‘Ha!’ Sister Pan barked a laugh. ‘That’s all you’ll be good for, young Nona, unless you work on your serenity. Serenity is what will lead you through the fog of this world to the Path. Clarity will let you see it. I’ve no complaint with your clarity. Your serenity on the other hand …’ She waggled her fingers.
Nona ignored the laughter sprinkled across the room. Most of the class knew nothing about her beyond her showing in the ordeal of the Shield. That and the fact she’d broken Darla’s finger of course. And pulled a real knife on Arabella Jotsis this morning. And done the same on the first day she arrived. ‘I find serenity difficult, Mistress Path.’
Sister Pan patted Nona’s shoulder and moved back to the head of the class, a kaleidoscope of colour sliding across her as she went.
Clera winked at Nona. Both of them had scraped through their serenity test long after mastering clarity and then patience. The trances were hard to touch, harder to sink into, and remaining in them despite distraction was the hardest. Sister Pan offered exercises to help attain each state along with explanation of what to expect and why. In class she gave guidance towards shaping one’s character and daily being to better fit the requirements. But in the end it was words, words, more words.
‘I can show you where it lies,’ she had said. ‘I can point at it. I can describe it. But I cannot make you see it. I cannot put it in your hand. The only person who can see it, take it, and own it, is you.’
The old nun taught them poems, stories, fragments of song, even riddles and jests, all to help them view the world through altered eyes – to somehow see what she saw so easily. On occasion she would open the great iron-bound chest at the front of the class and take from it some pretty object to fascinate the eye with patterns. Pieces of ancient glass rainbowed through with colours, interlocking puzzles of black metal, pictures that deceived – at one glance an old man looking to the right, at the next a young boy staring left, or a hill that with a shift of perception became a pit. Endless variety with one thing held common: all of them led to the same place in different ways, a path to suit each person.
Nona had come closest to serenity when running an old song through her mind. The one children sang in the village. She’s falling down, she’s falling down The moon, the moon She’s falling down, she’s falling down / Soon, soon. When she passed the words over her still tongue again and again until every one of them lost its meaning in a chain of unvoiced sound, when she remembered the shapes of the children dancing black against the focus of the moon, in those moments she reached that calm place where nothing outside could touch her, where every memory was robbed of its sharp edges. It wasn’t a state without care or purpose, but one with the serenity to rise beyond the reach of fear or even pain.
Nona found it no use whatsoever on the blade-path though: it just meant she fell serenely and was less bothered by how small a portion of the journey she had completed in a non-vertical manner.
‘Let us contemplate serenity, novices.’ Sister Pan settled herself on the great chest.
Clera covered her mouth and made an exaggerated yawn for Nona’s benefit. Nona pressed her lips together in a thin line and willed herself not to slump. If they had desks in Path she would have been tempted to bang her forehead on hers. Two years and she hadn’t come close to touching the Path, let alone walking it. Not only that, she hadn’t seen anyone else do it either. Infuriatingly, Sister Pan took Hessa, and later Ara, down the stairs when she judged it time to attempt the Path. The other novices of course abandoned their meditation and ran to the windows, peering through the small, coloured panes, to see where Sister Pan went. But she never emerged. One such time, Ketti returning from the sanatorium after treatment for a wrenched shoulder, reported the portrait hall below to be empty and to have met no one on the spiral stair. The conclusion then was that Sister Pan must take the girls to a secret room in the tower’s mid-section. But after endless ascents and descents of that stair Nona had no clue where any hidden door might lie.
With a sigh Nona let go of as much tension as she could without falling boneless to the floor and began her hunt for serenity. She’s falling down, she’s falling down / The moon—
For the first moment she thought the Bitel’s voice some figment of imagination, but the ringing continued and the steel bell cut swiftly through the layers of calm Nona had gathered to her. By the second tolling she was on her feet with the rest of the class.
‘Ancestor’s blood!’ Clera was at her side, scattering chairs.
‘We will proceed to the abbess’s house in an orderly manner!’ Sister Pan raised her voice.
Bitel had held its tongue since High Priest Jacob had brought the archons to judgement. Nona took her place in the queue of novices hurrying down the stairs behind Sister Pan.
‘Let it be a fire. Let it be a fire.’ Ketti, two places behind.
Nona half-wanted her to be right. Some natural disasters were preferable to the sorts that people could wreak upon each other.
The wind had turned overnight and blew from the north in unsteady, cold gusts, stuttering as if even now it might change its mind and let the Corridor wind chase around the girdle of the world. Soon though, if the change held, the winds would howl, ice-laden, blowing in from the endless white, and all of the empire would shiver. Nona wrapped her habit tight and reined in the desire to run, matching her pace instead to Sister Pan’s.
Abbess Glass waited on her steps, Sisters Wheel and Rose a step below, and a step below them Sisters Tallow and Rule. Sister Apple came hastening through the growing crowd as Nona’s class approached.
Out among the pillars a horseman could be glimpsed from time to time, riding away, a silver and scarlet banner snapping behind him in the wind.
‘That’s a royal herald,’ Ara said, coming up on Nona’s right.
‘Well yes.’ Clera elbowed in on Nona’s left. ‘It doesn’t take a Sis to recognize that.’
Nona stared at the retreating figure. It might not take a Tacsis or a Jotsis to recognize such a standard but it took more than a peasant girl from the Grey. The fluttering of the banner as it vanished for the last time tugged at her memory, the line of it trying to draw her back. ‘Is the emperor coming?’ The idea sounded silly even before she’d finished saying it.
‘The emperor went with the Rexxus army to counter raids by Durnish pirates,’ Ara said.
‘How do you know that?’ Ruli pushed up from behind. She liked to say her family were smugglers, or sometimes fisherfolk, but in truth her father owned several large fishing boats, a good deal more merchantmen, and had people to sail them for him.
Ara shrugged as if everyone knew it.
‘A whole army? And the emperor himself? For pirates?’ Nona asked.
‘When pirates strike shore the hand of the Durnish proctor is always at the helm,’ Ruli said. ‘It’s how they probe for weakness. The emperor is stamping down hard. Showing them strength.’
‘Mistress Academia would approve of your analysis, Ruli.’ Clera, half-mocking.
‘That only leaves the sisters,’ Hessa’s voice from behind the group.
‘Velera then, up from the coast,’ Clera said.
‘Run from pirates? While her brother marches along the shore?’ Ara snorted. ‘You don’t know sweet Velera! She’ll be turning the surf crimson.’
Abbess Glass struck the heel of her crozier against the steps. ‘Sisters, novices, we are to have an unexpected visit tomorrow. Sherzal, sister to the emperor, is approaching from the east and has requested a tour of this convent. High Priest Nevis will be meeting the royal procession at the city gates and accompanying our honoured guest on her visit.’
‘Sherzal?’ Nona looked around at Ara. ‘Wasn’t it her soldiers that tried to steal you from your father when he was summoned to court? And now she’s come in person to take you?’