Holy Sister (Book of the Ancestor 3)

For a moment Kettle’s weakness overwhelmed her and Nona found no strength of her own to replace it. So much death and hurt lay before her. So much blood that the storm drains would soon overflow. Murder, murder, and more murder. What else could they expect when the ice kept closing? All of mankind reduced to wild animals in an ever-shrinking cage.

‘The moon is coming.’ Nona used Kettle’s mouth to speak words for Kettle’s benefit. ‘Be ready to get out of its way.’

28

Holy Class

Nona jerked her head up. Only she and Zole remained in the chamber. Nona lay slumped against the wall. The others stayed outside, watching from the passage.

Zole could be seen only indistinctly, a dark figure orbited by four balls of light, four shiphearts, one attuned to each of the tribes that had come to Abeth in the long ago, plunging from the darkness amid a galaxy of dying stars. They had come seeking the warmth of a sun that burned hotter than those they left behind. Whether it was desperation or miscalculation that had beached them on Abeth’s shores the stories could never agree upon. Perhaps they could travel no further, but they had found a world already abandoned by those who had settled it. Scant millennia passed before the continued retreat of Abeth’s star from the red fury of its expansion began to see Abeth freeze. The world started its return to the ice-bound sphere it had always been before the sun’s death throes briefly thawed it.

Zole had said the Old Stones were things of the Missing, just as the Arks were. The Church taught that they were shiphearts, the vital force that had driven the vessels which brought the four tribes across the blackness of infinity to Abeth, and that the Arks were the work of Nona’s ancestors too. Perhaps that story was simple pride though, claiming some wonder for the Ancestor rather than having all of humanity’s tribes be painted as savages living within the ruins of a greater race. Now as Zole advanced towards the great round door at the chamber’s centre Nona could easily imagine her a creature very different to any that walked the Corridor.

Zole reached the vault door, light and shadow in constant motion around her as the shiphearts continued on their slow trajectories. Nona had thought that the door would fight her, that the earth would shake around them, that the ceiling would crack and the dust sift down. Instead the huge circular slab of silver-steel rose without noise or drama until it stood vertical, revealing a flight of stairs. Zole raised her arms and the shiphearts shot outwards to the four points of the compass, embedding themselves in the walls about halfway between floor and ceiling. Nona couldn’t tell if there had already been structures to receive them or if they had made their own holes.

‘How do you feel?’ She limped across to Zole, who looked like a statue. Now that she could approach her Nona realized how tall her friend had grown. She lacked the thick muscle of a gerant but she had the height, making Nona feel like a child beside her and dwarfing the others. Zole’s skin had turned greyish, as if the shiphearts’ power had burned her to fine ash, awaiting just the lightest touch to fall apart. Nona wouldn’t have been surprised to find on closer inspection that Zole’s flesh was polished to a high shine or just gently smoking. ‘Are you … Are you … still you?’

Zole’s eyes had turned a steel grey and Nona tried to see something of her friend within them. ‘I am shriven.’

‘I …’ Nona reached along their thread-bond but found nothing. ‘Zole …’ Her heart hurt. She wished in that moment she had known the woman who stood in front of her before she had ever touched an Old Stone, before the imperfection was burned from her. She would have held her friend but the devils in her own flesh refused to move any closer.

‘Hurry up!’ Clera arrived at Nona’s shoulder, with Ara and Ruli coming along behind. Tarkax and Jula had hold of Joeli and were bringing her too. The rest of the ice-tribers remained to guard the corridor. ‘Quickly!’

Clera’s urgency was born of the desire to get further from the shiphearts but it reignited Nona’s own. Outside, her sisters were still dying.

‘Lights on,’ Nona ordered and the dark steps beneath the door were illuminated just as the corridors outside had been when Sherzal demanded light. She led the way down, cursing each time her damaged leg had to take her weight.

The Ark proved completely different to anything Nona had anticipated, and her imagination had painted dozens of possible scenes. The stairs led down some fifty feet to a small circular chamber, a room, dirty and bare of anything save a single curving chair of some unfamiliar material, lying on its side near the wall.

‘Aquinas said there would be levers, a machine … He saw them in a holy vision!’ Ruli pushed in past Nona. ‘I kept that bastard’s lies secret when that bitch was wedging needles under my fingernails!’

Jula stumbled in with Joeli. It was getting crowded. ‘There are supposed to be four dials, each within the other …’

‘There’s nothing here.’ Even Joeli sounded disappointed.

‘How would you have worked such an engine, even if it hadn’t been stolen centuries ago?’ Clera spat on the ground and sent the chair skittering across the floor with a kick. The years had turned it brittle and it shattered against the far wall.

Nona frowned, staring furiously at the broken pieces. ‘Aquinas’s book was the key to get us in. A lie. I never expected it to help once we were inside. Though it would have been nice if it had.’ She looked slowly around the chamber, hunting for any clue. ‘The abbess told me that the goal of any design is simplicity.’ She spoke the words haltingly, gathering certainty as fragments of the day’s events came together. ‘What makes our most complex devices hard to use is that we lack the understanding to make them easy to use.’

All of them watched her.

‘Lights off.’ The room plunged into darkness. ‘Lights on.’ The illumination returned, soft, pervasive, casting no shadows and having no source. ‘When Sherzal closed the blast door … she just asked for it to close. Why would you think that the builders of an Ark where that happened would require levers and dials to command the moon? Sherzal’s first instinct was right. The abbess just made her doubt herself, made her think she needed a book full of secret knowledge.’

‘Show us the Corridor,’ Zole said. She spoke it to the air.

Instantly a ring of light appeared before them, hanging in the air, crowded with tiny features in shades of green and brown, fringed with white. A shadow divided it into night and day.

‘Show me the moon’s focus.’

A wide red circle appeared, wider than the Corridor, maybe half as wide again. A much broader pinkish region extended around it within an elongated ellipsis.

‘Show us where we are,’ Nona said.

The ring turned and grew steadily larger, the bulk of it fading from view as a closer and closer look filled the space before them.

‘The Grampains,’ Jula whispered, ‘and the Sea of Marn.’

‘Closer!’ Nona said. And in moments she saw forests and rivers spread before her as if Sister Rule’s precious maps had joined hands and unfolded themselves for inspection. All washed with a faint pinkish tinge.

‘Closer!’

They saw Verity, the Rock of Faith, and the farmlands all around. Tiny fires twinkled. Smoke streaks followed the wind.