Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

‘The first novices to touch the far wall are selected for the Caltess matches.’ Sister Tallow spoke in a conversational tone and for a moment no one fully registered her words.

Clera was the first to start scrambling towards the door. Jula had got to all fours just in front of her and Clera used her to lever herself up, pushing Jula’s face into the sand as she did so. She took off, though she hadn’t taken the trouble to finish standing up first so it was part-crawl, part-stumble rather than actual running. Zole set off next, quickly overtaking Clera. Alata got up, clutching her throat, and started to run. Croy tripped Leeni as she tried to rise, and staggered to her feet.

Nona watched them. Did she want to go back? Did she want to fight under the Caltess roof, with Partnis Reeve watching on? To put coin in his purse as Verity’s wealthy bet on which way the blood would spatter? She thought of Raymel Tacsis. Would he be watching? Would it shame him more if she didn’t even rank among the convent’s offering? Or did she want to look into his eyes and show him she had no fear?

Jula had got to her knees again, spitting sand. With two of the three places in the Fist rounds gone to Clera and Zole the last would be hers. Nona found herself running. Her mouth shouted a ‘sorry’ as she shot past Jula, but her legs just pumped harder.

30

The Caltess had a smell all its own. Nona had not remarked it on her arrival with the child-taker but now, among the many stinks of Verity, it was the particular smell of the place that brought Saida’s ghost to stand beside her. Sweat, blood, sawdust, sewage, old beer, stale wine – the Caltess could be inhaled and known in a single breath from floor to rafter.

The five competing girls from Grey Class, accompanied by Sisters Tallow, Flint, and Rock, were afforded a corner of the main hall in which to train. Partnis’s children had set out chairs and a long table to which the Caltess cooks brought the midday meal and periodic refreshments. This ensured that the nuns and novices would not have to mix with the Caltess’s various inhabitants.

The remainder of Grey Class watched from a roped area in the corner opposite the one where ales were sold on fight nights. Sister Kettle kept watch over them. Yisht came too but strode the hall like a predator in search of prey, with no regard to boundaries.

Nona felt on display the whole time, more so than if they had sat at table with the ring-fighters, apprentices, and bonded-children for their meal. She knew that every crack and chink in the ceiling high above her had an eye to it. There would be new kings to rule that particular roost – Regol and Denam would long since have joined the ranks of Partnis’s apprentices – but nothing else would have changed up there among the sacks and dust of the attic.

Several young men from the apprentice hall lounged at the main doors, watching with an amused indolence, though they must surely have seen the same spectacle on several occasions. Even the ring-fighters seemed to find excuses to cross back and forth across the hall more times than seemed reasonable.

Gretcha passed by once, the grizzled gerant fighter who had fought in the second ring that first night when Nona and Saida had watched Raymel at work. She offered the novices a gap-toothed grin.

‘She’s huge!’ Clera whispered beside Nona.

Nona just nodded. The woman’s arms were as thick as Nona’s whole body, banded by tattoos patterned in red and black like a winding serpent.

Two other gerant fighters paused to watch the novices work through their katas, each a towering mass of muscle, one with what looked to be deliberate facial scars, making something demonic of his smile, though the eyes above lacked malice. The other, balding, his grey hair cut to a stubble, scowled as though he’d happily eat a novice whole, given half a chance. A younger man sauntered by four times, humming to himself behind a sardonic smile.

‘That’s Aegon,’ Alata said after the first pass. ‘The Caltess’s newest ring-fighter. He sailed from Durn.’

‘How do you know?’ Croy’s eyes lingered on the doorway through which the man had gone. Nona supposed he had been handsome in a lean, dark manner.

‘Everyone knows,’ Clera said, before a snap of Sister Tallow’s fingers set them all back to their tasks.

The appointed hour approached – there were no bells in the Caltess but people began to gather even so. Sister Tallow broke training and allowed the novices to watch the watchers.

‘Who’s that?’ Clera pointed across to where Partnis Reeve stood, wine goblet in hand, amid a collection of ring-fighters and apprentices.

‘The owner.’ Nona had never quite managed to hate Partnis, though she knew she should.

Partnis Reeve waited, talking with his fight-masters and trainers as he watched his guests from the convent. Nona knew both the fight-masters: lean, grey men in their dark Caltess greens. A woman stood to one side of the group, or perhaps it was a man, hidden in cowl and robe. The nuns’ glances strayed towards the figure in quiet moments. On the other side a man Nona thought she recognized. He looked small compared to the fighters clustered around Partnis, though perhaps he missed six foot by only a few inches. He seemed out of place in sealskin trousers and a shirt stitched from the fur of many small animals. The tular at his hip and the scars across both cheeks finally hooked the right memory and drew it to the surface. The man had intervened once when the attic’s bully, Denam, had caught Nona off-guard. He’d said he was a ring-fighter … Tarkax, that was his name.

At last children began to descend from the attic under the watchful eye of the giant, Maya, who played mother for the Caltess.

‘You’re up first, Nona.’ Sister Tallow nodded towards the ring. ‘Don’t break anyone.’

Nona climbed up onto the platform and vaulted over the ropes that made the rectangle in which she would fight. The fact they called it a ring still irritated her. A blond boy of no great size clambered in at the opposite corner, looking nervous. Nona looked around, finding that the elevation of little less than two yards offered a profoundly different perspective. She looked down on the nuns, on Zole, Clera, Croy, and Alata; even the tallest of the gerants she could face nearly eye to eye. Gretcha, standing close to the ropes, gave her a grin and banged her barrel-chest with one huge fist.

‘Fight!’ barked one of Partnis’s fight-masters, and the boy came forward, fists raised.

Nona leaned back and kicked him as he closed the last yard. Her heel hammered into his solar plexus and he folded up with an ‘ooooff’ made by all the air leaving his lungs at once and collapsed onto his side on the boards. Nona glanced around, wondering if she were the victim of some kind of trick. The novices watching seemed just as surprised.

‘Next!’ the fight-master shouted.

Gretcha stooped and reached in a long, muscular arm to haul the boy out beneath the bottom rope as a hefty red-faced girl clambered in to take his place, her Caltess shift dirty with the attic’s dust and cobwebs.

This one absorbed a couple of punches and took a kick to the back of the knee to put down. She tried to rise twice despite Nona’s elbow strikes to the back. But not a third time.

The next was a dark-haired girl, younger than Nona. She tried to dodge Nona’s first punch and had some speed to her, but not enough. Nona’s fist crunched into her nose and the girl staggered back with blood sheeting down her lips and chin, then burst into tears. Gretcha lifted her bodily over the ropes with one hand, frowning, though more in compassion than disgust.