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But despite the violently awful nudes—the excess of latticework—Ianthe—you were a frequent visitor to her den. You took such a pitiful pleasure in Nonagesimus, now that you had spent months being Harrowhark the First. As God said, you might be the ninth saint, but you could never be Ninth again—except when you closed Ianthe’s door.
“It’s down to your want of ambidexterity, Tridentarius,” you said, giving her the same sickly pleasure in nomenclature. “It’s not exactly mathematics. You are trying to fight with a sword in your wrong hand. I am not even trying to fight with a sword. As I’ve been told tiresomely often, a half-cocked version of something is significantly worse than not being cocked at all.”
Despite the fact that you had said not being cocked at all, Ianthe only slurped angrily at her soup, making a sound like custard going down a flute. “Tell me to stop breathing,” she said. (“I have, on multiple occasions,” you said.) “You won’t understand. It’s utterly instinctual. It doesn’t matter if I try to fight from a distance. I’ll flinch at something, and then Babs will kick in, and the arm won’t work—”
“You cannot pass the blame on to your burnt-up soul. It’s psychological.”
“Bullshit,” she said, with vehemence.
Babs indicated a very bad day. She so rarely mentioned her cavalier. “Augustine is critical, I take it.”
“Augustine told me they might as well smother me along with you.”
You were only astonished that you had any ego left to bruise. She took another spoonful of soup and said, her whey-coloured face dis satisfied: “He says the same thing you do … psychological … says I persist in being damaged for my own enjoyment.”
Still cold and very weary, you laid your sword at your feet and sat yourself down in a high-backed armchair with a frill around the bottom, done up in citrine stripes. Ianthe’s rooms were undoubtedly more luxurious than yours, and more interestingly appointed, having belonged for centuries to a long-dead Lyctor with time enough to come back every so often and furnish them to taste: but that long-dead Lyctor still seemed to sit in all the chairs and lie in the bed and shave by the water-pump sink, and you were relieved that your rooms contained no ghosts but your own.
You said, “There’s nothing wrong with the arm.”
“It’s not mine,” Ianthe said vehemently.
“Then cut it off.”
“So typically Ninth—”
“Let your vaunted Lyctoral abilities kick in,” you said. “See if it regrows.”
“It won’t,” she said, taking you quite seriously. “Teacher said Lyctors don’t survive decapitation, and that a lost limb would heal as a stump. And I know that if I try to make myself a new arm I’ll leave something out. If it’s not perfect it won’t work, and I won’t want it.”
The once-Princess of Ida did not say this petulantly, but used the resigned, rather furrowed tones of someone mildly aggrieved by self-understanding. You suggested, “So get the Saint of Joy to do it. She can be relied upon for physiological perfection.”
“Oh, you crack-up,” said Ianthe, not lifting her eyes from her soup.
“I personally would not let our eldest sister regrow any of my limbs,” you said, “but if perfection is what you desire—”
“Boo to that,” said Ianthe.
You grew bored. “Teacher, then.”
“He’d tell me how wonderful it would be to do it myself. We’re not all Teacher’s sweet little darlings for whom he would do anything,” she remarked. “I have never been good at attracting indulgent fathers.”
You bristled, but had no adequate comeback. You were busy massaging your itching fingertips, which were still red and sore: the cellular degradation was subtle enough that you were healing one layer at a time, to ensure you’d got everything. Not for you the smooth stump of a regenerated Lyctor: you had to do everything yourself. Yet you also would not turn to God, who might heal you in one blinding, soul-nauseating instant, flensing you utterly from the bones upward, and who might also awkwardly pat you on the shoulder, or look at you with that solemn, half-troubled smile that you both craved and hated.
“Then I do not know what to tell you,” you remarked, “except that if you persist in asking for my opinion, at least pretend that you want it.”
Ianthe pushed away her empty soup bowl and sat up, looking at you, stolen eyes narrowing with a sudden spurt of inspiration. Her paste-blond hair fell lankly over a face that should have been beautiful and over shoulders that should have been exquisite, but only contributed to the general impression of a wax figure in a pink dolly dress. You had never been given the option to play with dolls, but given hindsight you could not see yourself ever volunteering to have done so.
“But you might do it,” she said, softly. You saw her looking at the necklet of bone that peeked out from the collar of your shirt, the top of your homebrew exoskeleton. “You could do it, Harrowhark. And maybe I’d even let you, seeing as we’re comrades-in-arms. Seeing as we’re intimates.”
You stood up, more than a little repulsed, and your exoskeleton creaked as you bent to pick up the two-handed sword. “I am not perfection yet, when it comes to meat,” you said. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t be close … but you want something I can’t give. Nor is it something I’m prepared to give. Being honest, I am mildly disgusted you asked. Is there soup left in the kitchen?”
“Oh, heaps,” said Ianthe, who appeared not to have taken offence at your rejection. It was so impossible to tell, with Ianthe. “I made it. It’s vile.”
Were there less likely bedfellows now than you and she, the daughters of mystical Drearburh and self-regarding Ida? It was not a connection formed of any mutual admiration; if anything, the more you saw of Ianthe the less likely you were to mistake her for likeable. She made herself like an overdecorated cake: covered so thickly in icing and fondants and gums that it would take serious excavation to find any bread. As a necromancer she was a genius, though you thought she relied too much on shortcuts and circumventions. She had an exceptionally fine mind. She was not afraid of rigour. She was also obsessed with what might lie beneath the River and, though this was a touch hypocritical coming from you but never mind, a fucking crank.
But a crank who had attained Lyctorhood. A crank whom you were now obliged to call sister, though you thought it hurt her to call anyone sister much more than it hurt you. A crank whom a dead self had respected enough to include in the work. A crank who had found you, distracted nearly to death, beside yourself, disgraced, having thrust your blade straight through a dead woman’s sternum, and simply said: Wish you’d taken off her arms. Perhaps there were more likely bedfellows, but yours hadn’t killed you yet.
14
THE MITHRAEUM, THE SEAT of the First Reborn! The Sanctuary of the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the bolthole of God—the removing place of hallowed bones, and the ossuary of the steadfast! A space station hidden forty billion light-years from the ever-burning light of Dominicus, lit by thanergetic starlight, set in the midst of the circumstellar disc, an ancient jewel within so much dead gravel.
