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“Hear, hear,” whispered Pent’s cavalier, holding the coffee pot, which was wildly belching steam. “That’s the stuff. We’ll make a Fifth of you yet, Reverend Daughter. Not that bad—can’t complain—it’ll be a damn sight worse in the River.”
“Just so long as the Duchess Septimus is holding on,” said Abigail, unperturbed by a fresh smash of icy pellets next to her head. “I tried to make her take the bed—she was so upset that the Templar pair weren’t on board. I told her that I didn’t think we’d get Master Octakiseron first time round … She won’t tell me what he said to her, just that he ‘was horrid.’”
“Cheeky little so-and-so,” said Magnus. “If he were my son, I’d give him something to think about. I’m not surprised he’s gone to ground.”
“I would hope your son might be of different character,” said his wife, half-smiling.
“Protesilaus should have biffed him.”
“It’s strange,” said Abigail, ignoring her husband’s exhortations to biffing. “The Eighth are not generally the type to hide.”
Harrow came to an internal decision to tell the truth. It was not particularly difficult. She had only been holding on to the knowledge because a woman whose tongue wagged did not love the silence of the Tomb. Also, she was frankly uncertain that what she had seen had been real: but now it was nearly a week later, and she was tired of what Magnus Quinn’s eyebrows did when he uttered the word biff.
“Silas Octakiseron is not hiding,” she said. “He’s dead.”
Both of them looked at her. The Fifth necromancer’s glasses were misting up with the cold, so that her tranquil brown gaze was seen as though through a filmy cataract. “Pardon?” she said.
“So is Coronabeth Tridentarius,” Harrow added. “I cannot confirm the fates of the rest of the Third House.”
“Both of them—” began Magnus, and his wife cut in quickly, “The Sleeper—”
Harrowhark said, “No.”
She told the Fifth House the story of what she had seen; though she left out the blood in the fog.
Magnus and Abigail shared what seemed a very long glance. Magnus looked troubled, and his wife looked set, and strangely resigned. After the awkward length of what passed between them, the cavalier meekly slurped at his coffee cup.
“We should have made him a greater priority,” said Lady Pent.
Magnus said, “I’m not certain.”
“And now he is gone,” she said, and added: “To say nothing of the Third … Reverend Daughter, you say this was nearly a week ago? A week, and you didn’t think to tell us?”
There was a slight accusatory note in Pent’s tone. Harrowhark did not feel great about it, but neither did she feel particularly bad; she just felt small and empty and hard, like the hail battering itself so fiercely on the window outside. The heater produced another helpless splurt of dust-smelling heat. “I had to be sure,” she said.
“Of what?” said Magnus.
This did not require an answer, so Harrowhark did not give one. She merely held her hot coffee between her hands and stared with what she knew to be a slightly smeared but still discomposing painted face, with all the white and black of Ninth House sacrament. It was not difficult to win a staring match against Magnus Quinn; he wilted in about five seconds, and stared out the window, and sighed very heavily.
“We didn’t need him,” he said bracingly.
Abigail said, “We need everyone.”
“I never thought he was quite the thing.”
“Tridentarius’s loss is the greater here,” said Harrowhark repressively, and she thought Abigail sounded somewhat distracted when she said, “Yes—yes, I do think so. I just hadn’t expected … If she’s gone, then perhaps that means … Reverend Daughter, will you do me a very great favour?”
“That depends on what the favour is.”
“I would like you to read this for me,” said Lady Pent.
She set down an empty cup of coffee on the frigid windowsill, and she took a little flimsy bag from her pocket. She unzipped the plex tab on the top and removed, delicately, a piece of yellowing paper. The Fifth adept used the very edges of her fingernails to unfold it, carefully and tenderly. Harrow stood up at once, but the cavalier was somehow between her and the door. The sweat beaded behind her knees and prickled behind her ears as she glanced down at the paper.
Harrow said, “I would like to bring my cavalier into this conversa—”
“You need Ortus the Ninth to read a piece of paper with you?” said Magnus Quinn, with broad good humour, the type that was as resolute and inflexible and polite as a summons. She had been stitched up. She was a fool. She had lost her fear of the Fifth House, and now she had been boxed in as only the Fifth House might box you: smiling the whole time, and acting as though the whole thing might be a bit of a joke. Harrow made her face imperturbable, and swallowed slowly, so that her throat did not so obviously gulp.
