“It’s no more than three feet away from us, Tridentarius.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if the answer is no; my beauty sleep is seriously impaired at the moment.”
“Touch it. Get under there.” She did not move. You said, “Touch it.”
Ianthe rose soundlessly to her feet, and the long skirts of her nightgown—a brilliant ruffled canary-yellow silk that made her look like a formal lemon—rustled restively around her calves. She said, “I’m going back to bed.”
Despite the layers of deadened scar tissue, there was still enough limberness in your soul for you to say: “Ianthe, for God’s sake, have mercy.”
She paused at your threshold. The violent yellow made her hair look white and gave her skin no colour found in skin. She said, light and careless: “Good night, Harrowhark,” and she walked out of your rooms.
You looked at your door. You looked beneath your bed. You went to your sink, and you ran the tap until you could splash the coldest water possible on your face: you took five deep breaths in, and five deep breaths out. You closed your eyelids and rolled your eyes in your sockets. Then you went and looked beneath your bed again.
Cytherea was gone. There were cuffs of bone glued to the floorboards. You had left it for maybe three minutes. No ward brayed. You searched the rest of the room, but there was no corpse to be found. You lay down on the bed, and if you’d had the ability, you might have cried bitterly from sheer desire to feel release. But you could not; and no release came.
* * *
On the last day, for the last time, the Saint of Duty tried to kill you.
You were coming out of the habitation atrium—you had stood, briefly, at the entrance to the tomb where Cytherea’s body no longer lay at rest, perhaps in the hope that she might coalesce before your eyes and rewrite reality—and when this inevitably failed to happen, you had walked away, hoping to find the remains of somebody’s leftovers to listlessly gnaw upon in the kitchen.
Ortus hit you out of nowhere like the hammer of God. He tackled you just as you stepped into the corridor—body-slammed you into the wall with an almighty crunch, prematurely ending the long afterlife of an engraved skeleton inlaid with black pearl that had been fixed to the wall holding a big waterfall sheaf of ebon grasses. You automatically fixed the small cracked oblongs of your nasal bones into position as you flung him away again, reawakening the broken memorial into an array of shoving palms pistoning forward from one almighty synovial joint. He slammed into the opposite wall, and you backed away down the corridor, bleeding a little, measuring the distance between you and his spear.
He barked, “Draw your sword.”
Immediately you reached for the bone-scabbarded blade you kept lashed to your back. He said with a touch of frustration, “Your rapier,” and you just stared. He held his spear in his left hand, its point a razor-sharp omen, and his plain rapier with the scarlet ribbon in his right; an ancient funeral bouquet was in tatters by his feet. Ortus had not shaved his head in the last week or so, and the stubble on his bony skull was a cap of brownish russet fuzz like a splash of forgotten blood.
“There’s no reason to kill me,” you said, and marvelled at it, suddenly, the ease of the conclusion.
The Saint of Duty did not answer you. He stood in the corridor with an impassive face, and you said: “The Resurrection Beast will be here within hours. I am going to die. And yet you are here to kill me now?” He did not answer. “That isn’t the act of someone removing a liability. You are either killing me for fun—doubtful—or out of anger—I’m unsure why—or for personal gain.”
Ortus looked at you again. Then he sheathed that plain rapier and twitched the wicked point of his spear up to face the ceiling.
“You’re wrong,” he said.
“How?”
“You’re still a liability.”
“Tell me.”
You thought he would not answer. But then he said, haltingly, in the manner of a man saying something difficult in a language he did not speak well: “Don’t go to the River. End it yourself. Before they breach. Cut off your oxygen. Or however you like.” At your expression, Ortus added as though it were an explanation: “So you don’t … suffer.”
“Why do you care if I suffer?”
“Because I was the one who failed you,” he said briefly.