Holy Sister

She walked to the edge of the Rock, head down, staring at a section of parchment as if memorizing it for an exam. She came to Blade Hall and waited for a cluster of Grey Class novices to pass inside before she slid quickly over the cliff edge. With her toes on a ledge she extracted the lantern, turned it up, and tied it to her belt.

Bray’s next toll was near. Old Sister Grass would already be creaking up the wooden stair to sound it. Nona reached the windows to the Shade chamber and hung by her flaw-blades, wishing her arms weren’t already trembling with the effort. If there had been a lesson ongoing then the bell would have ushered the class out and offered an opportunity to enter. But no sounds emerged, and the quickest of peeps confirmed that the room wasn’t filled with shadow-work or novices pressed to the walls practising the watchful patience that Nona herself should be exercising.

Nona made to swing through. At the last moment she caught herself awkwardly and hung, muscles aching, as she confirmed that the window shaft hadn’t been left with a criss-crossing of wire-work. Relaxing, she dropped in and crawled through. She rose amid the familiar benches and chairs, all stained and seared with a score of chemical spills. How many punishments had been handed out to the unfortunate authors of those accidents? she wondered. How many novices saved from making the same mistakes at some later point in their lives with consequences more dire than any of Apple’s punishments?

Nona reached for the door to the corridor. Even through the thick planking she could hear distant sounds from the cave where Sister Apple kept a bed. Officially the subterranean quarters were for when she was brewing mixtures that required regular supervision over a long period. Unofficially it served for times when the bed in her nun’s cell off the Ancestor’s dome was too narrow and too public.

Nona and Kettle had learned to manage their thread-bond so that in general neither could sense anything of the other beyond a vague idea of direction and proximity when they checked. To gain more intimate levels of connection now required agreement on both sides. Even so, this close, and with the cries reaching down the empty tunnels, Nona started to feel distracting echoes of the nuns’ happy reunion. Thoughts of Regol flooded her and if she let the influence continue she knew she might find herself running the five miles to Verity to find him, bad leg or not. Nona bit her lip, leaning against the wall as another wave of the lovers’ passion threatened to swamp her. Any more of this and Verity would be too far. She might not even make it past Ara’s study.

In the end Nona called on her serenity trance to insulate her from such intrusion and set about her business. The stores cave lay closer to Sister Apple’s living quarters. Nona hurried there, having no worries that she might be overheard. She needed her lantern now, but if Apple or Kettle should emerge the light would give her away immediately.

Despite Ruli’s suggestion Nona doubted that the sturdy door to the stores chamber would yield to a sledgehammer particularly quickly. It had that obdurate look about it that oak gets after a century or two of seasoning. Besides, the aim here was not merely to steal, but to steal without later discovery. Based on historical evidence, Nona would be prime suspect in any new theft so she planned to leave no signs that anyone had been there.

The sigil had been set above the lock in silver, inlaid into the wood. Nona studied the thread-scape. Like all sigils this one was a knot, drawing in and binding scores of threads. The shape of the sigil etched into the visible world echoed its more complex structure and function in the deeper world that lies beyond vision. Each sigil might be thought of as the shadow of an intricate structure cast upon a flat surface.

‘Tricky.’ Nona put her hand to the wall and focused her will.

Slowly the bedrock began to flow. Within a minute a groove had formed, allowing the door catch space to move as Nona opened the door. The lock remained locked.

Nona stepped through, alert for any further alarms, and drew the door closed behind her. The chamber beyond remained just as she remembered it from her previous theft more than five years earlier. Dried ingredients lay in neat bunches on row after row of shelves. One set of shelves was given over to a hundred or more earthenware jars, each crammed with seed pods from a different plant. Elsewhere stood glass jars filled with distillations, tinctures, and brews, a dozen kinds of snake scales in leather pouches, bones, tiny and large, whole and ground, minerals in all shades of the rainbow, some powdered, some in single crystals longer than fingers.

The cave had been chosen for its lack of leaks and the walls rendered with pitch to seal it. Even so, pots of deliquescent rock-salt stood at regular intervals sucking moisture from the air to prevent mould. The place had an aromatic smell to it, scores of herb scents mixing. A sharp edge to the mingled aromas served as reminder that sampling what lay on display would likely kill you.

In cabinets around the cavern pots and jars lined further shelves, scores of them in tidy rows. Unlike the herb bunches, which Apple presumably thought impossible to misidentify, the containers were labelled, some with the ingredients written in the glaze, others with the identifier seared onto a leather tag tied around the neck. Cloves, green peppercorns, red peppercorns, illwort hearts, dried cowdung, elmbark scrapings … On and on, the ordering sufficiently abstract that Nona could see only a hint of it.

Nona’s salvation in all this confusion was that the finished preparations were kept on one great set of shelves with an alphabetical ordering within various subgroups such as ‘contact poisons’, ‘ingested poisons’, ‘antidotes’, and ‘miscellaneous’.

The drops that Sister Apple had prepared were stored in a distinctive ceramic flask, wide at the base, narrow at the neck and about two inches high. Nona found the flask quite rapidly in the miscellaneous section, sporting the label, ‘Optorical greyjak, recipe fourteen, unreliable’.

The tiny flask released its hold on its cork stopper with a small pop. Nona poured half the contents into a glass tube and sealed the end with wax. She pushed the stopper back and was about to return the drops to the shelf when a key rattled into the door’s lock.

A great number of thoughts attempted to pass through Nona’s mind at the same time. Everything from the excuse she would offer first to which weapon she should use. A rant about the unfairness of it all struggled to be heard among the babble. Nona refused all of them admission. Instead her hand fell to the lantern. Sister Apple’s training was so ingrained that Nona had unconsciously been assessing the room for hiding places ever since she entered. The most obvious was in the gap behind the mixtures’ shelf. The curvature of the rock walls meant that none of the shelves could stand anywhere near flush with the stone. Instead Nona moved with hunska swiftness towards a sack bulging with fresh pickings from the woods and fields, still unsorted. Beside it lay two empty sacks and an over-habit soiled from some recent work.

The key turned, the lock clicked, the door began to open. Nona threw herself down, arraying the over-habit and sacks across the length of her, pressing her body into the angle between wall and floor. She hid her feet behind the full sack, wishing that she was as small and flexible as Ghena who might have concealed herself entirely in such a bag. As the gap at the door grew still wider Nona blew out her lantern and pushed it down between her legs beneath the over-habit, wincing at its heat. At the last moment she pulled her hood up to hide her face. Only then did she allow despair in. Perhaps Apple and Kettle wouldn’t report her to Wheel, but the loss of trust, and the disappointment in their eyes, would hurt worse than a whipping.