She turned away from you and walked toward the door. Your mouth was dry. You kept trying to rewet it, but you were afraid that it would come out as bile; your head was swimming. You steadied yourself enough to say, “Is your cavalier a forbidden subject, then?”
Her hand stilled at the pad of the autodoor, standing by the hanging that showed the First House picked out in white thread. “Babs?” she said. “I don’t care about Babs … Just don’t suggest my sister is dead to me, ever again.”
She touched the pad beside the door and crossed the opened threshold. The door closed behind her, leaving you alone. There was blood on your face and the knees of your robes. After a moment you shook them clean as she had done, drying out the blood, rendering it powder. You were weak. You staggered over to the Body, standing so quiet by the wall, and you buried your face in her thighs. The dead cool nearness of her was so close to being real that it rendered itself genuine comfort.
You were close enough to the crates stacked up by the door now to see that they had been placed against the wall hastily, and somewhat ajar. You wobbled to your feet and pushed them down in a domino cascade of clanging plex.
Behind the boxes were hundreds of thick nail fragments, like the broken horns of some weird animal, scattered on the floor and embedded in the wall. Some of them were brown with dried blood. Long, ragged missiles of keratin were, at some points, finger-deep in the panelling. You crawled back to the cot where the Body laid you down on the sheets, placed the heinous sword within your arms, added the letters to this pile, and gave you the go-ahead to fall unconscious.
5
SHE WAS FIRST AWARE OF LIGHT. It poured through the plex windows in lavalike radiance: white and steaming light, making her undershirt stick to her ribs with sweat. In the tiny black confines of the shuttle, the light took up all the space with its irradiating, corneal presence; and Harrowhark cried out as though she were dying from it, and then was tremendously self-conscious and discombobulated.
“Please,” a voice was saying. “Please, my Lady Harrowhark. Be—be peaceful. What can I do for you? What must be done?”
Ortus was almost bigger than the light, filling up the black-and-steel spaces of the passenger seats as much as the radiance did. Harrow realised, smarting, that his expression was that of a man who considered her a source of embarrassment. Somewhere down the years, she had come to understand that Ortus Nigenad, that perfect modern Ninth cavalier—perfectly shaved head, perfectly appropriate paint, perfectly grim solemnity, perfect body of two cabinets nailed together, perfect ability to carry six kilos of bone—considered her a slightly sorry object. How sorry an actual object, he could not possibly conceive.
“Am I making the sign?” she managed. “Am I giving you the signal? No? Then I will remind you that anything else is none of your business, and hope I do not have to remind you twice.”
He was not sweating as she was, but those lashes were damp from the light. “As you see fit, my lady,” he said. His rapier was not belted at his hip. He carried it over his lap, as though it were someone else’s baby. Harrow was pleased, dimly, to see that for his main-gauche he carried his pannier, despite Aiglamene cutting up so rough at the idea; that felt appropriate. She had always desired a helpmeet, not a circus performer.
“Where are we?” Harrow added, in another sudden welter of nervousness. “I thought—perhaps—”
“We must be four hundred kilometres above the surface now,” he said, mistaking her question. “They are securing our clearance to land. We shall leave orbit soon, I trust.”
Harrowhark rose from the placket of House dirt she had been sitting on, which held the merest suggestion of thanergy at this point anyway, and she crossed to where the light was coming in. At the last moment she remembered what she had brought with her and drew a piece of thick voile from within her sacramental vestments. She tied it around her head and pulled up her hood, which still smelled of the salts that Crux had so carefully packed it away with: that herbaceous, acrid, homelike smell, the one that made her eyes smart again with familiarity. Then she looked through the plexiform window.