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“Oh, goodbye!” she called out suddenly, to the corpse borne aloft. “Goodbye, Palamedes, my first strand—goodbye, Camilla, my second … One cord was overpowered, two cords could defend themselves, but three were not broken by the living or the dead.”
Harrowhark suddenly felt something, in her core, though she did not know precisely what it was. Somehow in Canaan House her ability to feel had been blunted, leaving only a sense of dislocated longing, a bizarre yearning as though flipping through the pages of a book for a proverb she remembered but could not find. She focused on what was in her hands, instead of on a stranger’s farewell to strangers.
The piece of flimsy was rolled up so tightly that it resembled a kind of fat pill. She took off her gloves, and with the edges of her fingernails—bitten to the quick, and never much help—she started to prise open one wrinkled corner. She was thoroughly surprised when a deep shadow fell over her: when her cavalier primary laid one black-gloved hand down on her naked ones.
“My Lady Harrowhark,” whispered Ortus, “perhaps … maybe you shouldn’t … in case.”
“You presume overmuch,” she snapped.
He withdrew. “I have often thought so,” he said sadly.
By the time she swept into the corridor, the rain driving through the holes in the roof and the walls and lashing in with gusty, bad-smelling sprays, Ortus three-quarters of a step behind her, she had nearly gotten the whole thing open. She opened it, hummocked and humped all over with little rills from being over-folded, and she read:
HIM I’LL KILL QUICK BECAUSE SHE ASKED ME TO AND BECAUSE THAT MUCH HE HONESTLY DESERVES BUT YOU TWO MUMMIFIED WIZARD SHITS I WILL BURN AND BURN AND BURN AND BURN UNTIL THERE IS NO TRACE OF YOU LEFT IN THE SHADOW OF MY LONG-LOST NATAL SUN
“It is a drawing of the letter S,” said the deep, solemn voice from over her shoulder, and she realized she had stopped midstride. “The letter in question is constructed from six short marks stacked vertically three by three. There are two triangles on the top and bottom, which, along with some diagonal strokes, form a calligraphic S.”
“Nigenad,” said Harrow, without turning. “I did not ask you.”
“Three people are dead, my Lady Harrowhark,” said her cavalier. “One ranked Cohort necromancer. Two scions of the enigmatic Sixth House, quick in learning and wisdom if not in martial prowess. Am I to act only on your command, when the Sleeper comes for me?”
“Were you planning to do anything other than lie down and die?” she said, waiting for rage; dying for rage; hoping for the simulacrum of rage, if nothing else. “What do you think you can do, Ortus? Did you have a tactic, beyond stopping bullets with your body?”
“It would be within the family character, I agree,” said Ortus, meditatively. “My father died, simply because your mother and father asked him to. He took his own life when your parents handed him the rope, though he had a wife at home and, if he acknowledged it, a son.”
Harrow lowered the flimsy more out of instinct than intent. She found herself turning around to look Ortus full in the face, as best she could with the umbrella over his head, and the hood half-plastered to his scalp with rain despite the oilcloth’s best efforts, and his painted skull now a sad melange of alabaster grey and black. She looked at his underslept, roly-poly face, his deep black Drearburh eyes. They were not true black, as she had usually thought: in the shadow she could finally see a deep earthy undertone, like the ploughed-up additive ground in the planter fields. His grown-up features were suddenly ancient to her. She wanted to panic, to feel the icy knives of despair.
“You knew,” she said. “You knew the whole time that Mortus the Ninth died at their command.”
Now Ortus’s face changed. It slid a second time into paint-splattered, black-irised, hooded contempt. He looked at her as though she were tedious. He looked at her as though he did not know who she was. His contempt made the doors she heard in her ears slam in an orchestra of unfathomable sound. He looked at her as though she were a squalling infant; as though she had not spoken, but rather opened her mouth and vomited.
“Harrow,” he said curtly, “you are not the only person who can add up two and two, and arrive at four.”
