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Ortus cleared his throat. This engendered many emotions in her—Ortus Nigenad cleared his throat with the import of a sword being slid from a scabbard, or knucklebones jostling in the pocket of a Locked Tomb necromancer—but it was too late, as he was already declaiming:
“Then did the dire bone frenzy fall upon Nonius, the mightiest arm of the Ninth and its bulwark;
Spasmed his veins with the death lust; his great heart roared like a black iron furnace, hungry for corpses…”
“Ah,” said Harrowhark. “Yes. Book Sixteen.” And, presently: “I think ‘bone frenzy’ might be a term open to coarse misinterpretation, personally.”
Better death by the drawn sword, and better the death of the knucklebone. There was only one trigger to drive Ortus Nigenad so comprehensively berserk, and she had forgotten that it was not a trigger to use lightly. Ortus primly said he thought that nobody who read the Noniad would be the sort of churl who misread a simple and evocative collocation like bone frenzy; he went on to suggest that such a person probably didn’t even read in the first place, and would be more inclined to trifle with prurient magazines or pamphlets than to bother themselves with a complex epic such as the Noniad; he said that he wouldn’t want such a person to read his poetry anyway.
“At least now I possess the time to finish it,” he added a little moodily, but apparently satisfied with that thought.
This surprised her only in that it was so obviously expressed. She did not voice what she thought: that even if he was right—even if the last thing Harrow wanted was for Ortus to get in the way as she studied the paths of Lyctorhood, to become a finger and a gesture, to take the only divine path that had ever opened for her in order to save her House from a destruction she herself had inflicted—it didn’t behove him to say as much. She hoped he never finished it. She hoped there was never world enough or time. Harrowhark had always thought Matthias Nonius, legendary cavalier of her House, sounded like an absolute horse’s ass.
“Harrowhark,” said her cavalier, “I wish to ask you a question.”
He did not sound timid now; his mood had shifted to a more typical restrained sadness, though she thought, perhaps, there was something else within it. Harrow took a moment to study his face. Ortus would be a good rest cure, should the homesickness get too acute. He had classical Ninth eyes: a tintless shade very close to true black, sharply ringed around the iris, very like her own.
Ortus said a little restlessly: “What do you think it is like—to be a Lyctor? Do you think it is a central tragedy to them, their great age, their timelessness?”
She was surprised again. “Nigenad, what would be the tragedy in living for a myriad? Ten thousand years to learn everything there is to know—to read everything that has ever been written … to study without fear of premature end or reckoning. What is the tragedy of time?”
“Time can render one impotent beyond meaning,” said Ortus unexpectedly. He made his eyes downcast again, and said: “I would not expect you to—be crushed by the weight of that particular comprehension, Reverend Daughter.”
He might as well have said, You are a baby of seventeen, and I am an adult of thirty-five. She regretted, not for the first time, not going for broke and taking Aiglamene. Perhaps there would have been something in rocking up to the First House with an octogenarian in tow: a sort of wild and confident fuck-you—Oh, your cavaliers are young? And they fight? How classic! So jejune!—but that would not have been the wild and confident fuck-you of the Ninth House. The Ninth House character, she was forced to admit, had always been low on wild and confident fucks.
“Nigenad,” she said, “I am what I am, and I am seventeen. Yet I assure you that I contain multitudes.”
“I am fully aware of that, my lady,” said Ortus.
Which was perfectly correct of him to say. But Harrow somehow did not like the way he said it. “They are taking too long to vet us,” she said, and stood, and restlessly pulled down the plexiform barrier between them and the empty cockpit. She was about to press her fingers to the communication button, to ask the pilot what the holdup was and how he was to explain it; but she saw something she either had not seen before or that had suddenly appeared, upon one of the padded seats. It was a piece of flimsy. She took it and withdrew into the bleeding light of the passenger hold.
She could feel Ortus’s eyes upon her as she turned the piece of flimsy over. It was coloured all over with thin blue ink, scribbled so hard that the termination of each letter pushed holes into the surface, and it read:
THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME
She gave it to her cavalier. The shuttle seemed totally quiet now. No mechanism ground; no pipe gurgled. The light was very still and white and she no longer felt it moving. He scanned over the piece of flimsy, frontward, then flipped it over to scan it backward. He cleared his throat—Harrowhark found herself flinching, and nearly tore herself to pieces for it—and he said:
“It’s blank, my lady.”
“Fuck,” said Harrow.
6
WHEN YOU WOKE, you were already sitting up. Your chin was bowed on your chest so that you had an exciting view of your lap. You were no longer in your bed, and the lower walls and floor were blurring past you in scuffed washes of black stone, bones, and steel.
Your vision swam. It became apparent immediately that you could not move. Your clinical brain rose to the fore as your meat brain shied and ran around and barked like the badly behaved animal it was. Your clinical brain took stock and realised that you were seated in some kind of chair being wheeled down an Erebos corridor, and that someone had pinched a high cervical nerve right into your spinal cord—not deforming the bone at all, but manipulating the flesh only—in such a way that you were locked out of your body from the neck down. You could not raise your head. You could blink, and breathe sufficiently, and swallow poorly. Otherwise you were as marble. It was an astonishing act of necromancy. You were righteously indignant, but amazed at the act.
You were still in your beautiful mother-of-pearl robe, head deep in your hood, hearing the thick and papery rustle of twenty-two letters secreted within your clothes. The sword was laid across your lap; a thick, fatty webbing joined the hilt to your forearm, a webbing that you had no memory of creating but was nonetheless your lacework. Perhaps you had woken up at an earlier point to stash the letters down your shift and fix the blade to your arm; you did not recall, but that was not unusual. Sometimes your conscious days were dreamlike ordinances of movement, functions, sounds. Rather than muscle mass within the web, there was a honeycomb of bone stretching out from your forearm through the webbing to the hilt. Nobody was going to get it away from you in a hurry. It was as though you had been picked up bodily, plopped in the chair, and disabled from the neck down. You hoped distantly that your bladder hadn’t evacuated.
The chair stopped. There were voices. You concentrated hard on whatever had been done to the back of your neck—visualized your known friend, the odontoid peg that protruded from your other known friend, the cervical vertebra—the bracelets that surrounded the vertebral arteries, the tangle of physeal joints. If it had simply been bonework, you would have been able to identify the mischief immediately, and unfuck accordingly. The voices coalesced—
“—can clear this instantaneously, Saint of Saints, once the Holy Prince has finished giving audience to—”
This came from in front of you.
“The meeting! The meeting!!” It was difficult to articulate extra exclamation marks, yet the new voice did so. “Do you think I have time for—for—for the extra hour in which three generals and your Resurrector, the God of Dead Kings, try to schedule another meeting after the first one has done? Do you think I came here to wait for three personal assistants, six calendars, and God himself changing his mind nineteen times??”
This came from behind you, and above. This voice, in all probability, belonged to the person who was pushing your chair.
“Sacred Hand,” said another voice, “forgive me. It was his order that she was not to be touched. There were no allowances; there were no riders.”
The first voice said, “There was no opposition when I ordered the shuttle. Nor to my preparations.”
“The order regarding Harrowhark Nonagesimus was specifically stated by him, Holy Finger, Holy Thumb.”
The voice above Harrow said, “And is my order suddenly not God’s order? Am I no longer Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, the second saint to serve the King Undying? Have I lost my rank among the Four—or, now, as I so horribly find, the Three? Am I not the last sister serving in a charnel house of dead sisters, all of whom gave their long and dutiful lives so that your squalling children and their germ-ridden children’s children’s children could bask in the light of Dominicus?”
