Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘What good am I going to do?’ Hessa shook her head and went on down the tunnel, ill at ease on the uneven surface. ‘If falling over is the worst that happens to me …’ She spoke to give herself courage. Before her the threads that led to Yisht snaked away into darkness.

Ten yards on the threads veered into a fissure in the wall, so low that Hessa would have to abandon her crutch and crawl. ‘How did she …’ But of course, even though the fissure was so tight that it daunted Nona, the novices had proved to Yisht she would fit through it.

Hessa went to all fours on the muddy floor. Or to all threes – her withered leg would do nothing but drag. She turned around, shuffling backwards into the fissure on her behind. She pushed the lantern ahead of her, praying it wouldn’t fall, praying she wouldn’t get stuck, praying that Yisht had already been apprehended and wasn’t already wriggling her way back through the very same gaps.

The distance to the larger tunnel was perhaps twenty yards, but squeezing through it took a lifetime and left Hessa flat on her back when she finally emerged, gasping and trembling. At the tightest spot Hessa had seen that the rock had been scooped away, leaving strange smooth gouges, widening the passage.

‘A rock-worker then.’ The rarest of the elemental marjal talents. Yisht’s unique qualifications were becoming apparent.

Hessa angled her lantern up. The shaft in the tunnel roof led to a boarded-over entrance. She looked down the tunnel. At any moment a knife could come winging out of that darkness and hammer into her, and Hessa’s story would be over, drawn into the great story of the Ancestor, a raindrop in an ocean. She should just wait for the nuns.

The threads running invisible through Hessa’s fingers said Yisht was not so close … but had she come alone, or did the black tunnel hold some accomplice, waiting, silent and ready to cut throats?

With a sigh Hessa began to shuffle along the tunnel floor, inch by inch, foot by foot. The seat of her habit would be worn through. ‘If I survive this Sister Mop will kill me.’

She carried on, knowing that in the shadows about her lay the spot where Yisht had all but choked the life from Nona.

Some minutes later she sat looking up at the entrance to the crawl-tunnel that joined her passage to the one where Yisht had been digging when Nona had found her. A knotted rope dangled from the hole, presumably set when the nuns came down to investigate. Without it Hessa would have had no chance of getting up there. Even with it she had to touch the Path in order to put enough strength in her arms to haul herself up. She lay in the connecting crawl-way, panting. She preferred not to touch the Path: its energies disquieted her and filled her with dreams of power that fitted awkwardly at best into her ordered mind. Thread-work suited her far better, had greater subtlety to it. She enjoyed working so close to the Path but not allowing its force to dominate and overmaster her. In its way thread-work was every bit as powerful as Path-walking, closer to the wonders Abbess Glass achieved without violence or threat. Path-walking was closer to the blunt and brutal methods of the Tacsis – not that they were unique among the Sis for that.

A gentle pull on Yisht’s thread revealed her to be close now, but focused on some task. Hessa could almost see her, high in the rising cut she had made over long weeks of digging. She was digging once more, but pausing every now and then to touch the stone, changing it into something less resistant that fell easily beneath the swings of her pick.

Hessa had never gathered such strong and detailed impressions from a thread before. She stared at her hand where the threads twined. Curious. Then she felt it. The pulse of the shipheart, thrumming through the thread, thrumming through everything, even the stone itself. Eager, she wriggled on through the narrow passage, seeing the space around her fill with detail as the shipheart built upon the power within her. She saw the threads of other people’s passing. Nona’s, Yisht’s, three nuns who she might identify if she were to pick out their threads and examine them. By the time she reached the opening into the wider passage beyond, strewn with rubble, Hessa was starting to see threads in the rocks themselves, their lineage running back across the aeons into ancient seas or the fires of the earth. She even saw the threads of the waters that had once run here, carving out these tunnels, threads that led on to rivers and oceans, up into the sky, down to percolate through dark soil and run in secret rivers.

Hessa shook her head, banishing the visions, focusing on her own task. She understood Yisht’s accelerating progress now. The rock-worker had used her marjal powers to aid her excavation, but as she grew closer to the shipheart its aura enhanced her talents and she was able to tunnel ever more swiftly.

Hessa saw then why no thread-warnings could be set around the shipheart or the tunnels about it as had been done with the Noi-Guin knife that Nona hid. The beat of the shipheart rippled out like waves, unhindered by thickness of stone, and would wash away any such workings. Only true threads survived and no entanglement would last for long under such conditions.

Another rope dangled from the tunnel’s far end, anchored on an iron spike driven into a crack in the wall. One of the nuns who came down to investigate lacked the athleticism required to make the journey without help. No Red Sister then.

‘Nona! Nona!’

Nona shook her head, spluttering, icy water dripping from her face. ‘Where …?’

‘They’re gathering again outside.’ Jula leaned into view, water-canteen in hand. Above her the roof of the cave lay rippled in red and shadow as the sun sank behind the ridges.

‘You fell … you’ve been lying there for ages, muttering … we thought the segren root had got you … or the black cure … or both.’

Nona rolled her head to look towards the entrance. Darla was there, hooded and filling out Tarkax’s sealskins pretty well, tular in hand.

‘She’s been letting them see her so they don’t think we’re escaping out the back tunnel,’ Ruli said.

Nona tried to get up at that, shaking the last strands of Hessa’s thoughts from her mind.

‘There’s no back tunnel!’ Jula said, glowering at Ruli. ‘We’ve looked.’

‘Let’s get you up.’ Ruli hooked an arm under Nona.

‘Wait!’ Nona shouted it loud enough to draw Darla’s attention from the slopes. ‘I was with Hessa – I mean, seeing what she’s seeing. Yisht is back at the convent again. She’s trying to steal the shipheart. Hessa’s going to try to stop her.’

‘Yisht? What are you talking about?’ Darla came stomping across, stepping over first Tarkax then Ara. ‘How do you know this?’

‘How can Hessa stop her?’ Ruli demanded.

‘She’ll get killed!’ Jula looked shocked.

Nona sat up. ‘She thinks she can do it. She’s not scared any more. That’s why I’m not there. We only join when something really bad is happening to one of us.’

‘Hell, she should be watching us then!’ Darla snorted. ‘We’ve got twelve kinds of bad right outside.’

Nona frowned. ‘There are no coincidences among the thread-bound,’ she repeated Sister Pan’s words. The nun had told them that the rhythm of their lives would start to match – and here they were both face to face with death.

‘Hessa thinks she can beat Yisht?’ Ruli asked, doubtful.