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Sister Pan left Arabella’s side and hobbled towards Nona and Clera. ‘Whilst it is essential that a Mystic Sister be the mistress of these techniques, all three are of benefit to any novice. The Holy Sister will find her communion with the Ancestor deepened by reaching clarity. The Sister of Discretion will carry out her duties with greater efficiency if she attains patience. And, ironically, the Martial Sister will be all the more deadly if before combat she has reached the peace of serenity. However, as this is Nona’s first day and I have a number of tests to go over with Arabella any novice who wishes to practise their blade-path may do so.’
The scraping of half a dozen chairs immediately followed this pronouncement as girls leapt to their feet all around the room and started to head for the stairwell at the centre.
‘Clera!’ Sister Pan called after them, her voice resonating down the stairs with surprising volume. ‘You can ask for the key to Blade Hall at the sanatorium!’
The six girls burst laughing from the base of the Tower of the Path and ran off towards the plateau’s narrowing point. The four hunska girls outdistanced Ruli and Kariss, but their natural speed counted for less in a race than it did in a fight: hunska blood gave whip-crack reflexes and a startling twitch that could move a hand from one place to another seemingly without the tedium of having to occupy any of the spaces in between, but it couldn’t, for example, move a full body-weight faster than a horse over four hundred yards.
The sanatorium sat at the compound’s outermost edge, built from limestone blocks hewn from the plateau itself, hunkered down against the wind, with a long and pillared gallery on the lee side. Clera ran on into the office while the other novices came to a halt by the door. ‘Why did we have to come here?’ Ketti frowned, hunched over to make herself a height with the other girls.
‘I saw Sister Tallow limping this morning,’ Ghena said. ‘She must be hurt.’
‘How?’ Ruli asked.
Ghena shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Nona tried to imagine Sister Tallow slipping and coming to grief on a flight of stairs. She couldn’t do it. She had yet to see Mistress Blade fight but everything about the way the woman moved said she would not be taken unawares by the inanimate. Which left …
‘Maybe someone sent assassins after Arabella,’ Ketti said.
‘Assassins? Why?’ Nona had only heard of assassins in the old stories. The Noi-Guin, trained in secret, deployed to end wars, or start them, or to cut away any life that might constitute an offence to someone with enough money to pay fees that even old nobility found staggering.
Ghena grunted at Nona’s obvious stupidity. Ketti raised both eyebrows and did something with her lips that signalled supreme surprise at the depths of Nona’s ignorance. ‘She’s the Chosen One. The Ancestor’s gift. You think there aren’t people fighting over who owns her? Or, if it’s clear that the person who owns her isn’t going to be them, you think they’re not ready to kill her just to stop someone else gaining the benefit?’
‘I heard Sherzal tried to take her from the Jotsis estate,’ Ruli said.
Even in the village the names of 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.
