Читать книгу Holy Sister - Mark Lawrence - Страница 15

Total darkness. An enduring silence wrapped Path Tower’s Third Room.

‘Dead dog’s bollocks!’ Nona broke the silence, banging her shin into something hard. The curse was one of Regol’s favourites, though he only used it when he thought she wasn’t there. One day Nona hoped to delight Clera with it.

She bent to rub her leg then reached out to examine the obstacle. A barrel-lidded casket. She wasn’t sure if she’d seen it in the moment before the light died or imagined it after. Her fingers explored the metal banding and found a heavy lock. Would there be more troublesome protections? Thread-traps? Sigil marks? Or did Sister Pan consider the fact that it rested in the third chamber of Path Tower sufficient defence?

Nona sat on the cold stone floor. She could put a foot to the Path and summon light but how that might end, so soon after the strange paths she had just pursued, Nona didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.

The lock was a big piece of cold iron. Nona defocused her sight to bring the thread-scape into view. The lock blazed with them. Threads for the metal itself, leading back through the journey from the locksmith’s, through the workshop, splitting through the smithies where various parts were beaten into shape, re-joining in the white heat of the forge, tracking back along rivers to the distant quarry that the ore had been dug from. All of them tangled with the lives of those who laboured to make the lock, and tangled with the old song of the earth where the iron’s constituents had lain for years uncounted.

A sudden light lanced through it all, washing out the detail and causing Nona to shield her eyes.

‘Thought you might appreciate a lantern,’ Ara said in a shaky voice. She held it up and glanced back at the wall she had come through. ‘Well, that was … unnerving.’ She drew a deep, centring breath and gazed around at the sigil-covered walls in appreciation. ‘These are more complex than in the other rooms. There are sentences written here …’

‘How did you get in?’ Nona demanded as she stood.

‘The same way you did, I expect.’ Ara blinked.

Nona doubted that very much. ‘Tell me, exactly.’

‘Well. I went up and down a few times, and I noticed you had vanished. I found a spot where I thought there might be a door and tried everything I knew to open it. It didn’t seem to work but when I got back down to the portrait room it was different … there was a new picture there that … Well, anyway, I didn’t stop to examine it. I just turned straight round and ran back up the stairs. And all along the stairwell were doorways into scenes from my life, as if I could just step back into them. Passing them by was hard. I mean really hard. And I think if I had hesitated they might have just sucked me through. But I didn’t stop. And halfway up was an archway showing you in front of that box. I stepped through and here I am.’ She smiled. ‘Same for you?’

‘My way was a bit more complicated.’ Nona shrugged. ‘The book’s in here if it’s anywhere.’ She nudged the casket with her foot.

‘And we really want to steal? From Sister Pan?’ Ara asked.

‘None of us wants to. I can’t see another way.’ Nona knelt before the casket again and checked it over. No sigil marks. She brought the lock’s threads back into view, hunting for traps or alarms.

‘Won’t she notice it’s gone?’ Ara asked.

‘What’s she going to say? “Which one of you took the forbidden book I wasn’t allowed to have on pain of banishment?”’ Nona identified the threads that would undo the mechanism’s riddle. Three of them. The key must be a complex piece of ironwork. ‘Besides, how often do you think she looks at it? It might be a year before she notices it’s gone. It might be ten years!’

‘So we steal a book to help us steal a different book, which also might not exist.’ Ara sat down, her eyes taking on that ‘witchy’ look as she joined the hunt for any protective thread-work on the casket.

‘It exists,’ Nona said. ‘Abbess Glass wouldn’t have lied to me.’

‘That woman lied whenever it suited her, Nona. There was nothing personal in it.’ Ara’s fingers twitched as she sorted threads, plucking one, examining it, setting it aside for the next. ‘Besides, she was very ill, she could have been confused. She kept calling me Darla the last time I was allowed to visit her.’

‘Jula knew about the book already. She tried to tell me about it years before,’ Nona said.

‘It still doesn’t make sense to me. Sherzal was going to take the Ark and use four shiphearts to control the moon. She didn’t need a book.’

‘The four ingredients of yellow cake are butter, flour, eggs, and sugar. If I gave you those four necessary things you still couldn’t make a cake that Sister Spoon wouldn’t laugh at.’

‘Neither could you.’ Ara took on the nasal tones of Sister Spoon. Ruli was the better mimic but Spoon was easy to do. ‘Novice Nona, that is an excellent cake, perhaps the best yellow cake I have ever seen …’

‘… if the goal in making such a cake were to produce something suitable for hand-to-hand combat,’ Nona continued, holding her nose. ‘However, if I were to wish to eat a cake rather than bludgeon someone to death with it—’

‘Then I would do better to scrape something together from the convent pigsties,’ Ara finished.

‘Not the point.’ Nona tried to look serious. ‘Sherzal wanted the Ark, the palace, the throne. The rest she was just hoping would sort itself out. The Ark was something she needed to get Adoma as an ally. The shiphearts are the necessary ingredients. What we’re after is the cookbook.’

‘It looks clean to me.’ Ara ran her hands over the casket. ‘Try the lock.’

Nona took hold of the three key threads. She didn’t need her hands but it helped her focus. Any lock is a riddle. The threads made that riddle simple, or at least less difficult, and allowed the answer to become clear through suitable manipulation. It took Nona seven tries. Ara had just opened her mouth, her lips shaping the ‘l’ of ‘let me try’ when the required click sounded.

It wasn’t until she opened the lid and gazed upon the contents that Nona first felt guilty. Seeing the bundled letters, a carefully folded scarf of Hrenamon silk covered with a child’s embroidery, the small figures of a horse and a baby carved from dark pearwood, a dozen other personal effects, Nona knew herself for an intruder of the worst kind, trampling a garden of memories.

