Ace Books by Mark Lawrence
The Broken Empire
PRINCE OF THORNS
KING OF THORNS
EMPEROR OF THORNS
The Red Queen’s War
PRINCE OF FOOLS
THE LIAR’S KEY
THE WHEEL OF OSHEIM
The Book of the Ancestor
RED SISTER
ACE
Published by Berkley
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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Copyright © 2017 by Bobalinga Ltd.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lawrence, Mark, 1966–, author.
Title: Red sister / Mark Lawrence.
Description: First Edition. | New York, New York : Ace, 2017. | Series: Book of the ancestor ; book 1
Identifiers: LCCN 2016058821 (print) | LCCN 2017004216 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101988855 (hardback) | ISBN 9781101988862 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Fantasy / Epic. | FICTION / Action & Adventure. | FICTION / Fantasy / General. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3612.A9484 R43 2017 (print) | LCC PS3612.A9484 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058821
First Edition: April 2017
Cover illustration © Bastien Lecouffe Deharme
Cover photographs: smoke © Honchar Roman / Shutterstock; abstract painting © Apostrophe/Shutterstock
Cover design by Judith Lagerman
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
To Celyn, who needs no words for eloquence
CONTENTS
Ace Books by Mark Lawrence
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Red Class Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Grey Class Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
AUTHOR’S NOTE
RATHER THAN PLACE this background information in an appendix at the back, where you might not notice it until you’ve finished the book (I’ve done that before), I’m putting it here at the front. However, it is best to skip it and return only if you find you need it. All the information here is given to you in the text and unfolds naturally with the story.
The people of Abeth descend from four “tribes.” These tribes were:
Gerant: distinguished by their great size
Hunska: distinguished by their speed; a dark-haired, dark-eyed people
Marjal: distinguished by their ability to tap into the lesser magics
Quantal: distinguished by their ability to walk the Path and work greater magics
The great families of empire adopt the suffix -sis when the head of the family is named a lord by the emperor. The emperor’s own family are the Lansis. Other families of note include the Tacsis, Jotsis, Memsis, Galamsis, Leensis, Gersis, Rolsis, and Chemsis.
In the Convent of Sweet Mercy novices move through four classes on their way to taking holy orders. A novice must graduate from each class. The classes are named after the four orders of nun:
Red Class: typical novice age 9–12
Grey Class: typical novice age 13–14
Mystic Class: typical novice age 15–16
Holy Class: typical novice age 17–19
On taking holy orders novices become nuns. They follow one of the following paths:
Bride of the Ancestor (Holy Sister): a nun concerned with honouring the Ancestor and maintaining the faith; the most common calling
Martial Sister (Red Sister): a nun skilled in armed and unarmed combat, usually showing hunska blood
Sister of Discretion (Grey Sister): a nun skilled in espionage, stealth, and poisons; often showing marjal blood and a talent for shadow-work
Mystic Sister (Holy Witch): a nun able to walk the Path and manipulate threads; always showing quantal blood
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Nuns (in order of superiority)
Glass: Abbess of Sweet Mercy Convent, also known as Shella Yammal
Rose: Sister Superior, Holy Sister, runs the sanatorium
Wheel: Sister Superior, Mistress Spirit, Holy Sister, teaches Spirit classes
Apple: Mistress Shade, Grey Sister, also known as the Poisoner, teaches Shade classes
Pan: Mistress Path, Holy Witch, teaches Path classes
Rule: Mistress Academia, Holy Sister, teaches Academia classes
Tallow: Mistress Blade, Red Sister, teaches Blade classes
Chrysanthemum: Holy Sister, mostly known as Sister Mop
Flint: Red Sister, Grey Class mistress
Kettle: Grey Sister
Oak: Holy Sister, Red Class mistress
Rock: Red Sister
Novices
Alata: junior novice
Arabella Jotsis: junior novice, quantal and hunska blood
Clera Ghomal: junior novice, Nona’s friend, hunska blood
Croy: junior novice
Darla: junior novice, gerant blood
Ghena: junior novice, hunska blood
Hessa: junior novice, Nona’s friend from Giljohn’s cage, quantal blood
Jula: junior novice, Nona’s friend, studious
Kariss: junior novice
Katcha: junior novice
Ketti: junior novice, hunska blood
Leeni: junior novice
Mally: junior novice, Grey Class head girl
Ruli: Nona’s friend, m
arjal blood
Sarma: junior novice
Sharlot: junior novice
Sheelar: junior novice
