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There were many days when you felt his disappointment as a vise, as a long-imagined hessian pressure against the bones of your throat. There were equally as many days when his nightmare eyes relieved your dry exhaustion like a long, chilly drink of water. Your love for God was akin to your love of the beautiful riverbed edge of the iliac crest. Your love for God was like those moments of reprieve, immediately after waking, when you were not sure who you were; those moments of living in another Harrow’s skin, a Harrow who understood everything with a purity of completeness. It was a relief, to worship thus. You had once thought your capability for adoration had been consumed when your eyes had bent upon that face in the Tomb, dead and irresistible, the interment of beauty. You were relieved to find some scraps left over.
You raised the hood of your mother-of-pearl Canaanite robe over your head. The sunshine beat down through it and pattered prismatic light over your face. Birds shrieked above. They were not large creatures, and you were not afraid of them, but you almost pitied them. It was an uncomfortable thing, to remove the soul of a planet like this: it would be the first time you had done it, and the first time you had killed any planet alone. The creatures would not die immediately when the planet did. But they would—slowly—come to change, and in the end they would be thanergy mutants who could not reproduce. A rather Ninth House death, and the death that came for all flipped planets, in the end.
The forest floor was gnarled and uneven—for the first hour you walked stoically, and you sipped your water. When you grew tired, you spent the second hour in the arms of a large, hulking, ambling skeleton, and you had to brush away the branches and leaves as a second skeleton stormed ahead, cutting down all this boil of thalergy as it went. It was with an ache like nostalgia that you thought of Drearburh, and home: that you thought of the vast gyre at the very apex of your temple, which seemed like a pinprick from the bottom tier, that thin, watery cloud of pumped atmosphere and the dead of space beyond. You thought of the murmurous prayers within the chapel. You thought of the Secundarius Bell, its booming profundity, its black tongue’s clangour, of waking to the CLANG … CLANG … CLANG.… as some ancient bellringer hyperextended his biceps in trembling, sacred eagerness to yank that rope.
The Body walked beside your construct. The sun did not dry the melted ice upon that indistinctly coloured hair. The moist warmth of the jungle around you did not impede her, and exertion brought no flush to those long, thinly muscled arms, nor to the slender, gracile legs, nor to the dead cheeks. She had been with you very often, of late.
You saw all the signs of your undoing. You had few months to live. It could be quite easily counted in weeks now. God had been correct: you had not changed—you were not fixed. You were the last, lone, assailable Lyctor. The others were now distant from you, looking to the Resurrection Beast that came to punish their mortal sins and kill their Kindly Prince.
And yet—there, in the alien slather of forest, among the ferns, and fronds, and greenery arching against a skyline that was a more reticent verdancy paling into navy blue—you could almost believe that you had the capacity to be happy again. You were an unfilled hole, but even a hole might be content in its emptiness.
At that point, though you did not know it, you were a mere kilometre from this insubstantial contentment’s obliteration. A hole might also be filled with worms.
33
INTO THE FOURTH HOUR, you realized you were being followed. A very dim awareness of some large presence pierced the curtain of so much other thalergy, and you were instantly irritable—Mercymorn had failed to gauge the planet’s character. It was plain there were large mammals in this region, and you’d have to come up with some way to carefully plant yourself so you wouldn’t get chewed on while you severed the planet’s soul. Your annoyance turned to suspicion when it became clear that the thalergy signature was following you—it was keeping careful pace about a hundred metres behind you, stalking your path. This was not hard. Your skeletons trod heavily. You were leaving a trail that a blind idiot might’ve followed, in the middle of a dark and moonless night; you went back to being irritated, this time at your own foolishness, and you stopped.
You waited in a clearing for your predator. You caulked a space over that rich red earth with bone, so that you could stand on a little platform of it with the tip of your sword touching that mat and not worry that some annelid was about to squirm over your feet. You checked yourself over to make sure that no airborne foreign body was making inroads on your immune system. You pulled your hood deep over your head, and you waited.