She stalled. “The text is small.”
Pent said, “Do you think so?”
The Fifth necromancer did not let go of the paper. Harrowhark looked down at its bloodred, panicked writing: a hasty, furious scrawl, written with such fury that the pen had bitten the paper.
I WILL REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU KISSED ME—YOU APOLOGISED—YOU SAID, I AM SORRY, DESTROY ME AS I AM, BUT I WANT TO KISS YOU BEFORE I AM KILLED, AND I SAID TO YOU WHY, AND YOU SAID, BECAUSE I HAVE ONLY ONCE MET SOMEONE SO UTTERLY WILLING TO BURN FOR WHAT THEY BELIEVED IN, AND I LOVED HIM ON SIGHT, AND THE FIRST TIME I DIED I ASKED OF HIM WHAT I NOW ASK OF YOU
I KISSED YOU AND LATER I WOULD KISS HIM TOO BEFORE I UNDERSTOOD WHAT YOU WERE, AND ALL THREE OF US LIVED TO REGRET IT—BUT WHEN I AM IN HEAVEN I WILL REMEMBER YOUR MOUTH, AND WHEN YOU ROAST DOWN IN HELL I THINK YOU WILL REMEMBER MINE
Harrow read this screed in a flat and affectless monotone, her voice dying away on mine. The cavalier looked at the paper, and his necromancer looked at her.
“Read it to me,” she said, knowing her voice was still flat and hard as the hail.
Abigail turned the note back to herself, still with the care reserved for some priceless antique.
“I still get an erotic charge from snakes, sorry to say,” she read.
There was a brief silence. The hail slapped at the window’s glass as though wanting to hurl itself through. There was a growing rime of pale blue frost at the edges, and a cleared mist from where Abigail had sat. Deep in the fast-moving fog outside—unmoved by wind and unresolved by gouts of chilly hail—all three of them watched, a little detached, as tiny particles of ash joined the hail in the storm, as though the already overcrowded weather had been augmented by the eruption of some distant cinder cone.
“It differs mildly, then,” said Harrow, and Abigail admitted, “Somewhat, yes.”
Magnus said, “But why—”
“I am mad,” she interrupted. “I have always been mad, since I was a child. I hallucinate sounds. I see things that do not exist. Ortus has masked much of it, but as you have identified and exploited, my vulnerability only requires his removal. I did not tell you of Silas Octakiseron’s death because I was not sure I was an accurate reporter. I am insane.”
Abigail Pent took off her glasses and popped them down into the top fold of her robe. She reached out to touch Harrow’s arm, and Harrow flinched away; she winced a little in sympathetic apology, and removed her hand.
“You have kept that close to your chest,” she said. “I would like to hear more sometime, if you are ever inclined to tell me. But, Harrowhark, that squares perfectly with another theory I have, if all this time you only looked to your own frustrations—have you ever considered the fact that you might also be…”
“Here it comes,” said her husband wearily. “The ghost agenda.”
“Magnus! Haunted,” his wife finished, in triumph. “Harrowhark Nonagesimus—I really think you should consider the idea that you might also be haunted.”
29
AUGUSTINE WAS ALL SMILES now that Ianthe the First had passed her final hurdle. His open delight did a lot to ameliorate the reddened, swelling tension that had permeated the Mithraeum. You found his frank and open relief patronizing, but your sister Lyctor did not, or at least made a very good show of enjoying it. You went to watch a bout between them in the training rooms, sitting quietly and holding your rapier—it was full of unnecessary formality even to your Ninth House eyes, all antique niceties and duelling condescension that had been long forgotten back home. Ianthe was a saint of the Third House, and Augustine an antique of the Fifth; neither did anything without putting down a little carpet first, and introducing themselves to an audience of a thousand quiet-eyed memorial bones, and you.
But after the ceremony came the sword. You remembered so little of Naberius Tern, either of his death or of his life, but from what you had gathered he would have been the last cavalier in the whole starless universe to think his sword-arm better off defleshed. Despite that, Ianthe was cured. It had been your faintest and most childlike hope that Ianthe would consider your bondage over; that your saving her life would be enough to release you from the collar of debt she had placed around your neck.
