Grey Sister (Book of the Ancestor 2)

Kettle struggled up and sucked a breath through a throat that felt narrower than a straw. The hands she used weren’t hers. One wrist bore a metal cuff. The tatters of a smock hung around her nakedness. Her ribs screamed at her.

I’m in Nona. Somehow I’m in Nona as she was in me. Kettle raised a hand to her face. I lifted her hand. I did that.

A spasm clenched her stomach into a knot of pain, curling her around it, and her throat sealed completely.

Kettle clutched at her neck—Nona’s neck—frantic. A moment later she felt something like a scalding hand that clenched her throat beneath her own useless fingers and somehow opened it again.

Get up. Do something. You are as useless as she was. A harsh voice, like that of an ancient, neither male nor female.

Nona . . . ? It wasn’t Nona.

You are dying. Move!

Kettle drew a throttled breath and crawled to the Noi-Guin. Her jacket had been cut open, exposing the antidotes and poisons she carried. Pain, weakness, strangulation. What poison? Think. Kettle’s memories surged, carried with her into Nona’s empty mind. She heard Apple’s voice, the lecturing tone she reserved for class. “You have close on a hundred of choices for blade-venom. Unless, of course, you want it to stay potent for more than a day. Then you have only a score. If you also want it to have a chance of disabling your opponent before the fight would have ended naturally then you have only a dozen. If you want it to be something people can’t build up resistance against too, then you have fewer still. If you want to source the ingredients locally rather than bring them halfway around the Corridor . . . there are five.”

Five choices. Pain. Strangulation. It has to be blue scorpion . . . but weakness? Varnish of boneless? You can build resistance . . . maybe that’s why Nona can still move?

Kettle began opening vials in an ecstasy of fumbling, stoppers popping off, contents spilling. A splash of the wrong poison on her skin and her problems could be compounded. The Grey Sisters had ideas about the Noi-Guin scripts, theories, but the Noi-Guin rotated their ciphers and Kettle would rather die because she was failed by her senses than because of an error in translation.

The Greys had training in sniffing unknown compounds. Not just for a day, or two, or a week. Kettle had been drilled with her two fellow would-be Sisters of Discretion for a solid month. A month during which she came as close as she ever had to disliking, even hating, Apple. Two sniffs, one at a distance, one close. Then decide, and if you think it’s safe . . . take it. The distant sniff gave a first and vital impression, and a chance to survive any trap. Noi-Guin in particular were known for packing a tube marked with some or other antidote (in cipher) with grey mustard, which when inhaled would eat away your lungs.

“Blind-eye.” Kettle wheezed a breath and tossed the vial aside. “Cramps.” Another tossed. “Blue scorpion.” A sharp scent and the stuff inside looked viscous. Spread on a blade it would dry to a clear coating like a resin varnish. “White-blood.” The first antidote but no use. Four more, three unpleasant poisons and an antidote to the blind-eye. Her throat tightened again so that each breath was sucked in with a wheezing rattle. Her heartbeat was now so fast it practically vibrated in her chest, and the effort of keeping her arm raised was starting to defeat her. And the pain. It made death seem welcome. If she had the air in her lungs for it, she would be screaming.

Hurry. The stranger’s voice in her head . . . in Nona’s head.

The next one had that sharp, almost lemon, smell that made Kettle’s gut roil. Proper lemons, grown at vast expense in the orangery of some lord, had a smell that made her mouth water, but somewhere between “proper” and “almost” something went very wrong. It was the red cure. Kettle would bet her life on it. The mixture had to be prepared much like the black cure, but lacked some of the more dangerous ingredients, and included a couple of others specific to counteracting the scorpionoid venoms.

Kettle bet her life on it. With the last of Nona’s strength she lifted the vial to her mouth and tipped in the contents, trying not to choke as they leaked down the constricted passage to her stomach.

* * *

• • •

NONA LAY DEEP below the tunnel she had first found herself running through. The narrow sinkhole had swallowed her. Gravity had pulled her over yard upon yard of slippery rock, a sinuous near-vertical descent, weaving around harder intrusions of igneous stone, the passage growing narrower, starting to grip Kettle’s body on all sides. Nona raised her arms and, just as she thought she might become wedged, her heels found a ridge. She’d slid down so far that the sounds of her pursuers no longer reached her. Nona held her breath and listened. She couldn’t imagine any Lightless so dedicated to the hunt or so scared of failure that they would voluntarily lower themselves feet first into the stony throat and allow themselves to be swallowed too.

Nona stood, clutched by the cold rock, damp, shivering, alone in the deep blind dark, yet seeing. The darkness pressed on her and into her. Nona understood the power she held over it, here in this body. But more than that, she was vulnerable to it too, in new ways. The dark was neither empty nor kind. She felt the shadows flowing through Kettle’s flesh in a way that she hadn’t on the previous occasions she had shared her body. This time was different. Kettle had gone.

Given a moment to think, Nona remembered where she had fled from. Somewhere not so far away her own body lay poisoned. Dead by now, surely? She would go back if she could but there seemed no way to do it. She sensed no connection.

An awful suspicion rose through her. Somehow Kettle had taken her place along the thread-bond. Somehow Nona had allowed it when she had weakened the sigils that walled off her power. Nona reached for the echoes of Kettle’s memories, hoping for some clue. She ground Kettle’s teeth with concentration and forced the most recent recollections to the surface, sifting through them with the fingers of her mind.

Kettle had been hiding, waiting where she came to rest after her long flight from the fortified tunnel. Judging the passage of time can be hard when you’re alone in a dark place, far from the sun and moon, but the Sisters of Discretion have their ways, and Kettle had sat her first day and night in silence. At some point she had slept, dipping into that feather-light and dreamless sleep in which those of the Grey are trained. Kettle had spent time remembering, without pleasure, the long, arduous weeks of her instruction on remaining alert. She had endured those weeks in the undercaves, as had a trio of other candidates for the Grey. It had been her first trial on reaching Holy Class. Safira was one of her three companions.

Sister Apple and Kettle’s classmates had made scores of attempts to take her unawares, day and night, creeping to the cavern where she waited, coming at her from any of five entrances. She had to last six days. If anyone managed to touch her without challenge then the count was reset, the six days started anew. If she hadn’t managed the six days before the month was up, she would never have worn the grey. Sometimes they came at her every hour, or twice in five minutes, sometimes they left two days. The longer gaps were the worst . . .

Nona shook herself out of Kettle’s older memories, searching for something fresher and almost immediately found a memory of Kettle lifting from her shallow sleep. Eyes opening to the darkness. Clarity descending as she strained to hear again whatever had woken her. Some faint sound reached her. A pebble sent tumbling by an insufficiently cautious foot. Distant but not distant enough. Kettle had risen silently and started off down the tunnel she had scouted. She sped up. Started to run. And suddenly her head had split with incredible pain, a hot rush of fear flooded her, she saw visions of a burning world and knew Nona was in mortal danger. Forgetting her own plight, she had reached for the novice. And somehow . . . somehow this.