‘Did you find it?’ Ara was waiting by the dormitory door when Nona came back. In the hall behind her the other novices were all in bed already, or changing into their nightgowns.
‘Yes.’ Nona walked past Ara into the room, holding her arms tight across her chest. A fever had sunk its teeth into her and clutching herself seemed to help keep the shivering to a minimum. She fell into her bed, too cold and trembly to want to undress, though her habit stuck to her where she’d been sweating. Clera and Ara watched as she dragged her slate from the habit’s inner pocket. With a groan she leaned down to place it beneath the bed so the carefully scratched instructions wouldn’t be blurred.
‘You got it then,’ Clera whispered.
‘Yes.’ Nona fell back. The recipe had been in a tome by Sister Copper of Gerran’s Crag, written more than two hundred years ago. The warnings had been more dire than Hessa’s – but she had it. She had the black cure.
33
‘Hurry up!’ Clera stood with her face pressed to the gap between two bars of the gate across the tunnel mouth. On the other side steps led down to the Shade class chamber. ‘Quickly!’
‘She’s coming as fast as she can,’ Ara said.
Hessa stumped towards them, her bad leg swinging with her crutch. With her back to the wall Nona peered at the convent buildings all around them, dark and silent. Somewhere an owl hooted, and in dark corners rats scurried. Ara uncovered the lantern, just a touch, to guide Hessa in.
‘Watch the steps.’ Nona moved to catch Hessa should she fall.
‘Here.’ Ara opened the lantern’s cowl enough to let its light flood out over the gate.
The sun wouldn’t show for an hour: focus had passed, its heat faded from the stones; the stars hid in a coal sack sky. These were the grey hours when mankind lay fast in slumber and the world stood open to the bold.
Should any novice in the Grey Class dormitory rise to use the Necessary they would discover the lantern gone. Apart from that, the danger was discovery by whichever nuns were scheduled to open the bakehouse that morning, or by Sister Tallow or one of her Red Sisters on their nightly patrols.
Hessa came up to the gate. When the lantern’s light caught her face it showed the curve of a half-smile, the tranquillity that Sister Pan taught would lead the true-blood to the Path. Hessa set her hand over the lock.
‘Don’t blast it!’ A sudden fear seized Nona, and with it the image of a wrecked gate and Sister Apple standing before it with the morning sun at her shoulders.
‘The Path runs through us like our signature, written upon the world.’ Hessa appeared to be quoting Sister Pan. ‘We are complex and changing, and so is our signature.’ Hessa’s hand drew Nona’s attention. It didn’t glow but somehow it seemed brighter and more real than everything around it. ‘A lock, though. A lock is a simple thing, no matter how it may be constructed. It is locked or unlocked. Its thread spells one word or the other. And if … I grasp … that thread and pull.’
The click of the lock’s surrender made them all flinch.
‘I’ll go back now,’ Hessa said.
‘You all will.’ Nona took the lantern from Ara.
‘I will not!’ Ara reached to take the lantern back.
Nona held it away from her. ‘One can search as easily as three. I don’t need you.’
‘Nonsense, we can cover more ground if there’s three of us. We don’t have long!’ Ara’s brow furrowed into the two vertical lines that developed just above her nose when she was being stubborn.
Nona pulled the gate open just wide enough to admit herself. ‘We’ve got one lantern. We can’t split up. Better just one of us gets punished if caught.’ She pulled the gate closed behind her as Ara reached for it. ‘Help Hessa get back. She could trip in the dark.’
Clera seemed to accept the logic, or realize how much she didn’t want to find herself in the Poisoner’s black books. Either way, she took Hessa’s arm and started to help her back up the steps.
‘But you’re poisoned!’ Ara protested. ‘That’s the whole point. What if you get worse down there? What if you need us?’
‘If I get caught then that’s my excuse: I was poisoned. I need this stuff. You two haven’t got an excuse.’ Without waiting for an answer Nona hurried down the tunnel, feet sure on the familiar stairs.
Once past the door to the Shade class cavern Nona had just a single old memory to follow. Sister Apple had led her and Abbess Glass along this tunnel in iron yokes. To reach the recluse where they spent the night Sister Apple had taken them past half a dozen junctions where tunnels split and wandered into the black secrets of the Rock of Faith.
At the bottom of the steps Nona spent a moment watching the dance of her lantern’s flame then turned from it and watched instead the memory of its dance written on the darkness. Of all the paths to clarity that Sister Pan had shown her this one worked best for Nona. Over the course of the next few minutes the trance wrapped her in its cold, tingling embrace, every shadow growing ripe with meaning, every detail in the walls crying out for her attention.
The air held a metallic smell, the scent of deep places. Nona shivered, though the damp air held no particular chill. In her mind’s eye she saw herself and her tiny flicker of flame entering a vast labyrinth. Sister Rule had once shown them a cast of the tunnels within an ant mound, so complex, so hugely intricate, that Nona wondered how any ant ever found its way out. Today she was the ant.
She walked slowly, examining the ground. The Poisoner’s storage chamber wouldn’t be too far from the class chamber, and the path between them would be well trodden. The muddy grit that gathered in the undulations of the rock showed signs of frequent passage. It was at the turnings she would have to pay close attention.
The first choice had to be made where a fissure, barely wide enough for an adult to squeeze through, opened in the tunnel wall. Nona knelt to study the floor. A drop of water hit the back of her neck, ice cold. In the shudder of the lantern’s light what she saw surprised her. A few inches into the fissure the rounded edge of a shoe had left its impression where ancient mud gathered in a fold of the rock. The imprint was clear and quite sharp. If it had been there for a long time surely the drip-drip-drip of the tunnels would have blurred its edges … Nona drew a deep breath and, turning sideways, slipped into the fissure.
The crack led downward at a shallow angle, the floor consisting of loose rocks caught where the walls grew closer together. Nona went as swiftly as she dared, expecting to find the way widening and discovering instead that it narrowed. She couldn’t picture the Poisoner making her way back and forth with her arms filled with supplies for the novices’ cauldrons. And yet someone had come this way.
The walls scraped her on both sides, her breathing the only sound, no scent but that of her smoke and the faint smell of damp stone, aeons old.
Nona pressed on though the way got tighter still. It seemed that the fissure would taper off and narrow to nothing and she became increasingly worried that she might become wedged, unable to turn or retreat, held in the stone’s cold embrace until her light failed and thirst drove her mad.
‘Whoever it was must have turned back.’ The darkness swallowed her voice.
Her fears mocked her, driving her on.
Close to the narrowest point Nona spotted soot on the wall. It was hard to miss, given that her nose was just an inch from it and the back of her head was scraping the opposite wall. The smoke from her own lantern rose along the wall, overriding the earlier blackening.
‘They must have turned back here.’