deemed the least leaky of all their rooms on offer, helped by their placement quite low down Canaan House’s southmost side, and Lieutenant Dyas had invited them to move in with no enthusiasm whatsoever. They had arrayed makeshift beds and mattresses on the floor of her parlour, the broken furniture pushed into corners and stacked up at the sides, and there they all lay like victims after a massacre.
They were a ragtag bunch: Abigail Pent and her husband, who shared the decomposing four-poster that the dead Judith Deuteros had slept in; Protesilaus the Seventh and his intubated adept, who slept like a healthy baby swaddled in carpet rugs, and robes, and all her spare clothes; Dyas, who seemed never to want to sleep again, but only to sharpen her rapier, to the point where it must have held around nineteen edges; and Ortus; and herself. Ortus had placed his mattress between all concerned and the door—“I will be that bulwark,” he’d said portentously, although Harrowhark had noticed that it was the driest and warmest spot. That was that, that was all of them. When she had asked after the remnant Fourth children, Pent had remarked a little cagily that she had already moved them on. Harrow read between the lines and found that she could not resent their being—squirrelled away—so that the rest of the group presented a larger and juicier target.
Her breath sparkled in front of her mouth, and her fingers ached, even though she’d slept in gloves. The sun shone thinly through lacy patches of feathery, tessellated mist on the glass, glass on glass: ice! All at once Harrow was homesick for Drearburh. The fog outside was so thick that Canaan House seemed to have ascended into the heavens overnight—risen up into the atmosphere within a thick wet fleece of cloud and mist, a dirty ovine colour. Harrow could not see the sea or sky. She thought the rain was falling less heavily outside—but then she perceived that instead of the dreary, murmurous fall of precipitation, each drop had hardened into a pellet of ice. The wind whipped them up against the thick plex window, and they sounded like shot from the barrel of a gun.
It was not much past dawn. She’d slept in her paint, and her teeth tasted like pigment. Harrow wrapped her veil around her mouth as a muffler, and rose silently from her bed. The others slept on, in silent hummocks like graves: Ortus before her, a black and faintly whuffling hill; on her right Protesilaus Ebdoma, who slept with his sword on his breast like some soldier’s monument, one where the sculptor had gone overboard on the muscles; on his right, his necromancer, her short buff-coloured curls falling on her childlike cheeks; and on her left, Dyas, who lay with her eyes open and her sword on her breast. Her gloves were very white against the steel hilt of her rapier, and very white against the bared sepia of her wrists.
The door to Pent’s room opened on silent hinges to reveal her kind-eyed, curly-haired, and abominably silly cavalier. He had his slippers on, and two coats over his pyjamas: on seeing Harrowhark, he touched his lips and beckoned her through to his room. Within, Abigail Pent was curled up on an enormous windowsill, a decrepit love seat tattering itself to pieces beneath her, watching the hail come down in calm fascination. There was a roasting smell, like chocolate and dust. A little electric heater blarted out tepid air on the floor, its fans wheezing hotly. To Harrow’s numb fingers, it seemed to be warming approximately jack shit.
“Pretty foul out there,” Pent said in low tones. “Coffee?” (That must have been the chocolate scent. Harrowhark accepted a cup, mainly to warm her hands.) “The pressure’s dropping freakishly … though of course, you aren’t victim to atmospheric conditions on Drearburh, are you? Are you getting any sleep?”
Harrow said merely, “I don’t care about surrounds. It could easily be less advantageous.” Often her cell had been worse.
“Hear, hear,” whispered Pent’s cavalier, holding the coffee pot, which was wildly belching steam. “That’s the stuff. We’ll make a Fifth of you yet, Reverend Daughter. Not that bad—can’t complain—it’ll be a damn sight worse in the River.”
“Just so long as the Duchess Septimus is holding on,” said Abigail, unperturbed by a fresh smash of icy pellets next to her head. “I tried to make her take the bed—she was so upset that the Templar pair weren’t on board. I