She wrapped the scarf around you, pinned it, grunted, then took it away. You were left to sit on her bed, eating one of the apples she had not yet used for practice. As you ate you watched her, and you reread the invitation, while—typical of a flesh magician—Ianthe took out needle and thread, and quite happily occupied herself with sewing. She pronounced it “very easy, actually” to thread the needle with her defleshed hand.
Written on the back of the paper:
My room, ten minutes beforehand.
“Try this on,” she said, eventually.
It amounted to little more than a veil. She pinned it over one shoulder and left both your arms chilly and bare. The material was water-thin and slippery; when you emerged from behind a gaudy screen, she cinched the black, scintillating stuff tight to your body. It was not true black, but shot with a deep chemical indigo, and as you looked in the mirror the shade made your eyes lightless hollows. Above that field of navy-black, little white scintillae trapped inside like luminescent filaments growing in a charred corpse, your irises were devoid of any colour at all.
Ianthe circled you, tugging and pinning, and you suffered it only because her touch was disinterested and clinical. Neither the touch of her living fingers nor her dead ones lingered. It was as though you were simply her patchwork corpse. You would have been impressed at her craft, except that she dismissed your compliments: “This is nothing. Naberius could embroider you a full overskirt without pricking a finger.” This might have veered close to sentiment had she not added, “I wish killing him had given me his needlepoint too.”
Your sister Lyctor brushed your hair and fluffed it out with her fingers. It was long enough to do this. Only a little while ago you had shaved it down to stubble: it had taken fright, and regrown at speed. Terribly afraid that this was your lone symptom of Lyctor regeneration, you had not cut it since. You would not let Ianthe fill any of the holes punched in your ears with metal earrings or pearls, and you refused all other jewellery not bone, and so there was not much else to be done. When she finished, you did not look upon your reflection with revolted shock, merely with a dull and uncomfortable distaste. The worst part was your sudden resemblance to your mother.
“I am very satisfied,” pronounced Ianthe.
You said drearily, “I look like an imbecile.”
“You look just good enough that I’m proud of my handiwork, but not so good that I’ll be consumed with lust and ravish you over the nut bowl,” she said. “I walked a fine line, and I walked it admirably. Go and fix your paint; your skull’s dribbly.”
As an act of meaningless rebellion, you applied the sacramental skull of Priestess Crushed Beneath the New-Laid Rock, the least beautiful skull in the canon. When you came back, she was smoothing her hair at her dressing table with a bone-backed brush. She wore a gown of achromatic purple—pale and almost grey, like the smoke from a fire banked with lavender, and made of what appeared to be a few layers of gauze. The back was open, and you could see the fine dents of her spine—her bleached skin bluer and sweeter against the pallid gossamer—and the twin blades of her shoulder blades looked strangely nude and vulnerable to you. She said languidly, “Button me up,” and you obeyed by sprouting three skeleton arms from the bone-impregnated inlay of her chair, glad to hide her vertebrae.
Ianthe wore her Canaanite robe over her shoulders, but did not slip her arms into the sleeves: you were glad for the feeble, diaphanous cover yours offered. She buckled her rapier belt loosely at her hips; your two-hander you carried on your back. As you followed your coconspirator down the habitation corridor to Augustine’s rooms, a prickle of anticipation washed over the insides of your stomach.
Just as your rooms bore very little resemblance to Ianthe’s, Augustine’s rooms bore no resemblance to either yours or hers. His interiors were of dark wood. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves ran up most of the walls, and the floor was not tile but deep plush carpeting. It was a much more crowded, lived-in room, and on every surface was a book, or a stylus, or a folded pair of socks. There were baroque leather armchairs with pale weals on the arms and seat from years of sitting, and