I didn’t run, but I legged it pretty quickly down the corridor, and then, beneath the alarm, I became aware of yet another sound: someone was screaming.
In a fork off the hallway, I found the source. Dead Heralds lay in an untidy semicircle around the last living, rearing member of their gang, and fighting this bee—screaming her head off—was Lemon-mouth Prime: the Lyctor you called Mercymorn.
She was shrieking, drunk and howling off pure fright, every so often lunging in the wrong direction as though she couldn’t see straight. I came into the room, not knowing what to do, not knowing how to help her. Despite the screaming, she was holding her own—her rapier was a steel needle flashing in and out, out of the way of the snapping jaws of the Herald, thrusting into the black eye socket in a shower of jelly. There were long, shining folds of a net wrapped around her offhand arm, but the net was not in her hand. She missed a thrust, nothing but wing, and then she drove herself into the Herald and laid that bare hand on its skull. And the Herald just kind of imploded.
The skull disappeared into dust, the thorax collapsed in on itself like a pricked balloon, and the insides blew out the back almost delicately. It slumped, and when it went still the Lyctor stopped screaming. There were thin runnels of blood coming off her face and I thought she’d been hurt, but then I realised they were coming out of her eyes like tears. She stood there with her shoulders heaving and her hand pressed over her face, pinky-reddish hair coming out of her braid, looking unhurt but pretty sorry for herself.
And she looked right at us, before I could duck back into the corridor.
The Lyctor called Mercymorn stared at your face, and I have never seen anyone so totally shocked by misery. It wasn’t just fear: it was this huge, grief-stricken panic, a welter of unhappy terror. It was the face of someone who had just seen their one true love drop-kicked into a meat grinder and come out the other end as a pile of sausages.
“So now you come to me, First,” she said raggedly. “Now you come … at the end of everything.”
She seemed to be waiting. I didn’t know what to say. No way I could pretend to be you; I knew you too well. As we both waited in idiot silence, her fear changed—her eyes narrowed—her mouth hardened from its softer line of anticipatory terror, and she said, “No,” and then, “No,” again. And she was so old, Harrow, I don’t know how you dealt with all these unbelievably old bastards—she was old like Cytherea was old, and her eyes were absolutely abominable. They made my skin crawl. When she looked at us, it was like she could see right through me, and she was seeing shit I hadn’t even heard of.
The Lyctor said: “You haven’t come, have you? You’re not her. That freak would have gone for me already … she never could act human. But you stand like a human—you gawp like a human—you are human,” she said, with a rising horrified disgust. “But I don’t understand! Harrowhark was meant to be eaten by now! She wouldn’t have died for hours, and the Heralds are everywhere!”
“Lady,” I said, “are you telling me you stabbed my necromancer?”
“Yes, and she should have thanked me for it!!” said the Lyctor, thoroughly distracted. “It wasn’t horrible—I dulled her nerves, out of a misplaced sense of affection—I put her out in the corridor specially so she would be eaten quicker, and once she started getting eaten alive, she would have been mad and not feeling a thing! But you’re the soul—the soul of the cavalier that she stuffed in the back of her brain! What happened to your eyes?”
“Let’s go to a better question,” I said, and I raised my sword in your hands. “You know we already killed one Lyctor, right? Me and Harrow? You know we’ve practised?”
“Oh, shut up, Harrow’s cavalier,” she said hysterically. “I’m trying to think. You’re not her—she isn’t driving you—but you have her eyes. Why? When they showed me your corpse I didn’t think to check the eyes. Stupid, Mercy. Oversight. I thought I knew what you were, though I didn’t want to believe it…”
I said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I am talking about the failure of the Ninth House operation,” she said.
And she cocked her flower-coloured