‘It must be at the bottom …’ Nona could see no sign of a book.

‘We should go.’ Everything Nona had just felt resonated in Ara’s voice.

‘We have to do this.’

‘It’s nonsense anyway.’ Ara stood up to go. ‘If the moon’s secrets were written down in a book they would have been used at the time it was written. Or at least a hundred years later Emperor Charlc wouldn’t have been forbidding the subject and hiding all the books in a vault! He would have used the secret himself. He wouldn’t have left it to two novices in his grandson’s reign!’

Nona looked up at her friend. She wished they could go. She wished they could just shut the box and walk away. ‘If I swore to you that the Ancestor had told me the true alchemy was written in a book … that all we had to do was follow the recipe and base metals would transmute to gold before us … would we be rich?’

‘Well, yes. We’d take the book and—’

‘Which book?’

‘You just said the secret was written in a book. Wait, doesn’t the Ancestor tell you the title?’

‘Just that it’s in a book on alchemy.’

‘Well, no then, we’d be poor because there are a thousand books and scrolls promising the true alchemy.’

‘And there are a thousand books promising all the secrets of the moon. But Abbess Glass, who forgot more things than you or I will ever know, and Jula, who would rather read the dustiest book than eat, and who is sharper than any Mistress Academia I’ve met, both said that this book was different. Jula said it might have something real to say. Abbess Glass promised that it did.’ Nona reached in with infinite care and began to remove items from the casket, committing their positions to memory. ‘And if Abbess Glass said it, sick or not, that’s good enough for me.’

Ara frowned as she had frowned so often over these past weeks. ‘So, if the book in the forbidden library is really what the abbess said it was, how do we use it? How do we prove it? We don’t have four shiphearts. Nobody does! We don’t have access to the Ark. We don’t have anyone to tell who would believe us, Wheel least of all. It seemed like a bad plan when we were just talking about it. Now that we’re actually doing it …’

Nona reached for the bundled letters with a sigh. Abbess Glass had taught her many things. She had taught Nona that you can often find an angle where any right looks like a wrong, and any wrong a right. She taught her the song of the Ancestor, the power of the long game, and the need for determination. Above all Abbess Glass had taught Nona the value of lies. The one thing she had never managed to teach her was not to feel bad for telling them.

‘It’s the right thing to do. The key to everything. I need you to have faith in this, Ara. I need you make the others believe too. We’re going to be taking holy orders soon so we should be good at believing, no?’

‘In the Ancestor, surely, not in any old—’

‘This comes from the highest authority I know.’

Ara looked up suddenly, incredulous, eyes bright. ‘You’ve had a vision? From the Ancestor?’ Awe and need mingled in her voice.

Nona bowed her head. ‘I have.’

Nona found three books at the very bottom of the casket, wrapped together in a length of black velvet. Aquinas’s Book of Lost Cities was the smallest of the three, looking less old and less impressive than The Mystic’s Path or The Lives of Lestal Crow. It looked more like a travel journal than some weighty tome worthy of forbidding. Nona took the leather-bound volume and hid it in an inner pocket of her habit before returning the other two to their wrapping and starting to replace Sister Pan’s other treasures.

A moment of panic came as she reached for the figurine of the baby and discovered on the floor behind it an ancient daisy, dried and pressed, that must have fallen from between the pages of one of the books. She carefully extracted everything, unwrapped the books, and placed the flower behind the cover of The Lives of Lestal Crow, hoping she had guessed correctly.

At last, sweating lightly, Nona closed the lid. ‘Done.’

‘Lock it.’ Ara nodded towards the keyhole.

‘Right.’ Nona found and manipulated the necessary threads. An easier task this time.

Ara went to the wall and set her hands on it. ‘Now we find that getting in was the easy part.’ Her smile was a nervous one.

‘I’ll follow you,’ Nona said. ‘You’re better at it than me.’

‘But you got in first!’ Ara pushed her lips into a pout.

‘You wouldn’t want to go back my way. Trust me.’

Nona stumbled out onto the Path Tower stairway, catching hold of Ara’s shoulders to keep from falling.

‘At last!’ Jula hurried down towards them. ‘I thought you’d died in there! Got stuck in the wall or something!’

‘Relax.’ Ara smiled, holding up the lantern. ‘We got it.’

‘We have to go!’ Jula pushed past them. ‘Bray’s about to sound sixth bell. There’ll be little Red Classers lining up outside any minute.’

‘Sixth bell?’ Nona shook her head. ‘I didn’t think we were that long!’

‘Well, you were!’ Jula all but stamped her foot. ‘Come on.’ And she set off.

‘I’m surprised Pan’s not here already if it’s so close to fourth,’ Ara said, grinning her disbelief.

‘She is.’ Jula didn’t stop, just hissed back up at them around the stairs’ twist.

That got both novices moving. They caught Jula as she hurried out into the portrait chamber.

‘She’s here?’

‘I was on the stairs when she started up them! I had to go up into the classroom, hide behind the trapdoor lid, and slip out while she was arranging the chairs. It’s a miracle she didn’t see me!’ Jula looked pale.

Ara slapped her on the back. ‘The Poisoner will make a Grey Sister of you yet!’

‘Then I hung around on the stairs again, expecting her next class any minute and wondering how long to leave it before declaring you both lost and confessing everything.’ Jula led them to the north door, opened it with caution, then threw it wide. The three of them spilled out into the day.

After the unreality of the past hour, strange and emotional treks through memory, walking through walls, stealing from Sister Pan in a cause that was larger than any of them … it came as a surprise to find themselves in the cold light of the same day and subject to the same old timetable that had ruled their lives for so many years.

The friends stood a moment, shivering and blinking in the lee of the tower.