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What followed was a long and incomprehensible parade of cavaliers, starting with Marta the Second. After Teacher called out, “Ortus the Ninth,” Ortus went up for his prize and returned to present it to his necromancer, as he ought. He placed within Harrow’s gloved hands a ring with a single key laced upon the iron: a singularly dull and uninteresting key, with two teeth and a triangle head. It sat very heavy in the black leather of her palm.
The little man eased himself down upon his stool, from the sides of which no small amount of stuffing was emerging, like a sat-on cream-filled roll. He said comfortably: “Now I will tell you something new, something you are not meant to know: about the First House, and about the research facility.
“The base of Canaan House dates back to before the Resurrection. We first built upward, to get away from the sea; then we built outward, to strive toward beauty … This was meant to be the palace of the Kindly Master, where he might work and hold court and live for always, and oversee all the rebuilding that had to be done. For the Resurrection did not resurrect every broken thing, you understand, and nor did it create anything new. There was hard work ahead—fixing, or designing, and it took a great deal of blood and sweat and bone. Yet those were lovely years, happy ones. And that was the time before Lyctors.”
He took a sip of his tea, sighed briefly in pleasure, and continued: “They were disciples, to begin with. Ten normal human beings of the Resurrection, though half were blessed already with necromantic gifts. But necromancy alone does not confer eternal life. Our Lord, the First Reborn, kept those ten devotees young and alive through his sheer might, but it was a shadow of living … They had to stay tucked near the Emperor’s feet so as not to strain his powers. They desired to spend their lives in service of him, not the other way around. They realised in the first hundred years how difficult their situation was, even as necromancy spread through the Nine Houses, and even as other disciples joined their number. Some of them took up the sword and became the first cavaliers, in the hope that their strength of arms might prove useful; the adepts honed their master’s craft, trying to break the rigors of deep space. And there was so much still to be done, and new necromancers being born, and ruins to reclaim. What a time to be alive.”
He sighed again, this time more nostalgically, and then he said: “Necessarily a great research had to begin, into how best to serve alongside our Lord without needing him to confer immortality—this search for what would become Lyctorhood. And it took place here.”
He pointed downward. Everyone looked at the floor beneath his feet, seeking out the origins of Lyctorhood in a few square inches of rotting carpet. “Below our feet. The laboratories. The original body of the building—a place steeped in the death of ages—the quietude of the last sacrifice … that is where Lyctorhood was begun, and that is where Lyctorhood was finished. You will see it. You will see where they threw down their tools and left the building like a palimpsest, unknowing, for you; where they left their blueprints to those who may yet have the strength of body and spirit to walk their path. This place was meant to be a palace, and they have left it as a road in the wilderness.”
Someone spoke up—the Fifth woman—and she said, fearlessly and amiably: “Then the path to Lyctorhood is independent research? Gosh! And it isn’t even my birthday.”
One of the young people sitting close to the Fifth made a sound like an exhausted balloon squeal.
“Part of the path is independent research, Lady Abigail,” said Teacher, smiling. “The other part, the greater part, is the silence … is the care. You are not alone in the facility. In its heart lies the Sleeper, and how long that creature has lain there I do not know; but I do know that they are your greatest threat, for although they lie in sleep … in that sleep, they walk.”
Here he trailed off. He stared into the middle distance, still grasping his cup of tea, as though seeing visions the assembled scions and cavaliers were not privy to. The pause stumbled execrably, fell down the stairs, and lay in a tangle at the bottom in full view of all listeners, who had to watch it bleed out in embarrassment. One of the grotesquely young pair of the Fourth actually tried to fill it in, and bleated: “There’s a—monster in a research laboratory? And we’ve got to—fight it?”
