Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

The ginger gerant howled his bloodlust and thrust a hand towards her.

Nona sank into the moment and timed her jump. She landed with legs bent, one foot against the back of Denam’s hand, letting his momentum carry them both forward. As he whipped his hand up, trying both to dislodge and catch her, Nona straightened her legs, driving off the broad back of Denam’s hand. To the onlooker it would look as if he literally batted her into the air with a fumbled attempt to seize her.

Airborne, Nona sailed across the upper rope, staring at her target. Raymel had time to lift his head and start to move his arms but caught by surprise he had no chance of stopping her. Twisting in the air, Nona brought her feet to the fore and hammered both into Raymel’s chest. She caught him around the back of the head to keep her place. Immediately, long before his hands could reach her, something else took hold, as if some unseen and clawed hand had sunk its talons into her mind, cutting through memories, letting emotion bleed out. She felt them. She felt whatever it was that now shared Raymel’s skull, the passengers that had ridden him back from his long stay trapped on the border between life and death. They lurked under his skin, watched her from his crimson eye.

Nona and Raymel remained in contact for only a split second, but some instinct told her that, although both eyes lighted on her, only the red eye truly saw her, and more, it recognized her. Something woke inside Nona as her gaze locked with whatever lay hidden inside the ring-fighter’s skull. Their communion lasted only an instant, but her speed drew it out into an age. A deep and twisting sensation enveloped her, half-pain, half-sickness.

A dozen different thoughts crowded through the small fragment of time that Nona had left for thinking. She should spring away. She should kill him. She should mark him.

Nona’s hands decided for her. ‘For Saida.’ She plunged her talons into Raymel’s throat, drawing them across the thickness of his neck, then sprang away, leaping backwards over his rising hands. She tumbled in the air and landed on both feet, just before the ring, arms spread for balance but looking as if inviting applause.

A shadow fell over her. Glancing up, she saw a hand big enough to engulf and crush her head, and behind it, Denam, crimson and furious, leaning over the ropes to snatch hold of her. For once Nona had no time to move. But, close as Denam was, Sister Tallow reached her first. She caught Denam’s wrist in a pincered grip, taking his little finger in her other hand. A moment later he was on his knees in the ring above them, crying for release in a voice hoarse with agony. Sister Rock drew Nona away towards the main doors. To the audience, to Denam, perhaps even to the nuns, the whole exchange would have looked like an accident. Nona swept out of the ring by the gerant, crashing into a member of the crowd, springing away.

Half-pushed, half-carried to the exit, Nona kept her eyes on Raymel Tacsis, the blue-robed man fussing about him. Something was wrong. Blades that could sink six inches into a stone wall seemed to have been turned aside, as if Raymel’s flesh held something inimical to their nature. Instead of a devastating wound they appeared to have left just a shallow cut, hardly parting the skin. With the red tide of her anger ebbing Nona realized that she could have been standing there with gory hands before a hundred witnesses to the murder of a lord’s son. Even the sisters would have turned against her. If she had managed to escape the hall then the emperor’s soldiers would have hunted from the Marn beaches to the Scithrowl borders for her. And yet … still some part of her knew disappointment.

Raymel for his part ignored the Academy man before him and stared at Nona in turn, with his scarlet eye and the blue. He kept one hand clasped to his throat, the smallest trickles of blood just starting to seep between his fingers. And as each of them stared at the other that sharp nausea twisted in Nona’s gut once more.

31

‘What do they even eat?’

‘What?’ Nona looked back at Clera, next behind her in the queue waiting for Bhenta to open the gate and let them down the stairs to the Poisoner’s cave.

‘What do they find to eat out there?’ Clera asked.

‘Who?’

‘The ice-tribes. They can’t just munch on ice.’

‘They hunt.’ Nona’s father had hunted on the ice.

‘What do they hunt?’

‘White bear, hoola, lynx. That sort of thing.’

‘To eat?’

‘My da sold their pelts.’

‘And what did the bears eat?’

‘They come down into the margins and forage.’

‘I’m talking about the deep tribes. Zole said her people roam a thousand miles north.’

‘Uh.’ Nona frowned. ‘Fish, I think. And since when do you speak to Zole?’

‘Fish? Isn’t it all supposed to be frozen?’

‘But there’s sea underneath,’ Nona said.

‘Miles underneath! How do—’ The clanking of the key in the lock ended the discussion.

Bhenta hauled the gate open and glared at the novices until they started moving. Clera claimed that Bhenta’s dead white skin and the alarming, unnatural blue of her eyes were the lingering after-effect of one of Sister Apple’s poisons, and her position as assistant was a kind of compensation. But Nona had it from Sister Kettle that such colouration wasn’t uncommon if you walked the Corridor for a thousand miles east, and that Bhenta would be taking the headdress next year as a Sister of Discretion.

Sister Apple stood waiting as Grey Class filed in behind Bhenta. Heavy curtains hung over the three shaft-windows tunnelled out to the cliff wall and a shifting gloom filled the place. The three work-benches had been positioned against the walls, chairs stacked on top, lanterns set between, leaving a large empty space. Even the Poisoner’s desk had been cleared of its usual vials, jars of pickled organs, and various oddments. Nona stood with the others, uneasy in the flickering shadows. At long last they might perhaps learn something other than poisons. Even so, Nona didn’t peel the wax from her fingertips. It never paid to let your guard down in Shade class, and anything you touched could be one of Sister Apple’s little traps.

‘Light is the interloper.’ Sister Apple spoke in the low voice of someone who is certain that they will be listened to. ‘Those of you who have heard me give this speech before, attend to your training.’ She waved at the group and four or five of the novices backed towards the rear of the chamber where the darkness lay thickest. Nona caught Leeni’s smile as the novice ran her hands up across her body from thighs to chest to face and somehow the night seemed to follow, her skin, usually nearly as pale as Bhenta’s, growing hard to see, as if the lanterns’ shuddering light could find no purchase on her. Beside her Alata’s dark brown skin seemed to shout its presence in comparison.

A sick sensation crawled up around Nona’s stomach, the same feeling she’d been experiencing since the Caltess forging. In the days since her return it had only got worse. Perhaps Raymel had poisoned her somehow when she had cut him, or had her poisoned earlier in the day. Maybe that’s what he had been there to watch – her dying in agony. If so he’d miscalculated the dose. Nona had told no one but Ara and Clera. Ara had wondered if it might not be an enchantment. The Noi-Guin were said to be able to lay marjal spells that would see the flesh rot from a strong man within a week. Clera had laughed and said that most girls of their age felt the same symptoms every month and to get used to it. Both suggested going to the abbess but Nona wouldn’t hear of it. If any of the nuns had realized that Nona’s collision with Raymel was other than accidental, or that she had tried to kill him, they didn’t appear to have told the abbess. Nona wasn’t about to either. Abbess Glass had endured horrors, narrowly escaping an even worse fate the last time Nona enraged the Tacsis family. And now Nona had gone and cut the throat of Thuran Tacsis’s firstborn son … again, albeit not as deeply as she wanted to. The fight was hers to finish.