Brother Pelter strode in, two Inquisition guards clattering at his shoulders, three more behind them, all gleaming in their armour, polished steel plates overlapping from neck to elbow.
“Brother Pelter, how may I help you today?” Glass returned her quill to its holder and stoppered her ink.
“Abbess Glass, I’m placing you under Church-arrest on the charge of heresy. You’re to be taken to the Tower of Inquiry for interrogation.”
“Heresy?” Glass pursed her lips. “Am I allowed a little more detail?”
“I’ve told you the charge.” Pelter waved his guards on and they advanced around him.
“I would like to hear more.” Sister Tallow stepped into their path. At her hip she wore her sword, a cruel strip of Ark-steel.
Pelter’s guards stopped. They might be hard-bitten and well-used to violence—the woman on the right had a gerant touch and stood well over six foot, broad-shouldered with it—but all of them had heard of Mistress Blade at Sweet Mercy.
“There are questions to be asked and answered, Sister Tallow. Asked and answered in the Tower of Inquiry, a place that admits no lies.” Brother Pelter stepped back to open the door. “A novice under sentence of death ran from the convent within minutes of that decision being reached at the convent table.”
“That’s hardly heresy!” Tallow spat.
“Holding any law above that of the Ancestor is heretical. And the novice had been encouraged to write in praise of past heretics whose histories have no place in any convent library.” Pelter waved the matter away. “More importantly Abbess Glass placed her authority over that of the parent. Zole Lansis was to be sent to the ice against her parent’s express instruction—expressed, I may say, through a judge of Verity’s highest court.” He turned his gaze from Tallow towards Glass. “And now the child has gone missing, an absence I suspect you to have arranged in order to keep your heretical control over someone you consider politically important at this time of heightened tension. The bonds of family form the branches of the Ancestor’s tree. No cleric can take to themselves the authority to overrule a parent. Such practice is an abomination before the Ancestor, a crime worthy of the Scithrowl.”
“Step aside, Tallow.” The abbess stood. “You’re to let Brother Pelter carry out his duty and arrest me.” She raised her wrists.
The guards stepped forward, the oldest of them taking a symbolic silver chain from his belt and using it to bind the abbess’s wrists.
“Abbess Glass.” Pelter stepped forward now with his warrant scroll. “You are a prisoner of the Inquisition. Come with me.”
“Let the sisters know, Tallow.” Glass came around her desk, dwarfed by the guards around her. “And of course the Martial Sisters and Sisters of Discretion will need to take action if I am questioned in the Tower of Inquiry.”
Sister Tallow frowned. “But you just said—”
“Ignore that, sister,” Pelter cut across her. “Clerics of the rank of abbess, abbot, or above are entitled to refuse questioning in Inquisition outposts and indeed in most other locations, but the Tower of Inquiry is sanctified and sanctioned to put any cleric to question, even the high priest himself. Abbess Glass needs to improve her research.”
Abbess Glass shook her head. “A high inquisitor, former or current, may not be put to question on Inquisition property. It’s an old ruling passed after a succession of high inquisitors were removed from office following interrogation by their deputies. It appeared to be being used as a form of self-promotion. Fortunately the ‘former’ was added to the ruling in order to defend past office holders such as myself from having the Inquisition used against them to settle old debts. And as an abbess I am of course subject to Church law rather than secular law, so the judges’ courts are not a fit place either.”
Pelter, wrong-footed, began to bluster. “Where, pray tell, can an individual such as yourself be made to answer to heresy? You don’t expect me to believe there’s no place fit to host so eminent a person!”
“Of course not.” The abbess smiled. “Take me to the emperor’s palace.”
“I’m taking you off this rock, that’s for sure,” Pelter snarled. He waved the guards forward.
“Have the sisters watch from a discreet distance, Tallow dear,” Glass called over her shoulder as they led her out.
The inquisitor and his guards ushered the abbess down the stairs and along her own entrance hall to her front door. Glass drew a deep breath, preparing to face the day. Many at the convent had seen her paraded in an iron yoke by their own high priest. As humiliations went the silver chains of the Inquisition were not the worst.
She stood while the guards tied her outdoor robes around her shoulders. If Pelter took her to the emperor’s palace it wouldn’t guarantee Glass’s safety but there was no place within those walls that rumour would not spread from. Rather than have Sherzal hand him both a confession and control of the convent, along with an excuse perhaps to seize any monastery he liked, Crucical would have the whole business unfold under his own roof before the disapproval of the high priest and the archons, before the Sis and the Academy. To Glass’s knowledge Crucical wasn’t even aware what was happening. It was one thing to grumble about not having the Red and the Grey answer your every whim, quite a different thing to wield the Inquisition as a political knife to carve out what you wanted. The latter required a stomach for blood. Lots of blood.
26
IN THE BLACK and rolling confusion into which Nona woke she found nothing to hold on to. Her limbs refused to obey. Her eyes found nothing to see. Keot’s words were distant, muted beyond understanding. The world moved and creaked and jolted and swayed around her. Something contained her. A box? And she was in motion. Captive and being taken somewhere?
Nona discovered herself unable to form sentences or coherent thoughts. Everything swirled around in her mind with nothing constant. When, in all that shifting chaos, she stumbled upon a way out, she took it.
Nona left the maelstrom of her poisoned thoughts to sit mute and watchful in the quiet place into which she had fallen. The eyes through which she gazed were not hers and looked where they wanted to, but they were sharp enough.
I’ve done this before.
Nobody answered, though she could feel another’s thoughts all around her, pulsing back and forth between memories. Some thoughts spiralled towards action, others were discarded and began to fade.
I’m inside Kettle. We’re thread-bound.
Nona watched a disjointed series of images roll past. Scenes from the Seren Way, nightfall in a forest, roads thick with travellers, wagons and carts queuing at a bridge. Sunrise over a river, watched from the prow of a boat.
While she tried to make sense of it Nona reached for the memories closest at hand, letting them run through her. It seemed that the memories around her were . . . about her. Reading lessons in the scriptorium; the day she arrived and Sister Apple made her wash in the bathhouse, how small and skinny she’d been; the sight of herself jumping from one loop of the blade-path to the next—scores of others . . .
Nona took another memory, this one feeling fresher, still buzzing with energy. It jolted into her, filling her mind with sound and light.
* * *
? ? ?
“KETTLE? KETTLE, ARE you even listening to me?”
Kettle sat up, holding the sheet to her against the cold of the undercaves. Apple stood above her, a pewter cup in one hand, salt-glazed flask of the convent red in the other.
“What?”
“Did you want any more wine?”
Kettle glanced up at Apple, in her nightdress, red hair unbound and coiled around her shoulders. A moment later it was all gone, Apple, the bed, the cave, and Kettle was reliving Nona’s fight in the graveyard at White Lake. The shock of the attack had drawn Kettle along their thread-bond to experience it with Nona.
Nona discarded Kettle’s memory of the attack before the third dart that had brought her down. She worried that, if she let it, the memory would drag her back into the darkness and confusion she had so recently escaped.
* * *