Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

When Nona lifted her head, gore dripping from her hair, the four survivors took a step back. Darla’s tular came down in an inexpert but devastating swing, nearly beheading the leftmost of the men and embedding the blade deep in his sternum. Jula appeared with her arm around the shoulders of the next, screaming and stabbing furiously at his neck. Ruli felled another of them by smashing a rock, two-handed, into the back of his knee.

The last man started to run, angling away across the slopes. Nona plucked a blood-slick spear from its fallen owner and threw it. The Path-energy was burning out of her limbs and the spear felt heavy. Even so it flew true and took him between the shoulder blades, carrying him to the ground.

Nona stood, panting, blood dripping from her hands, blood in her hair, the taste of it in her mouth, blood running down her legs, blood cloaking her habit as if she were already a Red Sister. She looked up, her gaze travelling slowly across the twitching of the injured and the stillness of the dead, dreading to see the condemnation in her friends’ faces.

The three of them stood over the bodies of the soldiers they had brought down. Jula with her mousey hair wild and sticking up at all angles, her face, neck and shoulders spattered with gore, Tarkax’s knife glistening in her hand. Ruli raised her face, the rock in her hands dark with gore. She had shattered the soldier’s head when he fell and the splash of it decorated her in scarlet. Darla freed the tular with a wet wrench and held it above her head. All three of them stood for a moment, panting. Then as one they roared out their victory and, raising her hands, Nona howled it out with them. She stood, her heart pounding, eyes full of tears, her chest full of that strange mixture of sorrow and exultation that she could never explain, a feeling that words could neither shape nor own.

It took her a moment to remember Hessa. Her death didn’t feel real yet. Nona stood there, casting no shadow, and found she could feel nothing for her friend. Some emotions are like that, too big to be seen from within, like the ice patterns, written across empty miles, which make sense only from a great height. She slumped, staggering as weariness caught up with her. She would find that distance in time, and there would be sorrow enough to make the dead weep, and she feared it.

Nona went across to Ara who lay by the edge of the slope, rope around her wrists where one of the soldiers had started to bind her. They hadn’t trusted the poison to keep her immobile but it was still doing a good job. Nona met Ara’s eyes as she sliced away her bonds.

‘They’re all dead, Ara.’ Nona looked down at herself, still red with slaughter. She couldn’t bring herself to speak of Hessa yet. She wanted to set off for the convent, to run all the way, to kill Yisht with her own hands.

‘Some are just wounded.’ Ruli came across, empty-handed now. Nona became aware of groaning behind her as Ruli spoke.

‘We should do something about that.’ Darla raised her bloody tular and eyed it speculatively.

‘They’re no threat,’ Jula said, the sleeve of her habit red and dripping. ‘We need to get the others moving. Then we can go.’

The slope stank of death, an ugly smell. ‘Let them be.’ Nona shook her head. ‘Help me with Ara.’ She made to stand. As she moved, the gleam of sunlight on metal further down the gully caught her eye.

The last edge of the sunset still caught the Devil’s Spine, and its light beaded on the smooth curve of a steel shoulder-plate as it came into view. The man walking towards them was armoured from head to toe, lobstered in interlocking steel, his helm a cylinder faced by perforated doors. Nona was amazed anyone could walk in such a weight of metal.

‘Get Ara back into the cave!’ she shouted.

At least five of the soldiers still had breath in them, though perhaps none would last the night. She crouched by a woman, a scar-faced veteran, her breathing shallow, the point of an axehead bedded in her ribs where it had driven the links of her chainmail into the wound, and shook her roughly. ‘Who is that?’

‘Can’t … you tell?’ The woman grimaced. ‘Wait … until he gets … closer.’

‘It’s Raymel Tacsis?’ Nona understood. Only a gerant could carry such armour.

She advanced down the slope, skidding on loose stone, into the gully where a small stream gurgled. When Raymel drew closer, Nona once again got that shock of realization as her eyes understood the scale of him. The sword he drew from over his shoulder must have been six foot in length and heavier than her.

‘It always pays to bide your time with witches.’ Raymel Tacsis set the point of his sword upon the ground. ‘Perhaps I should have brought more soldiers. I would have preferred you captured so we could spend a while together. But my father keeps a tight rein on his troops and he felt that you’re not worth breaking a promise to the emperor over. Not this year anyway. I disagreed.’ His voice was as deep and rich as Nona remembered, but beneath it, just at the edge of hearing, it seemed that she heard other tones, other voices whispering the words, voices that were older, crueller, and more hungry.

Nona backed off, matching Raymel’s advance.

‘I thought you were a fighter, little girl?’ Three more strides. ‘You seemed keen enough at the Caltess. Both times.’

Nona continued to back away.

‘Not so brave now you’ve spent your magic?’ The trailing tip of Raymel’s sword rattled through the loose stones by the stream, scoring the bedrock with a discordant noise.

Nona blinked. The ghostly echo of the Path hung in the darkness behind her eyes, but it lay beyond her reach, like a spent passion. She might be able to reach for it by the next morning, but not any time soon. And her flaw-blades – she had seen that they barely scratched the man, warded as he was by the devils that shared his skin. She kept backing away.

Raymel stopped advancing.

‘Trying to lead me away from your nest, mother-bird?’ He turned his head to stare at the cave and the bodies sprawled beneath it. Darla vanished into the cave mouth, Ara in her arms. A moment later and she would have been out of sight. ‘All this—’ he raised a gauntleted hand to the steel plates over his neck where she had cut him years ago, ‘was over another nestling. I had to find out her name after I got better. Saida. A dirty little peasant just like you. That’s not something a Tacsis heir dies over!’ He beckoned Nona closer. ‘Are you still angry about her? I bet you are. You should come and show me.’

Nona snatched up a rounded stone from the stream and kept backing away.

‘No?’ Raymel paused. ‘I’m glad she died. My regret is only that I didn’t get to do it, and in my own time. But Father just had her hanged, and quickly. Not one for scandals, my father.’ He sheathed his sword and held his arms wide as if daring her to attack. ‘Do you remember how she screamed?’

At the back of her mind, where Nona had expected anger to flare, an image of Saida rose instead. Her broad face with its mixture of timid and friendly. If she had been here she would be treating the wounded. The soldiers that Nona had torn open. Saida had wanted to mend, not to break. Nona took another step back.

Raymel shrugged, his armour squealing in protest. ‘It looks as if some of your friends won’t be able to run away as fast as you can.’ He started to march towards the cave, striding at a pace most men would have to jog to keep up with.