lightly beneath your chin, and they were tilting it up so that you could see their face.
You looked at the Lyctor. The Lyctor looked at you.
The face beneath the icy parti-coloured hood was a prim, virginal oval; much in shape and feature like the shape of a saint’s face in a portrait, or a death mask. The nose and jaw and forehead were all carven and serene, and therefore had the same indifferent dullness of a well-formed statue. You noticed the colours first, beneath that harsh and unlovely light: that the hair was a dead flower or apricot colour, and that the skin and lips and brows were of a similar hue, so that beneath the nacreous cowl the saint looked like a painting with a very limited palette; and the eyes …
You had seen a Lyctor’s eyes only once before. Lyctors kept their own faces, but the eyes they stole from someone else. You had been lucky that your own transition was not as startling. This pair of eyes were a slumbrous, sand-tinted hazel with grey-madder clouds within them, like a red hurricane moving over a gaseous mantle, like a storm-ridden planet of red dust. The expression did not match these dreamy and quite beautiful eyes: the expression was paralytically repellent in ways that had nothing to do with your dorsal nerve. It saw right through you, marked what you had done, and let you know that there would be a reckoning. No signs of age touched the corners of those screwed-up, dust-storm eyes, but nonetheless it was a gaze as elderly as Crux’s. There was something in the look she gave you—after she read the whole of your features, as though searching—that puzzled you. Then fell the final indignity. She hooked her finger into the seam of your hood and tugged it down to your neck, so that she could look at your whole face without permission, bloodied skull and all.
You flushed until the tips of your ears were red hot. Fear and humiliation formed a bone hook at the back of your superior articular facet; acrimonious rage drove it forward, caught the loop, and withdrew it backward, as though unknitting your nerves. The scythe of pain that swept over the back of your scalp nearly made you sick again, and you would have been if you had not of late become the Saint of Emesis. You squeezed the nerve flat with the muscles around it and wedged the minute hook back into your spinal mass where it belonged. This resulted in a whole-body case of pins and needles so profound that all you could do was thrash like a fish on the end of a line. The finger was withdrawn. The stormy eyes widened, just fractionally. An emotion was playing out over her face that was—not unfamiliar to you—but nonsensical; you discarded it.
“You oughtn’t to have done that,” she said. “You might have blown out your dorsal nerve and asphyxiated.”
She looked at your face and saw what was so nakedly writ there: disbelief that she could perceive what you’d done. “No, I cannot sense you,” she said, in answer to your unspoken dismay. “But your body is not a mystery to me. I may know it better than you do, you—you Ninth baby.” You were fumbling with the hood with clumsy hands, hiding your face. “How old are you?” she asked abruptly. “How old in years?”
You held your flopping idiot’s head up, to look at her face again. For some reason—and you never needed a reason; you were very good at producing a reaction to no stimulus whatsoever—you became afraid. It was then that the Body emerged from behind the Lyctor’s shoulder, squatting somewhere close to the doors. Her sweet dead face floated a little behind the Lyctor’s. She looked at you with her heavy-lidded, yellow-gold eyes, and she said, quite clearly, with the voice of Aiglamene and your mother commingled:
“Lie, Harrow. Now.”
“Fifteen,” you said immediately, hoping your own meat would not betray you.
She pressed, “Counting from conception, or from birth?”
“Birth.”
That emotion played out over the face again, like the ripple of darkness across a briefly disturbed body of water. The whole body clenched and unclenched. It didn’t matter that she was a black hole to you, without thanergy or thalergy to speak of; it was just a matter of seeing her shoulders. It was relief. It was unalloyed, full-bore relief.
“Yuck,” she said.
The elevator came to a thudding halt. The doors behind the Lyctor opened; she stood,