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THEY PLACED THE CANDLES in a ring around the Sleeper’s coffin. Abigail was busying herself with an immense chalk diagram, which took some time because she had to put her red, numbed fingers back in her glove every few minutes, or have her hands warmed between her husband’s. Harrowhark drew wards at the apex of each candle, as instructed, squatting beside the smiling, no-longer-intubated face of Dulcie Septimus.
No snow down here. Great icicles like stalactites seemed poised to crumble; oily pink webbing was strung from spike to spike, frosted up with cold. Drifts of broken glass and stagnant puddles of frozen fluid filled each corner, greeny-greyish in the dolorous buzzing overhead lights. Ropes of tube and ice hung over the entrances to each radiating passage in that nonagonal room, swagging over the signs that had once proclaimed each passage’s use. The only letters visible beneath the sluggish, pulsing viscera were a Y, the PR that had once heralded PRESERVATION, the AR once belonging to MORTUARY, and an almost-entirely obscured THREE. The crystal coffin in the centre of the room was misted thickly with cold that did not wipe off even when Lieutenant Dyas, a woman Harrow was beginning to grudgingly admit feared neither pain nor death after experiencing both, scrubbed at it with her sleeve. As such they could not see inside it, which was probably a relief.
The enormous old metal-rimmed whiteboard with its faded timetable and stained brown patches had been written over again. Harrowhark had startled when she first saw it:
END OF THE LINE. FALLING. OXYGEN CAN’T LAST THE DISTANCE AND WON’T REDIRECT POWER FROM THE PAYLOAD. INSTEAD I WILL MAKE YOU WATCH EVERY MOMENT AS I GET THE LAST PRIVILEGE YOU CANNOT ENJOY YOU BYGONE SON OF A BITCH.
I HOPE YOU’RE BOTH AS SORRY AS I AM.
She had said to Ortus, “I thought the messages were hallucinations, even though I never hallucinated like that before. It was easier to believe I was succumbing to the madness again.”
“Harrow,” he had said, “I have come to the conclusion that you were never mad … though who can be the judge of madness?”
It seemed so much worse to her if it wasn’t madness. She’d hate if it was under her control. She found herself saying curtly: “Then what?”
“The mind can only take so much pressure before it forms indentations,” he had said, meditatively. “It is strange—years and years after his death, I so often heard the sound … the way he pushed at the handle, the way he manipulated the haft … of my father, standing outside the door of my cell.”
Harrow had asked, “Did you miss him?”
He had thought about it. In the darkness of the big central room in that downstairs installation—the place he had never come to before, and that she felt she had left so much of herself inside, despite the fact that she had walked its metal-panelled halls for a few weeks only—he looked like an old statue, a Ninth House cavalier carved in the rock of some deep-set tomb.
And he had said thoughtfully, “Sometimes I imagined him coming back to life so that I might watch him die myself. The fantasy was a relief.”
Now Harrowhark dropped to her haunches next to the ghost of the Seventh House necromancer as she carefully fashioned wards using the blunt end of a needle. Everyone but Harrow had presented themselves to Abigail to have wards scratched on their palms: she was embarrassed by how long it had taken her to realise that they were counter-wards, and that she did not need one. They were the dead. For now, she was alive.
Dulcie mistook Harrow’s expression as curiosity over the missing tube, and she tapped one nostril and said brightly, “We thought I didn’t really need it. I’m not breathing at all badly. Abigail and I suppose that we enforce some measure of our own rules here; that’s why I’m not too badly off.”
Harrow said, “That would explain why you were affected by physical stimulus—why you have needed to eat, and why you experience pain.”
“Yes, and I always believed that so long as I got eight hours’ sleep, did some stretches, and didn’t think about it, I wouldn’t get any worse,” said the adept, and she smiled that dimpled, wasted smile that was the only thing that Cytherea had come close to parodying with any accuracy. She said, “Pal always said I’d be the death of him. And I was … He and I never even got to meet. I never even really got off Rhodes. It seems like such a bastard. You did kill the Lyctor, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Harrowhark.