Any reply she might have made was aborted by a sudden gust of rain through a broken window. A curtain of murky water splattered through the glass maw. The water carried with it a handful of flashing brown-and-steel objects, which fell in a tumbled heap on the rotten Canaan House corridor carpet. When they came to rest, she and Ortus stared down at a collection of large, rusted pipette needles, the hard plex type with measurement markings up the side.
“Would you like to know if I can see them also?” Ortus asked humbly, after a long rain-swept pause.
22
THE NIGHT AFTER YOU killed your thirteenth planet, you were beset by a dream wherein you sat down to dinner opposite the Body. This was far better than the normal travails of dinner, with its partakers all wearing the filmy mother-of-pearl Canaanite robes that clung to Mercymorn like starlight, turned Augustine ethereal, gave Ianthe jaundice, and rendered you a sacrificial parsnip; that trial where, if you did not eat enough, the Emperor of the Nine Houses told you kindly, “Try just a few more spoonfuls, Harrowhark,” as Ianthe repressed not her smirks. But in the dream you wore your thick dark vestments of the Ninth House, and sat only opposite the monstrous dead of the Locked Tomb, who wore the shabby black shirt and trousers of some particularly slovenly penitent. Both of you wore the sacramental skull paint, and you talked comfortably of very little—yet it felt as though it meant very much. And nobody made you eat.
Then the Body looked at you with those direct, incalculable eyes, and she said: “Harrowhark. Wake up.”
“Pardon?”
“Wake up. Now.”
You opened your eyes to the ceiling the long-lost Anastasia had never seen, twisted in the bedclothes she had never slept in. The thickly insulated blackout hangings covering the plex windows projected the high ceilings into an eternity of shadows, and you could barely perceive your hands in front of your face. You pushed away the coverlet. You were cold beneath your nightgown, which had been short in the leg when you went away to Canaan House and was a sorry affair now, and your exoskeleton scraped quite loudly in that black silence as you took the bone-sheathed sword from its loverlike position next to you on the bed. You held it with the swaddled blade flat on your shoulder, your hands cupping the bottom of the hilt—still the pommel—and you did not strap on the rapier that the Emperor had given you.
It was lighter outside your rooms, in the corridor. The low yellow panel lights cast warped, skeletal shadows up and down the memorials of the Mithraeum. They had been turned down to faint blue-hued ambers to acknowledge the hours of sleep, and gave texture more than vision. To your Drearburh eyes, however, the passageway was flooded with light. That was why you saw her so clearly.
She stood at the curve of the passage, perhaps fifteen metres from you. She struck weird shadows in that low halo of cold yellow, the softly gleaming whites of her shift glowing like a shaft of light through green water. There were still smudges of petal in her pale brown curls, and her eyes were too dark to see, but you recalled their nightmarish blueness. Cytherea looked at you, turned toward you, and began to walk.
That walk! That shuffling, disconcerting, slithering walk! The body flung its arms before it for momentum, the legs stiff-thighed and lock-kneed, right-side arm moving in time with right-side leg, ridiculous, appalling. Those fixed dead fingers caught a skeletal arm wrapped in gold foil, amethysts studded like so many eyes between the knucklebones, and it clattered to the ground, and Cytherea tripped over it—without the head losing its tracking focus on you, those unblinking eyes adhered to yours—and the body splayed and juddered on the ground. Then the corpse began moving inchworm-fashion, pushed forward by the action of the legs, the forearms banging on the tiles, thrusting the blessed bones of some fallen faithful out the way as though unnoticed. It was as though a magnet were stuck in the meat, a magnet that craved some polar force within you.
This assemblage writhed closer. You were a holy Lyctor: Harrowhark the First, ninth necrosaint to the King Undying, heir to a hard-won power that burnt in you like fusion. It was not arrogance to name yourself one of the most powerful necromancers in the universe. You took one look at that relentless, freakish argument of limbs, and you fled.
You hurled yourself back inside your room and locked the door. You scrabbled inside your mouth—drew blood with your fingernails, bit your tongue—swabbed your reddened saliva on the door in the hasty whorls of a blood ward, and pushed a chair up and beneath the handle, mindlessly. You threw yourself to the ground, your heart rattling the bars of its ribcage prison.
