ice where sites holy to the Missing lay exposed once more. Such ruins could be found here and there where the tunnels ventured across the cities that the Missing had carved deep into the very rock itself. ‘My father said that the Ancestor might watch over us in the Corridor but in the dark places of this world it’s the gods that the Missing left behind who matter.’

There was no laughter at this, only the silence of held breath, waiting for the hammer to fall.

Abbess Glass pursed her lips as if she had tasted something particularly sour. She studied Nona a moment, raising one hand towards Sister Wheel as the nun seemed about to get her first word out around her outrage. The abbess relaxed her face into a smile.

‘The emperor has forbidden worship of false idols, Nona. Much of our own history – ten thousand years and more of it – lies buried beneath the ice. A record of triumphs, follies, and a slow defeat beneath a dying sun. There are enough heresies and heathen gods of our own devising without pursuing the mysteries of creatures less like you and me than a dog is like a fish.’

The same anger that had boiled out of some red place within Nona when Raymel hurt Saida began to bubble through her again. She stood up so fast that her chair would have fallen but for Clera’s quick hands. ‘My father—’ The words, hard and angular, stuck in her throat. She bit down on them – anger had lost Nona her place in the village, then the Caltess …

‘I am here to address the why.’ Abbess Glass continued smoothly as if a small girl weren’t standing in defiance before her, fists balled at her sides. ‘We venerate the Ancestor because in doing so we connect with what is holy in the human spirit, what is holy in us—’

‘You’re not holy!’ Nona couldn’t stop the words. Warm beds and good food were too great a treasure to be sacrificed, but with them came knives in the dark and laughter behind hands and this woman calling herself holy. ‘You watched Saida die! You watched her strangle and choke!’

‘Sister Wheel!’ The abbess raised her voice to a shout, drowning whatever the nun had to say. ‘Bring me a wire-cane from the Blade stores.’

A sharp intake of breath sounded all around the room. Sister Wheel’s face split with an uncustomary grin. ‘Yes, Abbess Glass, yes indeed. A good choice. A fine choice for a beating.’ And she hurried from the room, her speed surprising.

The abbess waited for the door to close. She pulled up one of the chairs from an unused desk and sat on it, presenting a slightly comical image, portly abbess perched on child’s seat. ‘I’m not holy? What is holy? Nona? Anyone?’ Silence. Nona would have answered but found that she didn’t know. ‘I believe in the Ancestor – in the spirit of the Ancestor.’

‘Believe? Like Sister Wheel believes?’ Nona couldn’t keep the venom from her words – when she looked at Wheel it seemed that something had been left out in the making of the woman. Nona felt the same way about herself most of the time – as if some part had been omitted in her construction, so wholly absent that she couldn’t even say what it was, only that a void lay where it should be. ‘I hate Sister Wheel.’ It’s harder to forgive someone else your own sins than those uniquely theirs. Much harder.

‘You don’t know Sister Wheel, Nona. You’ve only just met her.’

Nona scowled. ‘I know plenty. I’ve seen plenty. More than you can see from up here in your nice warm convent, paid for by all the people working down there in the city and out in the Corridor growing your food from the mud. What good is holy if it can’t feed and clothe itself? This is a place to turn children into old women, praying for the sins of the world and never seeing them.’ Some of the words were her father’s but she owned all the anger. ‘What good is holy if it watches my friend die – not because she did something wrong but because her blood wasn’t good enough?’