direction, perhaps her appointed east; Augustine was lighting a neatly rolled cigarette, and the Saint of Duty simply studied the shield pulled down over the wide window that had used to look out into space. Even God did not look up from whatever administrative work concerned the Prince Undying. The only eyes for you were Mercy’s: that endless, red-shaded hurricane, sinking into those sandy brown depths, moving over the face of grey waters.
“Just don’t get in the way,” she said.
Augustine said smoothly: “See where you’re needed, sis. It may be that the Beast has some vulnerability you can mark. Or it may try to attack us from without, which means you’ll be useful on the perimeter. Keep flexible.”
This would have been a perfectly reasonable request had its meaning not been so obvious. Do not distract us with your death.
The Kindly Prince said, idly: “He’s right, Harrowhark. From what I can tell, it’s useful to have someone who can move laterally, rather than being obliged to keep to one place … and in any case, like most best-laid plans, this one won’t survive contact with the enemy. Do what you feel is best, and everyone else will endeavour not to swamp your skeletons … Can we have a tea break, Mercy? I’m gasping.”
Your sister closest in age did not stand, as everyone else did, at God’s request to put the kettle on. She was still looking at the black diagram, and she asked, quite unconcernedly: “What is the stoma?”
Mercy said, “Augustine, you did tell her about the stoma,” in tones of accusation, but he simply said: “No. I saw no reason to frighten her. Why—did you tell Harrowhark?”
Naturally, you had not been told about the stoma. Your teacher simply said, fractiously, “She’ll never see it! Why bother?”
“If I have my way, we’ll leave Ianthe safely in the mesorhoic. We three old lags will be more than enough to take it down,” said Augustine sharply. Ianthe’s languid brown-spotted gaze dragged up to him as though it barely had the energy to do so. “That thing has a ferocious gravitational pull. It’s not for neophytes.”
“Excuse me, we may not all of us be alive by the time the thing is exhausted, so I would stop swaddling your squalling baby—”
“You never did take the stoma seriously, which is why your whole damned House sucks at it like a grotesque teat—”
“Don’t be coarse—”
“It is the mouth to Hell,” said God.
He stood in the liminal space between dining room and kitchen, the biscuit tin clutched in his hands. There were crease marks on his clothes from too much wearing, and there was a faint smudge of blue where he had been writing with ink and touched his temple. He said, “A genuinely chaotic space—chaos in the meaning of the abyss as well as unfathomable … located at the bottom of the River. The Riverbed is studded with mouths that open at proximity of Resurrection Beasts, and no ghosts venture deeper than the bathyrhoic layer. Anyone who has entered a stoma has never returned. It is a portal to the place I cannot touch—somewhere I don’t fully comprehend, where my power and my authority are utterly meaningless. You’ll find very few ghosts sink as far as the barathron. If I believed in sin, I would say they died weighted down with sin, placing them nearer the trash space. That’s what we’ve been using it for, in any case. That’s where we put the Resurrection Beasts. The rubbish bin … with all the other dross.”
Then he said, “So who wants a bikkie?”
37
THE ATMOSPHERE ON THE Mithraeum crystallized into hot, waiting agony. You would walk down a hallway and find Augustine and Ortus fighting—their eyelids glued together in pink, smarting lines as they sparred blind, in tight corners, rapiers flashing like light over water—then stopping apparently at random, before the Saint of Patience would say something like, “Okay; again, but airless,” and you would hear a sudden pounding wheeze as both of them emptied the air from their lungs. Generally, you then took another corridor.
The Lyctors also did what they perhaps should have from the very start, and organised loosely planned, often contradictory sessions of instruction for Ianthe—and for you. You went en masse into the River, leaving your bodies behind to slump into C-curves—or at least, yours did, the rest of them stood—and crunched the silvery sand of the bank beneath your feet as the three saints led you both to assemble wards. No blood or flesh or