Holy Sister

Safira must have been saying something very similar because, with a snarl, Lano allowed himself to be steered away, across the street towards another road.

Nona watched them go, attempting to regain control of her breathing. The soldiers at the rear of the Tacsis cordon glanced back at her as if even now she might give chase. Nona still wanted to. Jula had been right that she would have killed Lano, but she wouldn’t have used the Path to do it. She would have cut his heart out with her bare hands.

The novices resumed their journey in a strained silence that lasted for several blocks. Eventually Nona stopped walking and stared at Jula. ‘You’d do everything in your power to bring me before the emperor’s justice?’

Jula turned. She folded her arms. ‘Yes, I would! We’re being invaded. We need every citizen, every soldier. The rule of law is vital to civilization at all times, and when else more so than at times when we’re under such strain? You know I’m right, Nona.’

Nona fought to keep the smile from her face. ‘You’d take me in?’

Jula nodded. ‘I would.’

Nona shrugged and grinned. ‘And when we’ve stolen this book you’re going to confess and throw yourself on the court’s mercy?’

Jula harrumphed and started walking again. ‘That, Nona Grey, is a very different thing!’

The friary of St Castor stood in one of Verity’s least desirable quarters, an area given over to industry and warehouses, edged by slums. The stink of tanners curing hides hung over the streets so thickly that Nona felt she should be able to see the fog of it in the air. The shadows had joined hands to usher in evening’s gloom and behind closed shutters the first candles were being lit. Ara, Jula, and Ruli walked almost arm in arm, trailing Nona by a few yards. They covered their noses and cast nervous glances at the alleyways. Not that any of them had anything to worry about. Even Jula would be able to knock down a common criminal or two. Nona supposed it to be a sort of anticipatory guilt setting their nerves on edge.

‘Try to look natural …’ Nona glanced over her shoulder at the trio.

‘Yes, Mistress Blackeyes.’ Ruli stuck her tongue out and ringed both her eyes with finger and thumb. ‘Normal.’ The more scared Ruli got the more jokes she made.

Nona shook her head and led on. With her stolen wimple she probably looked like a mistress leading novices out. She’d kept growing when the others stopped and stood a head taller than Jula, half a head taller than Ara, with Ruli in the middle.

‘Stop touching it!’ Ara hissed.

Nona found her fingers at the headdress again. After the disaster at the Shade stores wearing a wimple was likely to be as close as she ever got to being a nun.

Ahead the friary loured over its neighbours, an ugly brick-shaped building, built of huge sandstone blocks cut from the Rock of Faith. Travelling brothers from all of the empire’s monasteries were afforded accommodation within the friary walls when their duties brought them to the capital. Generally those duties would be delivering illuminated manuscripts to patrons, or educating the children of the Sis, but at such troubled times Red Brothers, along with their Grey and Mystic counterparts, might well outnumber their Holy cousins on the friary guest list.

‘Wait here,’ Nona told them.

‘Yes, mistress.’ Next to Ruli, Jula stifled a giggle. The enormity of the crime she was about to take part in seemed to have left her slightly hysterical. Nona would make sure they were all deep in their serenity trances before they approached the records hall.

The street door stood a good ten feet tall, oak weathered to a pale grey and studded with rusty diamond-headed bolts. The monk who opened it looked older and more weathered.

‘Yes … sister?’ The frown beneath white eyebrows suggested that in a long life of thinking that nuns seemed to get younger every year he’d yet to see one this young.

‘I need to speak with Brother Markus.’

A pause while he looked her up and down. Even from the height of the street step he had to crane his neck to meet her eyes. On finding them wholly black his brows lifted. ‘Hmmm.’ He turned away and closed the door. His ‘Wait here’ reached her through the thickness of the wood.

Nona huddled in the doorway eyeing the street. If Jula’s reports were to be taken seriously the Scithrowl hordes could be pouring past this door within days. Nona found it hard to believe. The emperor had legions at his disposal, the brothers and sisters of the Red, all the might of the Academy. Fortresses and castles dominated the Corridor from the Grampains to the Marn. The empire had endured for close on a thousand years and withstood half a hundred wars.

‘I thought you were supposed to be hard to sneak up on.’ Markus’s voice startled Nona from her pondering. Already the ancient was closing the door behind him lest the mere scent of a nun corrupt the brothers within. For an instant Nona pictured the old brother in an embrace with Abbess Wheel. They would probably get on. ‘Something funny?’ Markus asked.

‘Ah, no. Actually rather the opposite.’ Nona led him out into the street, stepping over a foetid puddle. ‘We need to do it today.’

‘Today?’

‘Today.’ She glanced back.

A moment of worry crossed Markus’s face but he pushed it aside and made a smile so warm it brought colour to Nona’s cheeks. ‘Today it is then. It’s not as if I need to prepare anything.’

A few more strides brought them to Ara, Ruli and Jula, the latter two staring at Markus with wide-eyed fascination while his gaze lingered on Ara’s golden beauty, not for long but for rather longer than it took Nona to grow irritated.

‘Novices.’ A large smile and a small bow.

Nona felt a pulse of the marjal empathy that Markus worked so well, at a low enough level to be an unconscious thing. She remembered how he had been in the cage before his talent flowered. A rather awkward, argumentative boy. She supposed that they had both changed beyond recognition.

‘Won’t you be missed?’ Markus asked. The sun had set and in the broad streets of the merchants’ quarter stray leaves spiralled here and there in the wind’s swirl.

‘No.’ Nona was less confident than she sounded. Ghena and Ketti had been primed with cover stories about the four of them going to bed early. They had also been encouraged to exercise all the skills Sister Apple had tried to impart to them in creating the illusion that the missing novices’ beds were occupied. Ruli and Nona had long ago fabricated fake heads from dried gourds onto which they had glued their own hair, saved from past punishment shavings. But there remained the distinct possibility that Sister Rose might come up to check on Nona after her unauthorized departure from the sanatorium, or that Kettle might drop by seeking clues to the day’s theft, or that Rock might burst in on one of the not infrequent chastity patrols ordered by Abbess Wheel. Nona hoped that the looming crisis would distract the nuns from the doings of novices and focus them on matters of more existential importance.

The houses grew larger, older, and somewhat more shabby as they approached the old cathedral. The building had lost its status over a hundred years before at the time the Church constructed the spectacular Sacred Blood, whose spires threatened to overtop even the Ark. The old cathedral had been given over to various purposes, including housing former priests too decrepit to care for themselves, the management and payment of Church staff across the empire, and, crucially, the storage of documents deemed too important to destroy but for which regular access was not necessary.