Second House’s mouth and manhandled her backward, which was very easy for someone of the Third’s stature to do to someone of the Second’s. Ianthe’s twin was stone-eyed, and the expression she and the captain gave each other was antagonistic, to say the least. Judith was humiliatingly bundled back within the confines of the shuttle—Coronabeth kicked a lever close to the door—the great shady overhead hatch started whining down, and you watched the darkness claim her and the furious dignity of the downed soldier beneath the cold gaze of that too-familiar portrait. Judith was signing something to you, but you could not make out Cohort signals. You’d never bothered yourself with the military.
Camilla was picking up the crutch. She said, restlessly, “Look, we should go. We weren’t meant to be here.”
You said, “You are a fool if you think I will let you leave like—”
“I evoke the rock that is never rolled away,” she said instantly. She was a quick study. “Let us leave. Tell no one we were here. Don’t ask any more questions. We’re not on the same side anymore, Ninth. I owe you. I owe you everything. But—things have changed.”
It was your turn for your tongue to cleave to the roof of your mouth. The once-cavalier of the Sixth House looked at you impassively, and she said: “I’m sorry, if that helps.”
You said, “It doesn’t.”
“Fair.”
“Let me ask one thing,” you said. “One single question—just the one—for the sake of what I have just done for you, and for the Master Warden of the Sixth House.”
Camilla looked at you distantly, and eventually said: “Ask. I’m not going to promise that I can answer.”
You said, “Who took you away from Canaan House? Who are you with, Hect?”
“You call them Blood of Eden,” she said.
* * *
That evening, Mercymorn came to fetch you from the surface of a planet you had killed, with almost no thought to its murder. Indeed, you had felt almost nothing, and you said very little, which met your teacher’s needs excellently as she had nothing to say to you except, “You smell like dirt.” She piloted you back to the Mithraeum in silence. You watched the retreating planet out the window, and it looked no different, except that perhaps the deep water that lined the equator in chilly juxtaposed slabs of ice seemed more cracked and turbid than previous. It was safely dead, with its cavorting animal populace unaware of their long-term death sentence. Worms crawled within the miserable, foetid pit of you.
35
“I AM SORRY, NINTH,” Abigail said, in the same hesitantly kind and careful tones you might use to tell someone that their cat would never grow up into a tiger: “I’m not at all an expert in psychometry, and with such an old rapier you’d need both a Sixth House specialist and to get awfully lucky. It was your grandmother’s nine generations back, you said? And it was handled, briefly?”
“That,” came the soft, funereal voice of Harrowhark’s cavalier, softer and more funereal filtered through his muffler, “was the nature of the condescension.”
“And the blade has been replaced?”
“The hilt is original, barring the grip.” Pause. “And parts of the basket.”
“Right. No chance of it being … bled on?”
“It was handled. She told stories of how the balance of the sword was complimented. It would have been touched for, perhaps, twenty to thirty seconds.”
“With gloves on.”
“That is customary.”
“Ortus,” she said. “I’m not trained for this. I think our chances are very small. I think we’ve got a similar chance of Magnus tripping over the secret entrance to the lost chambers of the Emperor Undying. Actually, that’s significantly less unlikely, as I’ve come to believe they run sidelong to the facility rather than—never mind. Sir, I am truly, truly sorry, but—Reverend Daughter, is that you?”
It was not likely to be anybody else standing on the threshold, unwilling to cross over and listen to the rest of the conversation. Harrowhark had been standing in profound silence, without so much as the rustle of a fold of robe, but the necromancer of the Fifth House had demonstrated extraordinarily acute hearing for eavesdroppers. “We’re used to Jeanne and Isaac, you know,” she had said, as though that constituted an explanation all by itself.
No hope of disappearing back into the corridor, or taking refuge in audacity and answering, No. The Reverend Daughter swept into the frozen library as though she had been noticed at the moment of entry, and found the Fifth and her swordsman-apparent standing before a rack of