‘I shall pray for you both.’ She offered a narrow smile and walked away, leading the four guardsmen. She left nothing but an echo of her lantern light, soon consumed by a night so ancient that it never truly left such places.
‘She didn’t seem very upset.’ Nona’s voice surprised her. She hadn’t meant to speak but darkness gives the tongue licence – like a mask – or a judge’s crown.
‘Apple is a Grey Sister,’ the abbess said. Nona heard her sit down. ‘She wears many guises, and she herself would tell you to trust none of them. Only remember that she is your sister, as true to you as you are to the Ancestor.’
‘What will they do with us?’ Nona asked. The ground was damp, uneven, and hard and the place held a lingering scent of the sewer, perhaps remembering the last nun or novice sent down here to reflect upon their sins.
‘Find us innocent, I hope.’
‘And if they don’t?’
‘Ah, well, then we will be subject to church justice, which sadly rests upon some very old and rather barbaric laws. I will have my tongue split and be scourged before being driven out of the convent. And you will be put to death.’
‘Oh.’
‘You did ask. And you were on the gallows steps when I found you …’
‘I thought you liked to lie.’ Nona wriggled her hands in the yoke’s grip. It hurt.
‘I said lies can be very useful. Even children deserve honesty in the dark, though.’
‘How?’
‘How?’
‘How will I be put to death?’
‘Ah.’ The abbess sucked in her breath. ‘Each convent has its own method. Silent Patience and Chaste Devotion burn, but in different ways; Gerran’s Crag opts for crushing with stones. We drown. Not in my time, but they say the bottom of the sinkhole is thick with bones …’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ Nona might only be ten but she knew that adults were supposed to comfort children, even if all they had to offer was false comfort.
‘So that tomorrow you hold your tongue and let me do what needs to be done without your temper digging us deeper.’
Nona bit her lip at that and drew her knees to her chest, resting part of the yoke’s weight against the cave wall. She kept silent for what felt like an age, remembering her classmates’ faces as they watched her being led away.
Finally, ‘Why are you helping me?’
Abbess Glass didn’t speak for the longest time, and when she did all she said was, ‘Perhaps because I really do know who Thuran Tacsis is.’
16
Church-guards brought Nona and the abbess blinking into the light of day and led them past the scriptorium and Blade Hall to Heart Hall. Nuns and novices lined the final fifty yards to the steps and pillars of Heart Hall’s grand entrance. The sisters and older novices muttered the Ancestor’s first prayer. Nona didn’t know the words by heart but had heard enough of it to recognize it when it was spoken.
‘Ancestor watch our journey. Ancestor guide us in the from and in the to. Ancestor help us to carry the weight of our years, and evening—’
‘Don’t they say that at funerals?’ Nona asked, stumbling as she tried to keep step with the abbess.
‘And at births, Nona. And at births.’
Great doors of ironwood gave onto a foyer, more pillars rising to a vaulted ceiling, the floor tiled in black and white. Other doors, bronze and of smaller scale, opened into a domed chamber where the high priest sat upon a dais in a chair whose gilded back rose above him in scrolls. The four archons sat at the base of the dais, two to either side, each clad in their finery and on chairs scarcely less impressive than the high priest’s. Nona took them in for the first time, having seen only their grandeur and the symbols of their office on the night of their arrival. A fat and pallid man, gone to grey, his eyes deep-set, his lips wet. A stern old woman, dark as pitch, head shaven, wearing a single golden earring. A tall and narrow man, younger than the rest, dark-haired and with a look of great melancholy. A solid man with an air of restless energy about him, head square upon a thick neck, half his face laced with ridges of old scar as if some clawed hand had tried to tear it off. This last official shot a quick tight smile towards the end of the hall – gone so swiftly it might never have been there.
Half a dozen assistants, some with leather-bound law tomes, attended the archons, the whole assembly before the dais apparently too deep in various muttered conversations to note the prisoners’ arrival. Sisters Wheel and Rose waited before an area close by the door cordoned within a short wooden wall that reached to Nona’s chest. Church-guards lined the chamber walls, five to each side.
Abbess Glass led the way into the enclosure, Nona following. ‘Are you scared, child?’ the abbess asked, turning her head and arms with difficulty to look down at Nona.
‘I don’t know.’ Nona knew that she should be scared. She had been scared of the fall when she had stepped out onto the blade-path. Not of the ground below but the helpless drop before it. She had been scared of losing Saida when the cart took them to the prison. Here though, in irons and with the sinkhole waiting, skulls in the black water looking upward for her arrival, she had yet to find room for fear. This came from Raymel Tacsis, his actions, his evil. That man would die by her hand and if the church supported him, it too would be her enemy. The high priest, she had already decided, would pay more than a crown for Giljohn’s mule. ‘I’m angry, mostly.’
Abbess Glass blinked, shook her head, then smiled. ‘Of course you’re scared, Nona. I am.’ She went to one knee to be on a level with Nona. A few strands of iron-grey hair had escaped her headdress; sweat beaded on her brow. ‘Do you know why they call this Heart Hall?’
Nona shook her head.
‘It’s named for the shipheart that’s kept in a cavern far below our feet. The heat for the bathhouse and dormitories comes from there, the pipes reach down, close enough to the shipheart to heat the oil …’
Nona let the abbess calm herself telling her stories and looked instead at her own wrists, held level with her shoulders by the yoke. The iron clamps had taken the skin, leaving wet red flesh beneath, the fingers above were numb and barely responded when she tried to wriggle them. If they threw her into the water still yoked she would sink and vanish. Even without the yoke she would drown, unless swimming proved to be an easy thing to learn in a hurry. But such a weight of iron … would they cast it aside as easily as her life? Or remove it for later use? That would be her chance.
‘… took it from the vessel that brought our forebears from the darkness above the sky. Did you know that, Nona?’
‘No.’ Nona looked away from her inspection of the damage to her wrists and faced the abbess. ‘Will they start soon?’
‘In a short while. There’s nothing a church court likes more than delay and debate, but I have a feeling that our high priest is anxious to be on his way. He must have a pressing appointment in Verity. Or perhaps he’s worried that other parties might show an interest in the proceedings given enough time to notice. I’m not without friends in court.’
As if hearing her across the length of the room and through the ebb and flow of the archons’ chatter, the high priest stood, bringing the heel of his staff down sharply upon the dais. ‘I, High Priest Jacob, holy of the church, declare this extraordinary meeting of the Ancestor’s court in session.’ He nodded to an assistant seated to his left, bent over a large and open scroll, quill in hand. The woman began to write.