on the flat table before him, damp with blood and water; you did not weep, but only because you no longer knew how.
The Emperor of the Nine Houses could only have been quiet for five seconds. To you, it felt like a hundred thousand years.
And then he said, very gently: “No, you didn’t.”
You pressed your face into the surface of the table, and you closed your eyes so violently that the pressure stung your brows and cheeks. No star hung so still as you did then, at the end of its hard hydrogen burn, breathlessly waiting to slough off its outer layer.
And he said, “Harrow, whatever you thought you did, you didn’t.”
“I opened the outer door.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I went up the passage.”
“I’ll accept it, though that thing’s a literal death trap,” he said.
“I broke the ward and I rolled away the rock—”
“There’s where you’re wrong,” he said.
You did not lift your head but said, “I was ten years old, but I was not a child. I set myself one task. I studied for one purpose. Don’t consider my limitations, God: I am not a person, I am a chimaera.”
“We won’t get into that, but don’t think I am discounting the genius of a single-minded, necromantically augmented ten-year-old,” he said. “I’m not saying that you didn’t do it because you weren’t good enough. Harrowhark, I’m saying that nobody is good enough. There isn’t a bypass. I built that tomb with Anastasia, designed every inch of it, and I did not include a way in. I never wanted that tomb opened, from either end. I made that ward, me alone, and it wouldn’t answer to the greatest of my Lyctors any better than the meanest infant necromancer in all the Nine Houses. Their might would be one and the same.”
The supernova of your heart went out; faded, as swiftly as it had shone; it became thick, and miniature, and dense. You lifted your head minutely, and an embedded fragment of glass fell from your temple, from a string of red blood.
“It can’t be broken,” he continued. “It can’t be contravened. It can’t even fade; its magic was my magic. The line of Reverend Tomb-keepers has laboured under a misapprehension if they think the rock could be rolled away, except by me. It’s a pure blood ward, Harrowhark. Whatever you thought you did—whatever false chamber has been built around that tomb that you mistakenly stumbled into—there is no possibility that you breached the real thing. I am so sorry. You were party to a tragedy based on a misunderstanding.”
You were rendered down to your incoherent parts. You wanted to say, I saw the Body; you wanted to say, I saw the tomb; but you were seized, all over again, by doubt in the face of fact. The uncertainty of the insane. The conviction of the mad. Nobody had seen you walk through that door. Nobody had watched you leave. What he saw in your face you had no idea; only that he crouched, and he looked at your blind, bleeding numbness with those chthonic eyes, and he wiped his thumb over the part of your temple where the glass shard had buried itself, and he tucked a stray lock of hair behind your ear with the thoughtless gentle tidiness of a parent.
Then God’s eyes widened fractionally, and his voice became altogether different when he said: “Harrow, who the hell’s been tampering with your temporal lobe?”
Your body rolled itself off the table, with such a reflexive suddenness that you were not sure that the action was through your conscious effort. Your meat floundered to stand, wild with shards of lead crystal and a dozen cuts through your clothes, and you turned away. The Emperor said, “Harrowhark?” as you stumbled away from the table, and more plaintively—“Harrowhark!” as you unerringly careened to the door, but he did not follow. Somehow your hand slapped the pad that slid it open—somehow your meat dragged itself away from him—and you walked, and you walked, and you walked.
As the door closed you might have heard, “Damn it, John—damn it.” But the last thing you were going to do was trust your own ears.
38
YOU ONLY STARTED TO accept your death after that terrible evening. It was impossible to ignore the manifold symbols of desolation. For example, the Body had made good on her word, and disappeared. She had been your quiet companion since your Lyctorhood—she had faithfully kept tryst with you—and in the morning after the sleep you could not