Red Sister

‘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.’

Even so, Nona wriggled on for another yard. No more smoke-blackened walls here. She started to inch back, but paused and sniffed. Her own lantern gave off the acrid tarry smoke of burning rock-oil, but a sweeter scent hung on the air, just the faintest memory of it. Old smoke, but not the cheap stuff novices burned: Nona had smelled such smoke in the entrance hall of the abbess’s house, and in Heart Hall when the high priest sat in judgement.

She pressed forward, gripped on both sides now, twisting where the crack in the stone was too narrow for her hips. At one point the rock’s jaws gripped her head and she could neither advance nor retreat. Fear proved to be sufficient lubricant and she escaped a moment later. Her courage gave up before the fissure started to widen again but by that point forward had become the only option and, weeping in terror, cursing herself for her stupidity, Nona inched forward.

Finally the walls released her and she stumbled into a wider space. Another tunnel. Above her a shaft opened in the tunnel’s ceiling. It looked neither hand-hewn nor natural, having instead a strangely ‘melted’ character, the walls being smooth and uneven. Debris covered the tunnel floor, rubble from the shaft above, in places fractured, in others smooth, in others bearing pick-marks. Nona could make little sense of it.

The shaft was too high above her to reach, a rockfall blocked the tunnel to the left, and Nona’s nerves weren’t yet ready to attempt the return, so the passage to the right remained the only option.

She pressed on, scraped and dirty, passing smaller fissures, and once a curtained waterfall where freezing water from the plateau above leaked down. A moment of panic seized her as she imagined the vast weight of the Glasswater somewhere close by. How thin were the walls that held that reservoir in place? What would it take to set those waters flooding along these ancient courses to drown her in the dark?

‘Apple never came this way. Not for stores.’ The sound of Nona’s own voice convinced her and she started to edge back.

That was when she heard it. Just once, and distant. The sound of metal on stone. She held her breath and waited, ears straining. Nothing. She strove for deeper clarity, wrapping her mind in the mantra Sister Pan had taught her. A single flame in the dark. A single note hanging in an empty place. A single sparkle upon a wind-rippled lake. Still nothing … no, nothing, except the faintest voice of the pouring water several twists and many yards back along her path. The sound came again. Metal on rock.