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“I say, Reverend Daughter, is it an ancestral Locked Tomb tradition for your spirit energy to be so diverse?” Abigail asked brightly. “I’ve counted up to one hundred and fifty signatures contributing to you, and there’s more—they’re stamps rather than complete revenants, of course, which means their spirits were manipulated to leave marks on you in some way, which is fascinating if it means…”
It took long years of self-discipline not to kill the woman then and there; or at least make the attempt. Against any other ghost-caller, their wards so exquisite and so fatally slow, Harrowhark had no doubt that a single decisive strike would do the job. Abigail Pent introduced doubt. It was that doubt that made her turn and flee—a tactical retreat, as she kept telling herself; Ortus broke into a trot to catch up with her, the rapier clanking at his side. She caught their voices, because she had very good hearing for low, hushed voices of any type. Magnus was saying, “Dear, you didn’t have to…” and Abigail, mildly: “It’s just curious, considering…” and nothing more.
She left the gas-levered autodoors of the library—which were, as far as Harrow could tell, the only autodoors that existed outside of the deep LED-lit basement with its metal grilles and groaning air conditioners—and stalked down the corridor as quickly as possible. It was hard not to admit that she was badly shaken; and she said lowly: “We now avoid Pent and Quinn at all costs. For the sake of the Ninth House, and of the sanctity of the Locked Tomb. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, my Lady Harrowhark,” said Ortus.
“If I believe they pose a threat, or that they intend us direct harm—frankly, on any minor excuse—I will invoke Tomb retribution. I’ll kill Pent where she stands if I need to, and you will swear that there was no sin of unjustified House war, no matter the circumstances.”
Only a pause. “Yes, my Lady Harrowhark,” said Ortus.
This calm agreement made her all the more furious. She did not examine why. “And it ought to be Non-i-us as three syllables, or Non-yus as two,” Harrow added, taking bloody satisfaction in cruelty. “Not whichever you happen to feel like at the time. It’s amateurish.”
Her cavalier stopped immediately, like a beast of burden shying before a jump. He said, “Yes, my Lady Harrowhark. I am flattered by your attention to my craft. It’s consciously archaic. Emphasising my commitment to spoken performance.”
“For God’s sake, Ortus, please stop sounding as though I’m about to whip you. I am taking care of our affairs, despite your ignorance.”
“Let me not be unpleasing to my lady,” he said. “Let the unseeing eye of the Locked Tomb gaze down upon me, and see me guard her with the unmoving aegis of a cavalier’s love. But I will not modulate my tone for you.”
She rounded on him. Harrowhark knew that she was being unfair; she knew that she was being petulant—had been scared into it, and could not soothe herself, and was using any means fair and foul to try to do so now. But when she was scared, she was a child again, and she was more afraid of being a child again than anything else in her life. Almost.
“I have every right to correct you. We are at the gates of the Tomb, even now,” she said. “I carry it with me, and its rules hold clear.”
“Let us never leave it,” said Ortus. “My lady, I follow your every order … I will accept your chidings gratefully. I will watch you slay whomsoever you feel the need to slay, and I will sponge the blood from your brow … but when I lay me down to sleep, I am a fully grown man who is allowed to feel precisely what I want, about anything I want. There has never been a rule against doing so, and that has always been my deep and unyielding relief with regard to you—to my lady mother—to Captain Aiglamene. Your final will be done, my lady.”
Then he bowed to her—the very correct bow of a Ninth House tomb swordsman; his paint a perfect, if sad and melting, skull, his attitude sombre, his face the blankness of the grave. And just when his Lady might feel the pain of any reflective empathy for him, he saved her by establishing his position as the biggest source of passive aggression her House had ever produced. “I might also note that synizesis is characteristic of some of our finest examples of early Ninth prosody. I’m certain your studies have kept you from the full breadth of the classics.”
Harrowhark looked at him, chose to make that look her final word, and then drew him into an alcove. The alcove was shallow, but he provided good cover. Her fingers shook a very little, so she withdrew them into her sleeves, so it might not be too obvious. She took the innocuous piece of paper that Abigail Pent had given her to examine, and she unfolded it.
When she saw what was inside her eyes seemed to strobe; the streaked red writing almost hovered above the page, the letters crowding and cramping themselves together as she read—
THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME SO I DID THE IMPLANTATION MYSELF YOU SELF-SERVING ZOMBIE AND YOU STILL SENT HIM AFTER ME AND I WOULD HAVE HAD HIM IF I HADN’T BEEN COMPROMISED AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE SAW ME AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME
AND FOR THAT I’LL MAKE YOU BOTH SUFFER UNTIL YOU NO LONGER UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF THAT GODDAMNED WORD
They were totally alone. Harrowhark nonetheless made her fingers very still, and made the sign she had taught to Ortus—the one that asked the question, What am I seeing? He instantly took the paper from her shivering fingers and scanned it.
“If you come to my room, I will make you the potato dish you liked,” he read aloud, with gravity. And: “How must we understand potato?”
“As your closest vegetable relative,” said Harrowhark, who’d never seen one in real life.
“You are a ready wit,” her cavalier said, with no apparent rancour and every sign of appreciation. “I have always admired your facility for repartee, my lady. Oftentimes someone will say something to me, and later I will think up the perfect riposte—so perfect the hearer could not help but wilt, and be ashamed that they had set themselves up to receive it—but by that point it is often hours after the fact and I am lying in my bed. And in any case, I hate conflict, all kinds.”
Harrowhark rounded on him.
“The Tomb have mercy, Nigenad, you should be ashamed to advertise as much,” she snarled, and did not even understand her incandescence. “A cavalier’s life is conflict. She is a warrior, not a human-sized sponge. If only duels took the form of competitive passive-aggression, I’d probably be a Lyctor already. And you have the temerity to call yourself a son of Drearburh? Don’t answer that; I know you barely have the temerity to call yourself anything at all. For the love of God, Ortus, I need a cavalier with backbone.”
“You always did,” said Ortus. “And I am glad, I think, that I never became that cavalier.”
Hours after the fact, when she was lying in her bed, Harrow’s brain let the response roll up to the surface: What the hell do you mean by that? Which was not a comeback.
11
SOMEONE TOOK YOU TO BED—at the time you had no idea whose bed, or where, or how; you did not wake up for it. Later that night, or perhaps early that morning, you were found by the Lord your God in the little chapel.
You were leaning over the corpse, your arms stretched high above your head, clutched around the hilt. Your two-handed sword was thrust through Cytherea’s breast for the second time. The rosebuds were scattered and stained with drops of old, sour blood. You could never recall how you got there.
That was how you passed your first night in the Mithraeum, apparently.
ACT TWO
12
SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
ON LAST COUNT YOU’D killed twelve planets, but you still found that first quick slice to the jugular the hardest. You felt your own breath wet on your face in your crinkly hazard suit; worn to keep the dust off; needless, at least for the moment. You judged the angle. You hesitated.
Your unwilling tutor mistook your hesitation for anticipation, sitting opposite you in her own rustling orange suit, the triple light of the three-star sunset dyeing her face orange through the soft plex stuff of the hood. A light hail of sand and dust particles pattered over the fabric and went plinkety, plinkety, plink.
“Don’t bother waiting for the timer, Harrowhark,” she said, muffled behind layers of amalgam plastic and thermal fibre. She was already sitting in the posture of submergence: knees high, back a soft curve, hands light over the fronts of the shins. “I’m confident you don’t need a timer anymore, and it’ll drop to flash-freezing out here in half an hour, so hurry up—it won’t be me they’ll be emptying out of the dustpan for the funeral.”
