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“I caught the Saint of Duty in the throes of grave lust,” you told Ianthe, about a minute later: she was not asleep either, but sitting up in bed with the lamp on, making complicated notes in a little journal.
“Oh my God,” said the Princess of Ida. She looked enchanted. In the lamplight, the bags beneath her eyes were very pronounced. Two apple cores sat in a perpetual state of perfumed rot by her bedside: her attempts to halt decay had progressed admirably. “The classical vice. Oldest sin in the book.”
“All flesh magicians,” you said coolly, “should be drowned in boiling blood.”
“Don’t tell me the Ninth never—”
“We do not.”
“Ah, but my beautiful na?f—”
“No.”
“Never mind that. Was he actually…?” (Here she made an evil gesture with her hands, which you took a moment to comprehend.) “You know. Waxing necrolagnic? Committing the love that cannot speak its name?”
You told her what you had seen, and she was immediately dismissive and mildly crestfallen.
“Oh, but who hasn’t done that,” said Ianthe. She reopened her small journal; you noted that whatever she was doing involved some quite substantial mathematics. “Dull. You obviously walked in too early. At least now you know who’s been moving her—so to speak.”
She did contentious things with her eyebrows, and then, apparently no longer interested, turned back to her mathematics. “Good night, Harrowhark.”
You were not to be so lightly disregarded. You stood with your sweat cooling inside your shirt and your flesh adhering to the exoskeleton, and said: “The depredations of a bad man do not cause Cytherea to walk.”
Ianthe closed her notepad and rested her pale head briefly against the headboard. “Bad man,” she murmured to herself, and then: “I’d walk out on a date with the Saint of Duty. Nonagesimus, this is no time to interrupt grown Lyctors committing acts that probably seem perfectly normal after ten thousand years with such limited romantic options—though you should hear some of the things Augustine has told me, my God!—nor is it a good time to advertise that you are not merely a failure, but a mad failure.”
“You should not advertise your utter lack of imagination,” you said. “Tridentarius, my position is not so precarious that I am going to ignore things that happen in front of my face.”
“Yes, but are they actually?”
“Don’t presume you know what you’re talking about.”
“Your position is that precarious, my dear,” said Ianthe, and reached over with a long left arm to place her journal on the rightmost table. “Did you know that Teacher asked Mercymorn if they could store you in his chamber when we go after the Beast? Mercymorn said no, they decompress that chamber for a reason, unless he thought it would be nice to asphyxiate you personally?”
You said, “And did you know that Teacher himself thinks you far from a perfect sword hand?” At her expression, you added, “I personally loathe tattletales for the purpose of insult, but it seems to be your main weapon in our conversations.”
Ianthe’s mouth had thinned to a purple slit where, you noticed, the skin was torn. “Those were his exact words?”
“It’s no secret that I’m going to die,” you said. In no way were you resigned to that. You had never died before. “I am most likely lashing out. Nevertheless, those were his exact words.”
She stared off into the distance, her eyes fixed on the huge painting of the long-dead, clothing-optional Lyctor. “God is a dickhead,” she murmured.
You were astonished by the force of your immediate anger. You were amazed by its intensity. You drew your two-handed sword from your back: your wrists weren’t quite in the right position, but it was a good attempt. The sword’s matte, calcified surface sucked in the lamplight, casting strange shadows on her eiderdown. You said, “Do not blaspheme in front of me.”
“Don’t draw on me with that ridiculous thing. You don’t even know where you got it.”
“God gave it to me.”
“And you’ve never asked yourself why?”
At those mere six words, your brain revolted. You felt a hot, thick sensation in the back of your top sinuses that you had not felt in a very long time, never approaching your limits enough for it to occur: a nosebleed. “So tell me why,” you said evenly.
“Can’t,” she snapped. “You ensorcelled my jaw, you fucking psycho shadow vestal! Yes, I worked that one out! So unless I want to do homebrew mandible surgery, I can’t squeal to anyone. And I have thought about homebrew mandible surgery, but I have no idea how far back your curse extends, because I’m not a blackened, tedious little bone witch. Now sheathe your sword; you don’t want to go toe to toe with me.”
You said, “There you are fundamentally wrong.”
“I’d strangle you with your own visceral fat before you raised one shitty skeleton.”
“Try me,” you said. “Oh, try me, Ianthe.”
You stared at each other: you at the foot of her bed, sword as still as you could make it, its weight a comforting and familiar pain—her sitting up in the fallen bedclothes, eyes like ice and frozen ground. You knew how you would do it: she was still fool enough to keep two jewelled candlesticks by her bed, thick with topaz and delicate flecks of polished tarsal, and from these you would smash two ropes of petrous bone straight into either side of her skull. You might run your finger up the inside of your sword blade, curling bone matter from there as though it were butter, fed and strengthened with your own heart’s blood. You might scatter it and thrust squamous pegs of thick phalange through her palms, the fissures between her tibiae and fibulae. At that point you’d get on top of her, use everything you had ever learned from watching Mercymorn the First, and fuse her spine like a hangman’s rope.
Ianthe looked at you, and in the paleness of her skin and in the shadows of her lips was her death, and yours.
Then she rolled over and covered her head with her satin pillow.
“Go ahead. Kill me,” she said, muffled through a thick layer of down and pillowcase. “I have to train with Augustine in less than five hours anyway and I’ve stayed up too late. Death is preferable.”
There was no answer to that, naturally, except to sheath your sword, return to your bedroom, and put yourself to bed, defeated.
24
IT WAS NO SECRET TO YOU, or to anybody in the claustrophobic, smothering schoolroom that was the Mithraeum, that Ianthe’s sword-fighting training was at the end of the line. The Saint of Patience had none left for her. Her ineptitude would have been a negligible problem had it not continued when Ianthe was in the River—had her doubts not gummed up the mechanism of Naberius Tern’s mindless sword-arm. You had watched the submerged Ianthe’s strong, upright, boyish posture flounder as the right arm dropped the sword. A psychological block, certainly, but one projected into the dead soul that stood to defend her body when the mind went voyaging.
There was more pressure on her than on you. The eyes that fell on you were now less critical, because in those eyes you were a woman already dead.
Your eighteenth birthday passed without anyone noticing, even you. One night before you went to sleep you thought to yourself, restlessly: another year. You recalled it as you always did: the memorial to the two hundred who had died seizing, kicking, and choking as their neurotransmitters were poisoned into overdrive. You silently begged them to stay their hands, as you always did. You never asked for forgiveness. Then you slept. Most people would have iced a cake, or something.
It was soon after your seventeenth year passed that you acknowledged a truth you had known for some time: Ortus the First had to die.
His Ninth House name no longer bothered you, now that you knew about Anastasia. It seemed reasonable that the foundress responsible for establishing many of your House’s naming conventions had chosen to honour her fellow Lyctors, in the days before their names were veiled in holy secrecy. It was just a banal and uncomfortable coincidence, as though he’d carried the name of a dead childhood pet.
The Saint of Duty’s death went from option to necessity the day you realised his true power.
