Читать книгу Red Sister онлайн | страница 90
‘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.