Grey Sister (Book of the Ancestor 2)

Sister Pan barked a laugh. “We’re all puppets. Other people pull our strings every moment of every day. The only difference between us and Sayan-Ra dancing in the street show is that we can also pull our own strings and those of others. Threads aren’t something external to the world that only a privileged few can touch. Every time you speak to someone threads are pulled. Every glance exchanged. Every punch thrown. Every kindness shown. In thread-work we are just more direct about it. More focused.” She turned and fixed Nona with her dark eyes. “You need to know how to draw a thread or how will you prevent your own from being drawn?” She reached forward, plucking at the air with finger and thumb. “At first it will help you to visualize the task, see it before you, use your hands. It’s nonsense of course. Not needed. But the mind loves the familiar. There!” She pinched and pulled. “How do you feel, Nona?”

“Hungry!” Nona clapped both hands across her stomach. “Starved!”

“Basic needs, simple emotions, are the easiest to influence.” Sister Pan opened her fingers as if releasing what she held. “And now?”

“Full of breakfast.” Nona laughed despite herself, then frowned. “But you couldn’t do that with just words.”

“I couldn’t?” Sister Pan tilted her head. “If I described a roast chicken in exquisite detail, steaming on a plate of buttered potatoes, its skin golden and crisp, seasoned with salt and pepper . . . your mouth wouldn’t begin to water? Your stomach rumble?”

Nona’s mouth had already filled with saliva. When it came to food her strings were remarkably easy to pull. “Hessa worked with threads when she tried to stop Yisht stealing the shipheart.” She shot an angry glance at Joeli then frowned at Zole, who still, years later, felt tainted by that association. “And I saw it because we were thread-bound.”

“Young Hessa was a remarkable talent. I’ve not seen another so gifted at such an age in all the years I’ve taught. She was a great loss.” Sister Pan settled her hand on Nona’s shoulder. “And perhaps you will have an aptitude for thread-binding, novice. It’s a rare skill and difficult to achieve but always greatly aided by strong and honest friendship between both parties. It only ever works between quantals though. You need to share the same blood.”

Sister Pan stepped back and addressed them all. “Two things you should always remember. Firstly: you can never pull the same thread twice. Every action you take changes the thing you act upon and changes its connections to the world. Secondly: you can never pull just a single thread. Every thread is bound to every other, sometimes through many links, though always fewer than you might imagine. Pull one thread and others are pulled: the effect spreads like a ripple on a pond. You can play at thread-work and think that you are alone, but if you pull on a strand of a web hard enough and often enough . . . a spider will come. It is the same with the threads that bind the universe. Sooner or later you will be noticed. The “spiders” will, like as not, be humans, older, more powerful quantal thread-workers, marjal sorcerers with particular talents, intuitives such as Abbess Glass. But there are bigger spiders out there too. This world is not ours: it is older than us, the Missing were gone before our ships beached here. When the Corridor was a thousand miles wide and there was no moon in the sky they were gone. Echoes of them live among the threads, vibrations that will not fade. And there are others; their servants and things more ancient still. So tread softly, work sparingly, and hope.” She waved her stump at the walls. “In here, however, there is no need for hope. The sigils seal us from the world, and the few threads that penetrate even these walls are beyond your reach.”

The morning’s exercises began with Nona and Zole paired, each seeking to visualize the threads that bound the other to the world.

“See the Path first,” Sister Pan instructed. “Each of you must see it as it runs through the other. You know it from your dreams. You hunt it in the serenity trance. You follow it every moment of your life. And when the Ancestor grants you grace, you walk it.”

Nona stared at Zole, at the black hair laid flat against her blunt skull, the stone-dark eyes, the broad cheekbones, the reddish hue of her skin as if the burn of the ice-wind had never left it, and the short, hard line of her mouth. She tried to see through the ice-triber to the Path, past her wide shoulders, past the height and strength of her. Time seemed both to race and to crawl in exercises like this. It always felt as if she had been at it an age, and when she stopped, Nona often discovered that the hours between one bell and the next had been devoured and yet with hindsight her efforts felt like just the work of minutes.

At first the Path showed as a single line, half-imagined, dividing Zole’s imperfect symmetry. In the next instant Nona saw it as Sister Pan had shown it, flexing at right angles to the world. A single, bright Path. The only difference being that where Sister Pan’s had been haloed by the diffuse white infinity of threads straying from the Path, each following its own convolutions before ending or returning to join the whole, Nona saw just the Path and nothing else.

“I see her threads,” Zole said.

“Good work, novice. Try to follow one back to where it left the Path,” Sister Pan called from across the room where she was working with Joeli on some more advanced matter. “Keep at it, Nona: there is still a little while before it’s time to return.”

Nona felt the familiar sense of surprise, a nearly whole class spent and nothing to show for it. She gritted her teeth and stared harder. The Path twisted across her vision, threadless. A bead of sweat rolled down her neck, the muscles of her jaw twitched and bunched. Her vision blurred. Nothing.

Help me! Nona never called on Keot but she needed this.

Helping is not in my nature.

Nona stared at Zole, willing her threads to appear. Abbess Glass had had Sister Pan try thread-work to hunt down Yisht and the shipheart of course, and without success, but Nona had been there, in Hessa’s head, watched her as the shipheart’s power filled her and sharpened her talents into something keen enough to dissect reality. They had been thread-bound. There had been an unbreakable connection. Something of it could have survived. Must have survived. For more than two years Nona had waited to be taught these arts. Years spent waiting for a chance to use them to avenge Hessa. And now . . . nothing. She hadn’t the skill!

“Well, novice?” Sister Pan touched Nona’s shoulder. “Have you been successful?”

Nona tore her stare away from Zole, her eyes hot and dry, too wide open yet unwilling to close. She found herself sweat-soaked and aching in every limb. “She doesn’t have any!” Behind Sister Pan Joeli’s laughter tinkled like silver coins.

Sister Pan shook her head. “Of course she does. Every living thing, every dead thing, and every thing that has never lived is bound by threads. Stone, bone, tree, and thee.” She pushed Nona aside and took her place. “Allow me to . . .” She paused, frowned, and squinted. Then blinked. “That is quite remarkable. More remarkable, to me, than the fact that four bloods run in your veins, Zole.”

Zole glowered at the old nun.

“She really doesn’t have any threads?” Nona asked, feeling vindicated.

“Of course she has threads!” Sister Pan snapped. “Were you not listening to me?” She frowned again. “But only the deepest and most fundamental, those hardest to find. Where there should be a myriad blazing around her, there are just a few, and buried deep in the stuff of the world. I have never seen the like.”