The thalergy made its approach. You realised with a deep and slithering horror that it belonged to a person.
And then a woman was standing at the edge of the clearing. She wore a peaked cap to keep the sun off her dark-eyed, scissor-slash face; a woman in a grey robe with the ends tied in a fat knot about her middle to keep them from dragging in the dirt. There was a rough canvas bag around her neck, an arresting, festering mass of thanergy amid all that clear and comprehensible life. She had two shabby scabbards peeking up over her shoulders, and chin-length, slate-brown hair tucked behind her ears, the colour of ancient tiles in an abandoned temple.
Your voice did not feel like it belonged to you when you said, “I saw your corpse.”
“Well,” said Camilla Hect steadily, “don’t tell everyone, or they’ll want to see it too.”
From the distance between you, you considered her; you also considered a body with a ruin for a face, lying on a long length of plastic sheeting. The sobbing, shrieking birdcall around you resolved into an indistinct burble, and you raised your hand to your right ear, and your fingers came away thick with blood so dark that it was almost purple. She took a step toward you; you retreated one, equalizing the distance, and she did not close the approach. You looked at the cavalier of the Sixth, and you bled.
A file opened in your mind. Your hands scrabbled within your robes—the exoskeleton gave up one of the twenty-two letters, with a reminder long memorised:
If met, to give to Camilla Hect.
This had not troubled you. Many of the letters required impossible contingencies. Now one impossible contingency was standing before you. You gave the envelope to your hulking skeleton, and it crossed the clearing, admirably navigating the lumpen forest floor, to deliver the letter to the previously dead Hect.
She took it, broke open the envelope, read the contents, and blinked; all while you siphoned blood out of your ears. She looked at the letter; she looked at you; she looked at the letter. Then she balled it up between her fists and ripped it to shreds.
“Okay,” she said finally. And: “It’s coming out your nose.”
You wiped your face, quashed your growing annoyance, and said, “Am I required to know the contents?”
Hect cleared her throat—you flinched—and recited perfectly: “For service previously rendered by your House: invoke the rock that remains ever unrolled, and understand that I will both consider your life as inviolate, and aid you if I can. Thanks.”
You said, appalled, “I did not.”
“It was there in black and white, Reverend Daughter.”
Reverend Daughter was still a little sweet to your bloodied ears; but you said, and knew you sounded irascible: “Then I have been seriously promiscuous with my past favours.”
“I suppose you thought you owed us,” said Camilla.
It had been a long time since you had been around those who were not Lyctors. You grasped for her, thoughtlessly, with your construct; you were astonished by the speed with which Hect drew those big, balanced knives from each shoulder, and hurled herself at your skeleton like a stone from a sling. Her first sweep with the butt of a knife shattered the ribcage—it coalesced back; you now disdained skeletons not made of permanent ash. She swept in with a foot, aimed at the fragile place beneath the knee, and sent your construct stumbling forward. You said, “Cease,” but she levered one knife into the base of the spine, severed it, pulled the spine back toward her with a twang—and you heard your voice rise to say: “I need to know you are real!”
She kicked the skeleton away from her; it was in two surprised parts, wriggling to fuse back together, slow to understand the damage. Camilla Hect sheathed her knives with as much speed and fury as she had unsheathed them, and she said: “No sudden moves.”
“I am Harrowhark Nonagesimus,” you said. “I am the ninth saint to serve the King Undying. I am his fingerbone; I am his fists and gestures … I am a Lyctor, Hect. What hope would you have against me?”
“None,” said Camilla.
And then she added calmly: “Yet.”
You were silent. Your head throbbed. The birds were very loud and shrill, and a multitude of smells drifted from the forest—of damp air, of damp earth, of all the things that crept upon it, with their insensible quantities of legs and little frondy parts. You sat down on your bone-plated log, and you wiped your face, and you said: “I watched your body be laid out. I examined it myself. And now you are here, forty billion lightyears from the Nine Houses, and you tell me that you are real.”
