‘What’s the fastest it was ever done?’ Nona asked.

Sister Kettle paused, the door half open. ‘Our records say that a little over two hundred years ago a certain Sister Owl – yes, the one in the stories, the Black Fort and all that – the ledgers record her setting a time in Holy Class of twenty-six counts. It does seem hard to credit though. Perhaps the timing mechanism has been adjusted over the years …’

‘Twenty-six!’ Nona blinked. It didn’t sound even vaguely possible.

‘Something to aim for.’ Sister Kettle went through the door with a slight limp, leaving Nona and Ketti to stare at each other. Way above them Ruli started out on the path.

‘Why was Sister Kettle here?’ Nona asked, to break the silence more than anything.

‘To watch the new girl, of course,’ Ketti said. ‘She’ll be reporting back to Sister Tallow. That’s what she does. Watches and reports. She’d be Mistress Shade if we didn’t already have the Poisoner! I expect—’ She paused as Ruli plummeted down into the net with a shriek of frustration. ‘I expect she’d have come anyway to size up the competition. Kettle holds the convent record for the blade-path – the record for anyone still living here – sixty-nine counts.’

Nona tried the path half a dozen more times, moving less quickly and falling, not to stay part of the group but because gravity seemed to have got its hooks into her. Quite how she had got so far before she couldn’t say, for now the path swayed beneath her like a foreign sea, its ways alien to her feet. Even so she got further along than Ruli, Ghena and poor Kariss, who barely made the first yard and never the third.

The sixth impact with the net left her ears ringing.

‘Bray!’ Clera shouted. ‘Oh hells!’ She dropped off the platform, habit swirling about her head, long legs out before her.

Nona hung on tight to the ropes. The only rule they’d told her was not to try the path while someone is still in the net, as you could bounce them out.

Clera scrambled for the edge. ‘We’ll be late for Spirit!’

Nona glanced up at the platform. Empty. She and Clera had been so deep in their competition they hadn’t seen the others leave.

‘Come on!’ Clera tossed Nona her shoes and dropped to the floor. ‘Mistress Spirit is the worst!’

‘I thought you said the Poisoner was the worst!’

‘They’re all the worst when you’re late!’ And Clera was running.

9

Racing around the Dome of the Ancestor Nona started to think that the place had no door, her breath came ragged and Clera’s longer legs were opening a lead. The pain of a stitch stabbed beneath her lungs and she slowed, grabbing her side. Fortunately a few more paces brought sight of the great doors that she had seen on her first night. The line of Red Class was already filing in through the narrow gap where a hand held the leftmost door ajar. Clera and Nona joined the end of the line, sweaty and breathless, just as Ketti and Ruli slipped through ahead of them. Ketti had to duck below the hand which turned out to be attached to Sister Wheel. Nona scowled, having yet to forgive the nun for turfing her from her bed with such holy zeal on her first morning at the convent.

‘Quickly! Quietly!’ Sister Wheel ushered them on.

At first the dim light yielded only an impression of great columns and a polished floor, with some brighter space beyond. Nona followed Clera’s back, blinking to help her eyes adjust. They were in a grand foyer that itself was bigger than all but the richest houses in Verity. Sister Wheel led them along the wall to the left towards a small door at the side of the foyer, as if allowing novices to venture any further in would sully so holy a place. From the view of the interior, glimpsed between sleek columns of black marble, Nona understood the space to be both singular and vast, lit by scores of long and narrow windows radiating from the dome’s apex, with a statue gleaming at the centre, tiny in such a space but far bigger than a man.

The pull that Nona had felt that first night in the nuns’ cells was here too. Not so strong as it had been when she stood just yards from the black door that entered the rear of the dome … but there even so. The huge and echoing space, the sunlight shafting in through many windows, the golden statue, they were grand things, impressive, perhaps even holy, but they were not the source. Something filled that dome, almost to bursting, but its centre lay deeper …

‘Nona!’ Clera at the open side door, beckoning. ‘Stop dawdling!’

Nona hurried on into a small classroom dimly lit by three of the high porthole windows that formed a ring perforating the wall of the great dome.

‘Late to class but never late to dinner!’ Sister Wheel’s fingernails-on-slate voice reached a surprising volume as she pointed Nona and Clera out in the doorway.

This seemed a harsh judgement to Nona, who had attended just one convent dinner so far.

The sister stood at the far end of the classroom in one of the circles of light cast by the windows, the white funnel of her headdress all aglow and the wisps of grey hair that escaped it seeming to float about her face. ‘Come along! The road to damnation is paved with tardy steps!’

Nona hurried to an empty desk near the door, head down, puzzling over how a road might be paved with steps. Clera took the next desk along, flashing a grin towards her. Fishing in her habit, she pulled out a tightly rolled scroll of parchment, a slate, a piece of chalk, a small and stoppered pot, and a quill. This latter gave the impression that the bird from which it was taken had died of some wasting disease, falling from its perch into a dirty puddle before being run over by several carts and finally thoroughly chewed by a hungry cat.

The novices at the other desks already had their scrolls unrolled before them, some dipping their quills into inkpots. Arabella’s quill caught the light, becoming something ethereal. A perfect swan’s feather, pristine and glistening.

‘We will continue with the eighteenth part of the catechism. Later I will be examining you on the names of the saints, the dates of their name-days, and the services and traditions particular to each— New girl! Get your parchment and quill out! Or do you not consider my remarks worthy of record?’

‘No …’ Laughter on all sides, Arabella’s a musical peal. ‘I mean yes, Sister Wheel.’

‘Sister Wheel? There’s no Sister Wheel in this class, girl. You will address me as Mistress Spirit. Now get your scroll out!’

‘But— I don’t …’ Nona patted her habit as if the items she required might somehow have been stowed in one of the interior pockets without her knowledge.

‘Quickly!’ Sister Wheel slapped an iron hand on Jula’s desk in the front row and began to advance on Nona, weaving her path between the desks, the girls head-down as she passed.

Nona felt a familiar anger starting to boil deep down where her thinking never ventured. Even if she had been given such things as quill and parchment she had never held either in her life and could no more make the required marks with one upon the other than she could fly.

‘Well?’ Sister Wheel, now looming above Nona, her pale and watery eyes meeting Nona’s stare.

Nona stood up, sharply.

‘Novice Nona’s entry to the convent was … non-standard.’ Abbess Glass had entered without being noticed and now settled a hand on Nona’s shoulder, returning her to her seat. ‘This precluded the usual correspondence regarding the supplies an entrant is expected to bring with them, Mistress Spirit.’ The abbess laid a grey-plumed quill and fat scroll of parchment on the desk. ‘Nona will, however, be a listening pupil rather than a writing one until such time as Sister Kettle pronounces her sufficiently advanced in her extra-curricular studies. She will—’