Emperor’s solemn mouth, Mercy reached up, grabbed great fistfuls of his shirt, and kissed God too.
It took Ianthe two attempts to get your attention. Eventually she stood you up wholesale, and with absolutely nobody paying attention to either of you, she propelled you out of the room. You looked over your shoulder as she opened the door—God had just picked up the Saint of Joy bodily and sat her at the edge of the table, and the Saint of Patience had his mouth at God’s neck, which was horrible—and Ianthe hustled you through as though escaping from a fire. You had never seen three people get their hands on one another before—you had never seen two people get their hands on each other before. Ianthe closed the door just as Augustine’s fingers reached the buttons of the Emperor’s shirt, and you had never been so grateful to her in your entire life.
31
“THAT WAS THE CUE?” Your voice sounded humiliatingly high-pitched.
“Harry,” said Ianthe, thankfully also a trifle strangled, “when three people start kissing, it is always a cue. A cue to leave.”
You said, “I feel unwell.”
“Yes. Yes, me too,” she said heatedly, in unexpected accord. “That was disgusting, to say the least. Old people should be shot.”
The underfloor lights glowed their cool blue, trying to soothe you into circadian sleep. A Cohort officer with grey tags at their sleeves lay enshrined in a niche opposite, an eyeless steel mask laid heavily on their face. Both you and Ianthe were breathing as though you had run a footrace, laboured and loud. Ianthe’s hair was in long margarine tangles down her neck, and her mascara was smudged beneath her eyes, and her ribs were heaving as though she were in an asthmatic fit. She carried her high-heeled shoes in her gilded skeleton hand, and they made for a strange juxtaposition. The breath-soft lavender gauze had a tiny violet stain on the front, and her mouth was red: she had been chewing her lips, and they had broken, and split. You realised with an uneasy start that you were both, in fact, quite drunk.
Ianthe ran a tongue across those wounded lips and said, “I suppose this is it.”
You said, “I appreciate your part in this, Tridentarius,” but before you could stop her, she drew you close with her living arm, and she bent her head to yours. You understood this inevitability only a second before it happened. Perhaps there was a dark universe in which you reached for her; in another you exploded her heart in her chest. In this one, as she lowered her mouth, you turned your face away, and her kiss fell on the side of your jaw. Both of you reeked of alcohol. Minute traces of blood smudged your cheek with tiny perfume blots of thalergy as she brushed her broken mouth across it with unanticipated tenderness. There was a rigid trembling somewhere in your sternum. When she raised her head again her gaze was cool and mocking, as though your inability to receive a kiss was yet more proof of limitation.
Your mouth was very dry when you said: “My affections lie buried in the Locked Tomb.”
“And let them lie,” she said, laughingly, and not very kindly. “Somebody might even exhume them for you. Good luck, Harry … try not to die.”
She walked off swinging her dancing shoes in her dead arm, and she even hummed tunelessly beneath her breath, before she disappeared down the corridor: a lone wax figure in pale purple chiffon, tall and colourless—except in the greasy metal of her bone arm, which the lights rendered all the colours of the rainbow. You could hear her carefree humming even after she disappeared, as you stood outside the dining room stock-still and frozen.
When it died away, you turned to your assassination.
You kicked off your shoes and left them, as you were still drunk enough to find that reasonable. Most of the alcohol was already in your bloodstream, but quite a lot of it was racketing around in your small intestine. As you walked in silence down the tiled hallways, past the pillars of tendon- and plex-wrapped wire, you focused on working it out of your capillaries and then out through your pores until you were running wet with sweat. Easier to move ethanol through water membranes than anywhere else. The fog in your brain and body burnt away, and you peeled two long strands of articular cartilage and hard calcium from your exoskeleton. These you melded and worked