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You kicked off your shoes and left them, as you were still drunk enough to find that reasonable. Most of the alcohol was already in your bloodstream, but quite a lot of it was racketing around in your small intestine. As you walked in silence down the tiled hallways, past the pillars of tendon-and plex-wrapped wire, you focused on working it out of your capillaries and then out through your pores until you were running wet with sweat. Easier to move ethanol through water membranes than anywhere else. The fog in your brain and body burnt away, and you peeled two long strands of articular cartilage and hard calcium from your exoskeleton. These you melded and worked between your hands like clay, until you had a smooth greyish globe of bone.
There was no question of proceeding by stealth. Stealth required advance preparation, scouting, mapping, and you had not been given time for any of those. You had not known until ten minutes before dinner that your target would be in the training room. You had been forced to come up with tactics that would work on any battlefield. The buzz of adrenaline and remnant alcohol sang through you and made you feel prickly and overwarm, despite the fact that you were as soaked with cooling sweat as though you had stood in a spray of blood. You had been the subject of attempted murder more times than you had fingers and toes. You had sat through a long, agonising dinner culminating in two elderly Lyctors getting their tongues on God. Your mouth had been very nearly kissed. The calm that came over you as you went to murder Ortus the First was the weary calm of someone who had already been tried within an inch of her fucking life.
You stood before the autodoor of the training room, bowered over the black lintel with rainbow-coloured bunting and tessellated butterflies of pelvises and spines. There was nothing to sense within, but you would never have been able to sense him. You pressed the obsidian tab that opened the doors; you rolled your ball through with a swift underhand movement; you shut the doors again before they’d had the chance to part fully.
You had thought this through in detail. The Saint of Duty was a thanergy void. This you understood. Send a skeleton construct in, and within a few seconds it would be an inert pile of bone upon the floor. You had wondered about trying to build some complex mechanism with multiple layers—interlocking tiers of thanergy-rich bone, freshly grown from your own body, forcing him to waste time chewing through it all—but then you had remembered the ease with which he had crumbled bone even as it sprouted from your wrists, and realised the risk was too great. You did not know how fast he could work, and you could not base your whole plan on a guess.
When Ortus the First had dried up your wrist spikes, you had felt him do it. There had been an appreciable jolt, as of a switch being thrown. He had gripped the periosteum in his hands and made something happen. That meant it was a conscious action, not passive. That was only logical, since a necromancer who automatically dispersed the thanergy from his surroundings would be a desperate liability to his fellow adepts. If the drain was a conscious action, it required some measure of concentration. He needed to focus. You could not give him that chance.
Your bomb exploded into a myriad of bone shards. You felt their thanergy light up like an electrical impulse, through the walls. You made that training room a goddamn hailstorm. Each fragment was no longer than four centimetres; that was long enough to kill, given the pressure with which you shattered them outward. There was a muffled eruption of rattling—a vigorous THWACKETA-THWACKETA-THWACK as thousands of missiles hammered into the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the foot-thick plex window. You thumbed two studs out of your ears, dropped six full constructs behind you in a spirit of pure optimism, and slammed the pad open again.
The training room was a smoking ruin. The wooden floors were a jagged carpet of embedded bone caltrops. The electrical lights overhead were smoking, crackling bars of broken housing and tungsten fibre; your bones were cilia inside a cavity, bristling spines on a rose’s stem, fine hairs on the legs of an arachnid. Razor-sharp spikes powdered harmlessly beneath your tread as you ran into that destroyed room wearing little more than a scarf and your paint, with your collagen-coated hands clutching your two-handed sword; and you readied yourself.
The Saint of Duty wasn’t there.
You said, “Fuck.”
Then, more aggressively: “Fuck!”
The smothering caul of disappointment around your heart was an unhelpful distraction. You sheathed your sword to the back of your exoskeleton and—reminding yourself, yet again, that reliance on others was as taking a brute-force blow with your vulnerable lacrimal bone—you turned off the lights, and you covered the ends of the wires in a thick cap of cartilage, heading off the fire alarm. Then you removed yourself from that bone-strewn ruin, somewhat chastened, thoroughly aggrieved.
Ortus the First was not in the training room. Fine. He had surprised you before. There was one other place on the Mithraeum where you had found him, at a time like this, when he thought he might not be disturbed; and so it was on swift feet, and with rising determination, that you retraced your steps toward the outer ring and the habitation atrium, and the room where one last Lyctor lay in state.
The Saint of Duty was not there. Neither was the body of Cytherea the First. A trail of blood emerged from the open doorway, smiled on dimly by the electric lights. It led away from the bier where once the necromantic saint had slept so restively. Your heart and brain responded when you bade them both be still, and for a few seconds you stood before that continuous ribbon of blood, almost without thinking—and then you retrieved them both, along with whatever madness-tattered sense you retained.
You crouched. The blood was minutes old, a tangled skein of oxygen-rich carmine and oxygen-poor scarlet: blood from the right atrium, expelled straight from the heart. You stood and stepped carefully into the room on your bare feet. Behind the abandoned altar there was a criminal crimson splatter of blood on the back wall, more sprayed across the incorrupt petals of the increasingly blush roses. And discarded on the floor lay Ortus’s spear, slick and red from its point to almost halfway down its shaft.
You did not need a Sixth House dust-botherer to reconstruct this particular tableau. Someone had stood behind the bier, their back to the wall; the spearhead had been thrust through their chest and exited their back with one almighty push—blood had spurted from the exit wound, and then sprayed forward when the spear was pulled back out, with that same prodigious strength. Judging by the mess it had made of the roses, the attacker must have received a liberal coating. Then the victim had been dragged past the altar and out into the atrium, and from there to who knew where.
The weapon belonged to Ortus; but to whom belonged the blood? You had wet your hands before with the blood of Cytherea’s unbeating heart; this was not hers. One possibility was that Ortus had stabbed a third party, and then chosen to abscond for reasons of his own with both their body and Cytherea’s. That might be the most plausible explanation. But it was not the simplest.
You followed that long, snaking trail back out of the room. It led down the hallway, then turned an abrupt corner into a feeder corridor to an inner ring. You spurred your exoskeleton into a trot; your chilled feet spattered through the still-warm blood, and you left cooling crimson prints behind you as you ran. You moved along a dimly lit statuary corridor, between the gilded and bejewelled skeletons of Third and Seventh heroes dressed in gold and green robes of necromantic office, with amethysts and topazes and emeralds for eyes; you turned abruptly, skidding a little in the blood, through a low service doorway.
You had passed through the habitation ring, and the storage ring. You were in the engineering and environmental ring now, with the power systems, and the life-support, and the exhausts and waste. The lights were dim here. There were fewer portholes, and the effect was immediately more claustrophobic, more tubular. Even here, no space was wasted: ten thousand years of memorial meant that even in the sharp yellow shadows of the filtration panels, and past the enormous gurgling vat of the water tank, the inlaid bones of the Nine Houses sat forever watching switchboard lights marked things like END EFFECTOR SUCK—END EFFECTOR WINNOW—END EFFECTOR SIFT. Better to decay to powder in the Drearburh oss than keep watch above END EFFECTOR SUCK until the end of time.
