Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

Snarling as if to drive away her fear with anger, Nona pressed on. Twenty yards on, the tunnel widened still further but the broad mud floor showed no sign of anyone’s passing. The sounds came more frequently now, or Nona heard more than just the loudest of them. A pick on stone. Someone was digging, but the echoing passageway gave no clue to the direction.

Further on and the sounds faded. Nona retraced her steps and found a rocky gullet in the fissure wall, above her head height. The sounds were louder here. She undid the cord that bound her habit and tied one end to the lantern’s carrying loop, the other to her ankle. She leapt, catching the edge of the higher tunnel, a thing no wider than a sewage pipe, and hauled herself up, the lantern swaying beneath her.

A minute later and she was inching along the tunnel on her belly. The crashes came so loud now that she cowled the lantern and moved ahead blind.

After what seemed a cold, wet age, in which she banged her head on the rock twice and scraped her knees raw, a whisper of light reached her amid the shouts of pick biting stone. She could see the end of the tunnel, glowing so faintly that only in the blind depths would it be noticed.

Mastering her breathing, Nona crawled to the edge, where some larger, newer tunnel had cut through the old one she was in. Down in the larger passage a lone figure in black was hacking at the wall, already nearly out of sight in the short cut they had made. Debris from the excavation littered the water-smoothed floor behind them. The work must have taken weeks.

Nona watched, fascinated, becoming aware as she did so of a new sensation. Until this point her mind had been filled with the pressing knowledge of the weight of stone above her and how long and narrow the return to the surface – if she could even remember all the twists and turns. But now something larger commanded her attention. Louder than the crash of the pick, heavier than the fathoms of rock. A fullness. An otherness. Something ancient and full of an energy that made her hands tremble and her skin burn.

The digger paused and turned to scoop up a leather bottle set on a rock at the mouth of the cut. She raised a hand, pushing sweat-soaked hair from her brow, and drank.

Yisht! Even as Nona named her in her mind the woman’s eyes swept towards the tunnel mouth. Nona shrank back, pressing herself into the rock, holding her breath. She waited for a moment, long enough for Yisht to return to drinking from her water bottle if she was going to, then started to reverse.

Going backwards through the tunnel, without the space to turn, pulling a smoking lantern whilst trying not to make a sound was not easy. The glow at the tunnel’s end grew brighter: Yisht must be approaching! Nona scrambled backwards as fast as she could while still not making a clatter. If Yisht climbed up she might see or smell traces of Nona’s lantern. How long then before a knife came flying through the air? And if not a thrown knife then Yisht herself. The woman had practically defeated the whole of Grey Class together. She could easily murder Nona down here and her body would lie undetected long after her bones had crumbled.

Nona’s feet eventually found open air and she dangled over the edge before slithering down into the lower tunnel, jolting her chin badly on a protruding piece of rock. Moments later she was hurrying back towards the fissure, her lantern bleeding just enough light through its cowl to stop her knocking herself senseless. She raced on, chased by shadows, slipping and sweating, sure at every moment a hand would close upon her shoulder.

‘Did you get them?’

‘Yes,’ Nona hissed back. ‘Shhh!’

Clera rolled from her bed and crossed to Nona’s. Ara slumped down in hers, yawning and stretching beneath her blanket. Hessa appeared to be fast asleep.

‘Everything go all right?’ Clera whispered close enough to Nona’s ear to make it tingle.

‘Yes, go back to bed.’ She counted out the stolen ingredients into her clothes chest. Blackroot wrapped in linen, red garlic powder in a paper wrap, quicksilver in a greased leather pouch, aclite salts, and sulphur. The stores cave had been the next one along, large, easily accessed, the ingredients laid out on shelves in labelled bags, bunches, vials, and pots. If she hadn’t been led astray by the mark of Yisht’s shoe she would have been in and out in a quarter of the time.

‘How are you feeling? I could stay with you?’

‘I’m fine. Go to bed.’

‘But you got everything? Even the quicksilver?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’ Clera squeezed her arm, hesitated, then went back to her bed. ‘You stink of mud by the way.’

Nona stripped off her habit and stuffed it beneath her bed. Cleaning it was a problem to be dealt with in daylight. She slipped beneath her blanket, the wool rough against her skinned knees, the darkness full of images of tunnel after tunnel, narrow rocky throats caught in the flicker of a flame, closing ever tighter around her. She turned on her side and coiled herself up, presenting as small a target as she could to the dark. On the nights since the forging it had been the pain she had curled around, the first and growing pangs of whatever poison it was that Raymel had got into her. Nothing swift of course – he would want to know that she suffered long and hard before she died. Sister Apple had told them plenty of horror stories about toxins that would do just that. Venoms that would rot the flesh from bones over the course of weeks, others that would cause first blindness, then peeling skin worse than any burn, and finally madness and death months later. Now she realized that apart from her knees, hands, arms and jaw … nothing hurt. Her head, her guts, and her joints, all of which had been in slow twisting agony, really were fine. She’d said she was fine to get Clera back to her own bed … but it was true … all she felt was that lingering sense of fullness that had invaded her when she spied on Yisht. A sensation she had felt only in one place, and never as strongly – before the black door into the Dome of the Ancestor at the far end of the nuns’ cells.

Her last thought before sleep claimed her was to wonder whether Yisht had used the gate and whether she or Sister Apple would notice it had been left unlocked.

On the windswept promontory in the break between Blade class and the evening meal Nona, Ara, and Hessa clustered around a shallow depression, partly sheltered by low walls made by piling up rock Nona had shattered with Path-energy on one of her many secret practices.

The fire had proved a nightmare to light and their few stolen pieces of kindling had burned out before setting fire to the coals stolen from the kitchen store. In the end Nona and Ara sat shivering while Hessa sought the serenity needed to reach the Path herself and eventually set the coals burning with a measured release of Path-energy.

They started to brew the black cure using pots stolen from the kitchens – safer to steal these than try to filch the correct equipment from the Poisoner’s stores. Lacking scales, Hessa weighed the ingredients using a measuring rule balanced at its midpoint on an eating knife. Hessa had a collection of pebbles that she had previously weighed in Shade class and claimed that by placing them at the correct distance from the rule’s pivot point she could, with some arithmetic, measure any desired weight on the other side. In theory it seemed, at least to Hessa, easy. In the Corridor wind with awkward ingredients that wanted to blow or roll away and couldn’t be heaped in one single spot on the wobbling rule … it appeared to Nona to be closer to guesswork than any science taught in Academia.