Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘Bad luck!’ Clera wrapped an arm around Nona. ‘You’re getting better, though.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Let’s watch Ara fall.’ Clera grinned. ‘Or just get old watching her finishing it.’

A novice, nearly as tall as Darla but half her width, pulled the lever on the wall, trapping the pendulum at the end of a swing and setting the dial back to zero.

23

‘Touching the Path is the second most dangerous thing a person can do.’ Sister Pan stalked the classroom with an energy wholly at odds with her ancient frame. ‘These games you play with swords and knives, poisons and acids … you think this is danger? You girls don’t even know the hurt that a sharp edge can do – a slip of the wrist and you’re opened to the world, blood, bone, nerves, guts, all the soft wonder of a body cut through. If you live the pain can last a lifetime, the loss … if you live.’ She raised her right arm and gazed at the stump where her hand should be, tilting her head as if perhaps she could still see the missing fingers moving to her will. A moment later the old woman spun on her heel to face Nona. ‘I’ve told these girls a hundred times – it doesn’t stick. It’s small matter if they haven’t the blood for it. But you … you, little Nona, you might yet do it. This ill-advised connection Novice Hessa forged with you is a possible sign. Not a proper thread-bond, but an echo of one.’ Sister Pan leaned in and tapped Nona’s forehead with a finger as dry and dark as a charcoal stick. ‘There might be a touch of quantal locked in there … and all we need to do is find a way to set it free.’

‘What’s the most dangerous thing?’ Nona asked.

‘Huh?’ Sister Pan blinked as if the path of her own thoughts had slipped away from beneath her feet. She stood dark against the magnificence of the stained-glass windows.

‘You said that touching the Path was the second most dangerous thing a person could do,’ Nona said. ‘What’s the most dangerous?’

‘Leaving the Path, of course,’ Sister Pan replied, her focus back and razor-sharp. ‘And why is that, Novice Hessa?’ She pointed at Hessa behind her without turning her gaze from Nona.

‘Because when you step from the Path you have to take great care to return to yourself and not to some other place,’ Hessa said.

‘Some other place,’ Sister Pan repeated. ‘Some terrible place from which you may never return. A dark place where demons whisper unseen. A hot place where your mind will burn. A place so cold that we who remain will see the hint of its frost in your vacant eyes. A silent place where time does not venture and from which no thing ever leaves … You must return to yourself. What else? What else makes it dangerous, Novice Arabella?’ She pointed to Ara.

‘You must own what you hold,’ Ara said.

‘Correct.’ A nod. ‘Every step along the true Path of the Ancestor – a path that runs through all creation – is a gift and a burden. Every step taken is a gift of the raw power of creation, every step increases the potential within you. Sounds good, no?’

Nona nodded. The stories spoke of Holy Witches filling their hands with magics that could blow the strongest door asunder, reduce rock to powder. They said Sister Cloud could throw lightning like a thunderstorm. Sister Owl could scatter men as if they were nine-pins with a wave of her hand.

‘Imagine a stream of your favourite drink. Girls like honey-wine don’t they? Imagine that.’

Nona had never tasted honey-wine, or wine, or honey, but she nodded again.

‘Now imagine it is being poured into your mouth. You like the taste, you swallow and swallow, it’s good. But the jug keeps pouring – it’s endless – it’s too fast – but all you can do is swallow it. Your belly is swelling, your stomach bursting. You can take no more. You break away.

‘The Path is like that. You return overflowing with the gift, burning with it, bursting with it. And you must own and shape what you’ve been given. Fail, and it will tear you apart – never the same way twice. It’s not a quick death either. The gift sustains. Even as it destroys you it will keep you there. Even as you burn, whatever pieces of you remain will know suffering sharp enough to make the emperor’s torturers weep with jealousy.’ Sister Pan frowned as if she’d had more to say, then looked at Nona expectantly.

‘I’ll stick to swords and poison then,’ Nona said.

‘Ha!’ Sister Pan barked a laugh. ‘That’s all you’ll be good for, young Nona, unless you work on your serenity. Serenity is what will lead you through the fog of this world to the Path. Clarity will let you see it. I’ve no complaint with your clarity. Your serenity on the other hand …’ She waggled her fingers.

Nona ignored the laughter sprinkled across the room. Most of the class knew nothing about her beyond her showing in the ordeal of the Shield. That and the fact she’d broken Darla’s finger of course. And pulled a real knife on Arabella Jotsis this morning. And done the same on the first day she arrived. ‘I find serenity difficult, Mistress Path.’

Sister Pan patted Nona’s shoulder and moved back to the head of the class, a kaleidoscope of colour sliding across her as she went.

Clera winked at Nona. Both of them had scraped through their serenity test long after mastering clarity and then patience. The trances were hard to touch, harder to sink into, and remaining in them despite distraction was the hardest. Sister Pan offered exercises to help attain each state along with explanation of what to expect and why. In class she gave guidance towards shaping one’s character and daily being to better fit the requirements. But in the end it was words, words, more words.

‘I can show you where it lies,’ she had said. ‘I can point at it. I can describe it. But I cannot make you see it. I cannot put it in your hand. The only person who can see it, take it, and own it, is you.’

The old nun taught them poems, stories, fragments of song, even riddles and jests, all to help them view the world through altered eyes – to somehow see what she saw so easily. On occasion she would open the great iron-bound chest at the front of the class and take from it some pretty object to fascinate the eye with patterns. Pieces of ancient glass rainbowed through with colours, interlocking puzzles of black metal, pictures that deceived – at one glance an old man looking to the right, at the next a young boy staring left, or a hill that with a shift of perception became a pit. Endless variety with one thing held common: all of them led to the same place in different ways, a path to suit each person.

Nona had come closest to serenity when running an old song through her mind. The one children sang in the village. She’s falling down, she’s falling down / The moon, the moon / She’s falling down, she’s falling down / Soon, soon. When she passed the words over her still tongue again and again until every one of them lost its meaning in a chain of unvoiced sound, when she remembered the shapes of the children dancing black against the focus of the moon, in those moments she reached that calm place where nothing outside could touch her, where every memory was robbed of its sharp edges. It wasn’t a state without care or purpose, but one with the serenity to rise beyond the reach of fear or even pain.

Nona found it no use whatsoever on the blade-path though: it just meant she fell serenely and was less bothered by how small a portion of the journey she had completed in a non-vertical manner.