Last Plane to Heaven (28 page)

“Are you taller than the post?” Sister Nurse asked.

At that, Girl turned and looked. Her own length of leg had not grown in the last day or two.

“Are you taller than the post?”

As always, there was no hint what the question might actually mean. Sister Nurse set exercises, asked questions, made demands, meted out punishments. Waking up each day was always reward enough. It meant she had a future.

It was more than some had, in the alleys and flophouses and mucky attics of her part of the city.

“Are you taller than the post?”

No question was ever asked more than thrice.

“I am taller than the City Imperishable,” Girl said.

Sister Nurse smiled. “Then you are free, if you can fly away.”

This was something new, something outside the boundaries of pain and promise. Girl looked down at the tiled roof sloping sharply away from the ledge beneath her feet, the angle so steep that the missing pieces were scarcely visible. It was a hundred body lengths and more to the pavement of the wallside alley.

“But I have not been given wings,” she whispered.

“Then we have failed you.”

It took Girl a moment to understand what had just been said. Not that
she
had failed, but that Sister Nurse, and the Tribade, had failed her.

I will not back down,
she told herself. Girl spread her arms, stared at the pale moon a moment, whispered a name, and toppled forward into empty air and the broken-toothed mouth of the cobbles far below.

Little Mother

“Run it again, Little Gray Sister,” urged Sister Architect.

She considered that. The baby shifted in her belly, making her heavy as a cotton bale, and just as ungainly. There had been pains in her groin, too, pushing the edge of what was permissible. She could not lose the child, but she could not lose herself either.

Little Gray Sister looked over at her partner in this effort. It was another rooftop, another nighttime, another Tribadist, but she was very much in mind of the night she'd been reborn. “It's not a matter of trust,” she said. “Nor casting away.”

“No…” Sister Architect smiled, her eyes glimmering in the pale moonlight. “Pride, I suppose. You've already made your goal.” Her goal, in this case, was a scale across the rooftops from the bakery on Forth Street to the Cambist's Hall on Maldoror Street a block over, and there up the false steeple on the old Water Bureau office to make the jump across Maldoror and down to the edge of the Limerock Palace's south wall. From there, it was trivial to slip over the wall and enter the building—the real work was in the run up and the leap, the parkour-pace practiced to deadly precision by the Gray Sisters among the Tribade. The false steeple was one of the two or three hardest runs practiced by the sisterhood.

To run the false steeple days before a baby was due was the hardest way to make the run.
No one
could scale and jump with her usual speed and precision while her belly was distended and full of sloshing life.

Little Gray Sister had, and fetched out the Third Counselor's privy seal to prove it. Not for the sake of the theft—the Tribade had their own copy of the seal, accurate right down to the wear marks along the left edge and the three nicks in the bottom petal of the rose—but for the sake of doing the thing.

Pregnant and due.

In this moment she was already minor legend. If she did what Sister Architect suggested, and she succeeded, her legend would grow.

“Vanity,” said Little Gray Sister, leaning backward to ease her spine. “I have already proven all that I need to.”

“Hmm.” Sister Architect sounded disappointed, but did not press her case. “Perhaps you are not quite so much flash as some of the younger sisters claim you are.”

Another test, she realized. But true. There were many kinds of sisters in the Tribade—red, white, blue, black, and more. Sister Architect was a blue sister, one of the professions, though her skills were mostly put to plotting and revising the rooftop runs, rather than any new construction.

Only the grays were trained to die and to kill. Only the grays were given the bluntest and sharpest weapons and trusted to use them. Only the grays were trained between hinge and post in secrecy and ignorance, that their true mettle might be known.

Only the gray sisters became Big, Bigger, or Biggest Sisters, to lead the Tribade into the uncertain future.

She smiled with pride at the thought.

Her abdomen rippled, a muscle spasm that caught Little Gray Sister by surprise so that she sucked in her breath.

Sister Architect tugged at her arm. “Sister Midwife awaits within the Quiet House.”