“No, no!” said Teacher impatiently. “Lord Over the River have mercy! The Sleeper cannot die. I doubt they can be wounded; they certainly cannot be killed. The greatest advantage we have is that the Sleeper sleeps deeply! The second threat to your work is if the Sleeper wakes—it has never happened, though I know the Sleeper yearns to escape its incognizant state and pick up where they left off—for if they wake, none of us will live. If the Sleeper meets you on their unconscious peregrinations, your weapon should be stealth; if through unholy means you wake them, there will be no other weapons left. We are reliant on a communal soundlessness. Travel in groups; tread softly; go where I durst not go: because I love my life, and I love noise, also.”
There was no pause here, just a perfect babel:
“—isn’t how it—”
“How much sound is—”
“—doesn’t make any—”
“—what kind of cack-handed—”
“I do not know the answers to any of these questions,” said Teacher calmly. “Only that, already, you are being too loud.”
The babel froze, in midair, on everyone’s lips. Harrowhark, who had never spoken, and Ortus, who had only sweated, almost audibly, stilled further. In that anechoic atmosphere one could have heard a hair split from someone’s scalp and twiddle down to the floor. One could have heard their own heart beating—Harrow did, loud and wet and hot. That silence was absent of anything, except those tiny, helpless noises of living.
“I am making a joke,” said the vigorous little priest, whose cheerful admission did not ease the room. “I josh. I kid. I do that. Believe me when I say that you are safe up here. You see, if you are not, then there is nothing to be done, not really. It is only down through the hatch for which you hold the key that you are in peril, and it is a peril you will bring on both yourself and those around you. Keep your swords sharp and your theorems nimble. I can guide you no further; this place has changed beyond my ken. But I wish you luck,” he added, and the priest with the long salt-and-pepper plait said, very softly, “I wish you luck,” and the tiniest and most wizened priest added in a wheeze, “God grant you luck to carry out your task.”
Those gathered were almost too stunned to attend to the constructs who came to get them; eyes that had been bright with excitement, or anticipation, or even in some cases a weird, weary comfort, were now troubled. They were greeted by those limber, reactive skeletons that moved in the manner of kindly in-laws, welcoming strangers to a house they knew was unfamiliar to them but nonetheless wanted to prove comforting. They were led away in twos—barring the Third House trio—and Harrowhark waited next to her cavalier, who was apparently trying his damnedest not to breathe, for a skeleton to cross over to them.
She realised that Ortus was very frightened. This was not unexpected. “Lady, I cannot do this,” he breathed. “I cannot protect you in this way. Monsters are beyond me.”
“The rock has been rolled,” Harrowhark said, and she was relieved by how much she believed it. She was not fearful. She felt dry inside, as though the liquid had all been wrung out. Monsters were never beyond her. There was no abomination she could not give a run for its money in foulness. “You are my cavalier primary. Your job is to stand, to face our foes, and to die when the panniers are empty, but not before.”
This did not comfort him, strangely enough. “You need a blade, and someone with the will to wield it,” he hissed.
“How strange! I have never needed such a person in the past.”
“I would that you had chosen differently.”
Harrowhark was unsettled now, and she had been at peace, so she was cruel: “The choice is beyond me now, Nigenad—unless you can conjure me the spirit of Matthias Nonius, in which case I’ll take on his services if he promises to not speechify.”
Their own First House skeleton, ridiculously girdled in that pure white, had come over to make them both a very respectful bow. A thrill of suspicion was growing in Harrowhark regarding the fluidity of its reactions. Its movement was too free, and when she angled her body in its direction it mirrored her in unconscious response, which was beyond her and therefore beyond any skeleton-raiser of the Nine Houses. But her cavalier primary did not seem to notice. He had fallen into a reverie of his own devising, and when the construct gestured—gestured, who wasted time on ossein instructions for gesture—he turned instead to her, his dark eyes earnest, his painted skull deliquescing.
He cleared his throat—
“No,” said Harrowhark immediately, but it was too late.
“Baleful the black blade struck at the shimmering stuff of the spectral beast, biting deep in its false flesh;
“Shrieking, it flailed with its claws at the pauldrons and casque of the Ninth, yet his heart never faltered or failed him …
“Harrowhark—I don’t understand why you chose me.”
