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“I do not know why I ask these questions,” she said.
She wrapped the scarf around you, pinned it, grunted, then took it away. You were left to sit on her bed, eating one of the apples she had not yet used for practice. As you ate you watched her, and you reread the invitation, while—typical of a flesh magician—Ianthe took out needle and thread, and quite happily occupied herself with sewing. She pronounced it “very easy, actually” to thread the needle with her defleshed hand.
Written on the back of the paper:
My room, ten minutes beforehand.
“Try this on,” she said, eventually.
It amounted to little more than a veil. She pinned it over one shoulder and left both your arms chilly and bare. The material was water-thin and slippery; when you emerged from behind a gaudy screen, she cinched the black, scintillating stuff tight to your body. It was not true black, but shot with a deep chemical indigo, and as you looked in the mirror the shade made your eyes lightless hollows. Above that field of navy-black, little white scintillae trapped inside like luminescent filaments growing in a charred corpse, your irises were devoid of any colour at all.
Ianthe circled you, tugging and pinning, and you suffered it only because her touch was disinterested and clinical. Neither the touch of her living fingers nor her dead ones lingered. It was as though you were simply her patchwork corpse. You would have been impressed at her craft, except that she dismissed your compliments: “This is nothing. Naberius could embroider you a full overskirt without pricking a finger.” This might have veered close to sentiment had she not added, “I wish killing him had given me his needlepoint too.”
Your sister Lyctor brushed your hair and fluffed it out with her fingers. It was long enough to do this. Only a little while ago you had shaved it down to stubble: it had taken fright, and regrown at speed. Terribly afraid that this was your lone symptom of Lyctor regeneration, you had not cut it since. You would not let Ianthe fill any of the holes punched in your ears with metal earrings or pearls, and you refused all other jewellery not bone, and so there was not much else to be done. When she finished, you did not look upon your reflection with revolted shock, merely with a dull and uncomfortable distaste. The worst part was your sudden resemblance to your mother.
“I am very satisfied,” pronounced Ianthe.
You said drearily, “I look like an imbecile.”
“You look just good enough that I’m proud of my handiwork, but not so good that I’ll be consumed with lust and ravish you over the nut bowl,” she said. “I walked a fine line, and I walked it admirably. Go and fix your paint; your skull’s dribbly.”
As an act of meaningless rebellion, you applied the sacramental skull of Priestess Crushed Beneath the New-Laid Rock, the least beautiful skull in the canon. When you came back, she was smoothing her hair at her dressing table with a bone-backed brush. She wore a gown of achromatic purple—pale and almost grey, like the smoke from a fire banked with lavender, and made of what appeared to be a few layers of gauze. The back was open, and you could see the fine dents of her spine—her bleached skin bluer and sweeter against the pallid gossamer—and the twin blades of her shoulder blades looked strangely nude and vulnerable to you. She said languidly, “Button me up,” and you obeyed by sprouting three skeleton arms from the bone-impregnated inlay of her chair, glad to hide her vertebrae.
Ianthe wore her Canaanite robe over her shoulders, but did not slip her arms into the sleeves: you were glad for the feeble, diaphanous cover yours offered. She buckled her rapier belt loosely at her hips; your two-hander you carried on your back. As you followed your coconspirator down the habitation corridor to Augustine’s rooms, a prickle of anticipation washed over the insides of your stomach.
Just as your rooms bore very little resemblance to Ianthe’s, Augustine’s rooms bore no resemblance to either yours or hers. His interiors were of dark wood. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves ran up most of the walls, and the floor was not tile but deep plush carpeting. It was a much more crowded, lived-in room, and on every surface was a book, or a stylus, or a folded pair of socks. There were baroque leather armchairs with pale weals on the arms and seat from years of sitting, and tasteful paintings with wooden frames, and a general smell of wood polish and book glue. It was a friendlier room than you had expected, insofar as you had expected anything. The wide tapestry sofa was thick with fringed cushions in comfortable disarray. There were vases of eggshell-thin ceramic on the table set before the vast plex window—currently hung with primrose drapes, shut—filled with, though you had no idea where he had procured them, cut flowers in shades of orange, red, and gold.
The Saint of Patience was bent over a mirror above a wooden washstand, wearing a suit of antique make beneath his robe. You were grudgingly impressed by the sight of a historical artefact actually being worn: black trousers, black jacket, a plain white shirt with a high white collar, very starched. Augustine had combed his hair into a flat cap against his skull, faultless and shiny, with not a strand out of place. Within the collar sat a funny little black tie that was cut in a curve, and he was knotting it into a fat bow.
“Nicely done, my dove,” he said jocularly to Ianthe, taking her hands and kissing them. There was a tightness around his concrete eyes that belied the good humour. “You put me in mind of a statue of some lost goddess hauled up from the waters, painted lineaments removed but marble intact.”
“Covered in moss, mould, and gunge,” she suggested, consenting to be kissed on each cheek. “You should see my sister.”
“You always say that,” said Augustine. He looked at you, and relieved your mind by not kissing you anywhere; he simply raised his eyebrows and said, “And so the crow can be a swan! Ah, this is like the old days … you should have seen the shindigs we pulled off, when we dared congregate. We partied as though it were the days before the apocalypse. I will remember them always. John laughed more then. Mostly at that madman Ulysses, and Cassiopeia, under the table because she’d had a single glass of wine.… All right, kiddies, shall I tell you how we’ll play this?”
You asked, “Why are you helping me commit murder?”
He checked his little tie in the mirror again, corrected some imperceptible skew, and straightened up.
“For reasons of my own, dear girl,” he said, with the glacial cheer that seemed to be his first line of defence. “Once upon a time, if my younger brother had deemed it fit for you to exit this vale of tears, I would not have stopped him, but I admitted long ago that Ortus no longer listens to anyone. He always did get his own bizarre obsessions, and you could never get them out of his head with a pneumatic drill. He has caused me more pain over these last scant forty years than I dare to admit. No, there’s no question of me barring you here. I’ll get Teacher’s undivided attention. You’ll both skedaddle. Harrow will finish her bloody business … if she can, which I am not at all sure of.”
“She can,” said Ianthe, ruining it with “probably,” and the Lyctor said: “She can try. I once watched that man fight a city. The city didn’t win. He’ll leave the dinner first, and be in the training room afterward, that’s his habit; you’ll leave on cue.”
This seemed nonsensical to assume. You said, “He’ll leave?” at the same time the Princess of Ida said, “On cue?”
“Won’t tell you what it is; if you’re waiting for it, our Emperor will smell a rat. Just believe me when I say that when I want Ortus to go, he’ll be giddy-gone.” (This did not make much sense to you, as a joke.)
There was a brisk knock on the door. You immediately pressed yourself to the wall, out of direct sight if it opened, and Ianthe tightened bony fingers on the shining end—pommel—of her Third House rapier; but Augustine merely said, “Come in, lynchpin.”
The lynchpin walked in. It was the Saint of Joy.
Your erstwhile teacher ignored you, folded into your alcove, and she ignored your sister, whose pallid eyebrows had shot up so fast and so far that they were in danger of breaking the atmosphere. Mercymorn wore a long slip of peach-coloured silk, and her white Canaanite robe was tucked over her forearms and had slipped entirely off her slender, aggrieved shoulders. She had scraped her hair into a merciless and shining coil at the back of her head, and she had no eyes for either of you.
She said, “You have some nerve.”
“Not remotely; I never have,” he said, affably. “Do you accept the terms of the offer?”
“Tell me what you’re—”
“Accept first.”
