Ianthe scrubbed at her forehead briefly with her bone hand.
“Really a corpse?” she said, with not totally believable carelessness.
“She wants the D,” I said. And: “The D stands for dead.” And: “Sorry.”
“I think I need a drink,” said Ianthe, and she murmured to herself: “All that fuss about the Saint of Duty. What a little hypocrite.”
“Don’t think this means you get more than the teeny-weeniest smidge of pity from me,” I added. “If you think anything I did, I did to make her love me, then you don’t know anything about her and me. I’m her cavalier, dipshit! I’d kill for her! I’d die for her. I did die for her. I’d do anything she needed, anything at all, before she even knew she needed it. I’m her sword, you pasty-faced Coronabeth-looking knock-off.”
Always your sword, my umbral sovereign; in life, in death, in anything beyond life or death that they want to throw at thee and me. I died knowing you’d hate me for dying; but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.
Ianthe was chewing pettishly on a lock of that bone-yellow hair. I added, “I need you to lay off. I was already the worst thing that ever happened to her, and she doesn’t need you trying to one-up that, like, Bet I can make this double shit.”
I watched her recross her legs slowly at the knee. She was no longer examining her nails. She looked at me with a searching, almost studious expression, pale lashes down over her dead-man’s eyes. Her biceps weren’t bad, actually, there was definite muscle in her remaining skim-milk arm. Nothing to write home about, but she didn’t have to be completely ashamed. Unlike you.
“You’re wrong, you know,” she said calmly. “It’s an interesting revelation. Perhaps it even gives some context. But my … attachment … to Harry isn’t remotely what you think it is. I’m not her cavalier, her servant or thrall. I am a Lyctor … Harrow is a Lyctor … and the centuries will entangle us whether she wants them to or— Nav, if you persist in making jack-off motions when I am talking, I will show you what Harrow’s kidneys look like.”
“That! That’s what I’m talking about,” I said. “Don’t show me her kidneys. Don’t think about her kidneys. Don’t do anything with her goddamn kidneys. Get a grip. Don’t look at her blood, or lick her bones, or do any of the shit necromancers lie and say they don’t do the moment two of them get nasty.”
She shrugged that gold-skinned shoulder.
“What can I say,” she said. “I love a little gall on gall.”
“Reverse everything I just told you,” I said. “Let’s get married.”
“Ah, the romance I have been awaiting all my life,” she said pleasantly. “Babs always said it would come along … or at least, he once said I would go to hell and get fucked, which I took as a roundabout way of expressing the same thing. That’s all I had to give you, Gideon: now we are going to get out of my bedroom, and I am going to take you to Teacher.”
The Emperor of the Nine Houses. The Necrolord Prime.
I said, “No, thanks. I’m good.”
“He needs to know. He can help you.”
“I might lie down and see if this fixes itself,” I suggested.
“Do you want Harrowhark to reclaim rightful ownership of her body, or not?” she asked reasonably.
She knew I couldn’t argue with that, and when she looked at my face, she added: “This is your chance, Gideon. If you want to help her, this is the only way.” And, for the third stab: “I will remind you that a Resurrection Beast is descending on us, on her, as we speak.”
If you’d come back, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up following Ianthe Tridentarius to see God. But you didn’t; you were gone. Might’ve been a good thing in this instance, honestly. I still didn’t know if you were going to kick my ass for that conversation, or if you would be sorry for me. I knew which one would have been worse.
49
“I am the Emperor’s Hand; do not thou persist in this combat; matchless am I with the long blade—”
Ortus Nigenad’s voice reverberated around that ice-rimed, organ-swagged facility like one of the Sleeper’s gunshots. The great body, the one that Harrowhark had in her crueller youth assumed would look best