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Harrowhark had been looked to before, though rarely by anyone under seventy years old. She kept her gloved fingers within the folds of her robe, flexing them occasionally, and waited. The Fifth historian continued: “My necromantic scholarship is specific, my general practice—scattershot. I never did hold ambitions in that quarter. I can command a skeleton, but I can’t create one. I can work tendon or a muscle, or settle skin into a gash, but if that can be weaponized, I’d love to know how. And as for the Duchess Septimus…”
All things considered, Dulcinea Septimus was a medical miracle. By her own account, her lungs were blown-out sacs of inflammation from the last round of pneumonia she had fought before her voyage to the House of the First; the cold ought to have already buried her beneath those deep, cerise snows outside. But there was seemingly very little wrong with her, apart from the occasional cough. Harrowhark had been ready to denounce her as a lifelong hypochondriac, except that Septimus herself was the first to insist as much: “I have always said that thinking one is sick is probably what makes you sickest,” she once said hopefully, while avoiding attempts on her cavalier’s part to feed her evil-smelling linctus from a spoon.
Abigail said, “She should be incapacitated. It’s marvellous that she isn’t. But her flesh magic is inward-supporting—she says the Master Warden of the Sixth House gave her instruction when they were children, though goodness knows he would have been what, nine years old—and that she neglected her other studies. You, the lieutenant, and Protesilaus the Seventh constitute our front line.”
Harrowhark very specifically did not look at her cavalier to see how he took this pronouncement. He had formed a violent passion against the heroic knight of the Seventh House; she thought it was nice that he had a hobby. She said, “If the temperature drops further, I am in danger of becoming less useful. I have been experimenting with heating marrow to stop it from freezing, an art I have as far as I can tell only just invented, but it is fiendishly difficult. I do not admit this lightly.”
“Oh, damn!” the Fifth necromancer said softly. “Damn, damn! I hadn’t even thought of that. I mean—gosh, that’s fascinating, you ought to tell me the details at some point, but—damn!”
Harrowhark rubbed her hands against her ribs through her robes and gloves, and said: “This is all precaution. I’m still fit for purpose, so long as the temperature doesn’t fall.”
“Then time is against us,” said Ortus.
“Time was always against us,” said Abigail.
“Oh, time … time,” said a voice from the doorway. “Time means very little … mastery does. This temple stood for ten thousand years untouched by all but time’s clumsiest pawing … but then its master was the Master, for whom even the River will part. Time is nothing to the King Everlasting.”
It was Teacher. He wore his white woollen tunic with its beautiful rainbow sash, and his sandals and a little white half cape, but nothing else to keep out the cold. He had a bottle of apple-coloured liquid in his hand that he took a pull from every so often, the sharp reek of which made Harrow’s nose crinkle.
To their silence, he added: “I believe we are now being punished for what they did. Even the devil bent for God to put a leash around her neck … and the disciples were scared! I cannot blame them! I was terrified! But when the work was done—when I was finished, and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price—they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm … Oh, but it is a tragedy, to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time. It happened to me, but I was only a man, or perhaps fifty men … Reverend Daughter, your whole House treads upon a knife’s edge, as keepers of such a zoo.”
He caught her gaze on the bottle, and his very blue eyes twinkled a little madly, and he said with greater calm: “It’s thistle shrub, child. I could not get drunk on it if I tried. And how I have tried.”
Ortus said, “You speak in riddles, old man.”
“Then let me speak plainly,” said Teacher. “You worship a monster in a box and play at being the masters of its tomb. Now we have a monster in a box, and it has become obvious that it means to master us all. Canaan House has never changed its colour, nor its shape, nor with the seasons. I should know; we measured summer to winter, temperature and precipitation and the acidity of the very sea beneath us, and it never hailed, and it never snowed, and we certainly never saw fimbriae hanging from the rafters. Let me prophesy in my old age: the Sleeper is getting up the strength to wake completely, and colonize what it finds. I fear! God! How I fear!”
