stared at Zole, at the black hair laid flat against her blunt skull, the stone-dark eyes, the broad cheekbones, the reddish hue of her skin as if the burn of the ice-wind had never left it, and the short, hard line of her mouth. She tried to see through the ice-triber to the Path, past her wide shoulders, past the height and strength of her. Time seemed both to race and to crawl in exercises like this. It always felt as if she had been at it an age, and when she stopped, Nona often discovered that the hours between one bell and the next had been devoured and yet with hindsight her efforts felt like just the work of minutes.
At first the Path showed as a single line, half-imagined, dividing Zole’s imperfect symmetry. In the next instant Nona saw it as Sister Pan had shown it, flexing at right angles to the world. A single, bright Path. The only difference being that where Sister Pan’s had been haloed by the diffuse white infinity of threads straying from the Path, each following its own convolutions before ending or returning to join the whole, Nona saw just the Path and nothing else.
‘I see her threads,’ Zole said.
‘Good work, novice. Try to follow one back to where it left the Path.’ Sister Pan called from across the room where she was working with Joeli on some more advanced matter. ‘Keep at it, Nona: there is still a little while before it’s time to return.’
Nona felt the familiar sense of surprise – a nearly whole class spent and nothing to show for it. She gritted her teeth and stared harder. The Path twisted across her vision, threadless. A bead of sweat rolled down her neck, the muscles of her jaw twitched and bunched. Her vision blurred. Nothing.
Help me! Nona never called on Keot but she needed this.
Helping is not in my nature.
Nona stared at Zole, willing her threads to appear. Abbess Glass had had Sister Pan try thread-work to hunt down Yisht and the shipheart of course, and without success, but Nona had been there, in Hessa’s head, watched her as the shipheart’s power filled her and sharpened her talents into something keen enough to dissect reality. They had been thread-bound. There had been an unbreakable connection. Something of it could have survived. Must have survived. For more than two years Nona had waited to be taught these arts. Years spent waiting for a chance to use them to avenge Hessa. And now … nothing. She hadn’t the skill!
‘Well, novice?’ Sister Pan touched Nona’s shoulder. ‘Have you been successful?’
Nona tore her stare away from Zole, her eyes hot and dry, too wide open yet unwilling to close. She found herself sweat-soaked and aching in every limb.
‘She doesn’t have any!’ Behind Sister Pan Joeli’s laughter tinkled like silver coins.
Sister Pan shook her head. ‘Of course she does. Every living thing, every dead thing, and every thing that has never lived is bound by threads. Stone, bone, tree, and thee.’ She pushed Nona aside and took her place. ‘Allow me to …’ She paused, frowned, and squinted. Then blinked. ‘That is quite remarkable. More remarkable, to me, than the fact that four bloods run in your veins, Zole.’
Zole glowered at the old nun.
‘She really doesn’t have any threads?’ Nona asked, feeling vindicated.
‘Of course she has threads!’ Sister Pan snapped. ‘Were you not listening to me?’ She frowned again. ‘But only the deepest and most fundamental, those hardest to find. Where there should be a myriad blazing around her, there are just a few, and buried deep in the stuff of the world. I have never seen the like.’
As if it had been holding its tongue and waiting for Sister Pan to pause Bray tolled, the sound of the bell reaching them faintly through the stones.
‘Come.’ Sister Pan waved for them to follow. ‘I will consider this later.’ And she began to walk the path that would take a nun through walls.
‘Hurry up!’ Jula beckoned at them from down the rock passage, a black shape behind her lantern.
‘Breathe out. I’ll pull.’ Nona grabbed Darla’s wrist and heaved as the girl exhaled. Behind Darla the outside world intruded as a line of brightness, glimpsed through the cliff-face.
Darla lurched forward, gasping for air, free of the crevice. Further down the passage Ruli gave a brief round of sarcastic applause. ‘I still have that grease if we need it!’
‘I’ll give her grease,’ Darla growled, and followed as Nona hurried to catch the others. The Seren Way was not as well travelled as the Vinery Stair and the chances of discovery were small, but the longer it took Darla to squeeze through into the caverns the greater that chance grew.
Nobody had ever told the novices that they weren’t to explore the caves and passages that riddled the plateau but Nona always had the strong impression that this was because they hadn’t asked, and also because all the entrances known to the nuns were barred and gated, the locks inscribed with sigils to defeat any form of picking. When Jula had first discovered the caves a year earlier Nona had moved their weekly meeting underground where the chances of detection shrank to zero. Nominally the objective of the group was to recover the shipheart but for Nona it had always been about killing Yisht.
‘Hold up!’ Nona and Darla closed the last few yards on the others. Jula and Ara carried the only two lanterns and the footing was treacherous. ‘If we break our ankles back here it’s you lot who’ll have to carry us out!’
‘We’ll just leave you here and say you ran away with city boys.’ Ketti, the last of their number, grinned and made kiss-mouths. The hunska girl was just a few inches shorter than Darla now, though thin as a rail. She talked about city boys a lot and it was a wonder to Nona that she preferred to spend her seven-day exploring the darkness beneath the Rock of Faith rather than going into Verity to giggle at the opposite sex across Thaybur Square.
‘Come on!’ Ara led off, eager to reach new ground.
At the first fork, where a smaller passage led steeply down, Ketti took her block of chalk and reinforced the letter on the wall that indicated the path to take. The moisture tended to blur the marks. They moved on in single file, Darla at the rear, demonstrating her impressive range of oaths as she repeatedly grazed her head on the rock above.
Nona called a halt at Round Cave a hundred yards from the entrance. Darla had come up with the name, and whilst unimaginative it was at least accurate.
‘Who’s got something to report?’ Nona looked to Ruli first. Ruli was on gossip duty, gathering any snippet of information that leaked into the convent through its connections with the outside world. Ruli had a talent for both creating and gathering gossip.
‘I do! I really do!’ Jula stepped forward, half raising her hand before remembering that she wasn’t in class. ‘I was reading the appendices in Levinin’s older works. Everyone always quotes from the Seven Histories of Marn but—’
‘What did you find?’ Darla had even less patience for Jula’s booklore than the others.
‘More about shiphearts in one page than I’ve discovered in all the books I’ve searched through since we started looking!’ Jula grinned. ‘According to Levinin there were four shiphearts within the empire’s boundaries: the one at Sweet Mercy which is most
