‘Good.’ Clera squeezed her arm, hesitated, then went back to her bed. ‘You stink of mud by the way.’
Nona stripped off her habit and stuffed it beneath her bed. Cleaning it was a problem to be dealt with in daylight. She slipped beneath her blanket, the wool rough against her skinned knees, the darkness full of images of tunnel after tunnel, narrow rocky throats caught in the flicker of a flame, closing ever tighter around her. She turned on her side and coiled herself up, presenting as small a target as she could to the dark. On the nights since the forging it had been the pain she had curled around, the first and growing pangs of whatever poison it was that Raymel had got into her. Nothing swift of course – he would want to know that she suffered long and hard before she died. Sister Apple had told them plenty of horror stories about toxins that would do just that. Venoms that would rot the flesh from bones over the course of weeks, others that would cause first blindness, then peeling skin worse than any burn, and finally madness and death months later. Now she realized that apart from her knees, hands, arms and jaw … nothing hurt. Her head, her guts, and her joints, all of which had been in slow twisting agony, really were fine. She’d said she was fine to get Clera back to her own bed … but it was true … all she felt was that lingering sense of fullness that had invaded her when she spied on Yisht. A sensation she had felt only in one place, and never as strongly – before the black door into the Dome of the Ancestor at the far end of the nuns’ cells.
Her last thought before sleep claimed her was to wonder whether Yisht had used the gate and whether she or Sister Apple would notice it had been left unlocked.
On the windswept promontory in the break between Blade class and the evening meal Nona, Ara, and Hessa clustered around a shallow depression, partly sheltered by low walls made by piling up rock Nona had shattered with Path-energy on one of her many secret practices.
The fire had proved a nightmare to light and their few stolen pieces of kindling had burned out before setting fire to the coals stolen from the kitchen store. In the end Nona and Ara sat shivering while Hessa sought the serenity needed to reach the Path herself and eventually set the coals burning with a measured release of Path-energy.
They started to brew the black cure using pots stolen from the kitchens – safer to steal these than try to filch the correct equipment from the Poisoner’s stores. Lacking scales, Hessa weighed the ingredients using a measuring rule balanced at its midpoint on an eating knife. Hessa had a collection of pebbles that she had previously weighed in Shade class and claimed that by placing them at the correct distance from the rule’s pivot point she could, with some arithmetic, measure any desired weight on the other side. In theory it seemed, at least to Hessa, easy. In the Corridor wind with awkward ingredients that wanted to blow or roll away and couldn’t be heaped in one single spot on the wobbling rule … it appeared to Nona to be closer to guesswork than any science taught in Academia.
It took longer than anticipated. Relying on the wind to clear the dangerous fumes meant frequent hurried moves as the direction shifted.
‘An ice-wind’s coming,’ Ara said.
‘They might send us on the ranging if it lasts.’ Nona tipped another silver drop of liquid metal into the black and stinking black mess simmering in the pan.
‘Maybe.’ Ara shuddered and hugged herself. The rangings almost always started during an ice-wind. Novices had gone missing on the journey before and been found days later frozen to the ground. Or not at all.
In the end all three of them missed the evening meal and returned to the convent in the dark, their habits reeking of blackroot, the ruined cooking pot abandoned over the cliff, the coals still glowing behind them, hidden in their hollow. Nona held the black cure in a tiny perfume vial that Ara had brought to the convent when she first arrived. When boiled down to a sludge and strained through a cloth, taking care not to let the liquid touch skin, there had been precious little to collect.
‘You won’t really take it? You know they call it the kill or cure, don’t you?’ Hessa asked, working to keep up with Nona and Ara. ‘Even if I got the proportions right it’s a terrible risk. Just tell the abbess what you did. She might be angry but she won’t throw you out.’
‘I’ll think about it. I don’t feel so bad today.’ The pain, the sickness, all of it had gone overnight, but Nona hadn’t the heart to tell the others after the risks they had taken for her. Besides, with an enemy who resorted to poison it never hurt to be prepared in advance. She had little doubt that Sister Apple and others among the Sisters of Discretion carried their own collections of small vials just in case – the black cure among them.
With stomachs rumbling they crept into the dormitory and changed their habits, Nona having to borrow an old one from Ara. The three tainted habits they wrapped in Nona’s mud-smeared one from the previous night and took to the laundry. If any nun recognized the smell of blackroot and took a close look at the bundle they would find the entire litany of the girls’ crimes written there. Fortunately blackroot was not a common ingredient and Sister Apple seemed never to be on laundry duty.
Nona walked behind Ara to the washroom, her sleeves flapping around her hands, but not as dwarfed by the Chosen One’s clothes as she once would have been. It took the best part of an hour to pound the soiled garments clean in the wooden tubs and wring them through the mangle until they were dry enough to hang.
They worked in the dark, elbow-deep in cold water, backs aching despite all of Sister Tallow’s training. A light might draw unwanted attention.
‘I saw Yisht.’ Nona spoke into the dark, her voice barely audible above the splashing.
‘I did too, with Zole in Spirit class,’ Ara replied. Sister Wheel allowed Yisht into the class, saying that everyone could do with more instruction in holy matters.
‘I saw her in the caves.’
‘What?’ Ara’s splashing stopped.
‘I took a wrong turn and found her digging.’
‘Digging?’ Ara asked. ‘Why? Where?’
‘I think she’s cutting a path to something under the dome – there’s something hidden there, something powerful.’
‘Blood and teeth, Nona! And you waited all day to tell me this … why?’
‘Because if I’d said it when Clera was here half the convent would probably know by now.’
‘Clera keeps secrets,’ Ara said. ‘Ones she wants to keep.’
‘She …’ Nona’s denial petered out, the image of that strange throwing star flashed before her. She hadn’t ever asked about it again, and Clera hadn’t ever asked her about the true story of how she had ended up in Giljohn’s cage. It seemed a fair exchange. ‘She knows how to keep her own. Other people’s she’s not so good with.’
Ara snorted. ‘So why didn’t you tell us when we were out there brewing? That should have been private enough for you!’
‘Hessa would have made me tell the abbess.’
‘Damn Hessa! I’m making you tell the abbess!’
‘Tell her that I broke into the undercaves planning to steal expensive convent-owned ingredients because I attacked the man she burned herself to protect me from after I attacked him the first time? For all we know Abbess Glass might have asked Yisht to dig her an access tunnel or given her permission to go prospecting in the caves. She might have opened that gate with a key.’
‘She didn’t though.’
‘No. In fact I saw a new shaft leading up and I’m sure it’s under the guest quarters. Yisht must have dug down from her room and set to exploring.’
‘Well that’s it then,’ Ara said. ‘She’s as guilty as sin.’