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The grossly named Dulcie sat back down in the chair, and her cavalier pushed her alongside one corpse, and then the other. Harrowhark watched her work. She gently grated a bit off the heel of each stiffening hand—she took a minute sliver off each thigh, unbuttoning both sets of trousers without a blush or grimace—she cleaned under the fingernails (“Just for bacterial thalergy, you know”), and, in the end, sighed.
“The one on the left’s Cam, the one on the right’s Pal,” she said, proving her desire to saddle the world with diminutives. “Did the Sleeper get them?”
“Only by assumption,” said Harrowhark, while Abigail’s dolt of a husband said, “I bloody hope so.”
“Magnus,” Abigail said, a touch disapprovingly.
“Well, if the Sleeper didn’t, that’s two maniacs with an ancient weapon and a love of blowing off faces, dear,” said Magnus.
Maniac did not seem apt. The first death was maniac. Deuteros was riddled with far more holes than necessary. This had been a simple execution. The effects were grisly. It would be difficult ever to get a clear picture of what Sextus’s and Hect’s faces had looked like, as they were now sprayed indiscriminately across the back wall of the mortuary. From what Harrow had been able to reconstruct, and the relative time stamps of the deaths, it looked as if both representatives of the Sixth House had stood quietly with their backs to the wall, about an arm’s length apart from each other, and had their faces forcibly removed from very short range. First went one; the second had waited; then the other.
Harrow said, “The projectile exited out the back of the skull, and we haven’t been able to dislodge it from the wall. Fragments suggest a similarity. There is reasonable doubt, and then there’s unnecessary caution. I say the Sixth were killed by the same entity that killed Deuteros.”
“A thesis I agree with,” said Ortus heavily. “The Sleeper, who sleepeth not. Perhaps a better name would have been.… the Waker.” (She searched her cavalier thoroughly for any evidence of humour, but found none, as per usual.) “It lies in an impervious coffin. It kills with a legendary weapon. What can we do against such a supernatural assault?”
The dreadfully named Dulcie was stroking a soft, wet lock of very dark hair between thumb and forefinger, quite close to the ruined ear of Camilla Hect. “The only thing you can ever do, when faced with an enemy too great for yourself,” she said. “Fight like a trapped animal in a sack.”
“I agree,” said her bronze statue of a cavalier. “Better that we make the first move. What is impervious? What is coffin?” (Harrow was astounded to hear the older man beside her mutter, “An adjective and a noun.”) “I say we muster all able-bodied cavaliers for an initial assault.”
“And die,” suggested Ortus ponderously.
“Better not to die as Deuteros and Sextus and Camilla the Sixth have died,” said the man. “If you think of the enemy as unassailable, shadow-priest, then the battle is lost already.”
Then this bronze statue cleared his throat, and added:
“I held to the faith of my fallible flesh;
Why should I think of the irradiating star?”
Harrow’s cavalier swung his head to confront this act of spoken poetry. He looked like a man who had stood on the bailey, beheld the enemy at his gates, and found them manifold and terrible. He stared as though the Seventh cavalier had revealed himself to be the Sleeper, done awful and inadvisable acts with Ortus’s mother, and compared Matthias Nonius to two shits.
“And that is how you would have your master end,” said her black-swaddled swordsman, “with her cavalier filled with shot, before a box that does not open?”
“Interesting hypocrisy, from a black cavalier of the Ninth sepulchre,” said his equally tedious opposite.
“All right, gentlemen,” said Magnus Quinn, with a slightly forced cheer. “Protesilaus, if I’m not wrong? I’m not? Good— Respectfully, I don’t agree with either of you. Ninth, you’re too good a man to roll over and wait for another death. Seventh, the last time I attacked a box I couldn’t open, it was my birthday and my wife had tied the ribbon too tightly. Let’s get everyone on side, inasmuch as that’s possible. Duchess Septimus. The Reverend Daughter. Lieutenant Dyas. United we stand, divided we fall, or so the saying goes.”
