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That evening, Mercymorn came to fetch you from the surface of a planet you had killed, with almost no thought to its murder. Indeed, you had felt almost nothing, and you said very little, which met your teacher’s needs excellently as she had nothing to say to you except, “You smell like dirt.” She piloted you back to the Mithraeum in silence. You watched the retreating planet out the window, and it looked no different, except that perhaps the deep water that lined the equator in chilly juxtaposed slabs of ice seemed more cracked and turbid than previous. It was safely dead, with its cavorting animal populace unaware of their long-term death sentence. Worms crawled within the miserable, foetid pit of you.
35
“I AM SORRY, NINTH,” Abigail said, in the same hesitantly kind and careful tones you might use to tell someone that their cat would never grow up into a tiger: “I’m not at all an expert in psychometry, and with such an old rapier you’d need both a Sixth House specialist and to get awfully lucky. It was your grandmother’s nine generations back, you said? And it was handled, briefly?”
“That,” came the soft, funereal voice of Harrowhark’s cavalier, softer and more funereal filtered through his muffler, “was the nature of the condescension.”
“And the blade has been replaced?”
“The hilt is original, barring the grip.” Pause. “And parts of the basket.”
“Right. No chance of it being … bled on?”
“It was handled. She told stories of how the balance of the sword was complimented. It would have been touched for, perhaps, twenty to thirty seconds.”
“With gloves on.”
“That is customary.”
“Ortus,” she said. “I’m not trained for this. I think our chances are very small. I think we’ve got a similar chance of Magnus tripping over the secret entrance to the lost chambers of the Emperor Undying. Actually, that’s significantly less unlikely, as I’ve come to believe they run sidelong to the facility rather than—never mind. Sir, I am truly, truly sorry, but—Reverend Daughter, is that you?”
It was not likely to be anybody else standing on the threshold, unwilling to cross over and listen to the rest of the conversation. Harrowhark had been standing in profound silence, without so much as the rustle of a fold of robe, but the necromancer of the Fifth House had demonstrated extraordinarily acute hearing for eavesdroppers. “We’re used to Jeanne and Isaac, you know,” she had said, as though that constituted an explanation all by itself.
No hope of disappearing back into the corridor, or taking refuge in audacity and answering, No. The Reverend Daughter swept into the frozen library as though she had been noticed at the moment of entry, and found the Fifth and her swordsman-apparent standing before a rack of old and crunchy maps. He had his fragile, rusty sword balanced courteously on his palms before the mild-eyed adept, and she had been rubbing a sort of clear balm over the knobbled base. Ortus, as blackly gowned, deep-eyed, and sadly painted as ever, had taken to wearing his black canvas panniers all the time. His hood was recklessly pushed away from his freshly shaven head—it took a sense of duty shading into martyrdom to shave in these conditions—and he looked rather as though he had been caught opening birthday presents a day early. His breath emanated from the black scarf around his face and nose as a pale mist.
The bloody fog had turned to sleet; the sleet had, in its time, turned to ice. A soft snow began falling like volcanic ash about a week after the first hailstorm. Banks of snow piled up through the cracks in the windows and blew loose into everyone’s faces in the more exposed halls and ways of Canaan House. Sometimes the snow fell red, and the ice settling into the cracks of the paving stones and the steel of the dock terraces was a deep, unsettling carmine. The fresh vegetables had died, and they were down to preserved food. The rainbow-girdled constructs had kept fishing in the still-moving salt sea, but Teacher had taken one look at their catch and refused to have it cooked, or to let anyone else even see it.
Nonetheless, the snow and the bloody ice proved to be the least of the changes facing Canaan House.
Ortus sheathed his rapier with more care than finesse, and he asked: “How fare the preparations, Lady?” at exactly the same time Abigail said, “You shouldn’t really be walking unaccompanied, Harrow.”
“Quinn and Dyas were with me until the end of the corridor. We’ve laid all the wards,” she said. Harrow had not bothered with scarf or muffler, and every so often regretted it: her lips were cracked, and so were her paints, no matter how much she powdered herself beforehand, which gave her skull the appearance of a worn-down fresco. “No matter their efficacy, they’ll tell us something—if the Sleeper trips them while moving, that will tell us one thing; if the Sleeper doesn’t trip them while moving, that will tell us another.”
“You did not attempt to move the coffin,” her cavalier said, with only the faintest flicker of hope.
“Of course I did,” said Harrow, and he briefly closed his eyes in a full-face wince. “Nothing. It is absolutely immovable. Dyas pried up the panelling to see how far down it extends—it is laid like a pillar. I didn’t hold out too much hope that we could simply drop the thing into the ocean, but I admit to being disconcerted.”
He said, “Mistress, you might have woken it up.”
“And that would have told me something else,” she said.
“I wish that you would not take such enormous liberties with your own life.”
Harrowhark said, “Would you rather I took enormous liberties with yours?” and did not intend it to be unkind; had thought it even faintly reassuring. But Ortus’s dark eyes chilled in their sockets, as though the icy cold had reached them also, and his lips curled downward, and he said, lowly: “That is my purpose, yes.”
“You hate the facility. It makes you sweat. You have begged not to be taken down there.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then try to not to mourn when everything goes according to your request,” said Harrow, and then they were both irritated—she knew that he was irritated because a conversation had not gone the way he’d overplanned it, and she knew that she was irritated because each time she tried to blunt the razor edge of her tongue, he somehow grasped the blades of her anyway. Nothing in their exchange had been less than typical of the Locked Tomb, and yet ever since she had come to Canaan House she had found it all—wanting, somehow. She did nothing to stanch the flow when she said, “Are we in agreement? Are we clear?”
“Thoroughly,” said her cavalier sadly.
Abigail had been making herself look busy as only a member of the Fifth House could. Harrowhark was learning that a scion of the Fifth House might busy themselves politely during a murder, or an orgy. Now she said briskly, “I’m glad you’re here, Harrow. I wanted to talk to you about what happens next.”
She sat down at the table and tossed her thick, painstakingly brushed sheets of smooth brown hair behind her—Abigail Pent would present smartly in earthquake, fire, or flood—and Harrowhark said, “I assume you mean the organs.”
“Yes. Those aren’t great,” said Pent.
The snow had settled; the ice, in pinkish, crackling drifts, had formed miniature fernlike cherry-shaded patterns on all the ancient glass. In their wake, great slithering, pulsing tubes had worked themselves up through the cracks in the floorboards, or wound down among the frozen weeds. The tubes were a fresh, clear pink, with redder veins beneath the translucent topmost layer. At intervals, black clusters swam within, this way and that, like frightened fish. When one cut them, they bled a gush of filthy water, then the wound closed up as one watched. The cold had deepened to the point where a few hours would freeze this substance solid, a sort of brownish cloud with a misty, gelid surface.
The tubes were not homogenous: every so often they would pouch out, or fall in dramatic drapes along the wall or from the ceiling, with whitish, pearl-bubbled globules secreted away within their flesh. The surviving inhabitants of Canaan House were united—even Harrow—in agreement with Dulcie Septimus’s pronouncement that it was “absolutely ghastly, bordering on shitty.”
Abigail considered Harrow gravely, with her hands tucked into a pair of her husband’s outsized woolly gloves, and she said: “Reverend Daughter, we look to you.”
