the view of the interior, glimpsed between sleek columns of black marble, Nona understood the space to be both singular and vast, lit by scores of long and narrow windows radiating from the dome’s apex, with a statue gleaming at the centre, tiny in such a space but far bigger than a man.
The pull that Nona had felt that first night in the nuns’ cells was here too. Not so strong as it had been when she stood just yards from the black door that entered the rear of the dome … but there even so. The huge and echoing space, the sunlight shafting in through many windows, the golden statue, they were grand things, impressive, perhaps even holy, but they were not the source. Something filled that dome, almost to bursting, but its centre lay deeper …
‘Nona!’ Clera at the open side door, beckoning. ‘Stop dawdling!’
Nona hurried on into a small classroom dimly lit by three of the high porthole windows that formed a ring perforating the wall of the great dome.
‘Late to class but never late to dinner!’ Sister Wheel’s fingernails-on-slate voice reached a surprising volume as she pointed Nona and Clera out in the doorway.
This seemed a harsh judgement to Nona, who had attended just one convent dinner so far.
The sister stood at the far end of the classroom in one of the circles of light cast by the windows, the white funnel of her headdress all aglow and the wisps of grey hair that escaped it seeming to float about her face. ‘Come along! The road to damnation is paved with tardy steps!’
Nona hurried to an empty desk near the door, head down, puzzling over how a road might be paved with steps. Clera took the next desk along, flashing a grin towards her. Fishing in her habit, she pulled out a tightly rolled scroll of parchment, a slate, a piece of chalk, a small and stoppered pot, and a quill. This latter gave the impression that the bird from which it was taken had died of some wasting disease, falling from its perch into a dirty puddle before being run over by several carts and finally thoroughly chewed by a hungry cat.
The novices at the other desks already had their scrolls unrolled before them, some dipping their quills into inkpots. Arabella’s quill caught the light, becoming something ethereal. A perfect swan’s feather, pristine and glistening.
‘We will continue with the eighteenth part of the catechism. Later I will be examining you on the names of the saints, the dates of their name-days, and the services and traditions particular to each— New girl! Get your parchment and quill out! Or do you not consider my remarks worthy of record?’
‘No …’ Laughter on all sides, Arabella’s a musical peal. ‘I mean yes, Sister Wheel.’
‘Sister Wheel? There’s no Sister Wheel in this class, girl. You will address me as Mistress Spirit. Now get your scroll out!’
‘But— I don’t …’ Nona patted her habit as if the items she required might somehow have been stowed in one of the interior pockets without her knowledge.
‘Quickly!’ Sister Wheel slapped an iron hand on Jula’s desk in the front row and began to advance on Nona, weaving her path between the desks, the girls head-down as she passed.
Nona felt a familiar anger starting to boil deep down where her thinking never ventured. Even if she had been given such things as quill and parchment she had never held either in her life and could no more make the required marks with one upon the other than she could fly.
‘Well?’ Sister Wheel, now looming above Nona, her pale and watery eyes meeting Nona’s stare.
Nona stood up, sharply.
‘Novice Nona’s entry to the convent was … non-standard.’ Abbess Glass had entered without being noticed and now settled a hand on Nona’s shoulder, returning her to her seat. ‘This precluded the usual correspondence regarding the supplies an entrant is expected to bring with them, Mistress Spirit.’ The abbess laid a grey-plumed quill and fat scroll of parchment on the desk. ‘Nona will, however, be a listening pupil rather than a writing one until such time as Sister Kettle pronounces her sufficiently advanced in her extra-curricular studies. She will—’
Sister Wheel’s pale face reddened. ‘I know exactly what kinds of extra-curricular activity Sister Kettle gets up to, and with whom, and I—’
‘Sister Kettle will improve Nona’s reading and writing to the standard required in Red Class.’ The abbess fixed Sister Wheel with a stare. ‘The matter is now closed.’
Sister Wheel scowled and stumped off towards the head of the class.
Abbess Glass rolled out the top portion of Nona’s scroll and produced an inkpot to hold it in place. She dipped the quill and in what seemed one flowing motion left a beautiful confusion of lines upon the parchment, black and glistening, coiling like a vine. ‘Your name,’ she said. She dipped again, and beneath it placed three very different lines, interlocked squiggles, careless where the name had been precise. The abbess produced a blotter and patted the design. ‘And there is you.’
Nona stared at the pattern, furrowing her brow.
‘And since I am here,’ the abbess continued, ‘I shall address the novices.’ She followed Sister Wheel, smiling at the girls to either side. ‘Some here may not yet have heard my welcome to the faith – certainly Arabella and Nona will not have – and it will do no harm to refresh those that have.’
Nona reached out a finger to trace the lines of her name, and as she did so the larger pattern beneath her name suddenly made sense … her face, caught in three black squiggles. A face that had last stared at her from a mirror on Raymel Tacsis’s wall. She blinked and stifled a laugh, wondering how she could ever not have seen what the lines meant. Perhaps writing would reveal its meaning to her in the same manner one day.
Abbess Glass reached the front and shooed Sister Wheel aside to take centre stage. ‘Sister Wheel teaches the important details of our veneration of the Ancestor. The mechanics of the thing, if you like. The hows and the whens. She does it well and we thank her for it. It falls to me though to remind us all of the whys.
‘Nona, for example, was a follower of the Hope before she came to us, and whilst the Hope is a sanctioned heresy that falls within the framework of the Ancestor we— Yes, Nona?’
Nona had raised her hand like the bigs did when they wanted to ask a question in Nana Even’s seven-day class in the village. Few of them ever did actually ask because the answer was generally: because I say so. ‘My mother went to the Hope church in White Lake but I never said the words. One star is white and the others red … why should I kneel to it?’ That’s what her father had said. ‘In my village they pray to the gods who are many and have no names.’ The novices tittered as if this were funnier than their dome and golden statue.
Abbess Glass pursed her lips. ‘Such practices are unusual in Verity, Nona. In the wild lands to the east and across the border into Scithrowl there are remnants of many faiths and the emperor is tolerant of them, at a distance, but the Ancestor—’
‘My father hunted on the ice and even in the tunnels that go beneath.’ Nona remembered almost nothing of her father save the stories he told. None of those tales had stuck with her quite so strongly as the ones that told of the tunnels. River-carved, they ran beneath the ice, drained when the waters found some better path or froze at source. In those stories her father and his clan had hunted beasts from every tale she’d ever heard. But the best of his stories told of the Missing, those who were not men and who lived on Abeth before the four tribes descended