“I—” Little Gray Sister stopped cold, fighting a wave of pain so intense it roiled into nausea. She took a deep, long breath. “Yes.”

*   *   *

Big Sister—like all Big Sisters, a gray sister—sat on the edge of Little Gray Sister's cot. Big Sister was almost a heavy woman, unusual in the Tribade, with roan hair fading to sandy gray and glinting gray eyes. “You're a mother now,” she said. “Would you like to see the baby?”

Little Gray Sister had thought long and hard on that question. Her breasts ached for the child, weeping a pale bluish fluid. Her loins felt shattered. Even her blood seemed to cry out for her offspring.

Like everything, this was a test, though of late she had been her own examiner more and more. “I would, but I shan't,” she told Big Sister.

Big Sister took Little Gray Sister's hand in her own, clenched it tightly. “You can, you know,” she whispered.

Little Gray Sister fancied she heard a burr in Big Sister's voice, some edge of old emotion. It was possible—the Tribade were neither monsters nor ghosts, just women of a certain purpose living within the walls of the City Imperishable. “I could hold her—” She stopped again, realizing she didn't even know if she'd birthed a boychild or a girl.

A girl,
she decided. The baby had been a girl. Just as she had been, once.

“I could hold her, but I do not think I could let her go.”

“And would that be so bad?” The emotion in Big Sister's voice was almost naked now, a shift from control to a raw wound that might be decades old.

She held on to that hurt, knowing she must own it too, if she were ever to set things right. “Not bad, Big Sister, not if it were my ambition to take the red and care for her myself, or even train among the Sisters Nurse.”

“Well.” Big Sister's voice was controlled once more. “Will you take the hardest way, then?”

That
was the other choice. The Tribade had many sisters of the brown, the street toughs and money bosses. They shook down good merchants and shook down bad merchants far more, kept rival gangs in line, maintained some semblance of order in streets and districts where bailiffs were rarely seen. Those women were the most public of the hidden faces of the Tribade, and they did most of the public work.

Little Gray Sister could run rooftops, tackle criminals, and watch over her city for the rest of her life as a brown sister. But the only way to become a Big Sister, a Bigger Sister, or even—and especially—the Biggest Sister, was to take the hardest way.

She cupped her leaking breasts in her hand, regretting the feeling of both tenderness and joy. There had been a man at them once, too, for a few hours, the night she'd gotten with child amid tearing pain and weeping and a strange, shivering joy. She still wondered who he was sometimes, but at least he'd been kind.

“I am ready.”

“I'll send for the fire and the knife.”

“The ink, too, please,” Little Gray Sister said. “I'd prefer to have it all at once.”

An expression flickered across Big Sister's face—unreadable, save for context. Most women waited for the healing before they took the ink. Tattooing the Soul's Walk across the flat, puckered scars on a Big Sister's chest was one of the greatest rites of the Tribade. It was also one of the most painful, for the poppy given for the fire and the knife was not given for the ink.

Little Gray Sister would do it the hard way, cutting away her womanhood in the first blush of mothering to join the ranks of the sisters who protected their world.

Still, she was surprised they had the brazier ready, and the long knife, and there was even no wait at all for Sister Inker.

Someone had known. Perhaps all of them had known. Just like they'd known to be standing on the rooftop just below, the night she'd jumped into the violet moonlight.

Even though it was the Quiet House, her screams set dogs barking three streets away. It was the only time in her life Little Gray Sister screamed.

Big Sister

She looked at the long, narrow velvet bag Biggest Sister handed her. The two of them were in a rooftop cafe in the Metal Districts, a place where women in gray leather with close-cropped hair received no special scrutiny. There was an electrick lamp on the table which buzzed and crackled, shedding pallid light against the evening's gloom. The wind was cool, bearing mists and distant groaning booms off the River Saltus.

“You know there is one more test,” Biggest Sister said. The woman was compact, a walking muscle more reminiscent of a bull terrier than the fine ladies of Heliograph Hill.

