AllFreeNovel
Share Us
You lost your patience. It was difficult to say if you’d ever had any; you’d just spackled over the hole with curiosity.
“Warden of the Sixth House,” you demanded, “why are you acting as though I should know you? Why are you acting as though your cavalier knows me? I am Harrowhark the First, formerly and in everlasting affections the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh: I am the ninth saint to serve the King Undying, one among his fists and his gestures. I did not know you in this life, and I will not know you in the next one.”
He stopped dead.
“You became a Lyctor,” he said.
“That was always the plan.”
“Not for the Harrowhark I knew. Tell me you did it correctly,” he said, and there was a quick, questioning eagerness to his voice, something beneath the confusion. “Tell me you finished the work. You out of everyone could have worked out the end to the beginning I was starting to explicate. Your cavalier, Reverend Daughter—”
“Has become the furnace of my Lyctorhood,” you said.
The dead Warden stopped. He looked at your face as though his eyes could peel through dermis, fascia, and bone. And he said, quietly: “How God takes—and takes—and takes.”
There was an enormous rumble overhead. It sounded like some great mechanism grinding against itself with unlubricated joints, a turbulence of machinery sobbing to life. There came another, farther off, and a bright white light at the window that made you think of the Emperor. Thunder, and a sweep of lightning. Palamedes’s lovely eyes widened, and he said, “That’s not possible,” and darted to the window.
You went with him. A squall of rain tossed itself at the window like a bird. Through the smeared glass—the still and static light outside was suddenly overcast—you looked down.
On the terrace stood a figure in haz orange, swathed in crinkling safety material from neck to feet. A breathing apparatus obscured the face. And in one gloved hand, clear even from this distance, you saw it: a huge two-bore gun. The figure stared with empty goggle eyes as the wind lashed, and as the thunder boomed, farther away now.
Sextus was saying, “The hell is—”
You said, and your voice sounded strange to yourself, as though you had heard the word only in dreams and never articulated by waking tongues: “The Sleeper.”
The Sleeper looked at you both. There came another sudden violent burst of obscuring rain, and it was gone. You and the necromancer of the Sixth House moved as one: shouldered both of your bodies against the door to the room until it shut fast, as you slid a crude deadbolt home. You leaned your full weights against it. This was not a very impressive mass. He said, quickly: “Ninth, this place is powered by one single theorem, held together with the fragility of spirit magic. I cannot manipulate it. I cannot change anything about it, not the room, not the cushions, not the astonishingly shitty book. I can’t change a thing about this space—but anyone coming to me could change the parameters, and you’ve brought something with you that’s changing them. Go.”
Both of you froze as you heard shuffling steps outside the door, a low, asthmatic wheezing from the apparatus. Then you shoved your pathetic necro bodies more forcefully against the door. You said, “Don’t be a fool.”
“Go and go now, Nonagesimus!”
“I’m not about to leave you alone with something I have done, Master Warden!”
“That’s more like the old Harrowhark—but I mean it, get out! I’m banking on it going with you. I’ll be fine. Just tell me, what’s Cam got of my bones?”
“Three inches of right-hand parietal, full right-hand frontal, leading down to—”
“That’s enough. Just so I know what to focus on— Can you change that into something more useful?”
You said arctically, “I am a Lyctor, Palamedes Sextus.”
“And I’m so sorry about it,” he said. “Point taken though. Anything that articulates, okay?”
“But—”
The crash against the door rattled you all the way down to your toes. You had no magic in that River bubble; it might as well have been the vacuum of space, before you had built the furnace within yourself. Your necromancy was as still and dead as the room itself. It was surprising, how badly it frightened you. It was only you, and your mind’s outline of your body, and the ghost of a dead man, and the thing that followed you inside.
The door held as both of you strained against it. The next rattle made the hinges squeal in agony. Palamedes looked at you and opened his mouth to say something as a third rattle flung you both back a little; your heads knocked together, and then you heard the deliberate steel rasp of a trigger being cocked.
Sextus was rubbing his temple and looking at you, awestruck, as though he had seen some stupefying glimpse of the beyond; you did not remotely understand the sharp smile that suddenly crossed his face.
“Kill us twice, shame on God,” he said, and he leaned forward, and much to your intense distress he swiftly kissed your brow. Then he said: “Harrowhark, for pity’s sake, go!”
You dropped back under, and you did not hear the gunshot; you were, not for the first time, overwhelmed with the suspicion that you were standing in the middle of what you had thought to be scenery, only to reach out and discover that it was all so much flimsy. You were not a central lever within a mystery, but a bystander watching a charlatan display a trick. Your eyes had followed a bright light or colour, and you realised with a start that you ought to have been watching the other hand. You were standing in a darkened corridor, and you could not turn around: and then a brief explosion of light revealed to you that it wasn’t a corridor at all, and it had never been dark.
But you were always too quick to mourn your own ignorance. You never could have guessed that he had seen me.
34
WHEN YOU SAT UP, struggling for breaths you did not need to take—wet only with the sweat trickling under the dormant bones of your exoskeleton—you saw not the canopy of trees overhead, but a filmy white length of sheeting. You had been moved. You were lying down flat, not bent in the curved posture that you had been taught to adopt, and your sword was tucked beneath your arm, and you had been upended onto a thin blanket that nonetheless let you feel each blade of grass and uneven mound of turf beneath, and feel the beating sun overhead and hear the shrill host of outside creatures.
Camilla Hect sat beside you, and she did not flinch when you sat up all at once. You were in a larger clearing, with a huge mess of crushed boughs beside you, some of which had been pressed into service to hold up the tent you lay beneath; beyond the tent curved the great metal belly of a shuttle.
Your mind idiotically focused upon its bizarre shape and style: it was not a Cohort shuttle, nor any kind of shuttle of the Nine Houses, and not only because it had not been adorned with even a single bone. It was made of very shiny silver steel, and its heat treatment made it sizzle, with a sort of wobbling radiance sitting just above the hull. It was also thoroughly battered and singed: you would not have flown it ten feet above the ground, let alone into atmosphere or the black depths of space. It was small, no more than three bodies wide and three bodies tall, and the thought of being forced inside curdled you. But your distaste and paranoia were stopped in midswing by Camilla saying with barely repressed intensity: “So?”
You said, “He’s in there.”
The cavalier of the Sixth House looked at you; then she collapsed back in a long, controlled movement. She lay flat on her back staring sightlessly at the sky, half-shadowed by the sheeting, half-glowing in the light. At last she gave a long, shuddering breath and sat back up with the same abruptness.
“Good,” she said, and she smiled, very briefly. This smile lit the corners of her face like a rising comet. It made her look, in fact, ridiculously like her adept. “What now?”
You held the carefully assembled fragments of skull between your hands, and hoped that he is had not become he was. Then you crushed the bone between your fingers—the cavalier next to you reached out reflexively, then stopped herself—and you kneaded the fragments within your palms until you could winnow out the glue, which, thank God, had been chemical in nature. It might have very easily been derived from keratin, which would have been a momentary confusion and annoyance. The glue was expunged as a knotty collection of gummy nodules, which you discarded, and left you with a thanergy-rich clay. You considered this malleable stuff for a moment before knitting it between your hands.
Phalanges spurted from the mass; then a distal row, then a proximal row of carpal bones and a length of articulated wrist. It was not the sheer animal pleasure of Ianthe’s arm, but it was easy and it was satisfying. You said, “I could simply give you a full skeleton frame.”
“Don’t,” said Camilla quickly, and paused, and said: “That’s going to get me in trouble.”
“The Warden specifically requested movement.”
