Grey Sister. Mark Lawrence

to she had always been the one of them with most to lose. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t …’ Across the cloister she saw a face at a window, above the galleried walkway. Joeli? Watching her? Smiling with the mouth that had sullied Hessa’s name. Nona knew she wouldn’t find any clues to Yisht’s whereabouts on top of the Rock. And Joeli had been right. Nona had failed her friend. For three long years Nona’s struggles with mastering Keot and the enormity of the challenge in finding justice for Hessa had kept her from action. Perhaps there really was something in the caves that might help. Maybe they could find a passage to the convent undercaves. She owed it to her friend to visit the place where she had died. Maybe Hessa had left some clue for Nona that might lead to her killer. Even at twelve Hessa had had few equals when it came to thread-work and bathed in the power of the shipheart she might have accomplished miracles. ‘Oh hells, let’s do it!’

      A raindrop hit the back of Nona’s hand. A fat raindrop, close to freezing. A heartbeat later a salvo scattered down around them. As one the novices joined the rush for the shelter of the galleries, and behind them the black sky opened, hurling down the rain as if each drop were intended to be fatal. By the time Nona looked again for the window where Joeli had been the rain had drawn a curtain across it.

      Sister Pail found Nona with her friends as they huddled together watching the downpour. ‘You’re to appear before the convent table tonight at eighth bell, that’s Ferra, not Bray.’ She stood regarding Nona with mild distaste, her habit beaded with water.

      ‘Why? What’s she done?’ Ghena, small and dark, working her way out of a clump of Red Class novices.

      Sister Pail kept her gaze on Nona. ‘The abbess doesn’t approve of novices trying to murder other novices.’

       5

      Abbess Glass

      ‘Any other business before we invite the judge to make his petition?’ Abbess Glass looked up from her notes. Along both sides of the long table nuns returned her gaze. All except Sister Kettle, still recording the minutes of the last item in the ledger of record. A chamber beneath the scriptorium held piles of such ledgers, filled with minutes, stacked to the ceiling in columns that marched off into the mildewed gloom. Enough minutes to constitute hours, weeks, decades. Never to be read. But authority must leave a trail or how else will it be held to account, and without checks, or at least the potential for them, authority, like any power, corrupts. ‘Other business?’

      ‘Nona Grey.’ Sister Rail laid a hand upon the table. It was, like the rest of her, little more than skin and bones, the long nails jagged at the ends.

      ‘Again?’ Abbess Glass sighed and flexed her own hand. The burn scar across her palm had remained stiff despite all of Sister Rose’s oils and unguents, allowing only limited movement. At times like these she let the echo of that old pain remind her that it had been Nona who saved her from the fire.

      ‘Again.’ Sister Rail inclined her head. On the table her nails dug at the wood.

      ‘Really?’ Abbess Glass had disliked Sister Rail within moments of her arrival from the Convent of Silent Devotion, but by that point Sister Rule had already departed on her sabbatical and nobody else could teach Academia to all four classes. Besides, Rail had other qualifications Glass required, and one did not have to like one’s pieces in order to play them. ‘Tell me.’

      ‘She attacked and very nearly maimed Novice Joeli within hours of joining Mystic Class.’ The bony hand on the table became a bony fist. The candle flames jumped as if Sister Rail had struck the wood and set the candlesticks shuddering.

      ‘I wonder that Sister Spire hasn’t brought this to my attention.’ Abbess Glass looked to the nun in question. Nona’s new class mistress was another recent addition to the convent, a young Holy Sister returned from three years’ ministering to the sick on the far borders of Archon Anasta’s see.

      ‘Sister Spire didn’t know anything about it.’ Sister Spire raised an eyebrow and turned her gaze on Sister Rail.

      ‘The girl came to me in confidence.’ Sister Rail made a sour pucker of her mouth. Rail’s family were a very minor branch of the Namsis tree and she had petitioned the abbess before on Novice Joeli’s behalf.

      The abbess frowned, wondering what ‘almost maiming’ the novice had entailed. ‘And what do you propose we do?’ She could see her breath before her. White hands pulled her robes tighter. The cold never left the hall, the heating pipes lay freezing since the shipheart had been taken. ‘Do you have a punishment in mind, sister?’

      ‘Reduce the girl to convent helper,’ Sister Rail replied without hesitation. ‘That’s what she deserves. At the very least she must be returned to Grey Class and whipped before the Ancestor’s dome.’

      ‘I vote she be whipped and then reduced to helper.’ Sister Wheel leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘Or banished.’

      ‘Perhaps we could hear some evidence first, sister? Before moving to sentencing.’ The abbess raised her hand to forestall Wheel’s reply. ‘Did someone think to summon the girls?’ She drank from the cup beside her, wishing the water were wine.

      ‘I saw them waiting in the corridor.’ Sister Apple had arrived late and sat at the far end of the table.

      Abbess Glass gestured towards the door. The ice had been surging for three years straight, all the nations of the Corridor squeezed tight against their borders, bursting for war, and here she sat arbitrating the disputes of children.

      Sister Apple’s footsteps echoed in the bare hall. She spoke a word to the junior nun outside and moments later Joeli Namsis limped in, one hand at her throat, blonde hair in disarray. Nona Grey stalked in behind her. She looked twice the size of the painfully thin stray the abbess had brought from Verity more than five years earlier. Her unnerving all-black eyes seemed to challenge each nun in turn. She stood as tall as several at the table now, still slim, but Abbess Glass knew the body beneath that habit was corded with muscle. The abbess frowned at the state of Nona’s hair, a short and spiky shock as consumingly black as her eyes. Efforts to tame it over the years had singularly failed.

      Abbess Glass nodded to Sister Spire.

      ‘If you could outline your grievance, Novice Joeli?’

      Joeli looked as if nothing but determination kept her upright, sagging around her unspecified injuries. She dragged her bad leg a step closer to the table and spoke in a cracked whisper, holding her neck. ‘I was watching the class at blade-path. The new girl fell and seemed to think it was my fault. She beat me to the ground and tried to kill me.’

      ‘Novice Nona?’ Sister Spire gave her an inquiring look.

      ‘I did knock her down. If I had tried to kill her she would be dead.’

      Sister Spire frowned. She had blunt features, not unkindly arranged, marred by a burn that ran across her forehead and down the side of her face. ‘Novice Joeli, how did Novice Nona try to kill you?’

      ‘She …’ Joeli stifled a sob. ‘She strangled me. She said she would kill me. She said it before she even chose her bed! And … and then she wrapped her hands around my throat and …’ Another sob. ‘They had to pull her off me.’

      ‘Is this true, Novice Nona?’ Sister Spire asked.

      ‘It was one hand. And for a few seconds. But yes.’ Nona furrowed her brow, looking furiously at the ground.

      ‘And how long would you say you were throttled for, Novice Joeli?’

      ‘I … it could be minutes. I blacked out after a while.’

      Sister Wheel banged her fist to the table and the shadows danced. ‘Any period of time one novice spends strangling another is too long. What are we even discussing? Take her habit. She’ll never be fit for her vows. Novice Arabella can take the Ordeal of the Shield and serve the Argatha in her place.’