Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

The smell bothered Argus when he first joined the guard. They say that after a while your mind steps around any smell without noticing. It’s true, but it’s also true of pretty much every other bad thing in life. After ten years Argus’s mind stepped around the business of stretching people’s necks just as easily as it had acclimatized to Harriton’s stink.

‘When you leaving?’ Dava’s obsession with everyone else’s schedule used to annoy Argus, but now he just answered without thought or memory. ‘Seventh bell.’

‘Seventh!’ The little woman rattled out her usual outrage at the inequities of the work rota. They ambled towards the main holding block, the private scaffold at their back. Behind them Jame Lender dangled out of sight beneath the trapdoor, still twitching. Jame was the graveman’s problem now. Old Man Herber would be along soon enough with his cart and donkey for the day’s take. The short distance to Winscon Hill might prove a long trip for Old Herber, his five passengers, and the donkey, near as geriatric as its master. The fact that Jame had no meat on him to speak of would lighten the load. That, and the fact two of the other four were small girls.

Herber would wind his way through the Cutter Streets and up to the Academy first, selling off whatever body parts might have a value today. What he added to the grave-ditch up on the Hill would likely be much diminished – a collection of wet ruins if the day’s business had been good.

‘… sixth bell yesterday, fifth the day before.’ Dava paused the rant that had sustained her for years, an enduring sense of injustice that gave her the backbone to handle condemned men twice her size.

‘Who’s that?’ A tall figure was knocking at the door to the new arrivals’ block with a heavy cane.

‘Fellow from the Caltess? You know.’ Dava snapped her fingers before her face as if trying to surprise the answer out. ‘Runs fighters.’

‘Partnis Reeve!’ Argus called the name as he remembered it and the big man turned. ‘Been a while.’

Partnis visited the day-gaol often enough to get his fighters out of trouble. You don’t run a stable of angry and violent men without them breaking a few faces off the payroll from time to time, but generally they didn’t end up at Harriton. Professional fighters usually keep a calm enough head to stop short of killing during their bar fights. It’s the amateurs who lose their minds and keep stamping on a fallen opponent until there’s nothing left but mush.

‘My friend!’ Partnis turned with arms wide, a broad smile, and no attempt at Argus’s name. ‘I’m here for my girl.’

‘Your girl?’ Argus frowned. ‘Didn’t know you were a family man.’

‘Indentured. A worker.’ Partnis waved the matter aside. ‘Open the door, will you, good fellow. She’s down to drop today and I’m late enough as it is.’ He frowned, as if remembering some sequence of irritating delays.

Argus lifted the key from his pocket, a heavy piece of ironwork. ‘Probably missed her already, Partnis. Sun’s a-setting. Old Herber and his cart will be creaking down the alleys, ready for his take.’

‘Both of them creaking, eh? Herber and his cart,’ Dava put in. Always quick with a joke, never funny.

‘I sent a runner,’ Partnis said, ‘with instructions that the Caltess girls shouldn’t be dropped before—’

‘Instructions?’ Argus paused, key in the lock.

‘Suggestions, then. Suggestions wrapped around a silver coin.’

‘Ah.’ Argus turned the key and led him inside. He took his visitor by the quickest route, through the guard station, along the short corridor where the day’s arrivals watched from the narrow windows in their cell doors, and out into the courtyard where the public scaffold sat below the warden’s window.

The main gates had already opened, ready to admit the graveman’s cart. A small figure waited close to the scaffold steps, a single guardsman beside her, John Fallon by the look of it.

‘Just in time!’ Argus said.

‘Good.’ Partnis started forward, then faltered. ‘Isn’t that …’ he trailed off, lips curling into a snarl of frustration.

Following the tall man’s gaze, Argus spotted the source of his distress. The Abbess of Sweet Mercy came striding through the small crowd of onlookers before the warden’s steps. At this distance she could be anyone’s mother, a shortish, plumpish figure swathed in black cloth, but her crozier announced her.

‘Dear heavens, that awful old witch has come to steal from me yet again.’ Partnis both lengthened and quickened his stride, forcing Argus into an undignified jog to keep pace. Dava, on the man’s other side, had to run.

Despite Partnis’s haste, he beat the abbess to the girl by only a fraction. ‘Where’s the other one?’ He looked around as if the guardsman might be hiding another prisoner behind him.

‘Other what?’ John Fallon’s gaze flickered past Partnis to the advancing nun, her habit swirling as she marched.

‘Girl! There were two. I gave orders to— I sent a request that they be held back.’

‘Over with the dropped.’ Fallon tilted his head towards a mound beside the main gates, several feet high. Stones pinned a stained, grey sheet across the heap. The graveman’s cart came into view as they watched.

‘Damnation!’ The word burst from Partnis loud enough to turn heads all across the yard. He raised both hands, fingers spread, then trembling with effort, lowered them to his sides. ‘I wanted them both.’

‘Have to argue with the graveman over the big one,’ Fallon observed. ‘This’un.’ He reached for the girl at his side. ‘You’ll have to argue with me over. Then those two.’ He nodded at Dava and Argus. ‘Then the warden.’

‘There’ll be no arguing.’ The abbess stepped between Fallon and Partnis, dwarfed by both, her crozier reaching up to break their eye contact. ‘I shall be taking the child.’

‘No you won’t!’ Partnis looked down at her, brow furrowed. ‘All due respect to the Ancestor and all that, but she’s mine, bought and paid for.’ He glanced back at the gates where Herber had now halted his cart beside the covered mound. ‘Besides … how do you know she’s the one you want?’

The abbess snorted and favoured Partnis with a motherly smile. ‘Of course she is. You can tell by looking at her, Partnis Reeve. This child has the fire in her eyes.’ She frowned. ‘I saw the other. Scared. Lost. She should never have been here.’

‘Saida’s back in the cells …’ the girl said. ‘They told me I would go first.’

Argus peered at the child. A small thing in shapeless linen – not street rags, covered in rusty stains, but a serf’s wear none the less. She might be nine. Argus had lost the knack for telling. His older two were long grown, and little Sali would always be five. This girl was a fierce creature, a scowl on her thin, dirty face. Eyes black below a short shock of ebony hair.

‘Might have been the other,’ Partnis said. ‘She was the big one.’ He lacked conviction. A fight-master knows the fire when he sees it.

‘Where’s Saida?’ the girl asked.

The abbess’s eyes widened a fraction. It almost looked like hurt. Gone, quicker than the shadow of a bird’s wing. Argus decided he imagined it. The Abbess of Sweet Mercy was called many things, few of them to her face, and ‘soft’ wasn’t one of them.