“Feel around?” Ruli, incredulous.
“It’s too dangerous,” Jula called. “You’ll break an ankle. Or probably vanish down a hole!”
“One minute!” Nona called.
Now do it.
What?
Make me see, like you did when you were scared.
I am Keot! Fear has no meaning to me!
Whatever you say. Make me see. Nona pushed Keot towards her eyes. For a moment he resisted, then, perhaps curious, he flowed into them. The pain made her gasp and brought tears running down her face. She hadn’t noticed the pain the first time: the holothour’s fear had left no room for such things.
Immediately the rocks took on the glow of coals deep in the fire. Nona looked at her hands and found them utterly black, her habit almost as dark with hints of deep grey here and there. The water-carved passage she had climbed into led in two directions. She chose the best one and scrambled off along it. Within twenty yards she stood where Hessa had fallen, at the foot of the shaft Yisht had dug up towards the shipheart’s vault.
Your friend died here?
Yes.
And you still want to kill the one who slew her, as you agreed to?
Yes.
Good. Keot relaxed and the glow of the walls brightened. Hate is good.
“She died here.” Nona crouched amid the scatter of broken rock. Yisht, a marjal with a rare talent for rock-work, had brought down part of the ceiling.
“Nona! Nona?” Distant cries from below.
She touched her fingers to the floor beneath the shattered stone. Had Hessa’s blood spilled here? Had the nuns washed it away when they took her body? They had buried her down by the vineyards but left no marker. We are all one in the Ancestor, our bones are nothing.
“Nona?”
Nona reached for her clarity, watching the dance of an absent flame in the shadows of her mind. She looked for the Path and rocked back upon her heels. With Keot’s vision the Path blazed red, written through everything, filling the air, diving into the rock and filling the hidden space beyond, writing itself across the surfaces and bringing each to life. Refusing to be distracted by the wonder of it, Nona strove to look past the Path’s beauty to the periphery where threads stray. There in the depths of the earth she found a thread-scape that competed with Zole’s for sparseness. Sister Pan said humans themselves drew threads from the Path, all life did. In the darkest and loneliest cave within the Rock, in places no person had ever seen, or would ever see, where no rat had scurried, no worm crawled, the Path would lie pure, bound tight. If that cave were broached then the mere act of gazing upon its secrets would set tendrils of thread straying from the Path, just as a foot set into a clear pool will raise silt from the bottom to cloud the waters.
“Nothing.” The word tasted bitter. A faint hope can be nursed so long that when it dies the shock outweighs all reason. “Hessa would have found something in my place. She would have read something in the threads.”
Keot remained silent.
“Nona!” The others sounded increasingly desperate.
“Coming!”
She almost missed it. Something at the corner of her eye as she turned. Perhaps without Keot she would have seen nothing. “What?” She turned back, reaching. A single black thread, so thin she almost thought herself mistaken even as her fingers tried to close around it. A black thread, leading from the spot where Hessa died, up along the shaft Yisht cut.
“There are no black threads.” Nona reached to trap the thread between finger and thumb. Sister Pan said that using your hands was unnecessary, a childish affectation, like moving your lips when you read. Even so, it helped. Nona pinched the thread from the ground. “Ancestor!” Immediately a familiar energy trickled into her. Fingers first, then into her hand making it tingle. A fullness, a potential. It felt like . . . the shipheart?
That is not a thread from a corestone. Keot sounded interested though, moving entirely into her eyes, the pain so bad she had to grit her teeth against it.
What is it then? Nona pulled on the thread and immediately felt a peculiar sense of disquiet. Nana Even would have said, “Someone just walked over your grave.” Nona leaned around the corner of the shaft, trying to see where the thread led, and picked it out easily now that she held it. It vanished into the rock. “That’s where Yisht went!” The murderer had sealed the passage behind her as she went, her rock-working power amplified by the shipheart. Nona had hoped that her disembodied shadow had killed the woman—a hope that had survived only until she returned to the convent from the ranging with the other novices.
Are you so stupid? It’s your own shadow . . . That is why you found it where others could not.
It’s my shadow’s thread? Nona stared at it. Why does it feel like the shipheart, then?
For that Keot had no answer.
“Nona!” Anger mixed with anxiety in the distant voices now.
“I can’t just leave . . .” she whispered. “With the Inquisition here we might not get another chance for ages.”
Take it with you.
What?
It’s your thread. Take it with you.
So Nona did.
18
ABBESS GLASS
HEART HALL HAD always been a lie, more so now the convent no longer housed the shipheart that had been entrusted to its keeping. Abbess Glass placed her hand against the door and frowned. Entrusted to her keeping. Abbess Mace they called “She of the Miracle.” Glass knew what they would call her if her portrait ever joined the others. “She of the Lost Heart.”
The abbess pushed through into the long hall where her sisters sat around the convent table. Tonight they waited beneath the watchful eyes of Brother Pelter and two of his assistants. Three inquisitors to witness eight nuns at table.
“Abbess Glass.” Pelter inclined his head.
Glass took her chair. The seat beside it lay empty. Kettle’s place. Sister Rail would have to take the notes this time. She exhaled and the air clouded. Every breath contrived to remind her of the shipheart’s absence, of her failure.
“First item on the agenda?” Glass looked along the table. Rose, Wheel, Tallow, Rail, Apple, Rock, and Sister Pan huddled in her furs, dark eyes aglitter.
“I have delivered the Grey reports for the last five years into Brother Pelter’s keeping, as requested.” Sister Apple looked as if she would rather have poisoned the man.
“Thank you.” Glass smiled. “And the ciphers?”
“And the ciphers.”
The reports were fakes. Apple had for years been producing a copy of each report, altering, excising, and sanitizing. The encryption she used differed from that employed on the true reports and the ciphers had been designed to be devilishly time consuming to apply. Glass wished Pelter and his subordinates much joy of it.
“Next?” Abbess Glass glanced towards Sister Wheel; she always had something to raise.
“Heresy.” Brother Pelter stepped up behind the abbess’s chair.
“Heresy, brother?”
“This whole convent is treading dangerously close to heresy, abbess. Your buildings may stand upon the edge of a cliff but your faith teeters at the brink of a far deeper chasm!”
“Indeed?” Glass steeled herself neither to rise nor look around. “These are grave charges, inquisitor. Perhaps you could elaborate?”
Pelter began to circle the table, staring at the back of each nun’s head. “It is more a matter of attitude and atmosphere at the moment. Something rotten in the state of Mercy.”
“Hearsay and heresy, though they may sound similar, are very different things, Brother Pelter.” Glass set her elbows to the table and steepled her fingers before her. “A crime is built of specifics. Have you any of those?”
Pelter paused his stride. “The worst example so far has been in Spirit class.”
“Spirit class? You amaze me!” Glass didn’t have to pretend surprise. The idea that Sister Wheel might fall short in any measure of piety or protocol stretched her belief.