She tugged, carefully, and the rest emerged: plain metal links, unadorned except for a flat steel tag about the length of her thumb. She turned the tag over. The other side had been neatly etched with a single word:
AWAKE.
“Reverend Daughter,” Nonius said courteously.
She stood and turned back to him. The long-dead ghost of her House still looked a mess; he had returned his rapier and dagger to their respective sheaths, but his face and throat were ghastly with drying blood streaked here and there with sweat. His dark eyes were bloodshot, his hair was matted, and his split lip was swelling up. He left sticky red footprints wherever he walked.
He said, “Does aught of the foe yet remain? Are there enemies still who would hasten to harm you?”
“If there are, I don’t know about them,” she said. “Pent, can you sense anything left of the invasive presence?”
“Your soul is your own again, but the ghost will still, I suspect, have a corporeal foothold on the other side. Defeating it here will not have destroyed it there. The only sure way to banish a revenant is to destroy the physical anchor it inhabits before it can escape the shell. Inanimate objects can be destroyed; corpses too, if you remove the brain. But, Harrow, we have other problems on our hands,” said Abigail.
The sounds of the flesh strings hitting the floor had resolved into background noise. But now, Canaan House rumbled again: not with any great ferociousness, but with a sort of timid, rattling unease, as though more of its facade was falling away. A sheet of dust fell from the ceiling, glittering softly in the white lights that winked off and on. The others looked up at the tumbling dust with varying shades of alarm, except for Abigail, who looked grimly expectant.
“Everyone, listen. We don’t have much time. The bubble is deforming,” she said swiftly. “After multiple separate evolutions there are too many places where it doesn’t agree with itself.”
Magnus said, “Another rearrangement? Will it cause a new scenario?”
“No,” said his wife. “The memories have squared themselves away, and the intruder is gone. There is no more grit for the clam to worry into a pearl. And depending on what’s happening outside with— All those external factors are driving the bubble to its natural end. We ghosts must head back to the River, or risk getting absorbed or expelled by Harrow’s soul.”
Another low rumble from somewhere else. The far-off, musical crash of some wall or partition slowly crumbling in on itself, a great particle mass sliding to a heap.
Nonius said instantly: “If I have discharged my duty to you and my House, I am bound by another; a debt from of old that I would repay, if I can. May I leave these halls with your blessing, my lady?”
Ortus said intently: “A debt?”
“A dread beast haunts this course of the River, a king among monsters,” he said. “A rival and ally is fighting against it, alone, and I grudge him the glory of such an impossible combat. Free me to aid him.”
A terrible conviction seized Harrowhark’s heart. She had been here for what seemed like such a long time that she had put to one side the pressing issues of now: the reality that was out there still, and the fact that she was still alive, despite her last coherent moments. A king among monsters in the River. And, perhaps worse, the realisation that she had lost a cherished and decade-long fight.
“You mean a Lyctor,” said Harrow. “You actually fought a Lyctor.”
“The third of the saints who serve as the Hands of the Emperor Undying,” he confirmed. And then, in case she’d missed the point, “The saint who is titled for duty.”
“Why is he fighting alone?” she demanded. A rising panic, strangely detached, was moving up the base of her spine. “Where are Augustine and Mercy? Where’s Ianthe?”
“I do not know these names. Even his own is beyond me. We met long ago, and I fought him,” said Nonius. She very specifically did not look at Ortus. He was being good enough not to say anything; but if he looked at her with anything close to smugness, she was going to kick his ankle.
Another rumble from above, sounding much more insistent. Harrow said, “But you’re half-dead already—the Resurrection Beast terrifies ghosts—”
“I am not half-dead,” he said. “I am dead, nothing more; but I am not afraid. This fight has sharpened my edge and awoken my senses. I am, if you like,