Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

As Nona’s feet drove her forward across the uneven floor of the cave she let her anger, every piece of hurt and rage and despair, throw her mind towards the Path. Nona had no trouble gathering what she needed. She had felt Hessa leave, felt her sweet and clever soul join something larger and more distant, as streams find the ocean. Hessa had gone, her last mile not limped or shuffled, not even walked upon her own two feet, but run. Hessa had not feared dying. But Nona feared living without her.

As she hit the Path Nona made no attempt to slow herself or find the balance she had always sought: instead she used her speed as she had on the blade-path, letting rage propel her where serenity had held her back, riding the twisting impossibility of the Path, shooting through the convolutions and relying on instinct to keep her on course, whatever came.

At the same time that Nona’s mind ran the Path her feet drove her towards the soldiers crowding through the cave mouth. She angled herself towards the wall, leapt at it, and kicked off, gaining height. Her speed and the unexpected nature of the attack, coming at the day-blind men from the darkness of the cave, took her over the points of their swords. Her target, quicker than the rest, managed to raise his blade but she twisted about it, her movements in the physical world somehow complementing and complemented by her simultaneous running of the Path.

Nona flew, arms extended, and hit the man in the face with both fists. Her flaw-blades, six inches long and spiking from her knuckles, gave her the purchase to leapfrog him, bringing her feet to his shoulders and springing away, her blades slicing clear as she jumped. A sword hissed towards her while she sailed over the last of the soldiers. She managed to swing her arms wide before her as it cut across her path. There was a moment’s contact, a bright metallic sound, and she came to ground tumbling across the rocky slope with sections of neatly-divided longsword clattering down around her.

Nona fell from the Path at the same moment as she hit the ground. The impact against rough stone could have broken bones, at the least torn flesh and left her too injured to put up much of a fight. Instead, wrapped in the Path’s power, Nona left a channel of shattered stone in her wake and rolled to her feet, crouched in the fighting stance. She didn’t know how many steps she had remained on the Path for but there were many of them, the energies building inside her with each one. Past the tenth or twelfth step Nona had noticed that energy was bleeding off her, and that each new step built her reserves a little more slowly than the one before, but still, the build-up was inexorable and exhilarating. Such a magnificent feeling, in fact, that had she not fallen then she would never have voluntarily left the Path.

Crouched there, with the soldiers still turning to follow the line of her attack, Nona knew that the impact with the ground had saved her life. Even now she struggled to own what the Path had given her. The raw energy of it smoked from her skin. All about her the rock trembled, and the broken fragments, shattered loose by her passage, now started to rise, each making slow revolutions as it lifted from the ground.

Nona opened her mouth and the scream that came from it was larger than her body, a hammer that smote the rock, cut down the soldiers like wheat before the scythe, and rattled away down every gully, even reaching out to smite the distant walls of the Spine and come echoing back. The scream tore her lungs and throat, spattering bright crimson blood across the rocks before her. Nona felt herself separate into broken pieces, each an image of herself, resonances in time as the power she struggled to contain vibrated through the stuff of reality.

Ara had been broken into three pieces by the Path energies she used on the day Zole came to the convent. She had struggled to pull herself together. Nona stood in nine parts, some captured in the moments as she had tumbled across the rock, others held around her, some just rising into the crouch, others lifting from it.

At the same time as Nona’s borrowed power threatened to scatter her across the slope something stabbed at her chest. A cold, sucking something, lanced into her, a hungry void syphoning off some of what she had taken.

Nona knew that in a heartbeat each piece of her would fly apart, torn one from the next by the Path’s energy. She needed to pull herself back into one unified whole, to find a common thread that would bind them together. All she could think of, all that was in her mind as she watched the soldier she had jumped from, still in the act of falling, his head a ruin, was that she ached to kill the rest of them.

It was enough.

With a snap like some deep bone clicking into place Nona stood whole, the Path’s energies owned, bound into her flesh, armouring her, strengthening her. All around her the rocks, once suspended, began to fall.

Nona tore at her breast where the coldness somehow knifed through her new-found strength. Her habit shredded and Yisht’s amulet fell from the torn inner pocket. Nona batted it away before the iron sigil of negation could drink any more of her power.

She slowed the turning of the world, dug deeper into the moment that she had ever been. The falling stones seemed to crawl towards the ground, and when she launched herself at the tall axeman who stood closest to her she hurtled through the air fast as any spear was ever thrown. Her cry of rage had set him falling, but she didn’t give him time to hit the ground.

Nona moved among the mailed bodies of her foe spinning and swinging, opening disastrous wounds wherever her hands passed. Shields and chainmail offered no resistance to her blades. With the Path-power bound into her, muscle and bone, a well-placed kick could shatter a grown man’s hip through his armour. Her blood sang with the violence. Ducking beneath the swing of a sword, she clawed through a woman’s knee and threw herself onto the largest of their number, a seven-foot warrior, thick with muscle. Nona sprang up the height of him. The punch she delivered to his throat held such force that her arm passed through his neck, scattering the small bones of his spine in a crimson splatter.

The red work of killing carried on. At some point in the midst of it Nona took the arrow from her belt and stuck it into the eye of the man who had fired it at her. Nona had hidden her secret so long, worked so hard to be … normal, but the truth lay all around her in crimson arcs of gore written out across the rocks. She had come to Sweet Mercy bearing the title ‘murderer’ and come to that deed from a cage where her first act of slaughter had placed her. Even before that the children of the village had seen her for what she was, a fox among hens. Billem Smithson tried to hurt me – she had said – this was inside him. She must have been all of three or four years old.

She twisted away from the lazy descent of two swords and a thrust spear, diving between a forest of legs, slicing into the meat of a thigh, opening muscle and arteries, scoring the bone. The novices, the nuns, the abbess herself, would all know her now for the monster she was, a rabid animal unfit for the company of decent people, holy or otherwise.

An axe scythed towards her, the wielder white-faced and desperate, more likely to wound a friend than to connect with Nona, and yet by luck he caught her on the turn with almost no time to act.

Her blades divided the hilt into tumbling sections that she dived through. The axehead flew free and bedded itself in the chest of the woman whose knee Nona had ruined, who was still in the act of collapsing.

The men who had been at the fore of the rush into the cave now returned to a scene of carnage. Apart from the four emerging into the light only one soldier stood uninjured. The four paused – an ill-advised hesitation that allowed Nona to leap at the face of their companion and bear him screaming to the rocks amid the wreckage of his comrades.