Keot made no reply. He’d kept silent since Nona spared Giljohn. Disgusted, she presumed. She felt him moving from time to time, sliding across her skin but going no deeper.
Nona hung off the wall and dropped down into the church. The memory of incense haunted the place despite the wind moaning in through window slits. She straightened and approached the rear door. Before she reached it Preacher Mickel bustled out, carrying in both arms the brass device Nona remembered. He kicked the door shut on the warmth and light behind him and crossed half the distance to Nona before registering her presence and startling to a halt. The bands of the globe slipped from his fingers. On instinct Nona leapt forward and caught the device before it could hit the floor. She straightened and held it out to him. It was heavier than she thought it would be given it was mostly air enclosed by just half a dozen strips of metal bent into interlocking hoops.
The preacher took his globe, his mouth working but no words emerging. Shock had replaced the fierceness Nona remembered. Mickel stood an inch or two taller than her. He was perhaps thirty years of age now, his dark hair still thick but receding in a widow’s peak. “I’m looking for Myra from Rellam Village.” It felt odd to give both her mother and the village a name. “She worshipped here.”
“Who are you?” The preacher backed away to put the altarstone between them. “A demon?” He set the heavy globe before him.
Nona puzzled for a moment then raised her fingers to her face. “No, just a normal person. A poison made my eyes dark. Do you know if Myra Grey survived? What happened . . . at the village? Sometimes she goes by Myra Reed.”
The preacher narrowed dark eyes at her. “You didn’t move like a normal person. Hunska, are you? How did you get in?”
“I climbed.”
The preacher snorted his disbelief and opened his mouth before glancing around. Perhaps lacking any more believable explanation he stopped short of calling her a liar. “You’re looking for a woman?”
“Myra from Rellam.”
“Rellam?” The fear in his eyes when he had thought her a demon had now entirely made way for suspicion. “What interest would this Myra be to you?”
“That’s my business.” If he didn’t recognize her then Nona had no desire to identify herself.
The preacher touched the amulet hanging from his chain, a flat ring of grey metal, set with runes. “If this Myra worships here then she’s my business. The Hope’s business. What right do you have to ask questions here?”
Nona’s temper lashed her tongue. “Right of blood. She’s my mother!” Subterfuge had always been a faint hope, marked as she was, and having shown her speed.
“Ha!” Preacher Mickel drew himself to his full height. “Now the truth comes out! Don’t think I didn’t know you, Nona Reed, standing there in your nun’s coat with talk of blood-rights on your lips. The Ancestor-worshippers have schooled you well.” A sneer now as if remembering the child reduced the warrior before him. “When we humble ourselves before the Hope we join a greater family than any founded on seed and grunting in the dark.”
“The Ancestor-worshippers taught me that the Hope is just a star like any other, only younger and still burning white. It’s not coming to Abeth. It won’t save us from the ice.” Nona flexed her fingers before her. “And they taught me how to beat a grown man to death with my bare hands if I need to. So, I’ll ask again, where’s my mother?”
“She has given up her spirit to the Hope.” He said it with such poorly disguised satisfaction that Nona had to fight not to follow through with her threat. Had Keot seized his chance he might have tipped her into violence.
“She’s dead?” Realization hit home and Nona’s anger blew out, leaving her hollow.
The preacher’s eyes flickered towards the door to his chambers. “You should go, nun.”
“She’s in there? You’ve got my mother in there?” The conviction seized her, the truth suddenly obvious, denial easy. Her mother couldn’t be dead: there was still too much unsaid between them. They could speak now, as adults, not separated by that gulf between a child’s ignorance and a grown-up’s sorrows. She started towards the door.
“What? No! Of course not.”
Nona was through the door before Mickel started after her.
“Wait! That’s forbidden!”
A corridor ran for twenty yards, three doors to the left, two to the right, and one at the far end. Nona glanced around, took the lantern from the wall, then ran for the second door on the left, which was heavier than the rest and bound with iron straps.
“She’s not in there! Don’t be stupid!” Mickel came flapping through the church door after her. He sounded as though he were hiding something.
Nona reached for her serenity so that she could pull the lock’s thread but waves of emotion pushed her back, a turbulence she couldn’t still. With the preacher closing on her she punched a flaw-blade into the heavy lock, once, twice, three times, then turned it. The ruined mechanism surrendered with a squeal and, shrugging off Mickel’s grasping fingers, she pushed through.
The room beyond was a small one, windowless, with a broad shelf set at waist height running around three walls. An image of the Hope returned the lantern light, sparkling in a thousand pieces of glass, mirror, and crystal. Scores of objects covered the shelf, arranged with reverence rather than scattered.
“I thought—” Nona let the preacher wrestle her back into the corridor. Her mother was dead. Her denial had been stupid. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Mickel shoved her back against the wall. “You’ve defiled the Hope’s sanctum! And broken my door . . .”
Images of Nona’s mother filled her mind. The hurt was worse than a wire-whip. She needed something, anything, to drive the memories out. Questions might help. “What is all that stuff?” Nona tried to see past the preacher’s shoulder.
Pieces of the old world. Keot broke his silence.
“Treasures.” The preacher tried to push her down the corridor towards the rear exit.
“I saw black-skin . . .” Red Sisters made their armour from black-skin, the oily sheen of the stuff was unmistakable. Even the scrap among Mickel’s treasures would be worth more than the building. “And . . .” Nona didn’t have names for the rest of the things but some of them had the same grey glinting quality of old Gallabeth’s precious whetstone. “Ark-bone.”
The preacher had her by the hood of her range-coat, pulling her to the back door. He lifted the bar and kicked it open. “They are parts of the ships that carried our tribes here across the black sea between the stars, and parts of the works they built here. When the Hope comes he will make them whole again just as he will bind flesh to bone and raise the dead from their graves to live once more.”
He pushed Nona out into the blustery night. She put her foot against the door as he tried to haul it closed.
“Where does it come from?”
“It’s the gift of the Hope.” Mickel tugged the door again. Nona held it open. One more tug and Mickel relented, hanging his head. “The Sis build their homes over the best of what remains in the Corridor. The emperors themselves built their palace above the Ark and bind the Academy to them with its power. We pay explorers to hunt beneath the ice.”
“My father—”
“Your father sold my predecessor much of what we keep here.”
Nona blinked and in her moment of surprise the preacher pulled the door free and slammed it between them.
Nona turned slowly from the doorway. The wind came laced with a cold rain. A graveyard lay before her, scores of headstones black in the moonless night. Her mother was dead. Her bones buried, waiting for the Hope. They would never speak again. Nona would never ask whether her mother truly sent her child away to save her from Sherzal’s revenge. She felt nothing, only an emptiness that reached up from her chest to constrict her throat. She stumbled between the headstones, dazed, trembling with a hurt that had no centre to it.