Grey Sister (Book of the Ancestor 2)

Was it a woman who captured me in the graveyard?

Yes.

The same one who came to Raymel’s side after I sliced his neck? The same one who was sent to kill me?

Yes.

You didn’t think to mention it?

How would it help?

Tellasah, that was what the Lightless had named her with the bitter taste of the Poisoner’s truth upon the tongue he had bitten off moments later. She might well have been waiting close to the Rock, waiting for any whisper of her prey. How far had she followed Nona before making her move? Maybe for days. Nona had been headed in the right direction after all, and what better way to get your target to your lair than have it walk itself there? It must have been when Nona started talking to people in White Lake that Tellasah had decided to strike, worried that the novice would find companions or guides there and gain safety in numbers.

Keot circled Nona’s neck, trying to find a weakness in the collar that would let him slide beneath. She ignored his efforts and found her gaze returning to the knife. It had been left there as a message. To put fear into her.

And it was working.

* * *

• • •

HOW ARE YOU going to get out of here?

Nona had been staring at the candle, and now as it guttered into darkness, wax consumed, Keot broke into the emptiness of her mind.

“I don’t know.” Prison cells and chains were much the same all the length of Abeth’s Corridor. Simple and effective. Nona had no sudden inspiration as to how to defeat them. With the band off one wrist or the collar removed from her neck she would make short work of the rest of her restraints, but the things were made not to be removed without a key.

Why do you think they haven’t killed you yet?

“Whatever the reason, it can’t be good.” Nona slammed her wristband against the wall. Despite her effort to hold her hand back it hit the stones too, skinning her knuckles. In the darkness she could barely see her arm, let alone any detail, but the wristband revealed no damage beneath questing fingertips. She checked the chain, first where it attached to the wall, then each link until she reached her ankle cuff. She tried twisting, pulling, swinging the chain against the ground. All with no result. She attempted to thread the chain beneath the wristbands but the links proved too thick and the fit too snug.

Animals in traps often gnaw their foot off to escape.

“I don’t think I would get far hopping.” The Poisoner had taught them that all bonds could be slipped, but Nona suspected she had meant those on wrists rather than ankles, and with the bands fitting so tightly it seemed unlikely they would come off over her hands without taking most of her skin and breaking bones. Perhaps not even then.

Nona stared at the slightly darker patch by the door, all that she could see of the knife now that the candle had burned out. It would be a useful thing to have, but at the full extension of the chain and lying flat she was still yards short of reaching it.

“Tellasah left it there, and me here, so I would try to reach it. So I would know who had me and so that the fear would grow inside me.”

Nona pulled off the smock they’d put her in. Immediately she felt the cold, as if invisible hands were touching her in the dark, pinching away her body-warmth. She felt more vulnerable too, which she reminded herself was ridiculous, given that she was chained in the dungeons of the Noi-Guin. She could hardly be more vulnerable and a linen smock would not preserve her.

Nona knew without trying that the garment wasn’t long enough to reach the knife, but artfully torn it might be. She would normally slice the thing apart with an invisible fingernail. Robbed of her abilities, she resorted to brute strength. At first the material resisted her, but once she found a seam it ripped quickly. Within a minute or two she’d made the thing twice as long as she was tall and had torn additional holes in it, hoping one would encircle some part of the weapon.

The flagstones were gritty, grime-covered, and cold. Lying naked, flat out, Nona began to flail with her torn smock. Experience trying to grapple hidden and possibly nonexistent edges in the dark of the undercaves had schooled Nona to persistence.

A score of tries brought no success. Twice Nona thought she had snagged the dagger, only to gently increase the pull and find her smock returning to her without the scrape of metal on stone.

Again! Keot urged.

Nona threw the material out, drew it back, threw it out, drew it back. She threw again. It snagged! She pulled. The knife’s weight resisted her. It seemed well entangled. She pulled harder. Somewhere outside, close at hand, something fell with a clatter . . . a small bell perhaps?

The door began to open almost immediately. Nona pulled harder. The knife resisted. She pulled harder still . . . and the smock came free with a tearing sound.

A figure stood in the doorway, one of the Lightless, framed by illumination that had seemed barely enough to see by when Nona had been escorted down the corridor, and now made her screw up her eyes.

The man bent down and picked up the cord that tied the knife in the cell to the bell that had rested just outside the door. He looked at her, lying there before him, his face too shadowed for any expression to be read, then backed out, closing the door behind him. A key turned in the lock.

A game. He was sitting just outside all this time. Waiting. Keot sounded grudgingly appreciative.

Nona opened her mouth to curse her gaoler, or Keot, or both, and finding she had no words sufficiently vile, closed it again. She levered herself to her knees and retreated to the wall, wrapping herself in failure, misery, and the tatters of her smock.

* * *

• • •

“A CORD.” NONA wondered how she had missed seeing it. Even disguised and in a darkened room the cord shouldn’t have escaped her. She had been trained to see. She sat up straighter, shrugging off self-pity, and applied her training, focusing on the memory of a flame, the start of the route into her clarity trance. Not every discipline she had learned could be forbidden by sigil-marked iron.

Clarity settled upon Nona, frosting across her skin, cleansing the darkness of ambiguity, and bringing every faint sound into focus as if the instrument of her being had been tuned to perfection. Nona isolated one sense then the next as Sister Pan had taught her, then brought all five together. She could hear the man outside the door draw breath, exhale, draw breath. The dark still hid what it hid, but those shapes it did offer were extracted and given meaning. Nona ran her fingertips across her restraints, learning all their secrets, from the sigils cut into the curved iron to the details of hinge and clasp.

“Nothing.”

The iron peg that anchored the end of the chain attached to her ankle cuff had been driven between two great stones in the wall, held there more by the weight pressing on the stone above it than by the mortar filling the joint.

Nona moved the chain to one side and pulled, bracing her legs against the floor and tugging slightly upward.

Every prisoner tests their chains. If they came loose then the gaolers would replace them with stronger ones. An untold number of desperate men and women have tested these cells before you and helped refine them.

Why don’t you help me then? Nona replied. When I die you’re going back to lurking on the boundary where Raymel found you.

There’s nothing I can do. I can’t make you stronger.