To their silence, he added: “I believe we are now being punished for what they did. Even the devil bent for God to put a leash around her neck … and the disciples were scared! I cannot blame them! I was terrified! But when the work was done—when I was finished, and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price—they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm … Oh, but it is a tragedy, to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time. It happened to me, but I was only a man, or perhaps fifty men … Reverend Daughter, your whole House treads upon a knife’s edge, as keepers of such a zoo.”
He caught her gaze on the bottle, and his very blue eyes twinkled a little madly, and he said with greater calm: “It’s thistle shrub, child. I could not get drunk on it if I tried. And how I have tried.”
Ortus said, “You speak in riddles, old man.”
“Then let me speak plainly,” said Teacher. “You worship a monster in a box and play at being the masters of its tomb. Now we have a monster in a box, and it has become obvious that it means to master us all. Canaan House has never changed its colour, nor its shape, nor with the seasons. I should know; we measured summer to winter, temperature and precipitation and the acidity of the very sea beneath us, and it never hailed, and it never snowed, and we certainly never saw fimbriae hanging from the rafters. Let me prophesy in my old age: the Sleeper is getting up the strength to wake completely, and colonize what it finds. I fear! God! How I fear!”
Abigail said, “Teacher, please come and take up residence with us. We have beds—we keep watches,” but he cried out: “And miss out on the chance to die? I’ve been wandering these halls at three o’clock in the morning, saying at the top of my voice, ‘It would be terrible to be shot,’ and the Sleeper still does not come … It is dreadful to be shown a monster’s pity.”
He pivoted abruptly and took another long suck at the bottle. “Your swords will not rend its armour,” he said, with his back turned to them. “Its weapons will ruin your flesh. It will not stop until it has subsumed its quarry. And it would only acknowledge the blade without … all we have are the blades within. It has seen them and made them dull. There is no hero left among us … and I say, hooray!”
Teacher, in a mad sprightly dash, clicked his heels together with the ardour and energy of a man a quarter of his age. “Hooray!” he said again. “Into the River with us, boys! Fifty can school like fishes!”
And he threw his bottle violently at the nearest section of tube, out in the corridor. Harrowhark watched as the shiny red organ gave out a wet, squishing blarp; the bottle bounced off it dismally, and as Abigail and Ortus drew close beside her, it rolled sadly beneath another fold of wet, curtaining pink. Some of the bitter fluid within spilt out onto the battered wooden floor. Within seconds, even the ends of that alcohol began to flake into shards of ice.
“It’s coming for you, Reverend Daughter!” said Teacher. “Oh, it’s coming for you—and once it’s got you, once that rock’s rolled away, once that tomb’s levered open, the Emperor of the Nine Houses will never know peace ever again! The King is dead! Long live the King!”
Teacher capered madly down the hallway like a child—slapping at long, shivering droplet-shaped lumps of viscus, and whooping as he went. His hooting and hollering rang off the antique walls long after he disappeared.
Harrow felt the cold as an old friend inside the thick black canvas of her church robe. Her fingers burnt as though she had held them too close to a fire. Her cavalier and the historian did not warm her as they stood beside her: it was as though she were alone in the room. She was startled when the latter touched her: laid her hand on her shoulder as though she were no older than one of the vanished Fourth House duo, a gawky little girl in the face of death.
“Well, bugger Teacher,” said Abigail Pent crossly.