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You were rendered down to your incoherent parts. You wanted to say, I saw the Body; you wanted to say, I saw the tomb; but you were seized, all over again, by doubt in the face of fact. The uncertainty of the insane. The conviction of the mad. Nobody had seen you walk through that door. Nobody had watched you leave. What he saw in your face you had no idea; only that he crouched, and he looked at your blind, bleeding numbness with those chthonic eyes, and he wiped his thumb over the part of your temple where the glass shard had buried itself, and he tucked a stray lock of hair behind your ear with the thoughtless gentle tidiness of a parent.
Then God’s eyes widened fractionally, and his voice became altogether different when he said: “Harrow, who the hell’s been tampering with your temporal lobe?”
Your body rolled itself off the table, with such a reflexive suddenness that you were not sure that the action was through your conscious effort. Your meat floundered to stand, wild with shards of lead crystal and a dozen cuts through your clothes, and you turned away. The Emperor said, “Harrowhark?” as you stumbled away from the table, and more plaintively—“Harrowhark!” as you unerringly careened to the door, but he did not follow. Somehow your hand slapped the pad that slid it open—somehow your meat dragged itself away from him—and you walked, and you walked, and you walked.
As the door closed you might have heard, “Damn it, John—damn it.” But the last thing you were going to do was trust your own ears.
38
YOU ONLY STARTED TO accept your death after that terrible evening. It was impossible to ignore the manifold symbols of desolation. For example, the Body had made good on her word, and disappeared. She had been your quiet companion since your Lyctorhood—she had faithfully kept tryst with you—and in the morning after the sleep you could not remember and the walk back to your room you could not recall, it struck you that she was not coming back. Nobody would come for you. The path was cleared for you to die, and the lovely woman lying chained to the marble had not been able to bear to watch your progress on it; or perhaps it was just that she had never existed, except within a ten-year-old’s fever dream.
The hours stretched themselves out to snapping point. You ate with a mechanical stolidity, even if you would rather not have. You washed yourself, and you dressed yourself, without a flicker of interest. Now when you caught sight of yourself in the mirror it was with a certain repelled bewilderment, as if you had never seen your face before, and it honestly seemed as though you had not. On one of the last days you discovered with distant consternation that you were trying to leave your rooms without even applying your paint.
You thought of trying to write a letter. To whom? Crux? Captain Aiglamene? Your wretched great-aunts? To God, to Ianthe? Should you plan your funeral, aiming to beat the Saint of Joy’s frugal twenty-four minutes? Once you would have asked your corpse to be sent back to your House, to be walled up in the Anastasian, the last daughter in the tomb-keeper line: but perhaps even your empty vessel would attract a planetary revenant. No, your body could never go back home. You decided to write, Toss me out the airlock, but thankfully this puerile self-pity sobered you up a little, and you did not bother to begin.
The only real advantage to those last few days was that of the swordsman with the thousand scars: one more could not harm you. There was very little left to surprise, and very little left to sicken. But on the penultimate night before the Resurrection Beast was due, you dropped your glove down the side of the bed; you had to kneel down to retrieve it. And you found that far beneath your bed—hidden in the darkness where you had once lain, waiting for the Saint of Duty—lay an inert corpse: the missing body of Cytherea.
You lay in that gap between the frame and the floor on the outside of the bed for quite a long time. You had not sensed any foreign thanergy in your room, nor trace of hostile theorem. Even now, she lay docile and dusty, empty in your sight. You extended your fingers to brush her arm—and there was the ever-present sign of God keeping her preserved, with the hot lemon scour of his divine necromancy punching the back of each sinus. She lay still as an abandoned doll. You even said, “Get up. I can see you,” but this command did not rouse her, for some reason.
At the time you did not wonder how the body had breached your wards, which you dutifully reapplied each night with fresh blood. You considered the corpse; you bracketed thick bone clamps to its dead ankles and dead wrists; and then you strode down the corridor, and when Ianthe answered your crabby knocking with a sleepy, “Nonagesimus, what do you—” you did not give her time to finish her sentence, but dragged her, by the icy gold of her skeleton arm, back to your bedroom.
