This sharpened Harrow’s focus. “You have the means to leave?”
“Yes.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Everyone who has stayed,” said Abigail, “has chosen to stay, and risk their lives—or souls, I should say.”
“What is the risk? Can a spirit be harmed?”
“A spirit can be trapped,” said Abigail, “trapped as every spirit in the River is trapped … I know it must sound puzzling, Harrow, so I’ll elaborate. The River is full of the insane, who attempt to cross—”
Magnus coughed in a genteel Fifth House way, and said, “Who wait for our Lord’s touch on the day of a second Resurrection.”
“Who attempt to cross, my love,” said his wife patiently, “to get to what lies beyond; who throng in their great and endless multitude, mad, directionless; or worse, have been trapped at the bottom, about which I know very little but fear all I know. Jeannemary and Isaac, who already endured so much, and never did anything wrong, other than the time they tried to pierce each other’s tongues, should have travelled lightly through those waters. Harrowhark never should have been able to stop their progress—no, dear, don’t shush me. She knows something of heresy.”
This was in its own way a dreadful slander on the Locked Tomb, and on what lay within it, and on the Ninth House in perpetuity. When she had been younger, and significantly stupider, she might have cared. But Harrow did not care now. She was utterly distracted. She held the even brown gaze of the woman before her, with her tidy hair and her squashy mittens, and she said, “It has been thousands of years since anybody bothered to believe in the River beyond.”
“Yet I believe more than ever, now that I am dead,” said Abigail, smiling.
“But God—”
“I firmly believe that the Kindly Emperor knows nothing of that undiscovered country. He never claimed omnipotence. I longed my whole life to give him my findings,” she said meditatively. “I think there is a whole school of necromancy we cannot begin to touch until we acknowledge its existence—I think these centuries of pooh-poohing the idea that there is space beyond the River has stifled entire avenues of spirit magic, and I believe the Fifth House was waning entirely due to us reaching a stultified, complacent stage in our approach … Oh, I hope so desperately that my brother found my notes! Something has gone terribly wrong in the River, Harrow, and I wish you’d find out what.”
Lieutenant Dyas did not look up from lugging another gun to the table as she said, “Let’s address what’s gone wrong in here, first.”
“Right. You don’t think I’m a mad heretic, do you, Marta?” Abigail suddenly said beseechingly.
“No. The Second House doesn’t overthink the River,” said Dyas. “If we did we’d just have to fill in forms. Quinn, show me where you found those bullets.”
Harrowhark had found her eyes avoiding the stairs, and the armchair; that was cowardly, and now she looked there straight and true. Ortus met her gaze quite tranquilly. He sat in the chair with his hood down, and he had opened up a book; he had been using it as a prop to unobtrusively write something on a scrap of flimsy. She mounted those stairs like a tremulous bridegroom, climbing toward a man who had known her all the days of her life.
At the top, she said: “How long did you know? Did you see it from the start?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “Not fully, until talking to Lady Pent and Sir Magnus, a week or so ago. At times I would recall, and then in the next few seconds, forget I had recalled anything. At times I knew, and at other times I did not. I realise that does not make much sense,” he added humbly.
“Ortus,” she said. “Do not bow and scrape to me. My family killed you.”
“No. Marshal Crux killed me, and my mother too,” he said, and he bent his nearly black eyes to the page balanced within the book, and he scribbled something down. “I knew that, when we discovered the bomb. The pilot found it midroute, and he stopped the shuttle so we could look at it; and my mother wept and wailed as he and I tried to work out its mechanism, but obviously—neither of us were experts in bombs.”
Her heart crushed within her. She said, “I take full responsibility.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Ortus.
“I asked him to put you on the ship—I was trying to—”