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“Couldn’t say, Lady Pent.”
The spacious apartment was cleaner and more … lived-in than when she and Gideon had first opened its doors and ransacked its mysteries. At her expression, Pent said: “I needed somewhere to keep the children, at the beginning.”
“The who?”
“You summoned Jeannemary and Isaac along with the rest,” said Abigail calmly. “I worked out how to return them to the River first thing. They didn’t want to go, but I overruled them. I would have done the same with anyone else—if only Silas had asked me; what has happened to his soul worries me horribly.”
This sharpened Harrow’s focus. “You have the means to leave?”
“Yes.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Everyone who has stayed,” said Abigail, “has chosen to stay, and risk their lives—or souls, I should say.”
“What is the risk? Can a spirit be harmed?”
“A spirit can be trapped,” said Abigail, “trapped as every spirit in the River is trapped … I know it must sound puzzling, Harrow, so I’ll elaborate. The River is full of the insane, who attempt to cross—”
Magnus coughed in a genteel Fifth House way, and said, “Who wait for our Lord’s touch on the day of a second Resurrection.”
“Who attempt to cross, my love,” said his wife patiently, “to get to what lies beyond; who throng in their great and endless multitude, mad, directionless; or worse, have been trapped at the bottom, about which I know very little but fear all I know. Jeannemary and Isaac, who already endured so much, and never did anything wrong, other than the time they tried to pierce each other’s tongues, should have travelled lightly through those waters. Harrowhark never should have been able to stop their progress—no, dear, don’t shush me. She knows something of heresy.”
This was in its own way a dreadful slander on the Locked Tomb, and on what lay within it, and on the Ninth House in perpetuity. When she had been younger, and significantly stupider, she might have cared. But Harrow did not care now. She was utterly distracted. She held the even brown gaze of the woman before her, with her tidy hair and her squashy mittens, and she said, “It has been thousands of years since anybody bothered to believe in the River beyond.”
“Yet I believe more than ever, now that I am dead,” said Abigail, smiling.
“But God—”
“I firmly believe that the Kindly Emperor knows nothing of that undiscovered country. He never claimed omnipotence. I longed my whole life to give him my findings,” she said meditatively. “I think there is a whole school of necromancy we cannot begin to touch until we acknowledge its existence—I think these centuries of pooh-poohing the idea that there is space beyond the River has stifled entire avenues of spirit magic, and I believe the Fifth House was waning entirely due to us reaching a stultified, complacent stage in our approach … Oh, I hope so desperately that my brother found my notes! Something has gone terribly wrong in the River, Harrow, and I wish you’d find out what.”
Lieutenant Dyas did not look up from lugging another gun to the table as she said, “Let’s address what’s gone wrong in here, first.”
“Right. You don’t think I’m a mad heretic, do you, Marta?” Abigail suddenly said beseechingly.
“No. The Second House doesn’t overthink the River,” said Dyas. “If we did we’d just have to fill in forms. Quinn, show me where you found those bullets.”
Harrowhark had found her eyes avoiding the stairs, and the armchair; that was cowardly, and now she looked there straight and true. Ortus met her gaze quite tranquilly. He sat in the chair with his hood down, and he had opened up a book; he had been using it as a prop to unobtrusively write something on a scrap of flimsy. She mounted those stairs like a tremulous bridegroom, climbing toward a man who had known her all the days of her life.
At the top, she said: “How long did you know? Did you see it from the start?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “Not fully, until talking to Lady Pent and Sir Magnus, a week or so ago. At times I would recall, and then in the next few seconds, forget I had recalled anything. At times I knew, and at other times I did not. I realise that does not make much sense,” he added humbly.
“Ortus,” she said. “Do not bow and scrape to me. My family killed you.”
“No. Marshal Crux killed me, and my mother too,” he said, and he bent his nearly black eyes to the page balanced within the book, and he scribbled something down. “I knew that, when we discovered the bomb. The pilot found it midroute, and he stopped the shuttle so we could look at it; and my mother wept and wailed as he and I tried to work out its mechanism, but obviously—neither of us were experts in bombs.”
Her heart crushed within her. She said, “I take full responsibility.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Ortus.
“I asked him to put you on the ship—I was trying to—”
“It does not matter what you tried to do,” he said, and he took the flimsy away and put it in his pocket. “If you are culpable … you are culpable only of giving the marshal the means to murder me. Marshal Crux was not a good man … and yet, perhaps, he did what he saw was fit. Perhaps if I had said, ‘No, I must stay and do my duty, and aid the Reverend Daughter whatever her will,’ then I would have lived. But I was a coward, and I let my mother overrule me. My mother was strong … so strong, I hear, that her spirit lasted beyond death. I was weak. I always was weak, my Lady Harrowhark.”
She said tightly, “Don’t call me that.”
“My apologies, Reverend Daughter.”
“Don’t call me your lady,” she said. “You owe me nothing. You don’t owe me fealty. You don’t owe me duty. Though the way I treated Gideon Nav defies description, I treated you in a manner that rejects any claim I had to your loyalty. You don’t have to stay, Nigenad—tell Pent to get you through the barrier and back into the River.” As though the River was the better option. She said, “In the River, you’ll be relatively safe.”
Ortus laid his pen on the arm of the beaten-up chair. He settled his hands over his body awkwardly—there was always so much of Ortus, too much of him for his own comfort: he did not know what to do with his fingers, he did not know how to settle himself into the chair he filled or accept that he occupied space. He asked, “How did Gideon die?”
She closed her eyes and lost herself in that dizzy unreality of blackness: of swaying minutely, of lost balance. So many months had passed: and yet, at the same time, she had only lost Gideon Nav three days ago. It was the morning of the third day in a universe without her cavalier: it was the morning of the third day—and all the back of her brain could say, in exquisite agonies of amazement, was: She is dead. I will never see her again.
Harrow said, “Murder.”
Ortus said, “I thought—”
“We were pinned down by a Lyctor, our backs to a wall,” she said. “I was utterly spent. Camilla Hect, our companion, had suffered multiple injuries.” It was a blow to her dignity all over again, her unconscious gracelessness to Camilla Hect; a girl whom, in reality, she should have taken by the hands and thanked profusely for every time she tried to save her cavalier. “Nav had a fractured kneecap and a broken humerus. She pierced her heart on a railing because she thought I would use her to become a Lyctor. I will spit in the face of the first person who tells me she committed suicide; she was in an impossible situation, and she died trying to escape it. She was murdered, but she manoeuvred her murder to let me live.”
His face was very sad: a wistful, light sadness, not the ponderous sadness that he wore like his sacramental paint.
“What is better?” he asked. “An ignoble death by someone else’s hands, or a heroic death by one’s own? How should it be written? If the first—that she was cut down by an enemy—I would feel such hate for the enemy … If the second—an ugly death at her own devising—who, then, would be left for me to hate? Who does the poet judge? The eternal problem.”
“Ortus, this is not a poem,” she said.
“I think you must hate her,” he said, and she thought she knew what he meant, until he said: “Don’t. If there is anything I know about young Gideon … if there was anything in her that I too understood … it is that she did everything deliberately.”
Very little in Harrowhark’s life had embarrassed her up until that moment. She had been caught naked in front of a stranger. She had been kissed by a half-drunk Ianthe the First. She had admitted to God her apocalyptic transgressions, and been gently told that she did not know herself. She had been outplayed by Palamedes Sextus, outgunned by Cytherea the First, undone by Gideon Nav.
