into atmosphere or the black depths of space. It was small, no more than three bodies wide and three bodies tall, and the thought of being forced inside curdled you. But your distaste and paranoia were stopped in midswing by Camilla saying with barely repressed intensity: “So?”
You said, “He’s in there.”
The cavalier of the Sixth House looked at you; then she collapsed back in a long, controlled movement. She lay flat on her back staring sightlessly at the sky, half-shadowed by the sheeting, half-glowing in the light. At last she gave a long, shuddering breath and sat back up with the same abruptness.
“Good,” she said, and she smiled, very briefly. This smile lit the corners of her face like a rising comet. It made her look, in fact, ridiculously like her adept. “What now?”
You held the carefully assembled fragments of skull between your hands, and hoped that he is had not become he was. Then you crushed the bone between your fingers—the cavalier next to you reached out reflexively, then stopped herself—and you kneaded the fragments within your palms until you could winnow out the glue, which, thank God, had been chemical in nature. It might have very easily been derived from keratin, which would have been a momentary confusion and annoyance. The glue was expunged as a knotty collection of gummy nodules, which you discarded, and left you with a thanergy-rich clay. You considered this malleable stuff for a moment before knitting it between your hands.
Phalanges spurted from the mass; then a distal row, then a proximal row of carpal bones and a length of articulated wrist. It was not the sheer animal pleasure of Ianthe’s arm, but it was easy and it was satisfying. You said, “I could simply give you a full skeleton frame.”
“Don’t,” said Camilla quickly, and paused, and said: “That’s going to get me in trouble.”
“The Warden specifically requested movement.”
“I don’t mean him,” said his cavalier.
You tossed her the hand bones and she caught them on reflex. You grasped your sword and stood, and, before she could prevent you, you walked around the side of the bizarre shuttle. There was some manner of open cargo-delivery hatch, or means of entrance, with the door hoisted up on a jack so that fresh air could circulate within the shuttle. You stood in the blinking sunlight before this open door, on the flattened grass, and you looked inside. The three inhabitants stared back at you.
The first was Captain Deuteros, a woman whose stretched-out corpse you had last seen riddled with bullets. She was sitting, not in her Cohort whites, but in a drab long-sleeved shirt of indeterminate colour, and dark trousers. She looked like a shell of the crisp adept you had seen back at Canaan House, and less robust even than her corpse. She had lost significant weight from her already fragile necromancer’s build, her cheeks were dark hollows, and she clasped two crutches in her lap.
Another woman sat close beside her, wearing her own shabby shirt of indeterminate colour, but as though it had been designed for her royal use: a woman you had last seen calmly falling to her death. Ianthe Tridentarius’s features stared out of Coronabeth’s face—an aurora of a face, with deep lustrous skin and burnished hair, and eyes of genuine violet, like plums. Both women were seated in the back of the poorly furnished shuttle, amid crude engines set in oil-reeking array beneath a thin metal grille, and a mess of boxes piled in every corner. Yet the Crown Princess of Ida, missing and presumed dead, filled up that space like a mass of flowers on a midden. She was in as blooming good health as could be, as vigorous as Deuteros was frail.
The third staring inhabitant was not a person. It was an enormous flimsy poster in a chipped frame, the only sign of decoration in that untidy little shuttle. A head-and-shoulders photograph of an unsmiling, adamant person, in all assumption a woman, stared fixedly at you as though calculating how much effort it would take to snap your neck. She was dressed in black to the chin, and her red hair curled thickly about her neck and shoulders. Thick, itchy streams of blood began to ooze down your sinuses.
That portrait frightened you more than anything you had seen since becoming a Lyctor; it scared the irresolute piss from your body. Yet you had never seen the face before in your life.
The Second House captain said, somewhat hoarsely: “Ninth?”