kept working with the grim efficiency of a merchant squeezing the margins, directing his resources to maximize survival.
Nona helped carry Abbess Wheel into the mausoleum. High Priest Jacob had commissioned the building for himself as soon as he took office. Under Nevis the work had continued, though quite who would now be interred within had become less clear.
‘Lay her here.’
Nona hadn’t needed any help. Wheel seemed to weigh nothing in her arms. Without her fierce will to animate her she seemed small, an old woman, mostly skin and bones. Ara, Sister Oak, and Ghena had insisted on lending their strength to the effort though, despite the latter two being barely able to stand. Ghena bore a host of minor cuts and perhaps had broken ribs. Sister Oak sported a livid bruise across her forehead and the left side of her face. Being knocked senseless early on had saved her life. She seemed dizzy, unsure of herself.
The four of them laid the abbess out, straightening her limbs, arranging her habit. They stood around her corpse, careful not to step upon the dozens all around them, and said the prayers of farewell. Nona had last heard them from Wheel’s own mouth when old Sister Bone had failed to rise from her bed on a cold morning three weeks before.
It took many trips back and forth from the King’s Road to find the fallen. Some they couldn’t locate. Nona had seen Ketti drop, the wound mortal. She remembered roughly where it had happened, but even so, despite lifting and rolling a hundred bodies, she couldn’t find her friend.
‘Could she have crawled away to die?’ Clera asked, white-faced, wiping at her eyes, claiming that the smoke stung them.
‘I don’t see how she could have.’ Nona blinked and tried to keep the waver out of her voice. ‘I can’t …’ She snarled, lifted a large stone from a collapsed wall, throwing it several yards. Nothing lay beneath.
In the end they had to let it go.
In the east the sky paled to grey and dawn threatened, as if this had been a night just as any other and the sun would rise to bear witness on a new day.
They laid Apple and Iron and Tallow and Rock and Chrysanthemum close to Abbess Wheel. Kettle lay across Apple heaving with sobs yet making no sound. Ruli wept, Ara was pale, Jula ran outside to be sick. Nona called on her serenity and wore it as armour, unwilling to face her feelings. Wheel would have told her that sorrow was a luxury she could keep for later, when the work was done.
However, even the armour of Nona’s serenity proved ineffective when they set to carrying the novices through to lie with their sisters. Two girls from Red Class had somehow joined the abbess’s war-party, though Wheel had said only seniors were to come. How their presence had been missed Nona couldn’t say. They were children, and she cried as she set them down beneath the great marble dome of the high priest’s mausoleum.
The sun had risen and a cold wind had stripped away the smoke before the remaining sisters and novices of Sweet Mercy set off for the convent. Kettle was not with them for none of them had the heart to pull her from Apple’s side.
Nona had retrieved the shipheart from the fire-gutted mansion she had left it in, kicking away hot ashes to uncover it. She placed it in a leather sack and had it dragged behind them. The wounded rode in carts commandeered for the purpose by the high priest. The five miles to the Rock of Faith had never seemed so long.
‘Sister Rose will tend to them as well as any in the city can, and she will have more time for them.’ High Priest Nevis stood on the steps to see them off, looking as if he had gone without sleep for days. He had called Sister Oak over as the oldest surviving nun, but he called Nona with her and addressed his words to them both. ‘As longest-serving sister superior it will fall to Sister Rose to occupy the abbess’s house for now. She is a good woman and will be the first to say she lacks the fire necessary for the office. I will appoint a suitable replacement by and by when we have made an accounting of the dead and seen which sisters among the Red and Grey return to the Rock of Faith. Until such time Abbess Rose will