and without noise the lower part of the white surface began to retreat. Nona saw that it was not one piece as she had imagined but comprised many bladed parts that shuffled beneath each other like the feathers of a folding wing. In consequence the cord-thin strip of colour girdling the globe widened, first to a finger’s width, then wider and wider still until Nona’s whole hand couldn’t cover it. The pattern of jewel-enamelled blues and greens and browns fascinated her eye.
‘What—’
‘That’s the world fifty thousand years ago, long before the tribes even came.’ Clera rotated the halves back slowly and the ice advanced. ‘All the people that lived across all these lands, pushed back.’ She returned the ice sheets to their original position. ‘Pushed into this tiny corridor as the sun got old and weak.’
‘How could they fit?’ Nona imagined them running before the ice.
Clera shrugged. ‘Mistress Blade says people need room. You can squash them in only so far, then the bleeding starts, and when it’s done … there’s just about enough room again.’
‘It’s good to see that some of your lessons stick, Novice Clera.’
Both girls turned to see the doorway behind them now almost entirely full of Sister Rule, the convent’s Mistress Academia, a woman of considerable height and still more considerable girth, all wrapped in the dark grey of a nun’s habit. Sister Rule pushed on into the classroom, the rest of Red Class filing in behind her, diverging towards their allotted desks. Arabella already had three girls pressed around her and they took seats beside each other, all of them smirking behind their hands.
‘Explain yourselves, novices.’ The nun fixed them with dark and beady eyes.
‘We were …’ Clera searched for an explanation … and could find nothing better than the truth, which she settled on with a sigh of defeat. ‘Nona was very hungry!’
A scatter of laughter went up at that, cut off sharply as Sister Rule’s yardstick cracked across a desktop. She reached the table, looming over both girls. ‘Well, Nona does appear to need some feeding up. Do not be late to my class again, Nona. Today you missed a quick observation of the layered structure of this plateau where the Glasswater sinkhole exposes it. Next time you could miss considerably more than that – dinner included.’
Clera slipped away to her desk near the door. Nona stayed by the table. She looked up at Sister Rule’s face, which was at once both fleshy and severe, then let her eyes slip to the globe again.
‘You can take either of those two desks at the back, Nona.’ Mistress Academia laid her yardstick against her table and let out a sigh. ‘I do hope you’re not going to slow us down too much, child. The abbess casts her nets very wide sometimes …’
Nona dropped her gaze to the floor and took a step in the direction the nun had waved at. A mixture of anger and defiance boiled behind her eyes but stronger than that, more than that, was the desire to know. Besides, she was too full to be properly angry.
‘I … don’t know what geography is.’
Sister Rule’s yardstick killed the laughter before it started. ‘Good. You’re clever enough to ask questions. That’s better than many I’ve had through these doors.’ She took her seat behind the desk, straightened her habit, then looked up. ‘Geography is like history. History is the story of mankind since we first started to record it. The story and the understanding of that story. Geography is the history of the world beneath our feet. The mountains and the ice, rivers, oceans, land, all of it recorded in the very rocks themselves for those with the wit to read what’s set there. Consider this slab of rock our convent rests upon, for example. The history of this plateau is written in the limestone layers that can be seen in the sinkhole two hundred yards west of this tower.’ She sent Nona on towards her desk with a gentle poke of her stick. ‘Our history is wide and we are narrow, so perhaps its lessons no longer fit. Cut your cloth to your measure, some say. But the history of the land has lessons more important than those of kings and dynasties. The history of the ice is written there. The tale of our dying sun, etched into rock and glacier. These are the lessons we all live by. And when the moon fails we will die by them too.’
Nona resolved to make it to Blade on time. Over lunch in the refectory Clera explained the meaning of the various bells that sounded throughout the day.
‘There are three bells. That’s the iron bell, Ferra, which just rang. It’s got a hollow sound and dies off quickly. That’s for the sisters, to tell them about prayers mainly. It hangs in the little belfry up on the Dome of the Ancestor. The one that looks like a nipple.’
‘Clera!’ Jula scolded. She had taken the chair on Nona’s other side and now turned to join the conversation. ‘Bray is the brass bell that hangs in the Academia, at the top of the tower. It sounds the hours, and that’s what you have to listen to for class and meals.’
‘And lights out and getting up.’ Clera cut back in. ‘Bray has a deep voice that hangs.’ She made her own deep and sonorous, a singer’s voice, Nona thought. ‘Afternoon class is sixth bell, lunch is fifth, dinner is seventh.’
‘Blade this afternoon.’ Jula rolled her eyes. ‘I hate Blade.’
‘Holies always do.’ Clera smirked.
Nona considered Jula for a moment. The girl had a studious look about her, slender despite more than a year eating at the convent table. She had mousey hair, cut at neck length. Nothing about her suggested that hunska or gerant blood might show in years to come. Almost nobody showed up quantal or marjal, however good the signs, so Jula would almost certainly be a Holy Sister. Nona knew very little about the Church of the Ancestor but the idea of a life spent in prayer and contemplation held no appeal at all. If the life in question didn’t also include being well fed and having a warm safe place to live then Nona might have felt sorry for the girl.
‘After Blade you’ll think you’ve met the hardest mistress,’ Clera said. ‘But Mistress Shade makes her seem gentle. Everyone calls her the Poisoner or Mistress Poison because she always has us grinding up stuff for one poison or another. She’s supposed to teach us stealth, disguise, and climbing and traps … but it’s always poison. Anyway, don’t ever call her Mistress Poison.’ Clera shuddered.
Jula nodded, looking grim. She picked up her fork and got it halfway to her mouth before remembering the bells. ‘Bitel is the third bell. The steel bell.’ She returned the fork to her plate, perhaps still thinking of poisons. ‘That’s almost always bad news, and you won’t confuse it for the others – it’s sharp and very loud. The abbess will ring Bitel if there’s a fire, or an intruder, or something like that. Hope you never hear it. But if you do and if nobody tells you different, go to the abbess’s front door and wait.’
‘I heard …’ The girl across the table spoke up, loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘I heard the abbess herself brought you up from Verity.’ The rest of the class had been focused on Arabella who had been telling them some story about the emperor’s court. Nona had only caught the odd word and had imagined it a fairy tale of the sort told about princesses around the hearth in her village … but then she had remembered Clera calling Arabella royalty and it struck her that the fairy story might actually be true.
‘I heard Abbess Glass brought you up the Seren Way in the middle of the night.’ The speaker was the one Clera had
