The Fifth necromancer did not let go of the paper. Harrowhark looked down at its bloodred, panicked writing: a hasty, furious scrawl, written with such fury that the pen had bitten the paper.
I WILL REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU KISSED ME—YOU APOLOGISED—YOU SAID, I AM SORRY, DESTROY ME AS I AM, BUT I WANT TO KISS YOU BEFORE I AM KILLED, AND I SAID TO YOU WHY, AND YOU SAID, BECAUSE I HAVE ONLY ONCE MET SOMEONE SO UTTERLY WILLING TO BURN FOR WHAT THEY BELIEVED IN, AND I LOVED HIM ON SIGHT, AND THE FIRST TIME I DIED I ASKED OF HIM WHAT I NOW ASK OF YOU
I KISSED YOU AND LATER I WOULD KISS HIM TOO BEFORE I UNDERSTOOD WHAT YOU WERE, AND ALL THREE OF US LIVED TO REGRET IT—BUT WHEN I AM IN HEAVEN I WILL REMEMBER YOUR MOUTH, AND WHEN YOU ROAST DOWN IN HELL I THINK YOU WILL REMEMBER MINE
Harrow read this screed in a flat and affectless monotone, her voice dying away on mine. The cavalier looked at the paper, and his necromancer looked at her.
“Read it to me,” she said, knowing her voice was still flat and hard as the hail.
Abigail turned the note back to herself, still with the care reserved for some priceless antique.
“I still get an erotic charge from snakes, sorry to say,” she read.
There was a brief silence. The hail slapped at the window’s glass as though wanting to hurl itself through. There was a growing rime of pale blue frost at the edges, and a cleared mist from where Abigail had sat. Deep in the fast-moving fog outside—unmoved by wind and unresolved by gouts of chilly hail—all three of them watched, a little detached, as tiny particles of ash joined the hail in the storm, as though the already overcrowded weather had been augmented by the eruption of some distant cinder cone.
“It differs mildly, then,” said Harrow, and Abigail admitted, “Somewhat, yes.”
Magnus said, “But why—”
“I am mad,” she interrupted. “I have always been mad, since I was a child. I hallucinate sounds. I see things that do not exist. Ortus has masked much of it, but as you have identified and exploited, my vulnerability only requires his removal. I did not tell you of Silas Octakiseron’s death because I was not sure I was an accurate reporter. I am insane.”
Abigail Pent took off her glasses and popped them down into the top fold of her robe. She reached out to touch Harrow’s arm, and Harrow flinched away; she winced a little in sympathetic apology, and removed her hand.
“You have kept that close to your chest,” she said. “I would like to hear more sometime, if you are ever inclined to tell me. But, Harrowhark, that squares perfectly with another theory I have, if all this time you only looked to your own frustrations—have you ever considered the fact that you might also be…”
“Here it comes,” said her husband wearily. “The ghost agenda.”
“Magnus! Haunted,” his wife finished, in triumph. “Harrowhark Nonagesimus—I really think you should consider the idea that you might also be haunted.”
29
AUGUSTINE WAS ALL SMILES now that Ianthe the First had passed her final hurdle. His open delight did a lot to ameliorate the reddened, swelling tension that had permeated the Mithraeum. You found his frank and open relief patronizing, but your sister Lyctor did not, or at least made a very good show of enjoying it. You went to watch a bout between them in the training rooms, sitting quietly and holding your rapier—it was full of unnecessary formality even to your Ninth House eyes, all antique niceties and duelling condescension that had been long forgotten back home. Ianthe was a saint of the Third House, and Augustine an antique of the Fifth; neither did anything without putting down a little carpet first, and introducing themselves to an audience of a thousand quiet-eyed memorial bones, and you.
But after the ceremony came the sword. You remembered so little of Naberius Tern, either of his death or of his life, but from what you had gathered he would have been the last cavalier in the whole starless universe to think his sword-arm better off defleshed. Despite that, Ianthe was cured. It had been your faintest and most childlike hope that Ianthe would consider your bondage over; that your saving her life would be enough to release you from the collar of debt she had placed around your neck.