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“This isn’t a conversation. Two.”
Harrow peered over the coffin. Magnus and Protesilaus were both sprawled on the tiles in puddles of blood; both were moving, but neither showed any signs of getting up. Dyas was flat on her back, eyes closed as the pressure from the Sleeper’s booted foot increased—she made a tight, choking noise, and when one hand frantically patted around for her sword, the Sleeper stepped from her neck to her hand with a crunch.
“One,” said the Sleeper.
Next to Harrow, hidden behind the coffin, Ortus cleared his throat.
48
HARROW, IF I’D BEEN thinking straight, I would have finished off the Lyctor; she was totally incapacitated, and she’d tried to kill you once already. Instead I took us out into the steaming corridor—the place was filling up with smoke or steam, and the alarms were going off like crazy, and I couldn’t see any sign of wherever Cytherea had gone. I picked a direction, and I set off down another hallway. The one I went down had a trail of dead bees, their skulls staring upward, green goo sprayed in big webs along the hallways—took out one living bee myself, but it was pulling itself down the corridor with a couple of skewer holes in its abdomen already, so I couldn’t really add it to my count. I came to a big dim open room: high ceilings, a huge table pushed to one side and wrapped up in tarps.
There were dead Heralds everywhere. It was a fuckshow of curled-in toes and creepy human hands. The floor was seething with slime and bones. Completely gross and bad. You would’ve loved it.
Past the huge field of revenant space wasps, in the stinking dark, there was a kitchen area with another few dead bees. A green-stained white robe had been discarded at the threshold, and standing on one of the countertops—
I didn’t recognise her at first. The last time I’d seen her, she had been flat on her ass, screaming after an impromptu divorce between her arm and her shoulder. It looked at first like she was wearing some kind of metal glove from the right shoulder down, but the light from the hallway moved over the long, dark-gold skin of the humerus, joint sliding soundlessly as the twin forearm bones moved, the rapier grasped in bony fingers closing over an ugly wad of fat where the palm should have been. Her hair and skin were colourless; that pallid face brightened to see me.
“Harry,” she said. Harrow, she was genuinely delighted to see you. The smile on that thin white face was real. “Harry, you’re—”
I moved closer and totally fucking ruined her day.
“Alive, bitch,” I said.
That expression hardened like it had been dropped in quick-set concrete. In the gloom, her face was a pale floating blotch with shadowed features: I couldn’t imagine the eyes, but I knew they wouldn’t be hers. She had long since ascended to the rank of double douchebag. Ianthe flicked a lock of goo-stained hair over her shoulder, leaned against the kitchen wall, and said: “Oh—you.”
Nonagesimus, I’m sorry. I was averagely good all my life. At least not criminally bad. I did a bunch of shit I’m not proud of—some of it I regret, some of it I don’t. I absolutely regret not kicking Crux down a flight of stairs and watching him go Oof, ow, my bones down each step, which now that I think about it does not help the case I am making here—I wasn’t absolute garbage. Maybe you’d agree.
But when I saw that tall hot glass of skank and heard her diffident Oh, you—like she’d never faked to your fucking face like she couldn’t see a corpse that was obviously there—like she’d never messed you up or messed around with you, like she’d never seen you vulnerable and smacked her pallid mummified lips—like she’d never put her hands on you, never made you want her, and never imagined there’d ever be a reckoning.
There would be a goddamn reckoning. Nonagesimus, I was going to reck her.
I said: “Do you want your ass kicked now, or do you want your ass kicked later, or both?”
“Please, let’s address this like gentlewomen,” said Ianthe, without much hope.
“Hell, no! I’m going to pull your whole ass off,” I said. “You want that? You want Harrow to grow you a new bone ass where I pulled off the old one? Let’s dance, Tridentarius.”
“This can’t be happening.”
“She’s not even into you, okay? It’s just the bones. She’s into bones.”
“One of the many aspects I possess that you now tragically lack.”
“Get down here,” I insisted. “Fight me.”
