Grey Sister (Book of the Ancestor 2)

“Two feet? Three?” Ruli stepped closer.

“That’s the best part of ten thousand years since someone knocked them off last.” Nona advanced too, her voice a whisper. “We should push on.” She looked past the ring to the back of the cavern where two tunnels led off, one rising, one falling. “Which way, Jula?”

“Shouldn’t we . . .” Jula returned her gaze to the ring.

“It’s been there forever. I need to see where Hessa died.” She saw the others’ doubt. “It’s the key to finding Yisht and recovering the shipheart,” she added, with more confidence than she felt.

“That one.” Jula nodded towards the tunnel heading up.

Ara led off, touching her fingers to her forehead every now and then. “Did you . . . come back for me?” she muttered as Nona came close.

“I tripped over you.”

They walked on in silence.

Your friends will get you killed. I don’t understand why you need them. Keot ran along the veins of her right arm, faint and petulant. Especially the other two. They’re weak. There’s no gain.

Nona thought about it. About the ties that bound her to those she had named her friends. Sister Pan’s words returned to her, how she described the Path and the threads that bound each thing to every other thing, a web of influence and dependence, invisible, eternal, ever-changing.

I’ve been at this convent five years, Keot, and I’ve learned to believe in something more than myself. All this time Wheel has been banging on about the Ancestor, about all those who came before and have gone beyond. But the larger thing I believe in is what’s here and now. Those novices are my friends and I would die for them. I would face a terror for them that I haven’t the courage to stand against on my own behalf.

* * *

• • •

EVEN WITH JULA’S instinct for finding her way below ground, making progress still proved a difficult business. Time and again they had to double back, seeking alternative routes where a passage grew too narrow or too steep or turned and led away into the depth of the Rock. It felt to Nona like days, and was perhaps hours.

“I think we’re getting close,” Jula said.

“I think we’re running out of oil.” Ara held the lantern up and shook it to hear the slosh.

“Five more minutes.” Jula pointed ahead with her Noi-Guin knife. “We risked our lives to come this far! We might not get another chance.”

“If we lose our light we can still die down here,” Ara said, but she followed on.

At the limit of their illumination the tunnel before them narrowed then opened into what might be a sizeable chamber. Nona had no idea where they were with respect to the convent but Jula’s talent for navigation had proved trustworthy so far.

The sound of running water greeted them, the air thick with the smell of earth and rot.

“What are those?” Ara raised the lantern and stepped into the chamber.

“I don’t know.” Nona stared at the ceiling. Strange stalactites hung in twisting profusion, like nothing they had seen before.

“They’re roots,” Ruli said.

“We’re below the centre oak.”

Nona kept her gaze on the mass of roots. Towards the rear of the cavern they stretched to the ground and snaked across it. Just feet ahead of her roots reached so low she could almost touch one with a raised arm. For years she had walked the novice cloister, chased the others, sat on the benches chattering, and all that time this void had waited in darkness only yards beneath them. Perhaps people were like that too: a void had waited behind Clera’s smile, a dark space where unspoken thoughts had festered and grown into betrayal.

“Look . . .” Ara stood at the side of the chamber beside one of five round, dark openings. Now she held her lantern closer Nona could see that the opening looked hand-hewn and that corroded iron bars blocked it off. The novices gathered beside Ara.

“It’s a cell.” Ruli pulled on one of the bars. Her hand came away thick with rust.

“Check the others,” Jula said.

They were all cells. Each a space hewn just two yards back into the rock, sealed with bars and a locked gate. The second and third held bones, complete skeletons, blackened with age.

“This is a prison,” Nona whispered, remembering the recluse, the cave where she and the abbess had been kept before their trial.

“An oubliette.” Jula’s voice was a whisper too. “They put people here to forget them.”

“Those skeletons we found . . .” Ruli frowned.

“Might not have been people who came into the caves and got lost. They might have been novices or sisters who escaped the cells but never saw the light again.” Nona tried to imagine it. Rotting away down here just yards beneath the novice cloisters where girls ran and laughed and played. Nothing but the stillness of rock and root. She suppressed a shudder. A place to forget. Did anyone in the convent still remember it existed?

To one side of the cavern in a low-roofed alcove a pool nestled, fed by a small stream escaping a crack.

“In the ceiling.” Nona pointed. A circular shaft led up.

“What’s in it?” Ara squinted. She crouched at the pool’s edge holding the lantern above the water. The light’s reflection on the rocky ceiling made a wonder of slowly shifting patterns.

“Is that . . . a bucket?” Nona frowned and squinted at something hanging in the shaft.

“It’s the well!” Jula said.

“The well?” Nona didn’t know of a well close to the novice cloisters.

“In the back of the laundry. That little room . . . They get the washing water there when the rain barrels are dry.”

Nona wondered if those trapped in the cells might sometimes have heard the outside world echoing down the well shaft. She shuddered again.

“We need to go now,” Ara said. “Or we’ll be feeling our way in the dark.”

With new meaning attached to the old bones along the way, the novices needed no further encouragement. They left without a word.

14

ABBESS GLASS

ABBESS GLASS STOOD in the shadow beside her study window, watching the novices of Red Class hurry towards Academia Tower, clutching their slates. She rubbed Malkin behind the ears. The old cat tolerated this and watched with her. At the back of the class little Elsie, just eight years old, scurried to catch up. She had been given over to the convent by her mother, a metalworker recently widowed and struggling to keep her younger children housed and fed.

A sigh escaped her. Able had been eight when he died. Her son would have been a man now, perhaps with children of his own. It still hurt to think of it, a physical ache in her chest. Glass struck her breastbone, willing the pain away, and turned from the window.

Sister Tallow waited before the portrait of Abbess Mace, she of the miracle. Abbess Glass had forgotten the nun was there and noticed her with a start. Tallow showed no more motion than the portrait. If not for the wisp of her breath escaping in the cold air she might have been just another painting. Though it would take quite an artist to capture her hardness and the dark intensity of her eyes.

“It won’t be long before the inquisitors want to read the Grey reports, you know that.” Sister Tallow glanced towards the door. “I’m surprised there’s not a watcher in your house yet.”