deserves,” he said. “Such a blade would I sooner return with better than blood and my best thanks.”
Protesilaus said, “I wish that my whole House knew of my privilege. If I lived again, I would advise all the Seventh to travel to Drearburh if they sought instruction in the art. If I had but five minutes of life again, I would spend them praising you. I would speak of nothing but my reverence for you, and the Ninth House, and its nonpareil swordplay.”
“I’d call that a waste of five minutes,” muttered his necromancer, sotto voce. Harrowhark’s cavalier was smirking with barely concealed glee.
“My lady,” Nonius said.
He had turned toward her; he neatly bowed. She bowed back, and said, “I hope that your bones are blessed in the Anastasian, for your service.”
“My bones fell far from home,” said the cavalier, with a faint smile. “Never, I think, will a wanderer happen upon where they now lie, far though he travel. ’Tis blessing enough that I see such a Reverend Daughter and know that my House stands stalwart and dauntless, proud in the face of its foes. But I still don’t know why I’m talking in meter.”
Ortus was saying to Abigail, “Lady, it’s you who should be praised. Your act of necromancy should reverberate through the Nine Houses like—like the dying refrain of a song. I would that I were still alive, so that I could complete my great work and begin the next one afresh—and call it The Pentiad, and perhaps alternate between five-foot and nine-foot verses—a total departure from my first work, but reflective of it—I would make you the poem, Lady Abigail, that you already are.”
“I did ask you to stop flirting with my wife,” said Magnus, and at Ortus’s face, said instantly: “Joke, man! Joke! Do they not have them on the Ninth? That would explain a lot—”
“Ortus,” Abigail said gravely. This was the first time Harrow had ever seen her even slightly disarrayed. Her hair, normally brushed to mirror smoothness, looked as though she had been dragged backward through the oss. She was wet with sweat. She kept rubbing her hands discreetly, and Harrow saw that they were singed. “Ortus, it should not have worked. We had no right to call the soul of Matthias Nonius. Your sword had no viable link to him—we had no thanergetic connection—we had nothing but the manuscript you gave me, in which I took the liberty of correcting a few spellings, I hope you don’t mind.” (Harrowhark was certain Pent had no idea how terribly she had just wounded Ortus’s gratitude to her; looking at the brief, stricken expression that crossed his face, it would perhaps have been kinder to make him eat the book.) “I find myself in the astonishing position of having created a revenant link through—well—sheer passion.”
That revenant turned to Ortus now. Standing together, Ortus towered head and shoulders above him. Harrow expected that same stricken horror to show on her cavalier’s face; but as Ortus looked at the ghost he had spent his whole life worshipping—yet another thing she and he had in common—he flushed deeply.
“I am unworthy,” he said simply.
“Clearly, that cannot be true,” said Matthias Nonius. “If the Fifth speaks aright—if your art was the anchor that rendered me whole here, and gave me a body and blade for the battle—your art, not my strength, was the ultimate source of our victory.”
Harrow looked away. From far off in the facility, there were more sounds: of melting ice, of snapping viscera. She found her layered robes heavy; so were the others, and they shed coats and gloves even as she watched. The air felt lighter. That reeking fog had gone. As she unwound lengths of fabric from around her neck, she found herself drawn back to the dead face of the Sleeper.
The woman had not died tranquil; her features had settled into an expression closer to determination than the peace of the grave. When rigor mortis developed—would it develop, in this parody of a world?—the whole might harden further into despair. The chin was firm; the jaw stubborn in its lines, the nasofrontal angle of the nose barely present, with flared nostrils like a large cat’s. It was the jaw, and something about the eyes and brows, that kept distracting Harrow.
Something grey protruded from beneath a flap of the orange collar, against the dead skin of the Sleeper’s throat. She crouched down and used one finger to hook it. It was a loop of thin chain.