Nona went down the rope hand over hand, not using her legs. The Blade-test had left her muscles tired and aching but not so weak she couldn’t climb a rope. At the bottom she swung, released her hold, and landed on the rocky edge of the subterranean pool. Jula, Ruli, Ara, and Ketti waited to one side of the chamber, hunched around a single candle. Glimmers of their light picked out the descending, stone-clad forest of the centre oak’s roots.
‘Nona! Sister Tallow didn’t cut your head off!’ Ruli jumped to her feet as Nona approached.
‘It was Sister Iron, our new Mistress Blade.’ Nona wasn’t supposed to speak about the test but she felt she could share this much.
‘New what?’
‘But Sister Tallow—’
‘Did you pass?’ Ara cut across the others.
‘Yes, I passed.’ Nona raised a hand to forestall Ara’s next question. ‘And I got a sword.’
‘We’re not to call you Nona Pink then?’ Jula grinned.
‘No.’ Nona sat down with Ruli. ‘If they let me take my orders I’ll be a proper Red.’
‘So how did—’
‘We’re not here to talk about my blade-test,’ Nona said. ‘We’re here to talk about Jula’s book.’
‘Hey, it’s not my book,’ Jula protested.
‘A pity. If it was your book we wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble to steal it.’ Ketti frowned, then brightened as if finding new resolve.
‘We’ve been talking through it again, Nona. We’re agreed. We need two things to pull this off, and we’re going to have to steal both of them, and I’ve no idea how.’ Ara held up two fingers to count them off.
‘We have to steal before we can steal,’ Ruli interrupted, showing no sign of remorse at the proposed criminality. ‘And we’re meeting underground with one candle. It’s like we’re Noi-Guin!’
Ara scowled at Ruli’s enthusiasm. ‘One, we need The Book of Lost Cities from Sister Pan’s secret stash. That’s got to be in the Third Room. Unless we have a forbidden book to take back we’re not going to have a reason to be anywhere near the high priest’s vault.’ She pulled her second finger back. ‘Two, we need the abbess’s seal of office. Without her seal on our message they’ll never let us in.’
Nona raised one of her fingers. ‘We also need the eye drops the Poisoner was working on.’
Jula looked shocked. ‘She stashed those away for good reason, Nona. They’re dangerous. She said you could go blind using them.’
‘They’re the only way I’ll get in there unrecognized,’ Nona said.
‘Plus they make you look good,’ Ketti added.
‘It doesn’t have to be you, Nona,’ Ara said. ‘Any of us could do it.’
‘It has to be me. And it doesn’t matter about looking good, Ketti.’ Nona shot her a narrow glance. Though it was true that she had loved those few days when her eyes had looked like any other person’s. Regol had said he liked her the way she was normally. Unique. But whatever he said he had spent a long time looking into her newly cleared eyes and part of her wanted that again. ‘Four!’ Nona said before Ara and Jula could object. ‘We need a brilliant marjal empath or this just won’t work.’
‘So, four impossible things then.’ Ara swirled darkness around the candle flame, making shadow birds take flight.
‘No.’ Nona shook her head. ‘Just two. Like you said.’
‘But—’
‘I found us an empath at the fight rings last night. The strongest I’ve ever met.’ Four mouths opened. Nona spoke first. ‘And I have this.’ She drew from her habit a disc of amber, carved in deep relief on one side, its edge guarded by a hoop of gold, the whole thing making slow revolutions on its golden chain.
‘The abbess’s seal …’ Jula stared at it, wide-eyed. ‘How …?’
‘I stole it from her when she embraced me after the blade-test.’
6
Holy Class
Present Day
Kettle moved through the town wrapped in a cocoon of shadow. In an hour the great red eye of the sun would see the carnage for itself but no other witness remained to watch it roll back the night. The fires had burned out, the smoke stripped away by the wind, but the stink of burning remained. The stink and the dead and the ruins of their homes.
The Scithrowl had spared none. They left the corpses of their own scattered infrequently here and there among the bodies of farmers, weavers, shepherds, and of children who might one day have taken up those trades. A small blonde girl lay broken in the doorway to