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Harrowhark knew from experience that no what-for was in the offing. Matthias Nonius never did battle in The Noniad (Matthias hight Nonius his Deeds and Accomplishments) without a significant amount of talking first. He generally spent at least fifty lines destroying his opponents in speech before he began to destroy them physically, wading through the giblets of the immoral for another two hundred or so. This part was no exception. It was hardly to be borne that Ortus would launch into The Noniad in company; she had been subjected to so much of it herself because she knew he hoped that one day she would be deeply moved by it, release him from the duty of cavalier primary, and make him a Ninth bone skald. The idea that he would give a public reading ought to have been a whipping offence.
Now he stood, wide and black and shadowy among all the brushed-steel shelving. The necromancer and the cavalier of the Fifth sat at a table spread wide with books, and fragments of delicate loose-leaf paper safely slipped into plex covers, and browned-out flimsy, and pens. The necromancer looked entertained, and the cavalier looked beside himself. The necromancer, the woman who had been so delighted with the idea of independent research, a grown woman with a very even smile, did not put Harrowhark in any good humour. Even she had heard of Abigail Pent.
“Lady,” said Ortus, and, sorrowfully: “Forgive me. Nonius has heroic standing among the priests and anchorites of our House,” he added to the others. “Perhaps I do him wrong by making poesy of the sacred mysteries.”
“I never realised that Nonius had passed into cult worship,” said Pent.
“He has not,” said Harrowhark shortly, and then was forced to admit: “Or, at least, the idea is passé.”
“Heroes are passé, you see,” explained Ortus with heavy sadness.
She did not murder him. It was a very near thing. Sir Magnus Quinn, that perambulating white-toothed smile, intervened quickly: “Have you made use of this space yet, Reverend Daughter? We prefer it for the moment to the idea of going downstairs. We’re taking up the biggest table, I am afraid—my wife found an annotated copy of The New Necromancer—my only contribution was that in the gentleman’s restroom, I found what is almost certainly an ancient theoretical epigram. That is how we got Ortus the Ninth onto the subject.”
“An epigram?”
He hesitated. Pent said mildly, “Magnus is being amusing. It reads as a dialogue between magicians from the schools of flesh, spirit, and bone magic, the punchline being: Yes, but my bone expands when I touch it, which at least proves that joke is as old as the Nine Houses themselves.” Before Harrowhark could take this prompt to make a hasty exit, the necromancer of the Fifth said without transition: “Are you interested in Lyctoral materials?”
This was an introduction, or a probe, or something different altogether. Scrutiny into the Ninth’s affairs might be deflected. She was more intrigued by the idea of an introduction.
“If you are asking whether or not we have any within my House,” said Harrow slowly, “I will not answer that question.”
“What a shame! I understand,” said Pent, who did not appear to be discomfited by refusals, or by the sacramental paint. “It was more to gauge your interest though. This library is stuffed. The books, now, the books are interesting—but the Lyctoral traces—phwoar.”
Abigail Pent had not seemed the type of woman to articulate phwoar. She said it very boyishly. On any other day Harrowhark would have been pushed beyond measure hearing phwoar after bone-related jokes and made her exit. But she was aware that priggishness was not a virtue. She was also aware that winnowing the secrets of Canaan House was going to take more than the skeletons she could construct and the diary she was documenting. She was very tired. She was being offered something. Wary of offering herself in return, she took it.
Harrow crossed around the table to see what was spread out in front of the adept of the Fifth. It was a curious assortment of the high and the low—a warped automatic pen with a thin inner cylinder of ink and a plex casing, rather more antiquated than one with an ink cartridge; reassembled scraps everywhere, like someone cleaning confetti up in an overly orderly fashion after a parade. A strand of hair. An open book with black ink still clear in the corner: This is nonsense.
“The books come from a later period, so I gather,” said Abigail. “The notes are priceless.”
