Glass shook her head. “If Sherzal has an ear in Sweet Mercy I want to decide what it hears. Now, to the matter in hand.” She picked up the report before her. “You’ve been out in the world, Kettle. Getting your hands dirty once again. Doing the things that let others sleep at night. Necessary things, but cruel. Such acts can taint us, if we let them.”
“I am already tainted, Mother.” Kettle raised her dark eyes and Glass for a moment felt her own weakness, her own taint.
“They call me abbess now.”
Kettle returned her gaze to her hands.
Glass’s given title had been Reverend Mother and the novices called her Mother. She had not long buried Able and while her son had gone beneath the ground her grief had stayed above it. She had given up the worldly, her job, her home, her wealth, but not her sorrow—that she had worn to the convent like a second habit. And the novices had been her children. She knew that now. Each of them a grain of sand to balance in the scales against the stone of her loss. But a mother is the root of the family and the strength, and the mother to so many must be stronger than most can imagine. Her weakness, her taint, had been to care for each instead of caring for the whole. So she set the title Reverend Mother aside and became the abbess. Her care was for all of them and it must be singular, it must be iron.
“Abbess,” said Sister Kettle. Somehow in her mouth it still sounded like Mother.
“Sister Apple pushed you into the shadow, Kettle. You did not step into it yourself and from where you stand you can still see the light. I believe the Ancestor will take you in when your work is done.”
Kettle had been a waif when she joined them. So quiet you might have thought she lost her tongue rather than her mother. But children have resilience. Children scar and those scars remain across the years, but children grow too. Kettle grew around her hurts and learned to laugh again—learned wickedness as they taught her scripture—learned the swiftness of her body and the sharpness of her mind. She grew into a woman and learned to love and to be loved.
“I’ve read your report, sister. Exceptional work, once again.”
Kettle twitched a smile, shadows rising across her throat like a blush spreading. Sometimes they danced around her, sometimes they lay quiet, a drifting smoke of them into which Glass’s imagination would pattern horrors of her own making. Some would call it a corruption. Some would say that the darkness spoke inside Kettle now and soon she would start to listen to it. But corruption knocked at every door, and power often invited it in, the power of emperors, of high priests, even of abbesses. Glass would back Kettle to turn a deaf ear to corruption’s whispers where many of those who might accuse her would be seduced.
Glass set the report down and laid her hand upon the papers, each covered with Kettle’s neat lettering, curled tight across the page. “Should we fear Adoma?”
“Mistress Shade teaches us to set fear aside.” Kettle looked at her hands.
“Sister Apple is correct, as she so often is.” No Grey Sister had come as close to the Scithrowl battle-queen as Kettle had. As much as she wanted to know Adoma’s plans Glass wanted to know the woman more. Plans were one thing, but what a person would do when the ice pressed depended more upon what lay inside them than on what they had written on parchment about the future. “Caution is wise, but fear is seldom of help and should be set aside. What do we need to set aside for Queen Adoma?”
Kettle smiled, a hint of the mischievous novice who had once dusted Sister Wheel’s habit with a sneezing powder so powerful that the nun had blown her own headdress off. “The queen is a very passionate woman. Nothing seemed to motivate her so much as being denied. I was never close enough to touch her, but I heard her hold court. She speaks well and knows it.”
Touch. Glass suppressed a shiver. For a Grey Sister “close enough to touch” meant close enough to kill. Kettle hadn’t been instructed to put an end to Adoma but any Grey took pride in coming close enough for the touch, whether they then made that touch or not.
“You did well to reach the black ice, sister.” In Scithrowl, not far from the border, the black ice touched the southern wall of the Corridor. Few from the empire had ever seen it, though. Glass flipped pages to reach the relevant section of the report. Here the writing grew tighter, smaller, as if unwilling to let go of its information. “You did well, but I found the account of your experiences there somewhat confused. You lost track of Adoma and her priests in the outer chambers?”
“It is a difficult place to account for, abbess.” Kettle hunched on her chair, cold with memory. “In places the black ice lies beside the clean ice, like ink on a white page, running through it. But when you approach from the Scithrowl margins you pass through tunnels and chambers where the ice greys, grows darker, and shades to black over the course of several miles. It is a taint. A pollution that clouds thoughts just as it clouds the ice. Something lives in it. Or at least there is something in there that is not dead.”
“How did you lose Adoma’s party?” Abbess Glass traced her finger along the text.
“The tunnels are narrow and she left numerous guards in her wake.” Kettle frowned. “But the truth is I didn’t lose her. I lost me.”
“You lost your path?”
“I fell into . . . nightmare. The ice took me.” Kettle’s mouth became a snarl, perhaps remembering the mask she wore in the world outside. “I would not have lived if I weren’t . . .” She held her hand out and shadow ran between her fingers. “. . . like this.”
“Then I am glad that Mistress Shade was able to save you twice.” Glass smiled. “You have done the Church a service of some significance, sister. Your report concerning Adoma’s gathering of both the Scithrowl shiphearts to herself is of particular interest. Also you have placed flesh on the bones of these rumours about the battle-queen’s explorations beneath the ice. Some even doubted the existence of black ice.”
Sister Kettle reached into her habit. “I can lay those doubts to rest.” She produced a vial filled with inky liquid. Glass found her eyes fascinated by the blackness of the stuff. “I chipped some free. It melted.” Kettle returned the vial to an inner pocket. “Apple thinks it is related to the Durns’ sickwood.”
Glass pursed her lips. The Durnishmen built their barges from sickwood. Some claimed the stuff lived even when cut to timbers and planks, imbued with its own malign spirit and harnessed to the Durns’ cause by their shamans.
“The forest in which the sickwood trees grow is fed by meltwaters. The rumour is that the ice in that region is grey. Sister Rule once showed me the works of Alderbron, the archon who was brother to Sister Cloud. They hint that it is some work of the Missing that taints the ice.”
Glass turned the pages back and set her hand to the topmost. “Is there anything else I should be telling High Priest Nevis when I report to him next seven-day?”
“I would be more worried about whether you’ll get to report to him, abbess. I came through Verity on my return and I took the time to listen at several important corners . . .”
Glass knew that meant places no nun had any right to be. “And . . .”
“The Inquisition is coming to Sweet Mercy.”
11
NONA HOBBLED DOWN the rock-hewn steps to the Shade chamber. Parts of her that she did not remember being struck had stiffened and now protested at each movement. She took the last steps with both hands to the wall, teeth gritted, sweat sticking her undershirt to her flesh.
All of Mystic Class looked towards the door when she entered, some stares narrow-eyed and accusatory, others wondering.
“Nona, good of you to join us.” Sister Apple watched her without expression from the front of the class. She had a hat and scarf in her hands. “Your tardiness has volunteered you to spend your study period on third-day helping me with Red Class. We’re brewing retchweed.”
Nona knew better than to argue. She hobbled across to sit by Darla. Retchweed distilled to a liquid that could rapidly induce vomiting and diarrhoea. The smell of the stuff sometimes had the same effect. It was always a messy lesson.