the eye of the storm, the destruction seemed to revolve around her, and the ground beneath their feet was still.
Harrowhark found herself studying Dulcie’s face: there was a strange, tucked-in stillness that made her old again, those fine sigil wrinkles on either side of the mouth that told her own lesson of suffering. Harrow said, “Then there is the River.”
“The River means madness,” said Abigail immediately. “You’ve never been there as an unanchored soul. You don’t know what it’s like. I haven’t the faintest idea of what would happen to the secondary soul in a Lyctoral bond if the host soul abandons the body … You are alive, Harrowhark—that does mean something where souls are concerned. Your soul longs for your body, and without something else to inhabit, I could not even promise that in your madness you wouldn’t somehow find your way back, rendering all this moot.”
Even with her feelings schooled, Harrow’s voice sounded feeble and childlike and plaintive. “Is there nothing I can do before entering the River that might mean I stay put?”
“No,” said Abigail. “It’s the River. It moves. You’d have to pick the revenant’s path and travel along a thanergetic link, and that’s just madness again: sitting inside—I don’t know—a teapot, clinging on without sense or understanding, going slowly insane. And as I said, your soul longs for your body. What if you lose yourself to eventual madness and are reabsorbed, leading to some kind of melange—you know what Teacher was—a patchwork fusion between your soul and fragments of Gideon’s? Harrowhark, you stand before a known quantity and hideous unknowns. Don’t walk back toward the unknown.”
“If it were me,” Magnus said, “I’d go home, and live, and live for her.”
There was a terrific crash from out in the corridor, followed by a hideous creaking as, close by, a girder came down. The noise was awesome. It was as though the world were screaming and bending all about them. The Fifth House spirit-caller lost her reserve, and took Harrow’s hands in her own, and said: “I’m so sorry, Harrow. I wish it were different. I am so tremendously sorry.”
The ceiling above them buckled and shuddered, but held. Harrow looked at the stricken faces before her: at the now-sombre lines of the cavalier of the Fifth, his jolly face achieving a certain supernatural dignity; his historian wife, a woman whom she now knew could never be properly avenged. The tragedy of the genius and the useless death. The irreparable loss to the universe.
As though the universe could withstand more holes; as though the fabric of the universe had not become a series of lacework cut-outs linked by the thin, snappable joins of those who remained. Could the pattern sustain itself, with such absences? Could she, who had once thought herself well-versed in absence, endure alone? The answer was so obviously no; she was not even ready to have the question put to her.
And yet—and yet—
Harrowhark said, “You’ve got to go before the roof comes down on you.”
Abigail gave a weary, rueful half smile. A very Fifth House embarrassment. “Not until you tell me what you’re doing. In loco parentis, you see. I’m afraid I feel responsible for you, and need you to promise me you’ll live.”
“Gideon decided that for me,” said Harrow. She was not really afraid; it was only that her hands were, and were shaking independent of her feelings.
The first falling chunk of ceiling landed with heavy, balletic stillness, causing them all to stumble from the shockwave. Abigail, Dulcie, and Harrow momentarily cowered beneath the automatic and totally useless arm Magnus had thrown over them, a sort of optimistic human umbrella. Harrowhark said briskly, “Pent; Quinn; Septimus. I’m poor with thanks and worse at goodbyes. Therefore, I won’t bother with them.”
Magnus said, “Have you—”
“Someday I’ll die and get buried in the ground and you can take it up with me then,” said Harrow, and found, after all, that she was not really speaking to them. “Until then—I am afraid that I have to live.”
“Then this is not goodbye,” said Abigail, and she reached forward to brush a stray lock of hair behind Harrowhark’s ear, which was an instinct Harrow could not find it within herself to feel humiliated by. “I believe that we will see each other again.”
Magnus said quickly: “Jeanne said to tell Gideon hi. If you see her before we do—”
“Though try not to with any great hurry,” said the Fifth spirit-caller.
And then that same blue shimmer, and they were gone, without fanfare,