remember and the walk back to your room you could not recall, it struck you that she was not coming back. Nobody would come for you. The path was cleared for you to die, and the lovely woman lying chained to the marble had not been able to bear to watch your progress on it; or perhaps it was just that she had never existed, except within a ten-year-old’s fever dream.
The hours stretched themselves out to snapping point. You ate with a mechanical stolidity, even if you would rather not have. You washed yourself, and you dressed yourself, without a flicker of interest. Now when you caught sight of yourself in the mirror it was with a certain repelled bewilderment, as if you had never seen your face before, and it honestly seemed as though you had not. On one of the last days you discovered with distant consternation that you were trying to leave your rooms without even applying your paint.
You thought of trying to write a letter. To whom? Crux? Captain Aiglamene? Your wretched great-aunts? To God, to Ianthe? Should you plan your funeral, aiming to beat the Saint of Joy’s frugal twenty-four minutes? Once you would have asked your corpse to be sent back to your House, to be walled up in the Anastasian, the last daughter in the tomb-keeper line: but perhaps even your empty vessel would attract a planetary revenant. No, your body could never go back home. You decided to write, Toss me out the airlock, but thankfully this puerile self-pity sobered you up a little, and you did not bother to begin.
The only real advantage to those last few days was that of the swordsman with the thousand scars: one more could not harm you. There was very little left to surprise, and very little left to sicken. But on the penultimate night before the Resurrection Beast was due, you dropped your glove down the side of the bed; you had to kneel down to retrieve it. And you found that far beneath your bed—hidden in the darkness where you had once lain, waiting for the Saint of Duty—lay an inert corpse: the missing body of Cytherea.
You lay in that gap between the frame and the floor on the outside of the bed for quite a long time. You had not sensed any foreign thanergy in your room, nor trace of hostile theorem. Even now, she lay docile and dusty, empty in your sight. You extended your fingers to brush her arm—and there was the ever-present sign of God keeping her preserved, with the hot lemon scour of his divine necromancy punching the back of each sinus. She lay still as an abandoned doll. You even said, “Get up. I can see you,” but this command did not rouse her, for some reason.
At the time you did not wonder how the body had breached your wards, which you dutifully reapplied each night with fresh blood. You considered the corpse; you bracketed thick bone clamps to its dead ankles and dead wrists; and then you strode down the corridor, and when Ianthe answered your crabby knocking with a sleepy, “Nonagesimus, what do you—” you did not give her time to finish her sentence, but dragged her, by the icy gold of her skeleton arm, back to your bedroom.
She did not protest, or make a comment, coarse or otherwise. She was too surprised. Ianthe raised her eyebrows at you as you pointed her to beneath your bed; but she took her nightgown in her fists, and crouched down to look between the mattress and the floor.
And she said after a long moment: “What am I looking at?”
You experienced a hot moment of aggravated panic; but when you crouched down with her, the Lyctor’s corpse was still there, dead and unmoving in her bracelets of bone. You said, “It’s right there.” She did not answer. You said: “The body, Tridentarius. Cytherea’s body. Cytherea’s body is beneath my bed.”
She did not answer. You rattled, mindless: “On its back, arms at the sides, feet arranged at a thirty-degree angle.”
Ianthe sat up and brushed down her knees. She looked at you with an expression you could not parse in the diminished light, only it had been made with great care. She said: “I—can’t see anything, Harrowhark.”
You stared at her. The Princess of Ida looked down, then away, and then slid her gaze deliberately back to you, as though it were difficult. You realised: she was embarrassed.