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Magnus said soberly, “She’s waiting outside. I offered to wait with her, but she turned me down. Don’t know Dyas very well and didn’t want to push … It’s a bloody business.”
When Lady Pent went to the kitchens, Harrowhark accompanied her. They found Lieutenant Dyas not sitting down, or even leaning against the wall as anyone else would have spent the full hour or so they had been with the body, but standing ramrod-straight to attention. Her crisp white jacket appeared all the crisper and whiter after the wreck of her necromancer’s. Her scarlet necktie looked redder too—by the time they’d gotten hold of Judith Deuteros the blood had dried hers nearly black. Ortus had sponged it, and was attempting to dry it over a stove. At their approach, Dyas drew herself up to her full height, and she looked at Harrowhark, not at Abigail.
She said, with uncharacteristic frenzy: “Why am I here?”
Pent said, “Just to answer questions, Lieutenant Dyas.”
The lieutenant said, “I want to know—I just want to know—”
“What you know is of vastly more importance,” said Abigail. “Please, if you can, tell us exactly what you saw down there.”
Marta Dyas looked at her. There was no woe on her face, only a deep, almost thirsty terror, an enormous anticipation, which animated what was usually a schooled Cohort mask. “I was in the chamber when it happened,” she said, “already engaged with the target construct. The room was closed off from the adjoining chamber where—the captain was.” (There had been a brief pause. Harrow wondered if the pause had meant to contain Judith.) “I didn’t hear a shot. The target disappeared—the chamber unlocked—when I came out, the captain’s door was open, and she was inside. No … vitals.”
Pent said, “How long from that chamber unlocking to you reaching her?”
“Five to ten seconds to exit the chamber and get there,” said Lieutenant Dyas. Then she said, “In hindsight, the door must have opened when she died.”
“Did you hear any subsequent shots?” Harrowhark asked.
“No. The test chamber was soundproofed.” Dyas continued, a little mechanically, “I left Captain Deuteros. I moved to the corridor. I saw, at the very end, the Sleeper.”
“Please describe it, if you can,” said Pent. She added: “Take your time, Lieutenant. I recognise this is difficult…”
Dyas said, ragged, “I just want to know—”
“You will. I give you absolute surety that you will. What did the Sleeper look like?”
“You’ve all seen it through the glass,” said Dyas. This was not entirely true. Ortus refused to go anywhere near the glass-faced coffin in that central room, or the somnolent corpse within, and quaked at his own breathing. Harrowhark did not fear to look more closely at the death Teacher had promised them, ensconced within that frozen, clouded plex. She had been nonplussed to discover that the Sleeper slept dressed for an emergency, as Dyas recited now: “Breathing apparatus over the face—orange hazard suit—oxygen hood.”
Harrowhark said, “Easy symbols to fake. It could have been someone dressed as the Sleeper.”
“It was carrying a weapon,” said Dyas. “One I hadn’t seen anywhere in or on the coffin before. I called out, but it wouldn’t stop … I pursued it to the central atrium. The Sleeper’s coffin was open and empty. The figure climbed inside. Pulled the lid down, snapped it shut.”
Abigail prompted, “And then you escaped and raised the alarm.”
The lieutenant of the Second looked at Abigail as though she had suggested And then you went for ice cream.
“I went and got a piece of tubing from the mortuary room,” she said monotonously. “I hit the coffin. I hit the coffin repeatedly. I did so for maybe a minute. You found blood on the glass. It’s mine. I tried my fists and my feet and the butt of my sword—that plex glass isn’t plex. Or glass.”
“That could have easily meant all our deaths,” said Harrow; she had tasted hypocrisy on her own lips so often that she hardly felt the sting.
“Emperor’s breath, Dyas!” said Lady Pent, white lipped, a little more tactful in her shock. “That didn’t—rouse it?”
Dyas said, “No.”
Harrow had only halfway noticed Ortus edging closer, ostensibly to check on Judith Deuteros’s blood-crusted necktie. He had stopped in his ministrations to listen in the dreamy, part-transfixed way he always seemed to listen to everything, with slight tonal differences depending on the person. He listened to Harrow with the happy demeanour of a person far away in his mind palace, unless what she was saying had a direct impact on him, at which point he merely got very sad.
The Lieutenant’s gaze—unsettling and part feral, giving the impression that she was now a bag with ten snakes inside—fell on Ortus, and the stained necktie he had been wringing out. Harrow stepped forward, trying to place herself between the sightline of the Second cavalier and her own. But she moved to protect the wrong cavalier.
Her cavalier cleared his throat—oh, damn:
“My sister, I envy your fortune; fearless you forge yet ahead, through the cold grey flood of the River.
“Fallen in war for the fame of the House is the death every warrior fain would win at the finish;
“Laggard I linger behind; hold fast on the far bank’s beach-head! Blood shall repay your blood spilt.”
Book Eleven. For a moment, at the lieutenant’s expression, Harrow thought that she might draw that practical Cohort rapier and go for Ortus there and then, which his turgid verse probably did not deserve but which his choice to quote it unwanted and in public very much did. She closed her thumb and forefinger over a chip of patella in her pocket. But then Dyas’s hands trembled, and her eyes dropped to the floor, and she said lowly: “I can’t hope for that anymore.”
Abigail Pent said gently, “Lieutenant—” but Dyas was saying, low and fast, and this time to Harrowhark herself: “Is this really how it happens? You know of no hope for her?”
“She had eight metal projectiles spun at high speeds through her midsection,” said Harrow. She knew that some people took comfort in the idea, so she added: “She would have died very quickly after her heart was destroyed.”
“No,” said the lieutenant, and now Harrow thought she seemed dazed. Her fingers kept working the hilt of her rapier, from which hung a neat scarlet riband. “That’s not … Don’t know why I thought … No.”
“You have faced down a monster that is likely to be the doom of many, and many less able than Captain Deuteros,” said Ortus. Harrow regretted not making him take a solemn pledge of silence, to walk the place as the mute and intimidating bulk his father had been; but only a very obedient idiot of a cavalier would have stuck to that. “I include myself among the latter. Is there no hint of our salvation?”
Abigail said, “Ortus the Ninth is right, Lieutenant. If there are any details, anything else you might be able to tell us—you’ve taught us so much already, even if the price was too high.”
The lieutenant drew herself up again. Her mouth was now a calm line that betrayed nothing but classic Second House stoicism. Harrowhark admired her for that.
“One,” she said crisply. “The Sleeper can move from its coffin. Two, the Sleeper can pass through necromantic wards. Three, Teacher told us not to wake it. I don’t know what does. Noise doesn’t.” (“Not necessarily, no,” said Pent, who never did truck with unconditional statements.) “Four, it’s carrying a rifle.”
“Like something from an old story,” suggested Ortus.
“Like something. That’s all the facts I have,” said the lieutenant. “Don’t want to guess. One more thing—I’m not saying this with absolute certainty. I only got a glance before the lid closed and the plex fogged up again. But there’s something else in the coffin. The Sleeper’s lying on it.”
The lieutenant closed her eyes, though her precise posture did not shift. When she opened them, she said, “I don’t know if this matters. But it looked like a standard-issue infantry sword.” She added, with Cohort precision: “A two-hander.”
19
TEN MONTHS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
