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Harrow’s lips were sore; everyone’s lips were a little cracked and bleeding, and on her and Ortus bloody lips and cracking paint blended in a pinkish-grey mosaic. She found the tip of her tongue worrying the little scabby plates that now lived on her bottom lip. She looked up into the kind face of Abigail Pent, who was dead; and she said: “I owe you a great debt. You have given me much, in return for very little.”
“Oh, Harrow, bless you, I always was a busybody,” she said smilingly. “Don’t thank me for sticking my oar in. You asked me to come, and I came. I understand you didn’t ask on purpose, but I like to think that there was a grain in your soul that saw yourself in need, and perhaps thought to itself, I wish I had Abigail Pent. It takes a great deal of ego to be a psychopomp. Thank you for letting me be yours.”
And she curtseyed to Harrowhark, with enormous grace. Harrowhark bowed in return, and found herself saying, “The body of the Locked Tomb preserve you and yours, Pent,” and meaning it.
“Do you know what’s in there?” asked Abigail, eyes sparkling.
Harrowhark cleared her throat and said, “Yes.”
“Is it intensely mysterious?”
“Yes.”
“God, I love tombs,” said the Fifth House necromancer. “Right-o. The curtain lifts … Places, people.”
In that echoing metal silence, they all moved to make their perimeter around the diagram. Harrowhark had dug big handfuls from Ortus’s panniers, and stood shod in a crunchy, perfectly pulverized pile of bone. She watched Abigail and Magnus cross on tiptoe, nimbly dodging any line that their shoes might scuff, and in passing turn and kiss each other gravely. She was not embarrassed to see this intimacy; in fact, she found that it was vaguely interesting to see a marriage play out in front of her. There were many strictures against a necromancer marrying their own cavalier, and whatever road Abigail and Magnus had chosen to walk had been a difficult one: she knew that the marriage had preceded the cavaliership, which perhaps had made it less grotesque for both. They kissed as chastely and briefly as children; Magnus touched her cheek and said quietly, “Godspeed, my darling,” and she said, “You too.” That was all. No more, and no less.
It was still entirely uncertain whether her skeletons could handle this freezing, wretched cold. If she was bound by the rules of her pre-Lyctor state, it was going to be difficult. The candles wheezed and flickered but kept burning gamely on. Protesilaus stood opposite his necromancer. Ortus was there beside Harrowhark, a big black-wrapped bulk in her peripheral vision, trembling a little from cold and probable fear.
Lieutenant Dyas was her opposite. Harrow had told her back in the laboratory that Judith Deuteros was alive, and she’d gotten a rather curt “Thought so” in reply. Dyas had begun to turn away, then surprised Harrow by turning back and suddenly saying, “She’ll give them hell,” in tones that were scarcely less blank; but with an expression that was far from it.
Now Magnus stood at the head of the circle facing the frozen-over coffin. His necromancer did not put herself at any particular point. She had taken a jug in her hands, one of a set that Protesilaus had carried with care down the long facility ladder, and Harrow did not know what had been put inside it.
“Here is the libation, for what good it may do,” said Abigail.
She carefully poured a measure of the jug’s contents at the foot of the coffin. A brief spill of thin, milky, whitish liquid pooled at the base, sluggish in the cold.
“You come to conquer,” she said, and spilt another runnel.
“You come in fury,” she said, and spilt another.
“You come bearing ancient weapons,” she said, and another.
“You come with a sword of the Ninth House,” she said, and one more.
“You come to claim a body,” she said, and upended the jug, and shook out the last pale drops. “This is all we know. You helpless ghost, this is not supplication … We came at invitation; whither did you? I am a spirit-caller of the House of the Fifth. I am Abigail for my mothers, Pent for my people. I who died am come in the fullness of my power, at the bidding of the Lyctor you seek to supplant. I will sever the thanergetic link you have to this woman, and I bid you—get the hell out.”