Abigail said, “Teacher, please come and take up residence with us. We have beds—we keep watches,” but he cried out: “And miss out on the chance to die? I’ve been wandering these halls at three o’clock in the morning, saying at the top of my voice, ‘It would be terrible to be shot,’ and the Sleeper still does not come … It is dreadful to be shown a monster’s pity.”
He pivoted abruptly and took another long suck at the bottle. “Your swords will not rend its armour,” he said, with his back turned to them. “Its weapons will ruin your flesh. It will not stop until it has subsumed its quarry. And it would only acknowledge the blade without … all we have are the blades within. It has seen them and made them dull. There is no hero left among us … and I say, hooray!”
Teacher, in a mad sprightly dash, clicked his heels together with the ardour and energy of a man a quarter of his age. “Hooray!” he said again. “Into the River with us, boys! Fifty can school like fishes!”
And he threw his bottle violently at the nearest section of tube, out in the corridor. Harrowhark watched as the shiny red organ gave out a wet, squishing blarp; the bottle bounced off it dismally, and as Abigail and Ortus drew close beside her, it rolled sadly beneath another fold of wet, curtaining pink. Some of the bitter fluid within spilt out onto the battered wooden floor. Within seconds, even the ends of that alcohol began to flake into shards of ice.
“It’s coming for you, Reverend Daughter!” said Teacher. “Oh, it’s coming for you—and once it’s got you, once that rock’s rolled away, once that tomb’s levered open, the Emperor of the Nine Houses will never know peace ever again! The King is dead! Long live the King!”
Teacher capered madly down the hallway like a child—slapping at long, shivering droplet-shaped lumps of viscus, and whooping as he went. His hooting and hollering rang off the antique walls long after he disappeared.
Harrow felt the cold as an old friend inside the thick black canvas of her church robe. Her fingers burnt as though she had held them too close to a fire. Her cavalier and the historian did not warm her as they stood beside her: it was as though she were alone in the room. She was startled when the latter touched her: laid her hand on her shoulder as though she were no older than one of the vanished Fourth House duo, a gawky little girl in the face of death.
“Well, bugger Teacher,” said Abigail Pent crossly.
36
ONE WEEK BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
IN THOSE LAST LONG, terrible days before the end—those strangled, claustrophobic, white-faced days that stalked the borders of your nights like predators waiting for your collapse—you began to pray again. This was not because you had anyone in particular to pray to. It just helped, in its own ineffable way, to read your knucklebone prayer beads, and to recite childhood meditations you had learned when you were yet too small to look out over the pew. You were filled with the baffling memory of Mortus the Ninth lifting you up to see your mother leading Mass; before you were allowed on the sanctuary, you were seated in front and held by your father’s cavalier, so that you might not stare at a softly powdered stone chair-back for the whole session. You remembered that you had far preferred the strong, sad hands of Mortus to being sat next to your great-aunts and given a stinging piece of peppermint candy to suck, as though you ever needed to be kept quiet. It had been the last assumption of immaturity you would ever enjoy. You had been three years old, maybe.
If you prayed for anything, you prayed for clarity. You prayed that you might look upon the face of each remaining Lyctor and that the Body would quietly point to the apostate. You prayed that it had been Cytherea, traitor even in death, and that her body had somehow been tossed out of the Mithraeum’s airlock. You prayed that the whole thing had been an illusion, and sometimes nearly convinced yourself that it was; that you had imagined the dead of Canaan House alive again, impossibly drifting through the jungles of your victim planet, far away from where their bodies had gone to rest. But then why had their coffins on the Erebos been empty? And why now was one of your letters missing, and another two freshly opened?
Whenever you thought about it, enervated lines of thick, hot blood drooled from each ear, so that your canals were perennially stained deep brown. You prayed to live just a few more weeks.
* * *