She had reassembled a torn half page of flimsy that read:
After that cut into cubes, fry in the butter or oil, turn it occasionally until it is crispy. Cut up the pickle so there are no big chunks and mix it into the pan before taking off the heat.
M told us yesterday that Nigella “eats like a child,” so I
Harrowhark said, “This proves by itself that antiquity does not give an object automatic value.”
“I disagree. With this,” said Abigail smilingly, “some blood—positive identification—perhaps a few more examples—I will be able to call the writer’s ghost.”
Then she added again, “Phwoar.”
“She can, you know,” said Magnus, reading disbelief in Harrow’s carefully schooled expression. In fact, she was cursing inwardly; she felt cold and thoughtful. “Though I have, er, asked her not to.”
“You would need something for it to feast on,” said Harrowhark, and not to Magnus.
“Yes.”
“A ghost that old—the feeding—”
“It would be unprecedented,” said Pent. She was talking a little bit too much, too fast. “I mean, there’s the issue of whether the Lyctor in question is even dead. That’s the first thing to consider. As a speaker to the dead, I really am at my best when people are not alive … If they are in the River, whatever the depth, I can only hope that a handful of minor relics and the new blood of my beating heart will tempt them to the surface. Nobody has ever tempted a Lyctor before. I am not even certain where they go. Do Lyctors enter the River? Do Lyctors pass as we pass? I don’t know where they wait. I don’t know how to direct them. But I would so love to try.”
Harrowhark waited, her thumbs pressed together within her sleeves.
From the half a step behind her, Ortus said: “Your indefatigability in the face of ancient death becomes you.”
“Stop flirting with my wife,” said Magnus. (Harrowhark had forgotten that he was Abigail’s husband, and found the concept of making eyes at one’s cavalier too revolting to bear.) When he caught sight of Ortus’s expression over Harrow’s shoulder, which Harrow could only imagine, he said hastily: “Joke! A joke. Wouldn’t suggest it of you, Ninth.”
“I would like to give you something,” said Abigail Pent.
This was to Harrowhark. She watched as the capable hands—strong, for a necromancer’s, beautifully formed and with very even nails—took a bit of folded paper from the table. She passed it to her Ninth colleague as though it did not hurt her to give away such precious material. She was smiling, very slightly.
“Scholarship is best made as a communal effort,” she said. “If you can tell me anything of interest about that paper, I’d be very grateful for it. If you could tell me anything tedious, I’d still be thankful. Bone adepts do have such a notorious eye for detail.”
Harrowhark Nonagesimus was of the Ninth House; if it had been her in possession of Abigail Pent’s resources, she would have kept them all to herself. On dying she would have put them all in a chest and buried them to keep them from the greedy eyes of other scholars for another thousand years. She took the gift with gloved fingers, turned it around in her hands—it was just paper; it had the thanergy of paper, and unlike flimsy, she would be able to feel the seethe of bacteria eating away at it if she pressed it to her bare skin.
“I am—obliged to you, Fifth House,” she said.
Magnus was saying: “Ortus. What does happen to Nonius, after he faces the ensorcelled swordsmen? I assume they fight?”
Harrowhark was surprised at how immediately she could answer in her cavalier’s stead: “He cuts down seven men in about as many lines. Then the leader of the swordsmen approaches, carrying two swords. I would have assumed there was a swift rate of decay in the efficacy of additional swords. The others part to let Nonius and him fight. Nonius wins easily, though he takes eight pages to do so. The remaining onlookers he kills, rather more cursorily, as it only takes around four lines.”
She was surprised to find Magnus looking at her, and not at Ortus; was unsettled by the press of his mouth, of his good-natured and rather foolish expression, of his curly well-brushed hair and slightly wanting chin. She was mostly unsettled by his eyes, which were of a colour suddenly hard to define, and whose focus was on her entire.
“Is this really how it happens?” he said.
“Pardon?” said Harrowhark.
