Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

When the steam reached the lip it rolled out like a hot wet blanket before being stripped away by the wind, swirling and confused in the focus. Ara and Clera sat up.

‘Go on then,’ Clera said.

‘I’m … trying.’ Ruli lifted her hands, the mist streaming about them, rising steadily in the void of the sinkhole, shredding around the novices where the wind took it. Ruli’s pale brow furrowed and grew more pale, sweat running down the sides of her face.

‘I don’t see anything,’ Clera said.

Nona didn’t either, but she could feel something, a tingling in her fingertips, spreading to her palms, an itching across the back of her mind. Her stomach chose the moment to knot itself into a ball of agony, nearly doubling her up and almost pitching her into the sinkhole.

‘There!’ Ara pointed. Just below them the mist had clotted into a shape … a something.

‘It’s a person.’ Nona gasped it past gritted teeth.

The figure drew closer, a more solid whiteness amid the rising steam. Featureless, perhaps a man, perhaps a woman, it reminded Nona of the Ancestor’s statue in the dome.

‘I … told … you!’ Ruli grinned, the strain evident.

‘Do a horse now!’ Clera said. ‘No! Do Sister Wheel … No! Kettle and Apple. Kissing!’

The figure broke apart and Ruli released a breath.

‘That’s great, Ruli.’ Ara leaned past Nona and put a hand to Ruli’s shoulder. ‘You’re a marjal touch at the least, a half-blood maybe!’

‘You’ll have no problems with shadow-weaving,’ Hessa said from behind them. ‘You’ll be a Grey Sister for sure if you want to be.’

‘I want to see more.’ Clera lay back, an arm over her eyes. The focus was approaching its peak, soon the light would be moving on. On the ice margins the thaw would be in full swing, the tribes at the lakes, busy gathering the moon’s bounty before the freeze set in again. ‘What else can you do?’

‘Just that.’ Ruli lay back. ‘And even that gives me a headache.’

‘You should tell the abbess,’ Hessa said.

Ruli snorted. ‘The abbess only cares about the Path. The whole convent only cares about the Path.’ She shrugged. ‘The Poisoner will know soon enough if I can work shadow, and she’ll help me.’ A smile. ‘Kettle and Bhenta will too. Us Greys stick together!’

They crept back to the dormitory in the last of the moon’s warmth, already shivering as the wind regained its voice and moulded their damp shifts around them.

It took an age for Nona to sleep, coiled around her sickness. Raymel had poisoned her somehow, and somehow she needed to fight back.

The next day Nona found herself yawning in Path. She often did, even without the excuse of lost sleep. Serenity proved elusive and the Path always beyond reach. Sister Pan had told her a hundred times that she tried too hard: ‘Serenity isn’t something that can be seized, taken, snatched up by force of will. It is a gift that you must be open to.’

Even so, however hard Nona tried not to want it, serenity had yet to reach out, take her in its arms and set her gently upon the Path.

Sister Pan summoned the girls’ attention from their meditations with a cough. She stood before the great ironbound chest which sat at the front of the room, black against the stained and sunlit glass. ‘There is a line that divides and a line that joins, and they are the same line and the line is a path.’

Nona found Sister Pan’s pronouncements more and more frustrating, more so now that she knew she had a genuine ability to touch the Path. In Red Class Nona had let the old nun’s philosophizing wash over her, just waiting for a chance to escape to blade-path, but now she felt bound to listen, hoping against hope that she might actually say something useful.

‘There is a thread that runs through all things, that binds each story to every other, a thread that runs through the veins and the marrow and the memory of every creature.’

Nona sighed. It was all very well Sister Pan making pretty speeches but it would be much more helpful if she would just tell them what they needed to know. If you understood something you should be able to explain it: if you didn’t understand it then you had no business teaching it. Either way, having the old woman spout poetry at them didn’t help at all.

Nona found her head nodding and jerked upright, blinking and trying to keep her eyes wide. Whatever poison the Tacsis had got into her seemed to work erratically, the symptoms coming and going without rhyme or reason.

In frustration at her failures with serenity Nona had on several occasions stolen away from the convent buildings to try to revisit the Path in the only manner she had ever reached it.

She had taken to slipping her friends and venturing out on the narrowing spur of the plateau. There, she hunched against the wind, gazing out over the garden lands of Verity and the Corridor narrowing away to the east between ice walls. If she looked down she could see the convent vineyards, huddled against the plateau walls, sheltered from the weather.

Pain and anger had driven her to the Path before. Anger had only to be reached for: the fact that Raymel Tacsis still drew breath was enough in itself. She had wanted to kill him at the forging and days later her fingers still itched at night for want of his blood. But she had found her blades unable to do more than scratch him. Had it been the man at his side, working some enchantment? Or the devils sharing his skin, armouring their host against her?

Either way Nona had failed Saida. Within yards of the place where Raymel had hurt her Nona had taken his throat in her hand … and still he lived. She only had to think of her own failings as a friend and the anger was there for the taking. Pain too.

It took time. Time to kindle the rage and let it burn to white heat, time to let her pain rise from the deep and hidden places where she kept it. But she could do it, and on each occasion that she did so the Path would coalesce out of the chaos of her mind’s eye. For a moment it would appear, stretching out before her, whipping this way and that, a white serpent in its death throes. And in the next instant she would be hurled at it with frightening speed.

The first time she had touched the Path on one of these excursions she made a glancing contact and the energy of it burst away from her in a boom that had rattled shutters back at the convent and sent birds spiralling towards the ground, killed in mid-flight. The noise had been so loud that nobody knew where it had come from. Sister Rule had suggested some kind of collapse in the many caverns that riddled the plateau.

On the second and subsequent occasions Nona had managed to drive the Path’s energies into the rock, shattering limestone, reducing some of it to powder, but not causing any damage that would be evident from the convent. On a dozen or more attempts though, despite her best efforts to slow her approach, to gain her balance as on the blade-path and make cautious progress, she managed just one step, or perhaps a glancing second step, before the Path threw her.

‘Nona?’

‘Yes?’ Nona looked up, rediscovering the room, the glorious colours of the windows, the novices on all sides in their chairs, and Sister Pan standing before her. ‘Yes, Mistress Path?’

‘You appeared to be slipping over the line from serenity to slumber.’ Titters of laughter around the room.

‘Sorry, Mistress Path.’