Suleri: senior novice
Others
Emperor Crucical: his palace is in the city of Verity
Sherzal: the emperor’s sister; her palace is close to the Scithrowl border
Velera: the emperor’s sister; her palace is on the coast
High Priest Jacob: head of the Church of the Ancestor
Archon Nevis: high-ranking priest
Archon Anasta: high-ranking priestess
Archon Philo: high-ranking priest
Archon Kratton: high-ranking priest
Thuran Tacsis: lord, head of the Tacsis family
Raymel Tacsis: heir to Thuran Tacsis, Caltess ring-fighter, gerant blood
Lano Tacsis: Thuran Tacsis’s second son, hunska blood
Academic Rexxus Degon: senior Academy man
Markus: child from Giljohn’s cage, marjal blood
Saida: child from Giljohn’s cage, gerant blood
Willum: child from Giljohn’s cage, marjal blood
Chara: child from Giljohn’s cage, marjal blood
Gretcha: Caltess ring-fighter, gerant blood
Maya: Caltess apprentice, gerant blood
Regol: Caltess trainee, hunska blood
Denam: Caltess trainee, gerant blood
Tarkax: known as “the Ice-Spear,” renowned warrior from the ice-tribes
Yisht: warrior from the ice-tribes, serves Sherzal
Zole: girl from the ice-tribes, Sherzal’s ward
Irvone Galamsis: high court judge
Sister Owl: legendary Red Sister (dead)
Sister Cloud: legendary Red Sister (dead)
Safira: former senior novice, works for Sherzal
Malkin: Abbess Glass’s cat
Argus: prison guard at Harriton
Dava: prison guard at Harriton
John Fallon: prison guard at Harriton
Herber: graveman
Jame Lender: prisoner executed at Harriton
RED CLASS
PROLOGUE
IT IS IMPORTANT, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy Convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men.
From the front of the convent you can see both the northern ice and the southern, but the finer view is out across the plateau and over the narrow lands. On a clear day the coast may be glimpsed, the Sea of Marn a suggestion in blue.
At some point in an achingly long history a people, now lost to knowledge, had built one thousand and twenty-four pillars out on the plateau: Corinthian giants thicker than a thousand-year oak, taller than a long-pine. A forest of stone without order or pattern, covering the level ground from flank to flank so that no spot upon it lay more than twenty yards from a pillar. Sister Thorn waited amid this forest, alone and seeking her centre.
Lano’s men began to spread out between the columns. Thorn could neither see nor hear her foe approach, but she knew their disposition. She had watched earlier as they snaked up the west trail from Styx Valley, three and four abreast: Pelarthi mercenaries from the ice-margins, furs of the white bear and the snow-wolf over their leathers, some with scraps of chainmail about them, ancient and dark or bright as new, depending on their luck. Many carried spears, some swords; one man in five carried a short-bow of recurved horn. Tall men in the main, fair-haired, their beards short or plaited, the women with lines of blue paint across their cheeks and foreheads like the rays of a cold sun.
Here’s a moment.
All the world and more has rushed eternity’s length to reach this beat of your heart, screaming down the years. And if you let it, the universe, without drawing breath, will press itself through this fractured second and race to the next, on into a new eternity. Everything that is, the echoes of everything that ever was, the roots of all that will ever be, must pass through this moment that you own. Your only task is to give it pause—to make it notice.
Thorn stood without motion, for only when you are truly still can you be the centre. She stood without sound, for only silent can you listen. She stood without fear, for only the fearless can understand their peril.
Hers the stillness of the forest, rooted restlessness, oak-slow, pine-quick, a seething patience. Hers the stillness of ice walls that face the sea, clear and deep, blue secrets held cold against the truth of the world, a patience of aeons stacked against a sudden fall. Hers the stillness of a sorrow-born babe unmoving in its crib. And of the mother, frozen in her discovery, fleeting and forever.
Thorn held a silence that had grown old before first she saw the world’s light. A quietude passed down generations, the peace that bids us watch the dawn, an unspoken alliance with wave and flame that lets both take all speech from tongues and sets us standing before the water’s surge and swell, or waiting to bear witness to fire’s consuming dance of joy. Hers the silence of rejection, of a child’s hurt: mute, unknowing, a scar upon the years to come. Hers the unvoiced everything of first love, tongue-tied, ineloquent, the refusal to sully so sharp and golden a feeling with anything as blunt as words.
