Holy Sister (Book of the Ancestor 3)

Kettle blinked away afterimages and tried to see what had happened. She heard the screaming before she saw the source. All around the fringes of the area where the brilliance had risen Scithrowl were burning. The screams came from further back, where warriors rolled around the pain of their scalded flesh but were not actually on fire. In the place where Adoma’s platform had been borne on the shoulders of a hundred men there was nothing. Just a black circle twenty yards across. No trace of the platform, of the throne, of the people upon it or beneath it. Even their smoke seemed to have been burned from the air.

The moon dimmed and the words returned.

Go home.

And everywhere the Scithrowl started to run.

In the Ark chamber silence reigned. Nona had controlled the moon by voicing her desires and using her fingers to place and size the focus on the image before them. She had watched the results through Kettle’s eyes. It seemed wrong to see the death of a queen and so many of her subjects as a flash of light that could be covered by a fist and have the ant-sized survivors run noiselessly from the fringes of the blackened circle left behind.

‘You should have killed them all,’ Clera said. ‘While they were in one place. They’ll scatter now. You can’t use the moon to hunt down thousands of small bands roaming the countryside.’

Nona stepped back from the image and looked around at her friends. Ruli still hugging her injured hand. Jula red-eyed, forehead furrowed with concentration. Ara slumped, breath labouring but watching even so. Joeli stood amazed, as if she had forgotten where she was or that she was bound, a traitor to the emperor whose palace they stood beneath. Tarkax watched Nona, his dark eyes unreadable. And Zole … Zole stood tall, apart from them all though she was within arm’s reach, her head cocked as if she were listening to music that no one else could hear.

‘Why didn’t you kill them all?’ Jula asked.

Nona frowned. ‘I had thought Abbess Glass made me promise to take the Black and become a Holy Sister because she knew it would change Wheel’s mind about me. That was part of it. But the abbess rarely did something with only one goal or said anything with just one meaning.’ Nona looked down at her habit, sticky with blood. ‘At Sweet Mercy they made a weapon of me. They honed every skill into a sharp edge. They put a sword in my hand, because there will always be foes who must be opposed, always violence that must be met with violence.

‘But that was never the heart of Sweet Mercy. The shipheart wasn’t the foundation of the convent. It was always the faith. Always the notion that all men and women are our brothers and our sisters. And that faith doesn’t end with borders. It doesn’t care about heresies used to divide us, or whether you speak your prayers to a white star, or to the fields and forests and stones.

‘Abbess Glass spoke to me on the day she died. She told me that when she lost her child, at first she took every novice at Sweet Mercy as her own, to fill that hole, the emptiness only a mother can know. But the Ancestor taught her not to be so narrow. She came to understand that the children before her, those she could see, those the Church gave into her hands, were no more or less important than any other. She saw that all of us are children, no matter how many years we might have walked through.

‘She taught this to us every day. Even Sister Wheel taught it to us despite herself, if you listened hard enough. It’s written in the Book of the Ancestor and no matter who speaks the words or how they try to twist them … the truth is there.

‘Abbess Glass wanted me to take the Black because she wanted the moon to be wielded by a Holy Sister. Not as a weapon but as a tool. As the healer might use the knife, sometimes to cut, but ultimately to heal.’

Clera looked astonished. ‘But they’ll just come back. The ice is closing. There’s not enough room or food. Someone has to die. Lots of someones. Sister Rule taught us that in our first year at convent. The point is that it not be us who dies!’

Nona looked around the room once more. The others were looking at her as if she were some new creature standing in a friend’s shoes.

‘Maybe Sister Rule will have to learn a new lesson to teach.’

They left the chamber at Nona’s insistence. Tarkax carried Ara up the steps since she lacked the strength for the climb, and Nona hobbled up behind half-wishing that she had someone to carry her. More than half-wishing it.

In the circular chamber above, bathed equally in the auras of the four shiphearts spaced around the walls, Zole employed her marjal healing. It had always been one of her least developed skills but with the power of four Old Stones buzzing through her she worked swiftly and well. Ara’s lung repaired itself and her flesh knitted together. Nona’s thigh and shoulder wounds sealed, the muscles rejoining beneath. Ruli’s wrist grew straight, the toxins beneath her nails neutralized.

‘What are we going to do with Joeli?’ Ruli grabbed the bound girl with her newly healed hand.

‘She killed Darla,’ Clera said. ‘Doesn’t she deserve to die?’

‘I didn’t!’ Joeli protested, her pretty face ugly with fear. ‘I wanted her to run!’

‘That’s a lie!’ Ara roared, suddenly furious.

‘But … I took Sister Apple’s truth pill!’

Ara shook her head violently. ‘Your father paid to have your memories altered.’ She grabbed Joeli’s shoulders. ‘I don’t know how many of our friends died out there tonight but it will be too many. I don’t think I can let this … stain … walk out of here.’

‘I swear! I swear it on the Ancestor! I wasn’t trying to kill Darla! I sw—’

‘Ara!’ Nona shouted. This wasn’t how Ara behaved. If anything it should be Nona wanting Joeli’s blood for her friend’s death and a hundred smaller crimes.

With a snarl and clear effort Ara unlocked her hands from Joeli’s habit and strode away. ‘You’re the senior nun here, Sister Cage. You pass judgement.’

‘Senior?’

‘The abbess raised you before me.’

‘By one minute!’

‘Even so.’

Nona looked Joeli in the eye and the girl tried to back away. Ruli held her tight. Jula looked on, her lips a bitter line. The desire to just reach out and press a flaw-blade through Joeli’s heart rose through Nona in a hot wave. But she’d heard the voice of each devil in that mix before, separate and unbound. Somehow, even though she had accepted those parts of herself back into the whole, back into the mess of contradictions that was her, it felt easier to discount them now – as if knowing them ‘raw’ as she had had helped her to moderate their demands.

‘She killed Darla!’ Clera reiterated. ‘She can’t walk away from that.’

‘You never even liked Darla,’ Nona said. ‘You poisoned her and left her helpless for Raymel Tacsis and his soldiers. So perhaps you should hold your tongue, Clera.’ She looked at Joeli, trying to see what calculation might lie behind the terror on her face. ‘Abbess Glass allowed Joeli back into the convent. And that woman only made the compromises she wanted to make. It’s not my judgement to pass … Zole? Have her memories been changed?’

Zole stepped in until she stood face to face with Joeli, who looked away, struggling to escape.