Holy Sister - Mark Lawrence Page 0,44

the first place they’ll look.’ The hut and shelter stood alone, the only structures in a wide, desolate valley. The famed Scithrowl crowding seemed to be something of a myth, or at least not to carry up into the high places of the Grampain foothills.

‘It is the first place they will look,’ Zole agreed. ‘Which is strange when it is, as you say, a stupid place to hide …’

‘So what are we doing here?’

‘There is no place they will not find us, but in this place it is likely that only one of them will find us.’

‘Oh.’ Nona lowered herself to lie beside the ice-triber, steeling herself against the shipheart’s closeness.

They passed a minute with no sound but the moan of the wind and the creaking of the walls. The scarlet stain at Zole’s wrist drew Nona’s gaze.

‘So the shipheart breaks pieces off you … off who you are … and you throw them away?’

‘It’s a ridding of impurities,’ Zole said, her voice low.

‘But a person’s flaws are part of them.’ Nona couldn’t keep the horror from her words. ‘My temper is a bad thing, but it’s part of who I am, like Ruli’s gossiping or Leeni bedding other girls even though she loves Alata. Jula’s obsession with learning, Ghena’s sharp tongue … if you got rid of all those parts of you and approached this ideal … isn’t that everyone becoming the same?’

Zole offered the smallest of smiles. ‘We have to let go of that pride, that ego. It will never bring happiness. Consider the Ancestor, who walks the length of the Path towards a perfect future, rather than the breadth of it from life to death. Is not the Ancestor a melding, a commonality in which the good is intensified and the bad fades? This is why the Ancestor’s statues are smooth-faced, features poorly defined. The Ancestor is not an individual.’

‘But that’s when we die …’

‘What happens to Ghena’s sharp tongue, to Clera’s selfish ambition when they join the Ancestor? In that wholeness the good is stacked on the good, and the undesirable, the individual, the ego, is all washed away. With the Old Stones we of the ice pare ourselves towards that perfect core before we die rather than after. The wise say that if anyone ever rid themselves of their last raulathu they would no longer need to die. They would be the divine.’

‘You really do think you’re the Chosen One,’ Nona gasped.

Zole shook her head. ‘Approaching divinity makes us all the same. If I am the Chosen One then at the heart of us, we all are.’

Nona looked away. She was lying amid goat droppings in a tiny shed in the wilds of Scithrowl discussing divinity … with a mad girl.

‘I—’

‘Horses!’ Zole motioned Nona lower.

The hoof beats were faint but drawing nearer. A single rider. As the sound came closer a faint background could be heard, more riders following.

The novices waited. Nona felt the shipheart’s aura dim as Zole somehow reined in its power.

Horses drew up nearby. Lots of them, filling the air with their snorting and the jingle of harnesses.

‘Search it.’ The words thickly accented. Further east the Scithrowl spoke a different tongue but in the shadow of the mountains the language of the empire clung on.

The thump of riders dismounting, their grumbles coming closer.

A moment later the upper half of a man obscured the patch of sky above the door at the far end of the goat shelter.

‘You do not see us.’ Zole muttered the words, a certain strain behind them.

‘Nothing here!’ the man called out.

‘Get in there and check, you lazy whoreson.’

Nona tensed, ready to attack, as the Scithrowl irregular kicked open the door, grumbling curses.

‘You do not see us. This place is empty.’ Zole spoke in a quiet but conversational voice, her hands in fists, fingers white.

The man stamped in, bent almost double to avoid the low roof. He smelled of old sweat, stale beer, and some over-ripe meaty scent Nona couldn’t place. He moved forward kicking at the bracken, his gaze passing over both novices several times. Zole rolled slowly to one side as he approached. She gave Nona a push to indicate she should roll to the other side. The man stepped between them, frowning. He wore a skirt of leather strips panelled with iron plates. He kicked the bedding everywhere but in the places the novices lay.

‘Nothing.’ He left by the far door, vindicated.

Outside, it sounded as if a dozen or more riders had dismounted and stood in

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