Emperor Crucical’s two sisters were known. Sherzal was said to be the worst of them, a plotter that the emperor had had to banish almost to the Scithrowl border before he felt safe behind his walls.
Clera interrupted Nona’s questions by hurrying out of the office, a grin on her face, a large iron key swinging from her hand. Behind her the bulky form of Sister Rose waddled to the door, her cone-like headdress just like Sister Wheel’s. ‘Careful on the line, novices. I mean it, Ketti! Make sure the new girls don’t end up on my doorstep this afternoon …’
Clera led the race back to Blade Hall and hurried them on across the training floor, along the corridor beneath the stands and straight on to the door at the end.
‘Shouldn’t we change?’ Ruli, turning left towards the changing room.
‘We need balance sticks …’ Kariss, panting as she caught them up and turning right towards the stores.
‘Pah. Sticks are for babies, and hunska balance better in their common habits.’ Clera flapped her sleeves like wings. She pushed on through into a corridor too dark to yield any detail.
Nona, Ketti, and Ghena followed, Nona at the rear, stumbling blind up a tight wooden stairway. Somewhere far above a door opened and light reached down towards her. She kept climbing.
‘Careful up here,’ Ketti warned. ‘There’s not much space on the platform.’
Nona edged out through the door behind the older girl, her initial questions immediately replaced by new ones. They stood on a platform just below the ceiling of a huge room lit by many small square windows in the furthest wall. Apart from great nets strung between posts in each corner and suspended a couple of yards above a sand-covered floor the room was almost completely empty. A great pendulum hung on the wall to the left, thirty yards long, nearly the height of the room, a heavy brass bob on the end of a long thin iron rod. Above it a round dial, as wide across as Nona could stretch her arms and marked around the edge with evenly spaced graduations. Running in a convoluted path from the platform where the girls stood to a door at ground level on the opposite side was a pipe of the sort that carried the hot oil through the nuns’ cells and bathhouse. It rose, fell, twisted, turned, and at one point made a corkscrew with three turns.
‘What is it?’ Nona found herself the only one still standing. The others sat on the edge of the platform, removing their shoes, their valuables in linen bags against the back wall. Ketti had hers off already, legs dangling over the drop.
‘The line,’ Clera said. ‘Blade-path.’ She pulled a small earthenware tub from her habit and started to dab the dark substance in it onto the soles of her feet. ‘This is—’
‘Pine resin.’ Nona could smell it.
‘I use tar,’ Ketti said. ‘Better grip.’
‘Pine resin’s cheaper.’ Clera applied it with a miser’s care.
‘The blade-path?’ Nona asked.
‘It’s the closest a hunska can get to the Path. Closest anyone who’s not a quantal can get. They say it helps the body teach the mind – but really it’s just to give us humble mortals something to do, and so we appreciate how hard it is for the poor witches sitting back there in Path with legs crossed and eyes closed.’
‘You walk down it,’ Ghena said in a rare helpful moment. ‘The pendulum counts how long you take.’ She pointed to a lever in the wall behind her. ‘That starts it and there’s one down there by the door that stops it.’
‘I’ll show you,’ Clera said.
But Ketti had already shuffled to the start, careful not to make the platform sticky, and stood just before the start of the narrow pipe. ‘Too slow!’ And she stepped out with infinite care, arms spread.
To Nona’s horror she saw that the cables reaching down from the roof to eye-rings on the pipe weren’t there to help steady the structure – they were its only support and the moment Ketti settled her weight on it the whole edifice began to sway, even rotating about joints at half a dozen spots along its length.
Ghena pulled the lever on the wall to release the great pendulum. It swung, swift and silent, taking perhaps ten beats of Nona’s heart to reach the limit of its range and start to return. During that first swing the wheel above turned through five of the small divisions on its rim.
Finding her balance, Ketti began to advance, being careful not to let the slope of the pipe accelerate her. She moved with a certain grace, her long thin body making a dozen subtle shifts each moment, swaying in counterpoint to the path beneath her, each new step changing the rhythm.
Coming to the first rise, Ketti slowed still further, and waited for the whole structure to adjust to her weight that now levered it in a new direction. The drop beneath the platform seemed huge to Nona. More than enough to kill. Tall as a tree. How much would it hurt to hit those nets at such speed? Would they hold?
‘Ah!’ Ketti found herself in trouble, arms wheeling at full extent.
The three girls on the platform watched, transfixed. A moment later Ketti had control again and advanced twenty feet along a steeply descending curve.
‘Now it gets difficult,’ Clera said.
Ketti stepped towards the rise where the pipe began its spiral of three complete turns, so tall that she could fit within them. With agonizing slowness she began the transfer from the inner to the outer surface, relying on the traction from her tarred feet to anchor her to the cold metal. Against Nona’s expectation she reached the top of the first spiral.
Nona turned to see the dial, now almost through a complete circuit. ‘How long will it take h—’ A wail of rage and despair cut her off. Far below them Ketti hit the net and bounced, screaming in frustration.
‘She does better than that normally,’ Ghena said.
‘Your go, Nona!’ Clera gestured towards the start point.
Nona glanced at the resin pot in Clera’s hand but Clera looked away, leaning over to tease Ketti, who was now scrambling for the edge of the net by the door. Ghena pulled the lever, which trapped the pendulum at the end of its swing and set the dial to its original position. Turning back, she nodded to the dark patch on the platform just where the pipe started. ‘Stamp about there. You’ll get your soles sticky enough. Mistress Blade has the path cleaned every day – we think she must have a deal with the resin sellers. But she doesn’t tell us to clean the platform … so we don’t!’
Nona slipped her shoes off. The tar and resin felt tacky under her toes. She tried to concentrate on the sensation rather than all the empty space between her and the ground. Clera’s hoarding of her resin pot hurt a little but Nona knew that need and generosity have their own cycles. In hungry times the village was wont to share food – but when the hunger built to a certain point everybody, even the kindest of them, closed in on themselves, sharing only with their closest family. Perhaps there even came a point when famine could stop mother feeding child. Nona understood better than most that even the most sacred bonds could be broken under enough stress. Clera wasn’t hungry – but she was once rich and now was not. Perhaps to someone raised in luxury that was like starvation …
Nona tried to push thoughts of her mother aside and seal her anger away. Gritting her teeth, she stepped forward. The pipe shifted beneath her foot the moment she pressed down. Far below the net trembled.
‘The