Abigail withdrew her hand from the fat glove and laid it bravely, bare, on the icy front of the glass-covered coffin. She did not wince from the cold. A chill blue light emanated from beneath that hand, as though somebody were shining a light from beneath the necromancer’s fingers. Harrow was struck by a thirst for her rightful power—to understand the theorem through a Lyctor’s eyes. All she could do was watch with her senses dulled.
After a moment, the adept said: “The ties lead outside this place, Harrowhark. The spirit is linked to some physical object.”
Harrow said, “Then—what?”
“Oh, we can get the spirit out of you,” said Abigail. “But we can’t kick it out of its other anchor. In other words, just because we banish it here doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily banish it there, outside the River … but let’s give a good, hard pull and see what emerges.”
The candles flared. Where before they had burned with a meek yellow flame, now they burned as strong and blue as the spirit-magic emanation from Abigail’s hands.
Abigail asked: “Who are you?”
And with a sodium flare sparking from Abigail’s fingers, the lid of the coffin swung open so wide that it wrenched itself off and crashed to the floor. One of the ice-fogged glass panels that had withstood all of Lieutenant Dyas’s violence burst into a shower of fragments. Abigail stumbled backward, then regained her footing.
There was nothing inside.
From the passageway just behind Harrow—the corridor that ought to have led to the mortuary—a voice crackled through its haz mask: “Nice try.”
A dry, unassuming click; an enormous blast that rattled around Harrowhark’s ears, and a crunch as the projectile meant for her cracked into the sheet of solid bone she flung upward from behind her feet. The sheet exploded with the impact, sending chips flying through the air and knocking her forward onto that freezing cold floor and its carefully wrought diagram. A familiar spike of pain went through her head, and her temples prickled with blood sweat. Had raising a simple shield really cost her so much? Had her reserves ever truly been so shallow, even in childhood?
She rolled to the side, and someone grabbed her arm and hauled her behind the monument: Ortus. Those assembled had run for what cover they could, mainly to the entranceways of SANITISER—PRESSURE ROOM—PRESERVATION. All except Protesilaus—he had unsheathed his rapier and was the last man standing, his cape a greenish-blue in the light of those blazing candles. He had slung the end of his etched metal chain, tied with a faded green ribbon, over the back of his neck; now the dead cavalier of the Seventh neatly flipped it off one shoulder and whipped the chain into a slow circle next to him, the links making a high-pitched noise as they cut the air.
“Don’t engage!” cried Abigail.
The Sleeper stood opposite, in its own doorway: haz mask gleaming dully in the candlelight, that enormous, wooden-stock gun cradled in its arms, the orange of the safety suit screamingly vivid. The Sleeper was not, in the end, of any great height or breadth, and the voice that had emerged from that mask was not inhuman. In fact, it was a woman’s voice.
“You wizards never learn,” said the Sleeper.
The nose of the gun jerked up with an ear-splitting bang. Protesilaus had already exploded into motion—with a great deal of grace for such a big man, he leapt to the side, and launched the whirring end of his chain out at the orange monster. It looped twice around the barrel and cinched tight. The Sleeper simply threw the gun away, and as Protesilaus tried to shake his chain free, there was another in her hands: this one so much smaller that it took Harrow a moment even to realise it was a gun.
The Sleeper walked forward, firing with each step, the hand gripping the gun supported on her other palm. These shots sounded higher and sharper, like whip cracks. The Seventh cavalier spun his chain in front of him, a blurred wheel in the air, and one of the ceiling lights shattered in a rain of sparks. The Sleeper tossed this gun to the side, broke suddenly into a run, and threw her haz-suited body into a diving handspring, jackknifing feet-first off the ground with a fluid agility that would have made even Camilla Hect erupt in a wild “Okay.” Protesilaus had braced his stance for an attack and had not expected his enemy to move past him; by the time he shifted and started to turn, the Sleeper was on her feet again, and yet another gun was in her hand. She pivoted lightly and shot him in the small of the back.