“Was it quick?”
“Quicker than she deserved,” said Harrow.
“She stabbed Protesilaus before he’d finished taking his sword out the scabbard,” she said, and scratched a flourish into her ward. “Then she started asking me questions. Who were my friends? Was I well enough to go out in public? Was I married? I told her a lot of hot bullshit,” finished Dulcie. “I knew she was going to take my place—thought maybe Camilla, at least, would figure out something was up … no such luck. I don’t even remember dying—I suppose that was nice of her.”
There was no resentment in that face, worn out before its time, heavily lined with the marks of pain and care. With her close-cropped curls and soft eyes, Dulcie Septimus in some lights looked like a child; in others, older than Magnus. She had a tip-tilted grin that showed little white teeth, and nowhere in that smile was a hint of pity, nor of condescension.
“I don’t understand why you’re here,” said Harrow, throwing her House’s caution to the wind. She said honestly: “I do not know you. I barely avenged you. You owe me no allegiance, and nor does your cavalier.”
“Oh, Protesilaus is here because he wouldn’t be able to help it,” Dulcie said dismissively, putting one of the candles down and, with a total lack of shame, wriggling her hands up into her shirt so that she could warm them on her abdomen. “I love him, but he’s such a pest. I wish he hadn’t even come with me to Canaan House. I feel horrible. He should’ve stayed home with his wife and his sons—his wife does tapestries and he breeds flowers for a hobby. I stayed on their farm right after my pneumonia because they thought the sitting temperature would be better for me, and if I ever see another rose I shall scream … No chance of that now. Don’t worry about Protesilaus. He can’t help being so fantastically, dorkily noble.”
“But you—”
Dulcie’s smile became ferocious; her lips curled to show that some of the very white teeth were a little pointed, and her pallid eyes seemed to turn up at the corners. She was no longer languid, but breathless, alive, and resembling nothing quite so much as a malign fairy. Harrow remembered that Palamedes Sextus had made a war of his whole life in order to prosecute his desire to marry this woman.
“The only thing that ever stopped me being exactly who I wanted,” she said, “was the worry that I would soon be dead … and now I am dead, Reverend Daughter, and I am sick of roses, and I am horny for revenge.”
Then she took her hands away from her middle and went back to happily fixing the ward.
It did not take long to complete the circle. They worked swiftly and quietly. When they finished the coffin was cocooned in an enormous circle of enmeshed ward and candle anchorage, although Abigail looked discontented. “I hate doing anything to spirits without something to feed them,” she said, “and there’s no real blood here … there’s nothing to tempt it. I wish we knew what it was anchoring itself to—what’s the thanergetic link, and why has it been able to follow it to you? Harrowhark, you really don’t have any insight into who might be haunting you? Do any of its signifiers mean anything? The suit? The blood? The gun?”
Harrow’s brain, though still a jumble, was no longer a mess in a darkened room. Memory had gifted her a small torch she could light the disarray with. She remembered the clipped Cohort accents:
A standard-issue infantry sword. A two-hander.
“The sword,” she said. “It’s Gideon’s. But none of the other signifiers match.”
“Did the sword belong to anyone before her?”
“Not that I know of. Aiglamene petitioned to give it to Griddle from the Drearburh stock. I signed the order. The box was still wrapped.” The light was not proving helpful enough: she was, in desperation, kicking over piles of the rubble in her own brain. “I hated that damned sword for years. I don’t know why; it just felt strange—rancorous. I cannot deny that I often assumed its edge would be the last thing I saw. I don’t know,” she finished, frustrated.
“Never mind. I’m sure I’ve done worse with more,” said Abigail bracingly. “Get to the perimeter. You’re on point with Dulcie, and I’m pairing Magnus with Protesilaus—and then there’s Ortus.”
“Ortus shouldn’t be fighting.”
“He very much wants to. I hope there won’t be any fighting. Are you ready?”
