Nona knew the voice. ‘Hessa?’
Hessa pivoted on her crutch. The length of the habit hid her withered leg, but only the tip of her shoe touched the ground on that side. ‘We’ve come a long way from Giljohn’s cage.’
Nona had her arms about her before she had time to blink. ‘They killed Saida.’
‘I’m sorry for it.’ Hessa lifted a hand uncertainly to pat Nona between the shoulders.
‘How are you here? Why haven’t I seen you?’ Nona released her and stepped back.
‘I’ve been in the sanatorium. Sister Rose wanted to keep me in until I got rid of this cough.’ Hessa thumped a fist against her narrow chest. ‘I’ve been here for weeks. Giljohn tried to sell me at the Academy but I failed their tests. They said I was the wrong sort, quantal maybe, but definitely not marjal. He tried to sell me to three different mages. Their houses are so big, Nona! I thought we were going into the emperor’s palace—’
‘NooooOOOooona!’ Clera hollering from the north door. ‘We’ll be late!’
‘Coming!’
‘We’d better hurry.’ Hessa shifted her weight and set her crutch forward.
A bony hand closed on both their shoulders. ‘The heathens have found each other, I see!’ Sister Wheel pushed between them. ‘The peasant and the cripple, plotting together. We’ll soon clear out those muddy little minds. Scrub away heresy and falsehood so the Ancestor may find you worthy. Even simple clay can be moulded and fired into something of worth.’
Nona opened her mouth to say something sharp. ‘I—’
‘Yes, Sister Wheel! I’m looking forward to our Spirit class.’ Hessa smiled up at the nun so sweetly that Nona almost believed she meant it. ‘But we’d best go now or Mistress Path will be cross with us.’
Sister Wheel made a sound of disgust and released both of them, wiping her hands on her habit. ‘Quickly then!’
Hessa showed a fair turn of pace with her crutch, her withered leg swinging beneath her skirts. Nona matched her speed, glancing back at Sister Wheel, now making for the dome. ‘I don’t like that old woman!’
‘Hah, Wheel’s all right once you know her ways.’ Stump, swing, stump, swing. ‘Just wait till you meet the Poisoner. Now she is scary!’
Nona entered the Tower of the Path with Hessa, using the east door. Novices were supposed to be drawn to a particular door but none of them called to her. All four doors led into the same room – an echoingly empty one with a stone spiral stair at the centre, and around the walls the strangest pictures Nona had seen, though in truth until she entered the ring-fighters’ rooms at the Caltess she had never seen paintings. While Hessa laboured up the stairs Nona took a moment to glance around at the two dozen or so portraits, nuns all of them, but with their hair uncovered and the most peculiar flights of fancy added. One lacked half a face, with tatters extending across the gap out over a night-black background. Another in place of one eye had a red star, its rays reaching in all directions. Another still had no mouth and in her hair flowers of a kind Nona had never seen, the deep blue of evening sky.
‘Nona!’
She sped up the stairs after Hessa. The stairway seemed long enough to reach the tower top but offered no doors into any rooms along the way before emerging into the middle of a classroom. At least Nona assumed it to be a classroom – it looked more like a church. Apart from the chairs on which Red Class sat, and a large iron-bound chest at the front, the room was completely bare. Even so, it had a beauty to it. Four tall and narrow windows broke the light into many colours. Scores of stained-glass panels made each window into a glowing, abstract picture that threw reds, and greens, and blues, across the walls and floor. For a moment all Nona could do was gape at the alien wonder of the place.
The nun standing before the chest was the oldest Nona had seen. Quite possibly the oldest woman she had ever seen. Nana Even’s older sister, Ora, had died a year back. Nona’s mother claimed the woman had seen eighty years come and go. Yet lying there on the pyre in the square before Grey Stephen’s stone-built home old Ora had looked young compared to Mistress Path.
‘Take a seat, Hessa.’ The ancient nun had a surprisingly young voice. ‘You too, novice …?’
‘Nona.’ Nona took a chair, little more than a stool really, the back a single narrow plank.
‘Knower?’ Mistress Path came a step closer, leaning in.
‘Nona!’ Clera all but shouted it.
‘Ah, Nona.’ The nun clapped her hand to Nona’s shoulder. ‘Like the merchant-queen?’
Nona wasn’t alone in offering this last question a blank look, though she caught Clera nodding.
‘No matter – no matter.’ Mistress Path moved off, shaking her head. ‘It was long ago and her sons are all gone to dust.’
‘We’re all gathered now?’ Mistress Path looked around the room, her eyes so pale as to be without colour, the whites creamy with age. ‘Two new girls, yes?’
‘Yes, Mistress Path.’ A loud chorus.
‘I’ll do my introductions then. I am Sister Pan. Within these walls, Mistress Path is my name.’ She paced towards the front of the class and, with an exaggerated sigh, settled herself upon the great chest. Nona noticed that the woman’s right hand, that she had thought lost in the sleeve of her habit, was more lost than that, the arm ending at the wrist in an ugly mess of scar tissue.
Sister Pan lowered her head and tapped her fingers on the lid of the chest. She was quiet for so long that Nona wondered if she had dropped into a doze, but a moment later she looked up, eyes bright. ‘In these lessons we study the Path. For most of you this will be a journey to serenity, to states of mind that can help you with patience or with concentration. Or perhaps they may help quiet your fears, or put sorrow aside for a while until you have time for her visit. For those few of you who might have it in your blood to see the Path clearly rather just sense it as an idea these lessons are the first steps to discovering hidden worlds, the boundary between them, and the power that may be won by those who dare to venture in such places.’
Clera leaned across to Nona, speaking in a low voice. ‘If any of us do go there we’ll be doing it alone. They say the old girl hasn’t put a toe on the Path for thirty years.’
Nona pressed her lips together, gesturing with her eyes towards Mistress Path.
‘She’s deaf as a post, silly.’ Clera grinned and raised her tone a fraction. ‘Those that can, do – those that can’t, teach. At least in Path. The doers are too valuable to waste on us.’