‘We should go up.’
Ara let Nona set the pace on the steps, following behind. As Nona made her slow turns around the rising spiral she tried to think back to the grievances she had harboured against the girl behind her. Ara’s crimes appeared to be confined to being beautiful, being born rich and being the Chosen One. Everything else, Nona realized, was something given to her by Clera, or something assumed. She had assumed that the remainder of half-heard jokes were at her expense, that the laughter that faded as she entered a room had been at her.
‘Ready?’ Ara asked, her smile nervous.
Nona found that she had come to a halt just below the classroom. She also found in that moment a sudden realization. Arabella Jotsis was very easy to like.
‘Ready,’ Nona said, and they went up together.
Sister Pan was waiting for them, sitting without formality in a student’s chair, and gestured for them to pull up chairs of their own. She looked impossibly old, like the corpses men find in the ice tunnels, blackened skin on bones, folded in on themselves like flowers before an ice-wind. ‘It’s blowing out there!’ When Sister Pan smiled even that had something of a skull about it. ‘The Corridor will narrow tonight.’
‘And the moon will clear the path,’ Ara said, giving the proper reply.
‘And the moon will clear the path.’ Sister Pan nodded. ‘Did you know that the moon is falling?’
Nona glanced at Ara. ‘No …’
Again the skull-grin. ‘Not to worry. It’s been falling all your life, and mine.’ Sister Pan raised her hand, leathery but darker than any leather, cupped just a little as if shining moonlight down upon the world. ‘It’s been falling ever since they put it up there. The light presses against it, the sun’s wind too. And as it drifts close it starts to scrape the very edges of our air, touching the highest of Abeth’s winds. Then … then it will be swift.’ Sister Pan brought her hand down onto her knee.
‘Can we do anything?’ Ara asked, staring at the hand on Sister Pan’s knee.
‘No. At least, nothing good.’ The old nun shrugged. ‘So … I called you to this place to hear what you’re called.’
‘I’ve chosen,’ Ara said. She looked at Nona. ‘Shouldn’t we … do this in private?’
Sister Pan turned her head one way, then the other. ‘Nobody here but us.’
‘But …’ Ara frowned. ‘But we’re not supposed to tell anyone our names. It’s a secret until we take our orders …’
‘The Chosen One and The Shield don’t have secrets from each other.’
Nona kept her mouth closed. She didn’t care who knew her name – though she wouldn’t tell it. The abbess had wanted to know if she could keep a secret, and she could.
‘I’m not the Chosen One,’ Ara said. ‘I would know if I was. And besides, I can’t do anything a marjal can.’
‘Doesn’t matter one way or the other,’ Sister Pan said. ‘That prophecy is what’s put you in danger – what’s keeping you safe for now is this convent, not the walls, not the sisters, red or grey or otherwise. It’s that woman in the big house. Glass has a long reach, and a subtle one. Time was when I could have put a big enough hole in this rock we live on to swallow this tower whole. And even then I wasn’t half as deadly as that woman. Not half.’ She tilted her head as if listening to distant music. ‘The prophecy put you in danger because people half-believe it. Make them believe it wholly and it will start to look after you. Both of you.’
‘And we need it to look after us … because the abbess might … change her mind?’ Nona asked.
‘Because the wind will always blow and moon will keep on falling.’ Sister Pan dusted her palm against her thigh and looked to them, expectant. ‘Now, what are you to be called as sisters? Nona?’
Nona hadn’t thought about it, not in her days at the convent surrounded by Kettles, Apples, Glasses and Wheels, not on the walk to the tower or the climb up the stairs.
Pan smiled. ‘Often sisters choose a name that makes them think of home, of something safe, something they cherish.’
‘I …’ Nona tried to think of the village, of her house, her mother cutting the reeds, weaving one into the next. She thought of the Rellam Forest – of the savagery and the death – she thought of her mother’s face when they brought her child back from the wild, clothed in other people’s blood.
‘Choose carefully, Nona. Let the Path lead you to a name.’
Nona opened her mouth. ‘Cage,’ she said. ‘Let them call me Cage.’
Sister Pan pursed the wrinkled gristle of her lips. ‘Cage.’ She turned to Arabella Jotsis who watched them both with a serenity Nona envied. ‘And you, dear?’
‘Thorn,’ Ara said. ‘I will be Sister Thorn.’
Grey Class
It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient skill. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy Convent Lano Tacsis brought Pelarthi mercenaries, warriors drawn from the ice-margins east of the Grey, from a tribe considered savage by their savage neighbours. Brawlers, murderers, hard men and hard women who kill for coin. Heretics who set the worship of past warlords, not yet three centuries beneath the ground, above the veneration of the Ancestor on whose shoulders all humanity stands and who makes each man brother to the next.
The throwing star, or cross-knife as the Noi-Guin have it, is typically a weapon of distraction, to put off-balance, to cause minor injury; but in the hands of a Red Sister such projectiles become deadly.
The bandolier above Sister Thorn’s blackskin held two dozen stars, pointed for penetration rather than bladed for blood, each set about a central ring weighted with lead. They spat from her fingers as she ran between the pillars, the Pelarthi shocked by the sudden swiftness of her. Eye, throat, forehead. Punching in through soft flesh and hard bone. Eye, throat, a mouth opened to roar for battle swallowing the star’s swift rotation amid broken teeth. Forehead, throat. Here a gerant, huge in his armour, pot helm visored, a heavy gorget about his neck. The star arced as it flew, taking him in the wrist just beneath his gauntlet, tearing tendon and artery, leaving his great-sword slipping from numb fingers.
There is, in the act of destruction, a beauty which we try to deny, and a joy which we cannot. Children build to knock down, and though we may grow around it, that need runs in us, deeper than our blood.
Violence is the language of destruction, flesh so often the subject, fragile, easy to break beyond repair, precious: what else would we burn to make the world take note?
Your death has not been waiting for your arrival at the appointed hour: it has, for all the years of your life, been racing towards you with the fierce velocity of time’s arrow. It cannot be evaded, it cannot be bargained with, deflected or placated. All that is given to you is the choice: meet it with open eyes and peace in your heart, go gentle to your reward. Or burn bright, take up arms, and fight the bitch.
There is in every delicate thing, no matter how precious, nor how beautiful, a challenge. Break me. No bride of the Ancestor can see life as anything but the fragile, wondrous gift that it is. From the alpha to the omega we are all brothers, sisters, children, born of unity, bound for unity. And yet … and yet … those who take the red are trained to listen. Break me.
Thorn carried in each limb every hour of her training, every day and year bound into the muscle of her arms, written along the length of her legs, beaten into the hardness of stomach and thigh. She knew five dozen ways to kill, she knew them with a lover’s intimacy, and in the execution perhaps lust also played its role – for what is lust but a hunger? And hunger must be fed.