“I don’t know how much I can do,” confessed Dulcie, who was most likely Duchess Septimus, and who had wrinkled her nose when a fat drop of rain had fallen on it. The gleaming Protesilaus thrust the umbrella over her head. “I’ve … I didn’t really prove myself … there was nothing much to prove, on Rhodes. When I came here I thought it might be my chance to do something.”
She finished this rather helpless little speech by playing with a fold on her virginal white skirts. Harrowhark said bluntly, “Listen to your first instinct. There’s a tube in your chest, and you can barely walk.”
“I’ve felt heaps better since I got here,” Dulcie said defensively. “I’ve coughed a few times, but it’s mainly for show, isn’t it, Pro?”
“Do not mistake the thaw for the spring.
Our bud is not yet certain,”
quoth her cavalier.
Harrowhark deliberately did not watch for the hot flash of murder in her own cavalier’s eyes, though it at least leavened his thick, porridgy sadness. It must have been traumatic to see his only cultivated personality trait co-opted by someone who looked like the hero of his very own epics. It was more interesting to look at Abigail Pent—to look at those slender, workaday hands turning over the forearms and elbows of the body that was apparently Palamedes Sextus, examining. “No defence wounds,” Pent murmured. “Just like Judith … I wonder.”
The wind had picked up. It suddenly screamed shrilly over the glass-covered, vine-choked roof, bringing bullet sprays of hard rain in its wake. For a moment, Abigail shuddered. Then she straightened up and clapped her hands together, as though she led a class of unruly small children. “We’re all in this together,” she said, which was a typically Fifth assumption. The Ninth didn’t think anyone was in anything together, or if they were, they all had to disperse as soon as humanly possible to avoid splash damage. “I am beginning to suspect I know where the danger lies. Or at least, I’ve got a perfectly baseless assumption, and every scholar knows that this is where you begin. Dulcie—Lady Dulcinea, do you mind if I ask you to get Silas Octakiseron with us? He’s neither to hold nor to bind to me, but he might listen to you.”
“Fine,” said the woman in the chair, drying her nose carefully with her crochet necktie, so as not to disturb her shunt. “I don’t love you for asking, but I won’t say that the renowned Abigail Pent asked something of me and I didn’t do it. And you’ve been kind to Cam and Pal. I’ll go.”
Abigail said, “Magnus, will you ask the lieutenant—” (“Anything for you, even that,” he said promptly.) “—and, Reverend Daughter, if you can, when you can, Coronabeth Tridentarius. And her sister, of course,” she added, though Harrowhark thought that addition a bit belated. “With the cavalier. Again, if you can. I haven’t been able to check … I’ll get any leftovers. Ask everyone to leave the facility alone, to come together. And find out whose room doesn’t leak,” she added, struck by inspiration, “so we can put down mattresses, as—I tell you for free—we’re flooded.”
It was left to the cavaliers to transfer the faceless body of Camilla Hect back into the frozen morgue—Abigail had removed all of the cavalier’s effects from her pockets, and was brooding over them like a crossword—and the intubated flesh necromancer wheeled herself over to the grisly remains of the skinny Sixth boy. He was a perfectly normal sight, except from the neck up.
“Is this how it happens, Lady Pent?” she asked soberly.
Abigail picked up a worn leather strap that must have belonged to a clockwork watch face, and said gently: “No. It’s not.”
“Does it get—better than this? Do you know?”
This did not seem to Harrow like a question that could ever be answered. She did not fully understand it. But the Seventh did love questions that were as beautiful as they were unanswerable. This oblique sally did not get a response from the other woman, who had taken off her glasses to examine a crisscrossed piece of wax and a fragment of darning thread. Harrowhark felt bounden to look at the things they had taken from the Master Warden’s pockets: a scrap of soft cloth that you might wipe your glasses with, a pen, a little fold-out examining lens, a crumpled-up piece of flimsy. When the cavaliers came to bear away the Warden (less heavy than his cavalier: only Magnus and the Seventh, Protesilaus, bore him, with Ortus hovering on the sidelines), the chair-bound girl gave a woeful little sigh.