Thorn waited. Fearless as flowers, bright, fragile, open to the sky. Brave as only those who’ve already lost can be.
Voices reached her, the Pelarthi calling out to each other as they lost sight of their numbers in the broken spaces of the plateau. Cries rang across the level ground, echoing from the pillars, flashes of torchlight, a multitude of footfalls, growing closer. Thorn rolled her shoulders beneath black skin armour. She tightened the fingers of each hand around the sharp weight of a throwing star, her breathing calm, heart racing.
“In this place the dead watch me,” she breathed. A shout broke out close at hand, figures glimpsed between two pillars, flitting across the gap. Many figures. “I am a weapon in service to the Ark. Those who come against me will know despair.” Her voice rose along with the tension that always presaged a fight, a buzzing tingle across her cheekbones, a tightness in her throat, a sense of being both deep within her own body and above and around it at the same time.
The first of the Pelarthi jogged into view and, seeing her, stumbled to a halt. A young man, beardless though hard-eyed beneath the iron of his helm. More crowded in behind him, spilling out into the killing ground.
The Red Sister tilted her head to acknowledge them.
Then it began.
1
NO CHILD TRULY believes they will be hanged. Even on the gallows platform with the rope scratching at their wrists and the shadow of the noose upon their face they know that someone will step forward, a mother, a father returned from some long absence, a king dispensing justice . . . someone. Few children have lived long enough to understand the world into which they were born. Perhaps few adults have either, but they at least have learned some bitter lessons.
Saida climbed the scaffold steps as she had climbed the wooden rungs to the Caltess attic so many times. They all slept there together, the youngest workers, bedding down among the sacks and dust and spiders. They would all climb those rungs tonight and whisper about her in the darkness. Tomorrow night the whispers would be spent and a new boy or girl would fill the empty space she left beneath the eaves.
“I didn’t do anything.” Saida said it without hope, her tears dry now. The wind sliced cold from the west, a Corridor wind, and the sun burned red, filling half the sky yet offering little heat. Her last day?
The guard prodded her on, indifferent rather than unkind. She looked back at him, tall, old, flesh tight as if the wind had worn it down to the bone. Another step, the noose dangling, dark against the sun. The prison yard lay near-deserted, a handful watching from the black shadows where the outer wall offered shelter, old women, grey hair trailing. Saida
wondered what drew them. Perhaps being so old they worried about dying and wanted to see how it was done.
“I didn’t do it. It was Nona. She even said so.” She had spoken the words so many times that meaning had leached away leaving them just pale noise. But it was true. All of it. Even Nona said so.
The hangman offered Saida the thinnest of smiles and bent to check the rope confining her wrists. It itched and it was too tight, her arm hurt where Raymel had cracked it, but Saida said nothing, only scanned the yard, the doors to the cell blocks, the outer buildings, even the great gates to the world outside. Someone would come.
A door clanged open from the Pivot, a squat tower where the warden was said to live in luxury to rival any lord’s. A guardsman emerged, squinting against the sun. Just a guardsman: the hope, that had leapt so easily in Saida’s breast, crashed once more.
Stepping from behind the guardsman a smaller, wider figure. Saida looked again, hoping again. A woman in the long habit of a nun came walking into the yard. Only the staff in her hand, its end curled and golden, marked her office.
The hangman glanced across, his narrow smile replaced by a broad frown. “The abbess . . .”
“I ain’t seen her down here before.” The old guardsman tightened his fingers on Saida’s shoulder.
Saida opened her mouth but found it too dry for her thoughts. The abbess had come for her. Come to take her to the Ancestor’s convent. Come to give her a new name and a new place. Saida wasn’t even surprised. She had never truly thought she would be hanged.
2
THE STENCH OF a prison is an honest one. The guards’ euphemisms, the public smile of the chief warden, even the building’s façade, may lie and lie again, but the stink is the unvarnished truth: sewage and rot, infection and despair. Even so, Harriton prison smelled sweeter than many. A hanging prison like Harriton doesn’t give its inmates the chance to rot. A brief stay, a long drop on a short rope, and they could feed the worms at their leisure in a convict ditch-grave up at the paupers’ cemetery in Winscon.