Grey Sister (Book of the Ancestor 2)

The third approached with a white linen smock that they worked to get Nona into. She noticed as they did it that she had metal bands around her wrists, her ankles too, presumably matching the collar at her throat.

Nona shook her arms, trying to get more life into them. She couldn’t see much of the chamber. The only light filtered in through a barred window in the door. From what hints the gloom offered, the room seemed to be fairly small and bare, maybe a washroom.

For people who had gone to great lengths to abduct her and keep her incapacitated Nona’s captors didn’t seem to be particularly wary. She puzzled. They must know of her Path-walking, and likely they would know of her blades too. If they had taken the trouble to find her they would have taken the trouble to find out about her first.

“Come.” The tallest of the three walked to the door, knocked, and led through when it opened.

Nona followed, flanked, and occasionally supported, by the other two. A fourth person, similarly shaven-headed and robed, waited in the corridor and joined the escort. Nona supposed they knew how the drugs must still be affecting her and thus felt safe enough from any display of violence on her part.

Single candles burned at irregular intervals in niches along the corridor, just bright enough so that at the darkest spots a hint of the surroundings could still be seen. The doors that they passed looked like cell doors, heavy, each set with a small barred window and a large iron lock. Nona gave silent thanks to Hessa for showing her how to deal with those. Mistress Shade taught classes on overcoming the various mechanisms with a dozen curiously shaped picks, or a vial of acid, but Nona had never fared too well at these, perhaps lacking the motivation of those who can’t open a lock by pulling its thread.

A sewer-stench hung around the corridor. Nona knew that she had smelled worse before they sluiced her. The stink put her in mind of Harriton gaol, whose bars she hadn’t thought of in an age. Smells will do that for you, reach out and pull you back across the years. She remembered being walked along to the cells with Saida, two little girls, only one of whom would come out again with her neck unbroken.

“Here.” The woman at the front—Nona was sure she was female now—stopped at a door no different to the previous half dozen. A key appeared from the woman’s robes and once the door stood open she led the way inside. In the blackness against the back wall somehow the woman found a chain and locked the clasp at its end into the cuff around Nona’s ankle. Nona considered kicking her in the head and making a break for it but she still felt weak and ill. Better to escape in private later.

Her four captives left without further words, locking the door behind them. Nona supposed that at least one of them must be a marjal touch with some shadow-weaving skill in order to perform their task in such gloom.

You’re in trouble. Keot moved across her collarbones, stinging like an old scald.

“First I need to get this chain off.” Nona tried to force her flaw-blades into being but nothing happened. “Bleed me! I’ll try later. Unless you can do something to clean this muck out of my blood.”

It won’t make any difference. The collar and the bands are sigil-worked. I can’t move under them. They must be to disrupt your abilities . . . such as they are.

“Hells.” Nona felt the metal cuffs around her wrists. The sensation in her fingers had returned. The cuffs were heavy pieces of metal, hinged, locked, smooth except for where the sigils had been engraved in deep, swirling lines. Sister Pan had told her that to permanently imprint power into a sigil was an act that required far more than just marking the correct symbol. A marjal full-blood would have to train at the task for half a lifetime and even after such training the setting of a single sigil could take anything from hours to days, months for the most potent sigils. Sigil-marked armour and swords lay beyond the pockets of even many of the Sis. Such things were passed from lord to heir as treasures of the house. “If I get out of here wearing these I’ll be richer than Joeli Namsis.”

Nona leaned back against the wall, finding it cold and uncomfortable. Her body appeared to be made entirely from aches connected by pains. She retched then gathered her will and tried to find the Path. Her eyes saw nothing but darkness. She tried to defocus her vision, to look past the world to the network of threads that underlie all things, including darkness. Again nothing.

“I’m going to have to do this the hard way.”

The bravado was for any ears that might be listening. It was also a lie.

* * *

• • •

“A LONELY TRAIL, sister. Are you lost?” The man stepped into the path from the treeline and Kettle’s heartrate doubled from one beat to the next.

In a dark cell miles from the forested foothills of the Artinas Ridge Nona’s head snapped back and what Kettle saw replaced her blindness.

“I’m neither lost nor your sister.” Kettle ignored the woodsman, though her eyes continued to point in his direction. She drew in the halo of peripheral vision that surrounds what we see, searching for any hint of motion. Her ears opened to every whisper of the trees, every creak, rustle, or scrape, hungry for the telltale crack of a twig.

The one that allows you to see them is the distraction. The one that will kill you is hidden, waiting their moment. That was how Apple always opened the first lesson on ambush. It wouldn’t take long for a novice to ask why they both didn’t stay hidden and attack together. “Because in conversation you may reveal information that they are interested in. But mainly because you will be more vulnerable with your attention on the one before you,” Apple would say, and she would lift her hand, wriggling her fingers in a puzzling motion. At that moment her assistant, Bhetna for the last few years, would rise behind the curious novice and lay a blunt knife across her throat. “As we have demonstrated,” Apple would conclude.

“So, where would you be heading?” The trail behind the man lay thick with evening shadow.

Kettle spared him a moment’s attention. He had pallid skin, short brown hair, pale eyes. His garb was convincing enough, but it didn’t suit him. The hand-axe at his hip gleamed as if sharp enough to shave with.

Sometimes you need to wait for an enemy to reveal himself, sometimes you need to take the initiative. Knowing which to do, and when, makes the difference between those who live and those who die.

“I could give you directions?” The man seemed relaxed enough but his questions were too pointed.

“I’ve been invited to dance naked for the battle-queen,” Kettle said. A nonsensical statement can create a moment of confusion in which the Grey Sister acts. A flexing of her wrist dropped an envenomed throwing star into her cupped fingers, the edges slightly dulled to avoid poisoning herself. Kettle was already turning as she released the star. She dived between the nearest trees, closing off as many angles as possible, scanning the confusion of undergrowth, the lines of the trunks, the branches interlocking against a purple-grey sky.

Kettle heard the thunk of her star hitting home: she’d aimed for his upper arm. There was always the chance he was simply a woodsman, and if not, she would want someone to question. Either way she didn’t want him dead.

Two bolts hissed above her as she dived. Heavy bolts, not the knitting needles Nona had been hit with. The killing kind. Poor shots though. Hunskas could move with great speed but they couldn’t fall faster than anyone else: the shots should have been on target and required Kettle to deflect them both.