The preacher took his globe, his mouth working but no words emerging. Shock had replaced the fierceness Nona remembered. Mickel stood an inch or two taller than her. He was perhaps thirty years of age now, his dark hair still thick but receding in a widow’s peak. “I’m looking for Myra from Rellam Village.” It felt odd to give both her mother and the village a name. “She worshipped here.”
“Who are you?” The preacher backed away to put the altarstone between them. “A demon?” He set the heavy globe before him.
Nona puzzled for a moment then raised her fingers to her face. “No, just a normal person. A poison made my eyes dark. Do you know if Myra Grey survived? What happened . . . at the village? Sometimes she goes by Myra Reed.”
The preacher narrowed dark eyes at her. “You didn’t move like a normal person. Hunska, are you? How did you get in?”
“I climbed.”
The preacher snorted his disbelief and opened his mouth before glancing around. Perhaps lacking any more believable explanation he stopped short of calling her a liar. “You’re looking for a woman?”
“Myra from Rellam.”
“Rellam?” The fear in his eyes when he had thought her a demon had now entirely made way for suspicion. “What interest would this Myra be to you?”
“That’s my business.” If he didn’t recognize her then Nona had no desire to identify herself.
The preacher touched the amulet hanging from his chain, a flat ring of grey metal, set with runes. “If this Myra worships here then she’s my business. The Hope’s business. What right do you have to ask questions here?”
Nona’s temper lashed her tongue. “Right of blood. She’s my mother!” Subterfuge had always been a faint hope, marked as she was, and having shown her speed.
“Ha!” Preacher Mickel drew himself to his full height. “Now the truth comes out! Don’t think I didn’t know you, Nona Reed, standing there in your nun’s coat with talk of blood-rights on your lips. The Ancestor-worshippers have schooled you well.” A sneer now as if remembering the child reduced the warrior before him. “When we humble ourselves before the Hope we join a greater family than any founded on seed and grunting in the dark.”
“The Ancestor-worshippers taught me that the Hope is just a star like any other, only younger and still burning white. It’s not coming to Abeth. It won’t save us from the ice.” Nona flexed her fingers before her. “And they taught me how to beat a grown man to death with my bare hands if I need to. So, I’ll ask again, where’s my mother?”
“She has given up her spirit to the Hope.” He said it with such poorly disguised satisfaction that Nona had to fight not to follow through with her threat. Had Keot seized his chance he might have tipped her into violence.
“She’s dead?” Realization hit home and Nona’s anger blew out, leaving her hollow.
The preacher’s eyes flickered towards the door to his chambers. “You should go, nun.”
“She’s in there? You’ve got my mother in there?” The conviction seized her, the truth suddenly obvious, denial easy. Her mother couldn’t be dead: there was still too much unsaid between them. They could speak now, as adults, not separated by that gulf between a child’s ignorance and a grown-up’s sorrows. She started towards the door.
“What? No! Of course not.”
Nona was through the door before Mickel started after her.
“Wait! That’s forbidden!”
A corridor ran for twenty yards, three doors to the left, two to the right, and one at the far end. Nona glanced around, took the lantern from the wall, then ran for the second door on the left, which was heavier than the rest and bound with iron straps.
“She’s not in there! Don’t be stupid!” Mickel came flapping through the church door after her. He sounded as though he were hiding something.
Nona reached for her serenity so that she could pull the lock’s thread but waves of emotion pushed her back, a turbulence she couldn’t still. With the preacher closing on her she punched a flaw-blade into the heavy lock, once, twice, three times, then turned it. The ruined mechanism surrendered with a squeal and, shrugging off Mickel’s grasping fingers, she pushed through.
The room beyond was a small one, windowless, with a broad shelf set at waist height running around three walls. An image of the Hope returned the lantern light, sparkling in a thousand pieces of glass, mirror, and crystal. Scores of objects covered the shelf, arranged with reverence rather than scattered.
“I thought—” Nona let the preacher wrestle her back into the corridor. Her mother was dead. Her denial had been stupid. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” Mickel shoved her back against the wall. “You’ve defiled the Hope’s sanctum! And broken my door . . .”
Images of Nona’s mother filled her mind. The hurt was worse than a wire-whip. She needed something, anything, to drive the memories out. Questions might help. “What is all that stuff?” Nona tried to see past the preacher’s shoulder.
Pieces of the old world. Keot broke his silence.
“Treasures.” The preacher tried to push her down the corridor towards the rear exit.
“I saw black-skin . . .” Red Sisters made their armour from black-skin, the oily sheen of the stuff was unmistakable. Even the scrap among Mickel’s treasures would be worth more than the building. “And . . .” Nona didn’t have names for the rest of the things but some of them had the same grey glinting quality of old Gallabeth’s precious whetstone. “Ark-bone.”
The preacher had her by the hood of her range-coat, pulling her to the back door. He lifted the bar and kicked it open. “They are parts of the ships that carried our tribes here across the black sea between the stars, and parts of the works they built here. When the Hope comes he will make them whole again just as he will bind flesh to bone and raise the dead from their graves to live once more.”
He pushed Nona out into