She did not protest, or make a comment, coarse or otherwise. She was too surprised. Ianthe raised her eyebrows at you as you pointed her to beneath your bed; but she took her nightgown in her fists, and crouched down to look between the mattress and the floor.
And she said after a long moment: “What am I looking at?”
You experienced a hot moment of aggravated panic; but when you crouched down with her, the Lyctor’s corpse was still there, dead and unmoving in her bracelets of bone. You said, “It’s right there.” She did not answer. You said: “The body, Tridentarius. Cytherea’s body. Cytherea’s body is beneath my bed.”
She did not answer. You rattled, mindless: “On its back, arms at the sides, feet arranged at a thirty-degree angle.”
Ianthe sat up and brushed down her knees. She looked at you with an expression you could not parse in the diminished light, only it had been made with great care. She said: “I—can’t see anything, Harrowhark.”
You stared at her. The Princess of Ida looked down, then away, and then slid her gaze deliberately back to you, as though it were difficult. You realised: she was embarrassed.
“Have you been sleeping?” she asked tactfully.
“It’s no more than three feet away from us, Tridentarius.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if the answer is no; my beauty sleep is seriously impaired at the moment.”
“Touch it. Get under there.” She did not move. You said, “Touch it.”
Ianthe rose soundlessly to her feet, and the long skirts of her nightgown—a brilliant ruffled canary-yellow silk that made her look like a formal lemon—rustled restively around her calves. She said, “I’m going back to bed.”
Despite the layers of deadened scar tissue, there was still enough limberness in your soul for you to say: “Ianthe, for God’s sake, have mercy.”
She paused at your threshold. The violent yellow made her hair look white and gave her skin no colour found in skin. She said, light and careless: “Good night, Harrowhark,” and she walked out of your rooms.
You looked at your door. You looked beneath your bed. You went to your sink, and you ran the tap until you could splash the coldest water possible on your face: you took five deep breaths in, and five deep breaths out. You closed your eyelids and rolled your eyes in your sockets. Then you went and looked beneath your bed again.
Cytherea was gone. There were cuffs of bone glued to the floorboards. You had left it for maybe three minutes. No ward brayed. You searched the rest of the room, but there was no corpse to be found. You lay down on the bed, and if you’d had the ability, you might have cried bitterly from sheer desire to feel release. But you could not; and no release came.
* * *
On the last day, for the last time, the Saint of Duty tried to kill you.
You were coming out of the habitation atrium—you had stood, briefly, at the entrance to the tomb where Cytherea’s body no longer lay at rest, perhaps in the hope that she might coalesce before your eyes and rewrite reality—and when this inevitably failed to happen, you had walked away, hoping to find the remains of somebody’s leftovers to listlessly gnaw upon in the kitchen.
Ortus hit you out of nowhere like the hammer of God. He tackled you just as you stepped into the corridor—body-slammed you into the wall with an almighty crunch, prematurely ending the long afterlife of an engraved skeleton inlaid with black pearl that had been fixed to the wall holding a big waterfall sheaf of ebon grasses. You automatically fixed the small cracked oblongs of your nasal bones into position as you flung him away again, reawakening the broken memorial into an array of shoving palms pistoning forward from one almighty synovial joint. He slammed into the opposite wall, and you backed away down the corridor, bleeding a little, measuring the distance between you and his spear.
He barked, “Draw your sword.”
Immediately you reached for the bone-scabbarded blade you kept lashed to your back. He said with a touch of frustration, “Your rapier,” and you just stared. He held his spear in his left hand, its point a razor-sharp omen, and his plain rapier with the scarlet ribbon in his right; an ancient funeral bouquet was in tatters by his feet. Ortus had not shaved his head in the last week or so, and the stubble on his bony skull was a cap of brownish russet fuzz like a splash of forgotten blood.
