the sides of the empty altar. Within that bed of ice and glass, on the stone-shaped pillow to prop the head, that final resting place of Harrowhark’s one true love, lay a sword.
It was the two-handed sword that had lain at the bottom of the Sleeper’s coffin, just as Dyas had seen it.
Harrowhark had come home, and she was not afraid. She did not know why she did it, but she climbed inside that empty coffin, and she took the sword within her arms. She was filled with a drowsy, comfortable certainty, as though rather than an icy tomb she had been tucked into a bed with a pillow fluffed beneath her. Her eyelids felt as heavy as the chains that lay broken around the outside of the bier. The sword she embraced shamelessly; those six feet of steel held no fear for her now.
Something rustled at her side. She had not seen it when she climbed in; it had been tucked to one side of the coffin. When she reached out to hold it in front of her face, she found a shiny mass of magazine flimsy. The crumpled front page showed a woman in a Cohort uniform that was so far from official it did not merely strain credulity, but snapped it in two pieces: a white jacket at least three sizes too small, boots, and nothing else.
The ice felt kind and warm; the stone gave as though it were cotton. Harrow lay where the Body had lain, perfectly at her ease, perfectly comfortable, and she peered blearily at the header.
“Frontline Titties of the Fifth,” she read, and found she was smiling helplessly to herself. She murmured: “Nav, you ass, that’s not even a real publication.”
Then there was a huge, side-to-side rocking, in the manner of an explosion, or a cradle. Her eyes closed. Lying in the tomb that had claimed her heart, faraway in a land she had never travelled, Harrowhark Nonagesimus fell asleep, or dropped dead, or both.
EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS AFTER THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
THE THICK FUG OF a summer evening. The curfews stalling the traffic outside to a funeral crawl, with the hot sun blistering the road into sodden clags of concrete and tar. What she liked best was the way the haze of combustion from the vehicles colonized the dying rays of the sun into deep pinks and oranges, oranges into scarlets, scarlets into purples, purples into the sweet deathly navy of the night. The antisniper striping frosted over the windowpane turned everything into feeble shapes, but the colours were just as intense even if the shapes were a mush. And the murmurous honks from the traffic below—the occasional low, lamenting blart of a cargo carrier—were transformed by the tall buildings into an orchestral echo. The crack of the open window let the outside air, redolent of sun-warmed plastic and fumes, ruffle the drying sweat in her hair.
This time of day was a crossbar. It blocked off the afternoon, when black cloths would be tacked up over windows and she would sit in that tight, squeezing, claustrophobic heat, and she would be given the bones by the people who lived with her. She lived with three people: the person who went to work for her, the person who taught her, and the person who looked after her. The person who taught her often gave her these bones to arrange (“just whatever feels normal”), sometimes to just hold, in the hand or in the hollow of her cheek. Then the bones could be packed away in secret—the blackout curtains could come down, and the window cracked—and once the temperature dropped a few degrees, she would be at the chin-up bar, or doing press-ups, or the sword would be put in her hand by the person who looked after her—“whatever feels normal,” again.
And then when it was very late, they’d climb down thirty flights of stairs to street level, picking their way through abandoned sacks of clothes, or laminate takeaway boxes, the press of other people, smelling like the day-to-day sweat of working in a sultry office, or the day-to-day sweat of being outside in the heat, or the day-to-day sweat of fear. She would be taken to the little corner store with its great barricades of snacks and pills and pamphlets and thin cheap shirts, and sit on the should-be-white chairs and smell the deep fryer going, and then pick over crispy chunks of potato, or pan-blasted sweet fruit, or sausage meat in batter, with time enough