assumed its edge would be the last thing I saw. I don’t know,” she finished, frustrated.
“Never mind. I’m sure I’ve done worse with more,” said Abigail bracingly. “Get to the perimeter. You’re on point with Dulcie, and I’m pairing Magnus with Protesilaus—and then there’s Ortus.”
“Ortus shouldn’t be fighting.”
“He very much wants to. I hope there won’t be any fighting. Are you ready?”
Harrow’s lips were sore; everyone’s lips were a little cracked and bleeding, and on her and Ortus bloody lips and cracking paint blended in a pinkish-grey mosaic. She found the tip of her tongue worrying the little scabby plates that now lived on her bottom lip. She looked up into the kind face of Abigail Pent, who was dead; and she said: “I owe you a great debt. You have given me much, in return for very little.”
“Oh, Harrow, bless you, I always was a busybody,” she said smilingly. “Don’t thank me for sticking my oar in. You asked me to come, and I came. I understand you didn’t ask on purpose, but I like to think that there was a grain in your soul that saw yourself in need, and perhaps thought to itself, I wish I had Abigail Pent. It takes a great deal of ego to be a psychopomp. Thank you for letting me be yours.”
And she curtseyed to Harrowhark, with enormous grace. Harrowhark bowed in return, and found herself saying, “The body of the Locked Tomb preserve you and yours, Pent,” and meaning it.
“Do you know what’s in there?” asked Abigail, eyes sparkling.
Harrowhark cleared her throat and said, “Yes.”
“Is it intensely mysterious?”
“Yes.”
“God, I love tombs,” said the Fifth House necromancer. “Right-o. The curtain lifts … Places, people.”
In that echoing metal silence, they all moved to make their perimeter around the diagram. Harrowhark had dug big handfuls from Ortus’s panniers, and stood shod in a crunchy, perfectly pulverized pile of bone. She watched Abigail and Magnus cross on tiptoe, nimbly dodging any line that their shoes might scuff, and in passing turn and kiss each other gravely. She was not embarrassed to see this intimacy; in fact, she found that it was vaguely interesting to see a marriage play out in front of her. There were many strictures against a necromancer marrying their own cavalier, and whatever road Abigail and Magnus had chosen to walk had been a difficult one: she knew that the marriage had preceded the cavaliership, which perhaps had made it less grotesque for both. They kissed as chastely and briefly as children; Magnus touched her cheek and said quietly, “Godspeed, my darling,” and she said, “You too.” That was all. No more, and no less.
It was still entirely uncertain whether her skeletons could handle this freezing, wretched cold. If she was bound by the rules of her pre-Lyctor state, it was going to be difficult. The candles wheezed and flickered but kept burning gamely on. Protesilaus stood opposite his necromancer. Ortus was there beside Harrowhark, a big black-wrapped bulk in her peripheral vision, trembling a little from cold and probable fear.
Lieutenant Dyas was her opposite. Harrow had told her back in the laboratory that Judith Deuteros was alive, and she’d gotten a rather curt “Thought so” in reply. Dyas had begun to turn away, then surprised Harrow by turning back and suddenly saying, “She’ll give them hell,” in tones that were scarcely less blank; but with an expression that was far from it.
Now Magnus stood at the head of the circle facing the frozen-over coffin. His necromancer did not put herself at any particular point. She had taken a jug in her hands, one of a set that Protesilaus had carried with care down the long facility ladder, and Harrow did not know what had been put inside it.
“Here is the libation, for what good it may do,” said Abigail.
She carefully poured a measure of the jug’s contents at the foot of the coffin. A brief spill of thin, milky, whitish liquid pooled at the base, sluggish in the cold.
“You come to conquer,” she said, and spilt another runnel.
“You come in fury,” she said, and spilt another.
“You come bearing ancient weapons,” she said, and another.
“You come with a sword of the Ninth House,” she said, and one more.
“You come to claim a body,” she said, and upended the jug, and shook out the last pale drops. “This is all we know. You helpless ghost, this is not supplication … We came at invitation; whither did you? I am a spirit-caller of the