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The Saints of Duty and Patience were out in the corridor. If either had wanted to run you through, you could not have stopped them. You looked at them despite Ianthe urging you away: at Augustine, looking as though he had seen the ghost of someone he did not particularly like, and at Ortus.
Ianthe kept trying to turn you to face forward, but you kept watching even as she hustled you down the corridor. You saw Augustine fumble for a cigarette, light it with the little silver arc lighter he kept in his breast pocket, and pass it silently to his brother Lyctor. Ortus was impassive. There was not a trace of blood on his clothing. There was not a stray lump of viscera upon the shabby shirt, nor on the mother-of-pearl cloak still slung over his shoulder. There was no be trayal of any emotion on his face: not the surprise that had dawned over his heavy-lidded eyes earlier, nor anger, nor even dissatisfaction. He caught your gaze. You held his.
And the Saint of Duty lifted his lit cigarette to you in an unmistakable salute.
26
ONE DAY, HARROWHARK’S EYE was caught by the rain drizzling outside on the docking terrace, and by black figures rising in the fog. They were on the very edge of the terrace. She tugged her hood deep down over her head, walked outside into the rain—she kept bone chips clutched between her knuckles so that they would not grow wet from sweat or weather—and approached. One of the black figures resolved itself in that grey, stinking blanket of cloud: large and imposing, like the midday sun amid clouds. It was Coronabeth Tridentarius.
She was turned away from Harrow, and her riot of hair—half-caught in a fillet, half-escaping—was soaking wet, a dark and crinkling amber in the rain. She was not fighting or arguing. She was still as a statue, and ready and waiting as a dog.
The figure behind her was much smaller and slighter, the aseptic robes of his office a bleached, blued grey with the water. The braid pinned high on his head was so pale as to be white, and his rain-sodden chainmail kirtle gleamed, wetly, amid the fog. At her creeping pace, Harrowhark had covered only half the distance when she heard Silas Octakiseron say, clear above the patter of falling drops:
“And somewhere out there, may all the blood of your blood suffer even a fraction of what I have suffered.”
He pushed. The eldest princess of Ida dropped from the side of the docking bay with swanlike ease. She simply tipped off the side, neither folding nor seizing—there one moment, a golden star, and then gone. There was no question of going to her aid. The Eighth House necromancer stood there with the wind flapping his wet alabaster robes, his braid torn to wisps and ribbons, and he did not even look over the side.
But he did look to Harrowhark.
“Defend yourself, Octakiseron,” she called out. “The black vestals have only one answer for murder.”
“The black vestals only ever had one answer for anything,” was the reply, in his profoundly deep, gorgelike voice. He looked at her: from their distance of about five bodies apart his eyes were umbrous in his white and stricken face. “The question came, Why … and the black vestals said, Because. Now you have come to me, you cur of the nighttime, you fry of slavery, you have done what you have done, and you say to me, Defend yourself? How could I?”
“I don’t give a damn about White Glass mysteries or cryptics,” she said. “I care that you just pushed one of the Tridentarii to her death.”
“Death?” said Silas.
He looked out again at all the rolling fog, at the clouds that obscured the grinding sea down to which Coronabeth was most likely still falling. From closer up, Harrow saw that he was all in disarray: his clothes were smudged and a few of his buttons were not done up. The rain and the fog had lashed him terribly.
Harrow took her hands from her pockets and strewed her chips upon the ground. From each chip—she felt a pop, pop, pop at the back of her brain from the thalergy expenditure—she unfurled a full appendicular skeleton, extending the bone in a hurry so that none of the cortex could mix with water. The dull gleam of their compact bone shone like marble in the wet. Silas Octakiseron looked at her five full constructs with his lip curling.
“Her filthiness is on her feet,” he murmured. “She has not remembered her end.”
“For God’s sake, raise your hands, Octakiseron,” she said. “Or make me strike down an unarmed man.”