“Perhaps I should have guessed that the moment your footstep cursed this universe again, you would issue me these comedy challenges,” she said wearily. “What was your name again? Goblin? Gonad? Help me out here.”
“Your cavalier knew my name,” I said. “Corona knew my name. You know my name.”
She fell silent.
I said: “Gonad was pretty good. Mildly amusing.”
“Thanks.”
“Goblin wasn’t.”
“I haven’t had a good day. I’m very stressed right now. Give me a break.”
“You have three minutes of me being reasonable, and then I’m going to beat you so badly that you look like a Fourth House flag,” I said, and lowered my sword. “Is it over? Did you do the thing, you know, fight the whatever?”
“The Resurrection Beast?” she said. “No, if you must know. We engaged it for a while. Mercymorn went AWOL—nobody expected that. Then Harrowhark dropped. We had expected that, though I’d hoped … Things got difficult. After Augustine dropped out I was not about to stay down there with a two-person team. That creature is … large. I surfaced. And here I am. And here you are.”
“If you’re talking about the sour-faced donkey’s ass with the net,” I said (“Yes, Mercy,” said Ianthe instantly), “she put a sword through Nonagesimus’s back. Last I saw, she was thrashing around in a puddle.”
That white face in the darkness sharpened. I heard her indrawn breath. “You’re certain that Mercy tried to kill Harrow?” she said, after a moment.
“Yeah.”
“But that doesn’t— Why would she—?”
“Do not fucking ask me for information. I could not be more lost right now.”
“Help me down, Ninth,” she demanded. “I cannot walk on these things without succumbing to a strong desire to scream and loose my bladder, and we have to talk, you and I.”
I kicked a path for her—rolling some of the bees clear with your arms, shouldering them out the way until a thin aisle was cleared for Ianthe to walk through, shuddering all the while. When we made it out into the hallway, she took a few moments, leaning against the wall, framed against the unbelievably tacky bone decor—all the skeletons in their little outfits, and the mummified busts in niches, and the fanned-out rings of arms holding jewels or swords or whatever. That place was like a party where everyone was dead. She froze when we heard that infernal buzzing, from down the corridor. It was followed by a shout.
“Stay here,” I said.
“Get fucked,” she said thickly. “I absolutely did not become the eighth saint to serve the King Undying so Gideon Nav could play hero for me.”
“Why did you ascend to be a Lyctor?”
“Ultimate power—and posters of my face.”
Fair.
The end of the corridor opened into a wider hallway, obviously meant to showcase that same King Undying’s every grotty little trophy. The hall was lined with pillars of bone sweating in the heat—runnels of moisture trickled down the pale carvings—and I readied my sword, but I was too late. The bees were already dead. They were strung up neatly from the ceilings in strangling nets of tendon, squeezed to death, thick streams of green slime dripping from their bodies all over the black-and-white tiles. Some of the lamps had been smashed in the chaos, and even now swung dangerously from the ceiling, strobing over these hideous parcels.
A figure stood in the hallway, breathing hard into the crook of his elbow. He hadn’t even drawn his rapier, though somebody obviously had at some point, as piles of dead bees lay in the corner segmented neatly. It was the Lyctor you called the Saint of Patience, alive and unhurt, apart from a gleam of sweat and blood on those snobby, aristocratic features. I was struck again by how almost-unreal Lyctors always looked—or like they were more real than anyone else was, more present, painted in more saturated colours. He kept running one hand over his flat combed-back cap of fair, greyish hair, and looked as though he was thinking seriously about power-chundering. When he saw us standing in the doorway, he approached and snapped: “Chick, we have to get back in there. Gideon hasn’t surfaced, so he’s fighting the damn thing alone. Help me find your elder sister—wait, Harrow?” His surprise shifted almost immediately to distracted annoyance: “For the Emperor’s sake, Harrowhark, if you lived could you not, at least, have dropped in to assist—”
But he had stopped dead, and he was looking at us.
