following you—it was keeping careful pace about a hundred metres behind you, stalking your path. This was not hard. Your skeletons trod heavily. You were leaving a trail that a blind idiot might’ve followed, in the middle of a dark and moonless night; you went back to being irritated, this time at your own foolishness, and you stopped.
You waited in a clearing for your predator. You caulked a space over that rich red earth with bone, so that you could stand on a little platform of it with the tip of your sword touching that mat and not worry that some annelid was about to squirm over your feet. You checked yourself over to make sure that no airborne foreign body was making inroads on your immune system. You pulled your hood deep over your head, and you waited.
The thalergy made its approach. You realised with a deep and slithering horror that it belonged to a person.
And then a woman was standing at the edge of the clearing. She wore a peaked cap to keep the sun off her dark-eyed, scissor-slash face; a woman in a grey robe with the ends tied in a fat knot about her middle to keep them from dragging in the dirt. There was a rough canvas bag around her neck, an arresting, festering mass of thanergy amid all that clear and comprehensible life. She had two shabby scabbards peeking up over her shoulders, and chin-length, slate-brown hair tucked behind her ears, the colour of ancient tiles in an abandoned temple.
Your voice did not feel like it belonged to you when you said, “I saw your corpse.”
“Well,” said Camilla Hect steadily, “don’t tell everyone, or they’ll want to see it too.”
From the distance between you, you considered her; you also considered a body with a ruin for a face, lying on a long length of plastic sheeting. The sobbing, shrieking birdcall around you resolved into an indistinct burble, and you raised your hand to your right ear, and your fingers came away thick with blood so dark that it was almost purple. She took a step toward you; you retreated one, equalizing the distance, and she did not close the approach. You looked at the cavalier of the Sixth, and you bled.
A file opened in your mind. Your hands scrabbled within your robes—the exoskeleton gave up one of the twenty-two letters, with a reminder long memorised:
If met, to give to Camilla Hect.
This had not troubled you. Many of the letters required impossible contingencies. Now one impossible contingency was standing before you. You gave the envelope to your hulking skeleton, and it crossed the clearing, admirably navigating the lumpen forest floor, to deliver the letter to the previously dead Hect.
She took it, broke open the envelope, read the contents, and blinked; all while you siphoned blood out of your ears. She looked at the letter; she looked at you; she looked at the letter. Then she balled it up between her fists and ripped it to shreds.
“Okay,” she said finally. And: “It’s coming out your nose.”
You wiped your face, quashed your growing annoyance, and said, “Am I required to know the contents?”
Hect cleared her throat—you flinched—and recited perfectly: “For service previously rendered by your House: invoke the rock that remains ever unrolled, and understand that I will both consider your life as inviolate, and aid you if I can. Thanks.”
You said, appalled, “I did not.”
“It was there in black and white, Reverend Daughter.”
Reverend Daughter was still a little sweet to your bloodied ears; but you said, and knew you sounded irascible: “Then I have been seriously promiscuous with my past favours.”
“I suppose you thought you owed us,” said Camilla.
It had been a long time since you had been around those who were not Lyctors. You grasped for her, thoughtlessly, with your construct; you were astonished by the speed with which Hect drew those big, balanced knives from each shoulder, and hurled herself at your skeleton like a stone from a sling. Her first sweep with the butt of a knife shattered the ribcage—it coalesced back; you now disdained skeletons not made of permanent ash. She swept in with a foot, aimed at the fragile place beneath the knee, and sent your construct stumbling forward. You said, “Cease,” but she levered one knife into the base of the spine, severed it, pulled the spine back toward her with a twang—and you heard your voice rise to say: “I need to know you are real!”