And Silas said, “Is this how it happens, then?”
He turned away. She saw what he meant to do, and her skeletons skittered forward on the rain-slick concrete of the docking terrace. But it was for nothing: Silas Octakiseron had launched himself fearlessly into space after the tumbling body of Coronabeth Tridentarius. He fluttered in the wind and rain briefly, like a dirty white bird, and disappeared.
She pushed through her skeletal crowd to stand at the edge—they held her arms back, for safety—and stared down into the virginal and unbroken bank of salty, reeking fog. There was no sign of either adept. From far below, the ocean howled. Harrow thought she perceived a tatter of something penetrate the cloud. Her heart pounded rhythmically in her ears, and she thought she saw, absurdly, a sudden gush of watery blood, as though the fog itself had been knifed; but it was gone almost as soon as she had seen it.
27
YOU LOST A GREAT INTERSTICE OF TIME. The next thing you knew, you were staring at the shadowy bowels of a room, lit only by a soft yellow puddle of light—a bedside table–lamp—sheets slippery and cool over you. For the first time in your life, when you tried to let yourself panic and generate an adrenaline spike, it did not work. That trigger had broken. After too many days of generating cortisol, your pituitary gland was taking an unsanctioned holiday somewhere far away from you, and all you could do was lie, bewildered, in these unfamiliar surrounds.
Not so unfamiliar. After many long and stupid moments, you realised that you had been laid to rest in the white-and-gold confection of Ianthe’s bed, with its chilly satin coverlet and the lilac flowers embroidered in silk floss on almost every inch of the bedclothes. You willed yourself into panic again, flailing against the mattress, and sputtered out dolefully.
“Lie back down,” said the Princess of Ida.
She was standing before the windows. The amethysts dripping from her rapier’s basket hilt flashed and glittered in the darkness: she had her left arm tucked behind her, and her feet arranged a hip’s width apart, and her right arm extended before her, holding her sword. She was moving the sword into mechanical attitudes: blade pointed high, blade pointed low, wrist twisted to sweep the blade into position.
You struggled to sit up. Your head felt as though someone had studded your skull with fine little spikes that stroked your brain with hooked barbs whenever you moved.
“I said, lie down,” said Ianthe. “You absolute madwoman,” she added, without any particular emotion. “Can’t believe I ate a whole bowl of nun … I should’ve made myself throw up.”
The Princess of Ida sounded unlike herself: this was a more detached Ianthe—Ianthe as an arm pulled from the socket; Ianthe as a tooth torn from the root. Your head was so heavy. For a moment it was as though you were back on the Erebos again, when you had been made of cotton wool and black fog.
She changed form. The rapier came down low over her left side—swung slowly to cover the right—flicked up in a steel shimmer so that the tip of the sword pointed at the ceiling, on guard. Then to the left again, then swinging high to absorb an imagined blow to the head and shoulders. Parry positions, which you should have known but didn’t. Ianthe was training in her nightgown—a grisly floor-length concoction of pale golden lace that made her long, limber body look like a green-veined mummy—and even you could tell that her movements were ungainly and belaboured.
It took you a long time to say, “Augustine,” and she answered, immediate, impatient: “Are you still awake? Yes. One might’ve hoped that your light dinnertime entertainment would have given me an extension, but not so much.”
You said feebly, “The Saint of Duty—Ortus can suck wards.”
Ianthe said something very coarse in response. Then she said, “So that’s why you stopped sleeping. Well, if he wants to attack you while you are here, I tell you truthfully that I welcome that inferno.”
“But—”
“Sleep, Harry.”
You were very weak. You felt an exhaustion beyond tiredness; a drugged, unstable fatigue. When you laid your head back against Ianthe’s pillow, you smelled the thin putrefying off-apple smell from her bedside table, and you smelled her, and that scent was now familiar. It was the animal yearning for the familiar that undid you. You closed your eyes, and you were asleep.
* * *
