Holy Sister (Book of the Ancestor 3)

As always the Path’s touch lit her whole being, as if the Ancestor had reached out and plucked her like a harp string. The power that thrilled through her brought with it such unalloyed joy that it threatened to wash away all trace of the necessary fear that would allow her to fall from it again. Fear that even as the Path’s energies burned through her they consumed from within, fraying the fabric of her being. Fear that on returning to the world she would neither be able to hold or shape what she had taken. Fear that with insufficient care she might never again find Abeth but fall into the dark places Sister Pan warned of, places from which there was no return.

Jula’s scream brought Nona tumbling from the Path, building up an awful velocity as she fell back into her flesh. For an instant Nona stood, shuddering with power, light bleeding from her skin to fill the vault with crimson and shadow. In the next moment the Path’s momentum caught her up and flung her at the wall like a stone from a sling.

Nona lay sprawled and smoking. With a groan she stood up, still armoured in the Path’s strength, half-deafened, shaking off rock and dirt, chunks of both still falling behind her. Back through the dust-filled tunnel she had made she could see the glow of Jula’s lantern.

‘Come on …’ Her voice escaped as a hoarse whisper. ‘Hurry!’ Louder this time.

Jula came running through, head down, Markus behind her, bent low, stumbling across the rubble. Another blow rang out from the vault, followed by the sound of an iron door crashing to the ground.

Nona glanced around as Jula’s light started to reveal the space about her. They were in a brick-lined tunnel with a low arched ceiling. Rectangular recesses punctuated the walls, places where coffins might have been slid for eternal rest, prior to their relocation when the cathedral closed.

‘Quickly.’ Jula moved past Nona.

‘Come on!’ Markus too, galvanizing her into action.

Shaking off the last of her disorientation, Nona gave chase. Shouts echoed back in the vault as the soldiers began to pour in, ready for battle.

The tunnel met a second and they turned left. That tunnel met another and another. Left, right, their choices mounted as they hurried into what proved to be something of a labyrinth.

‘We’ll never find our way out!’ Markus turned, white-faced. Ahead of him Jula splashed on through ankle-deep water.

‘We will,’ Nona said. ‘And this is good. We can lose them in here.’

‘I can’t stay down here.’ Markus seemed more terrified than when they’d been moments from capture. Nona could feel the fear bleeding from him, infecting her as only a marjal empath can, filling her mind with images of being trapped, held tight in unbroken darkness far below the ground.

She shook him. ‘You’re a monk. Have a little faith.’

‘I’m a monk stealing from the Church. I’m not sure the Ancestor would want to help me,’ Markus whispered, but a shadow of a smile came with it.

‘There’s a grating here,’ Jula called back. ‘It’s too high to reach … but I can see the stars.’

‘There you go.’ Nona tried to hide her own relief. ‘The Ancestor approves.’

14

Three Years Earlier

The Escape

The tunnel into the black ice was hard to see. They found it easily though, announced by the great fan of ink-dark debris strewn before the mouth of it.

‘They dug this?’ Nona gazed with horror at the opening, little more than six foot high. The malice pricking at her made her want to scratch the skin from her arms. Even without Zole’s story she would have known that the black depths of the ice were filled with devils. She felt them, countless, hungry, far worse than Keot, and eager for flesh to occupy. ‘People actually dug this?’

Zole only nodded and walked on in. Nona followed, trying to imagine the effect on those that had laboured here with picks, the black frost melting all across them.

‘I can’t see …’ After twenty yards Nona felt as if her eyes had simply stopped working. Turning, she could see the circle of daylight behind her, just a patch of brightness, illuminating nothing, holding no meaning.

Zole grunted and a moment later the Noi-Guin’s shipheart spilled its violet light between them. Nona could see herself now, and Zole, but nothing else. Their surroundings swallowed the glow, returning nothing. Zole led on, her footsteps cautious on the broken ice.

The passage took them perhaps four hundred yards before joining a natural tunnel carved by the passage of meltwater that had long since found a better course. They tramped down from the breach on a ramp formed from the passage debris, now frozen into an irregular, solid mass. The water-cut tunnel crossed theirs at right-angles making their choice of direction unclear. Zole crouched, considering.

‘Up?’ Nona suggested.

Zole scrutinized the ice for a silent minute, then another. Nona hugged herself. Her toes had grown numb in her ill-fitting boots and the cold had started to seep into her bones.

‘Or down.’ Nona just wanted to move. A thousand eyes watched them, the freezing air sharp with their hatred.

‘Up.’ Zole stood and started along the barely perceptible incline. She moved more slowly here, the ice slick underfoot.

Nona paused for a moment. Where Zole had crouched and waited the ice had paled to a translucent grey. In the depths beneath them the ancient flaws glimmered with the shipheart’s violet light.

‘It pushes them away!’ Nona caught up with Zole, nearly losing her balance in the process. ‘The shipheart.’

‘It does.’ Zole nodded. ‘It breaks them free of our minds and then, if we are strong, it drives them from our flesh.’

Nona kept close to Zole after that. The shipheart’s radiance was hard to tolerate but it shielded her from the devils’ malice and of two unbearable choices it proved the lesser evil.

The tunnel led them for an untold distance. It might have been miles, snaking through the thickness of the sheet, the vanished stream turning one way and another where pressure hardened the ice into something closer to the consistency of iron. In places where one ancient glacier swallowed another or pushed it from its path, their burden of rock and stone lay bedded through the ice in bands many yards deep.

Several times the gradient steepened and neither novice could continue without falling to their knees and using knives to find purchase. Nona tried her flaw-blades first but they would hardly scratch the black ice, just as they had proved impotent against Raymel Tacsis’s devil-haunted skin.

Gaining height, they found the ice riddled with meltwater channels where surface water had drained away after the passage of the focus moon. The sound of running water penetrated the ice, a constant behind which deep-throated gurgling reverberated as chambers filled and emptied around natural airlocks.

In several places vents in the tunnel walls would erupt without warning, blasting out spray-laden air at tremendous velocity. Nona had been dimly aware of such phenomena from her father’s tales but it was Zole who dived and took her to the floor when she walked unknowingly in front of one fissure just as it started to blast.

The spray of black mist hurt where it found skin, neither scalding nor freezing nor acid but somehow worse than all three, as if wrongness had been made into liquid.

‘How did you know it was coming?’ Nona wiped her hands on the range-coat Kettle had given her.