Sister Pan summoned the girls’ attention from their meditations with a cough. She stood before the great ironbound chest which sat at the front of the room, black against the stained and sunlit glass. ‘There is a line that divides and a line that joins, and they are the same line and the line is a path.’
Nona found Sister Pan’s pronouncements more and more frustrating, more so now that she knew she had a genuine ability to touch the Path. In Red Class Nona had let the old nun’s philosophizing wash over her, just waiting for a chance to escape to blade-path, but now she felt bound to listen, hoping against hope that she might actually say something useful.
‘There is a thread that runs through all things, that binds each story to every other, a thread that runs through the veins and the marrow and the memory of every creature.’
Nona sighed. It was all very well Sister Pan making pretty speeches but it would be much more helpful if she would just tell them what they needed to know. If you understood something you should be able to explain it: if you didn’t understand it then you had no business teaching it. Either way, having the old woman spout poetry at them didn’t help at all.
Nona found her head nodding and jerked upright, blinking and trying to keep her eyes wide. Whatever poison the Tacsis had got into her seemed to work erratically, the symptoms coming and going without rhyme or reason.
In frustration at her failures with serenity Nona had on several occasions stolen away from the convent buildings to try to revisit the Path in the only manner she had ever reached it.
She had taken to slipping her friends and venturing out on the narrowing spur of the plateau. There, she hunched against the wind, gazing out over the garden lands of Verity and the Corridor narrowing away to the east between ice walls. If she looked down she could see the convent vineyards, huddled against the plateau walls, sheltered from the weather.
Pain and anger had driven her to the Path before. Anger had only to be reached for: the fact that Raymel Tacsis still drew breath was enough in itself. She had wanted to kill him at the forging and days later her fingers still itched at night for want of his blood. But she had found her blades unable to do more than scratch him. Had it been the man at his side, working some enchantment? Or the devils sharing his skin, armouring their host against her?
Either way Nona had failed Saida. Within yards of the place where Raymel had hurt her Nona had taken his throat in her hand … and still he lived. She only had to think of her own failings as a friend and the anger was there for the taking. Pain too.
It took time. Time to kindle the rage and let it burn to white heat, time to let her pain rise from the deep and hidden places where she kept it. But she could do it, and on each occasion that she did so the Path would coalesce out of the chaos of her mind’s eye. For a moment it would appear, stretching out before her, whipping this way and that, a white serpent in its death throes. And in the next instant she would be hurled at it with frightening speed.
The first time she had touched the Path on one of these excursions she made a glancing contact and the energy of it burst away from her in a boom that had rattled shutters back at the convent and sent birds spiralling towards the ground, killed in mid-flight. The noise had been so loud that nobody knew where it had come from. Sister Rule had suggested some kind of collapse in the many caverns that riddled the plateau.
On the second and subsequent occasions Nona had managed to drive the Path’s energies into the rock, shattering limestone, reducing some of it to powder, but not causing any damage that would be evident from the convent. On a dozen or more attempts though, despite her best efforts to slow her approach, to gain her balance as on the blade-path and make cautious progress, she managed just one step, or perhaps a glancing second step, before the Path threw her.
‘Nona?’
‘Yes?’ Nona looked up, rediscovering the room, the glorious colours of the windows, the novices on all sides in their chairs, and Sister Pan standing before her. ‘Yes, Mistress Path?’
‘You appeared to be slipping over the line from serenity to slumber.’ Titters of laughter around the room.
‘Sorry, Mistress Path.’
‘I said that you would be accompanying me to the Academy.’
‘Me?’
‘And Hessa and Arabella. I take the Grey Class quantals every year on the twentieth seven-day. If we have any quantals, that is. It is important that you be exposed to marjal enchantments, and likewise the Academy masters believe their students should know something of Path magics.’
Bray sounded and Sister Pan frowned at the fading bell before waving her hand in uncharacteristic irritation, dismissing the class. Clera’s chair almost spun in her wake as she beat the scramble to be first down the stairs.
Nona found Clera already attacking a bowl of stew when she reached the refectory table that evening. Darla had secured a drumstick that looked to have come from a swan rather than a chicken, and seemed determined to gnaw through to the marrow, her cheeks and chin running with grease.
‘You’re late. Not like you.’ Darla managed to get the words around her drumstick. Of all the novices only Darla seemed to have more of an appetite than Nona.
‘Sister Wheel caught me for a lecture.’ It wasn’t true though – she had been trying to walk the Path again, reaching it angry. As usual her attempts to slow down and take control saw her pitched off within moments. A crazing of shattered stone and cracks that ran a yard or more into the bedrock were all she had to show for it.
‘I saw Wheel whispering with Yisht behind the pigsties.’ Clera didn’t look up from her bowl, speaking between spoonfuls. ‘I think they’re plotting together.’
Nona looked around for Zole but the girl wasn’t there. Sherzal often sent her food-parcels to cater to her ‘ethnic diet’ and Zole could be found eating from them in the cloisters. It looked like dried fish usually, sometimes with disturbing hints of tentacle. At other times it looked like cubes of fat, blackened with age, and the stink made Nona’s eyes water. Nobody ever asked to share.
Nona helped herself to stew and a heel of bread, squeezing in between Clera and Ketti. ‘Sister Wheel would rather cut her nose off than skip singing the fourth psalm before eating. She’s the last nun in the whole faith who would plot against the church.’
‘Maybe it’s not the church she’s conspiring against.’ Ara pulled out a chair from the other side of the table and leaned in for the bread. ‘Maybe she doesn’t consider you a part of the church, Nona. You do manage to destroy every prayer she makes you learn.’
‘I get the words right!’
‘You make them sound like death threats. Even if everyone didn’t know you hate her it would only take them listening to you in Spirit class to be sure.’ Ara sat down.
‘I don’t hate her.’ Nona chewed and swallowed. ‘I just really, really don’t like her.’
‘Anyway,’ Ara said. ‘Forget about Sister Wheel, we get to go to the Academy in four days!’
‘I’ve been.’ Nona shoved a big spoonful of stew in her mouth and, finding it too hot, sat breathing rapidly in and out over it while Ara made furious eyes at her, motioning for more information.
‘And …’
Nona finally won the battle and started to chew, her tongue a little scalded. ‘It’s not so great.’
‘How did you get to go there? I wanted to visit with my father and they wouldn’t let us!’ Ara looked up at Hessa, now emerging from a crowd of older novices and stumping towards the table. ‘She says she’s been!’
‘I have too,’ said Hessa. ‘It’s not so great.’
‘What!’ Ara let her spoon splat into her stew. ‘Outrageous. Is there anyone at this convent besides me who hasn’t had the tour?’