I ask, you will know you have been asked, Nonagesimus.”
The Saint of Patience had held to his promise to gild the arm, and now you often caught Ianthe marvelling at her metal-shod fingerbones, at the buttery shine of gold upon her triquetrum. Your eldest sister, whose discomfort and annoyance only grew with Augustine’s delight, confronted you about it in the corridors: “Did you really erect that ghastly edifice?”
“Yes,” you said.
“And it’s really self-synthesizing bone?”
“Yes,” you said. “Though I wouldn’t call the process synthesis when the construct is merely perpetually growing to fill a pre-realised skeletal map. It’s yet more proof that topological resonance can be manipulated.”
Mercymorn’s eyes narrowed to hurricane slits with short, thick lashes. Her prismatically white Canaanite robe was wrapped very tightly around her, as though she were cold, and she had bound back her peach-coloured hair as though it were a wimple. She said, “I see,” and then, “I see. I see. What’s two plus two?”
“Four—”
“Smallest bone in the body?”
“The auditory ossicles, but—”
“What’s the name of the Saint of Duty?”
You said, “Ortus the First,” and you were too slow. She reached out and tapped you on the side of the head. What Mercymorn the First could do with a simple tap on the side of the head might have meant your end far more easily than the Saint of Duty, a run-up, and his spear—but she said out loud, “Ortus,” and then hurriedly again, all in one single Ortus—Ortus. The back of your skull ached, and you felt the chilly stab of pain in your sinuses that you sometimes felt in the dry atmosphere of the Mithraeum. You jerked away—your fingers flew to the bone studs in your ears—but she was not attacking you. You, so aware of your body, could sense no gland overworking, nor chemical coursing, nor vessel constricting.
The only change was in Mercy. Her placid oval face had taken on much the same look as you had seen, through a thin veil of viscera, the day you had fed the Lyctors your own marrow. She looked at you, quiet, and perhaps even a little lost; and she said: “I can’t tell if you’re a once-in-a-lifetime genius, an insane imbecile, or both.”
Then she said: “Children as fists! Infants as gestures! Yuck! Pfaugh! I live in the worst of all possible worlds.”
And without saying another word, Mercymorn stalked off down the corridor in the opposite direction, the lights making rainbows of her tightly shrouded robes.
When you reported this conversation to Ianthe, she was not particularly interested. This was, you thought, your sister-saint’s downfall: she had pre-defined a set of things that merited her attention and consideration, and everything else she put aside. (“You brood over everything,” she had said once, to this accusation. “You read unholy omens in the way people say good morning.”)
“She’s a crank,” said Ianthe. “Augustine says she went funny years ago, and that much like a stopped clock, she’s ‘right twice a day, by coincidence.’ Avoid, avoid.”
How you loathed any sentence beginning with Augustine says. “But she touched my head,” you said. “She was changing something, or looking for something—and I have no idea what.”
“Your brain,” suggested Ianthe.
Later you lay together in her lavish bed, far apart enough that if you reached out your hand, you might just brush her with your fingertips. It was, you had admitted, the only place you now felt safe to sleep, what with your wards so eminently destroyable. The mockery you endured for needing her proximity was exquisitely painful, but humiliation was steadily becoming your existence whole and entire.
But sleeping side by side was—awkward. It had been her idea. You would have slept on the carpet, if you hadn’t thought it would leave you more vulnerable to the Saint of Duty—it would have been too easy to see you from the window in the case of a spaceside assault. Trauma prevented you from simply taking a pillow and sleeping in the bathtub. You lay flat on your back in borrowed blankets, wearing third-hand clothes. Ianthe had given you a daffodil-coloured nightgown, rummaged from some ancient drawer of artefacts belonging to a long-dead Lyctor’s cavalier. It made you look like a liver inflammation. You stared glumly at a painting opposite the bed of an exquisite woman with lots of ruddy golden hair, a dreamy smile, and no clothes—though she was holding a rapier and, for no reason you could see, a melon.
That first night in her bed, you’d placed your bone-dressed sword between you, and felt better;