Holy Sister (Book of the Ancestor 3)

Nona hugged the trunk of a screw pine and squinted up through the dense needles. Kettle’s upper half appeared through the Shade chamber’s middle window, tiny in the distance and pink in its nudity.

Nona slunk further into the undergrowth, stifling another sneeze. Pepper. Joeli hadn’t meant to kill her, just panic her and leave her to be found amid the inevitable mess. The lord’s daughter couldn’t have known for certain it was Nona in there, or whether she had been identified or not, but she’d been willing to take the risk on both. Clearly she felt that even if she was named as having been in there she would be protected, whereas whoever had broken in would be thrown to the wolves. Or more likely thrown into the Glasswater, or at least metaphorically from the Rock of Faith.

With the pepper still tickling her nose, Nona made her way down the slope. She needed to be somewhere else by the time Kettle thought to check for her along their thread-bond. In the meantime she did all she could to deaden the connection.

At the foot of the Seren Way a sudden panic gripped Nona and she patted her habit pockets. The damp patch and the crunching within told her all she needed to know. The vial into which she had poured those precious eye drops had broken as she rolled across the cave floor. The others had been right. The drops weren’t essential to penetrating the high priest’s vault. It was vanity that had drawn her to that cave. A desire to be normal, to meet another person’s gaze without seeing that momentary widening of their eyes.

Sister Apple said she had locked the drops away because of risk that they might take Nona’s sight. But Nona knew now that she had been blind all along.

11

Three Years Earlier

The Escape

The herder’s hut wasn’t more than a low circle of drystone wall topped with a cone of sticks and bracken. The goat shelter proved even more rudimentary – a slanting roof on four poles, sides of woven sticks, a simple door at each end with space to look over the top.

Zole lay down on the soiled bracken bedding and motioned for Nona to join her.

‘This is the worst hiding place ever.’

Zole patted the withered foliage beside her.

‘This is stupid.’ Nona crouched down. Old droppings speckled the bracken, which must be bitter stuff if the goats left it. ‘It’s the first place they’ll look.’ The hut and shelter stood alone, the only structures in a wide, desolate valley. The famed Scithrowl crowding seemed to be something of a myth, or at least not to carry up into the high places of the Grampain foothills.

‘It is the first place they will look,’ Zole agreed. ‘Which is strange when it is, as you say, a stupid place to hide …’

‘So what are we doing here?’

‘There is no place they will not find us, but in this place it is likely that only one of them will find us.’

‘Oh.’ Nona lowered herself to lie beside the ice-triber, steeling herself against the shipheart’s closeness.

They passed a minute with no sound but the moan of the wind and the creaking of the walls. The scarlet stain at Zole’s wrist drew Nona’s gaze.

‘So the shipheart breaks pieces off you … off who you are … and you throw them away?’

‘It’s a ridding of impurities,’ Zole said, her voice low.

‘But a person’s flaws are part of them.’ Nona couldn’t keep the horror from her words. ‘My temper is a bad thing, but it’s part of who I am, like Ruli’s gossiping or Leeni bedding other girls even though she loves Alata. Jula’s obsession with learning, Ghena’s sharp tongue … if you got rid of all those parts of you and approached this ideal … isn’t that everyone becoming the same?’

Zole offered the smallest of smiles. ‘We have to let go of that pride, that ego. It will never bring happiness. Consider the Ancestor, who walks the length of the Path towards a perfect future, rather than the breadth of it from life to death. Is not the Ancestor a melding, a commonality in which the good is intensified and the bad fades? This is why the Ancestor’s statues are smooth-faced, features poorly defined. The Ancestor is not an individual.’

‘But that’s when we die …’

‘What happens to Ghena’s sharp tongue, to Clera’s selfish ambition when they join the Ancestor? In that wholeness the good is stacked on the good, and the undesirable, the individual, the ego, is all washed away. With the Old Stones we of the ice pare ourselves towards that perfect core before we die rather than after. The wise say that if anyone ever rid themselves of their last raulathu they would no longer need to die. They would be the divine.’

‘You really do think you’re the Chosen One,’ Nona gasped.

Zole shook her head. ‘Approaching divinity makes us all the same. If I am the Chosen One then at the heart of us, we all are.’

Nona looked away. She was lying amid goat droppings in a tiny shed in the wilds of Scithrowl discussing divinity … with a mad girl.

‘I—’

‘Horses!’ Zole motioned Nona lower.

The hoof beats were faint but drawing nearer. A single rider. As the sound came closer a faint background could be heard, more riders following.

The novices waited. Nona felt the shipheart’s aura dim as Zole somehow reined in its power.

Horses drew up nearby. Lots of them, filling the air with their snorting and the jingle of harnesses.

‘Search it.’ The words thickly accented. Further east the Scithrowl spoke a different tongue but in the shadow of the mountains the language of the empire clung on.

The thump of riders dismounting, their grumbles coming closer.

A moment later the upper half of a man obscured the patch of sky above the door at the far end of the goat shelter.

‘You do not see us.’ Zole muttered the words, a certain strain behind them.

‘Nothing here!’ the man called out.

‘Get in there and check, you lazy whoreson.’

Nona tensed, ready to attack, as the Scithrowl irregular kicked open the door, grumbling curses.

‘You do not see us. This place is empty.’ Zole spoke in a quiet but conversational voice, her hands in fists, fingers white.

The man stamped in, bent almost double to avoid the low roof. He smelled of old sweat, stale beer, and some over-ripe meaty scent Nona couldn’t place. He moved forward kicking at the bracken, his gaze passing over both novices several times. Zole rolled slowly to one side as he approached. She gave Nona a push to indicate she should roll to the other side. The man stepped between them, frowning. He wore a skirt of leather strips panelled with iron plates. He kicked the bedding everywhere but in the places the novices lay.

‘Nothing.’ He left by the far door, vindicated.

Outside, it sounded as if a dozen or more riders had dismounted and stood in debate.

‘… there’s no sign they left again!’ A raised voice.

‘Well they’re not here.’ A woman’s voice, deep and belligerent.

‘We should burn it to be sure.’

Zole began to mutter to herself. Tiny veins in her eyes surrendered under mounting pressure, lacing the whites with crimson.

‘Burn it? It’s a hut and a stall.’

‘There’s nowhere to hide.’

‘… plenty to burn on the other side of the mountains …’