The novices crowded around the stain-stand, each hurriedly wiping their knife against the bundled rags, taking the lamp-black onto the blunt edges and rounded point. Any contact would leave a line or dot on the pale leathers of the blade-habit.
Ara pulled her blade back from the rags, dark as ink, and grinned at Nona, making an exaggerated slow-motion thrust towards her. Nona found she couldn’t echo the smile, remembering that the knife in her hand had once been a death threat. Even so, she lifted the knife in response to Ara’s thrust. In that instant something exploded from the base of the wall where nothing had been but shadows. A figure, moving with breathtaking swiftness, devouring the scant yards between them before Nona fully turned her head to see. The ground leapt up and Nona found her bruised body pinned to it, her attacker on top of her, securing her by both wrists. She tried to speak but the impact had hammered the breath out of her lungs.
‘Nona?’ The blurred figure astride her leaned in closer.
Nona managed to pull a breath back in past bruised ribs. She blinked, clearing her sight. ‘Kettle?’
‘Sister Kettle?’ Sister Tallow appeared over Sister Kettle’s shoulder, reaching down for her.
Kettle allowed Sister Tallow to bring her to her feet, pulling Nona up with her and keeping tight hold of Nona’s knife hand.
‘What are you doing, sister?’ Sister Tallow asked. Sister Flint loomed over all of them now, with Sister Wheel deploying sharp elbows to find a path through the crowding novices.
Kettle said nothing, only held up Nona’s hand with the knife clutched tight.
‘An interesting weapon you have there, novice.’ Sister Tallow raised a single brow in that manner of hers which Nona had been trying and failing to imitate for two years.
‘The assassin!’ hissed Sister Wheel. ‘This girl is in league with them?’
‘Don’t be foolish, Wheel.’ Sister Tallow waved the idea away. ‘Arabella and Nona shared a dorm room for over a year, and will start doing so again tonight.’
‘The threads led us here!’ Sister Wheel looked up at Tallow, indignant, hands on her hips. ‘Not just me. Flint and Kettle too!’
Sister Tallow motioned for Kettle to step back, her eyes on Nona’s. ‘Where did you get this interesting knife, novice?’
‘I …’ In the rush and with her mind on Darla, or at least the various hurts the girl had left her with, Nona had been too distracted to notice that the blade in her hand bore little resemblance to those the other novices held, being smaller and razor-edged, the point needle-sharp.
‘Show me the hilt.’
Nona opened her hand, revealing a slim hilt wound with a narrow strip of leather and ending in an iron ball.
The novices about them remained dead silent for fear of being noticed and sent away. Sister Wheel noticed them even so. ‘Class dismissed! Go and pray. Pray you don’t find yourself in this much trouble! Go!’
‘Practise your blade-path. Return your practice knives to stores first,’ Sister Tallow overruled. And with reluctance the girls began to retreat to the tunnel. ‘Novice Arabella, remain.’
Ara came running back. Sister Tallow motioned for her to stand off to the side.
‘That’s a throwing knife.’ Sister Tallow returned her attention to the weapon. She held out her hand and Nona gave it over. The old nun held it to the light. ‘The Noi-Guin take their blades from those they kill. So there is no tell-tale make or style to identify their work.’ She returned the knife, her fingers leaving clean steel where they rubbed the lamp-black from its blade. ‘But I have seen the twin to this knife before. And its triplet. In the belt of a woman I pulled from the wall of your dormitory on the second night you spent in this convent.’
‘A Noi-Guin!’ Nona looked at the knife in her hand. She’d had little opportunity to inspect it between retrieving it from her bed and hiding it in the stores the next day. That had been more than two years ago. She wasn’t sure why she had hidden it beneath the storage shelf – it had meaning to her, and having it mixed with the other knives and lost had seemed wrong. So she had stabbed it into the shelf support beneath the lowest shelf. That way she obeyed the abbess by returning it, but kept it hers. ‘What did a Noi-Guin want here?’
‘I opened that discussion with her.’ Sister Tallow narrowed her eyes at the memory. ‘But a second assassin from her order interrupted us. By the time I’d dealt with the interruption the first of them had fled … and the second, well he was in no condition to answer questions. So I ask you again – where did you get it?’
‘It was in the storeroom …’
Sister Tallow raised a brow. ‘I inventory the weapon stores on a regular basis. The novices in Holy Class clean and maintain all the blades daily. I’ve not seen this weapon or its like in two years.’
‘It was in the storeroom.’ Nona gritted her teeth.
Sister Tallow’s narrowed eyes became gimlet. She drew breath for what might have been harsh words, but Sister Kettle spoke first. ‘Do you know how it got there, Nona?’
‘The abbess told me to put it there.’ Nona knew what they wanted but something deep inside her had always kept tight hold on every secret she owned. She found she could no more easily volunteer such truths than she could lie.
‘When did she tell you this?’ Kettle asked.
‘On my second night at the convent.’
‘And where did you first get the knife?’
‘It was in my bed.’ Nona frowned. ‘I sat up in the night, and when I looked back at where I had been lying the knife was there, sticking into blankets as if it had been stabbed there.’
‘Or thrown there.’ Sister Tallow glanced across at Sister Wheel. ‘We thought the assassins came for Arabella, but it looks as though they were here for Nona. The Noi-Guin are anything but cheap but perhaps Thuran Tacsis found their prices more reasonable than those of the high court judge whose arrival followed their failure. Ancestor knows what funds Tacsis put behind the visit of our own high priest and archons after that …’
Sister Wheel cast a sour eye over Nona then made a sickly smile for Arabella. ‘Our priority should be the Chosen One, the emperor’s sister made her interest clear there. A Shield should be able to look after herself or what use is she?’
Sister Tallow made a small sound that might have been all of a long-suffering sigh that escaped her discipline. ‘Sherzal is certainly not known for letting slip anything on which she has designs … But these titles are unhelpful. Chosen One? The abbess herself revealed the truth to us, sister.’
Sister Wheel moved behind Arabella and set a bony hand to each shoulder. ‘It is called “faith” rather than “reason”, sister. The Argatha comes to us out of stories, and even if the stories about those stories differ, they all agree that they came from the mouths of the holy. A nun? A priest? For this purpose, or that purpose.’ She lifted a hand as if to wave away smoke. ‘The story exists. It was born within the church and many have faith in it. I have faith in it. That is enough.’
Sister Tallow returned her dark gaze to Nona. ‘Did the knife in your bed look as if it could have been thrown there?’
Nona screwed her eyes shut, bringing back the image she had played through her mind so many times before. She’d imagined the knife stabbed there, Arabella Jotsis’s hand about the hilt … but the angle … ‘The window! It could have been thrown from there – it was open that night.’
‘What honest reason would anyone have for keeping a thing like that secret?’ Sister Wheel discarded Ara and moved in closer, leaning to be level with Nona, watery eyes studying her face as if a lie might be discovered there.
‘She didn’t keep it secret,’ said Sister Tallow. ‘The abbess knew: she told Nona to put the blade in stores … Though that and her silence on the subject are both very strange.’