“There is always one more test.” Big Sister shrugged. Even now, a year and a moon after, her chest ached whenever it was chill, or when she moved certain ways. Sometimes she awoke with the pain of her breasts still full of milk, and for that brief muzzy instant between sleep and alertness treasured the feeling, false though it was.
Never again
kept slipping into the future. “Life is one more test,” she added.

“Yes, yes, that's what we tell the girls. It makes nice philosophy for them to whisper over after lights-out. But really, life is for living. After this, only you will set yourself to more.”

“Have you ever stopped setting tests for yourself?” she asked Biggest Sister.

“No.” Biggest Sister smiled. “But my Sister Nurse always did say I was a fool and a dreamer.”

Big Sister held the bag. She already knew what was in it, just by the feel—her old sharkskin scourge. With her old name coiled in copper round the handle.

“There've been three sisters to take the hardest way these past two years,” said Biggest Sister. She folded her hands around a cup of kava, but did not lift it to her lips. “Four have gone to rest beneath the stones, and one has taken the blue in deference to her age.” The cup twirled slowly in her hand. “I am sure you have studied arithmetic.”

“Yes,” said Big Sister. “I can count.”

“We are not dying away, far from it.” Another twirl. “We are at some danger of losing the edge of our blade, becoming in time nothing more than an order of monials ministering to the poor and the victims of the state.”

“And if we did not run bawd houses and guard the dark pleasure rooms and take money from the cash boxes of the petty merchants?”

Biggest Sister sipped this time before answering. “We
protect,
and we aid. That is not the same thing as bettering. If we did not do these things, someone else would. Someone else always will. Someone male, who does not care for women, who will not trim the balls off men who prey on children and break the pelvises of whores. Someone who will simply count the money and throw a few more bodies to the sharks. And they would not give hospice or teach beggar children to read or make sure the potshops have meat in the soup kettles.”

They would not beat bloody the girls growing between hinge and post, either,
Big Sister thought, but she kept her words within. As she had always known, there was a sad wisdom to everything the Tribade did.

“There is … more,” Biggest Sister said. “You have not reached this lore yet, but believe me, there is more. Much sleeps beneath stones and behind walls in this City Imperishable that is not seen in daylight. And for good reason. Along with others, we guard those secrets. Only the Big Sisters, though. And you must pass this final test before your title is more than honor.”

Big Sister drew the sharkskin scourge from its bag. Though it loomed huge in her memories, the thing seemed small in her hand. A toy, almost. She'd used worse straining at pleasure with some of the other sisters who had a taste for the rough trade.

But never used such a thing on a child.

“This,” Big Sister began, then stopped. She took a deep breath. Her hand shook as it held the scourge. “This is what is wrong with us.”

“No.” There was an infinite, awful gentleness in Biggest Sister's voice. “That is what is wrong with the world, that we must raise some of our Girls so in order to be strong enough to stand against it.”

They were quiet a moment as a waiter passed with a basket of hot rolls, spiced with cardamom and sea salt. He didn't see the scourge lying in Big Sister's hand, and he never would. It was why some among the Tribade met here to talk from time to time.

“Hear me now: there is a greater wrong to come,” said Biggest Sister. “This last test. A distillation of our way. You must give life before you can take it. This you have done. You must take life before you can have power over the life and death of others. You must kill for the City Imperishable, for the Tribade, for yourself.”

“With this?” Big Sister asked. “It would be a sad and messy business.”

“With that. So you come full circle, releasing the last of your name.” Biggest Sister put down her mug. “If you do not come to do this thing, you will still be a Big Sister. In other times you would have remained a Gray Sister, but our need is too great. But you will never rise to Bigger or Biggest Sister, and you will never see the inner secrets that we guard. And you will never wield the blade against someone's neck, either in your hand or by your word.” She stood. “Come to me when the thing is done. Tonight, or half a lifetime from now, come to me.”