reality one way or another. But his gaze was still levelled at the ground.
“Our House has received good service from ‘those who are fit but to hold their blade in the scabbard,’” said Harrowhark, keeping her voice even. “Which is not a line that scans, just so you know. Nobody will be surprised to find you a laggard.”
“It’s enneameter. The traditional form. Those who are fit but to hold their blade in the scabbard—”
“That’s not nine feet of anything.”
“—never to draw it forth for the battle.”
“You will train with Captain Aiglamene for the next twelve weeks,” said Harrowhark, rubbing her fingers back and forth, back and forth, until the pad of her thumb felt very hot. “You will meet the very minimum that is expected of a Ninth House cavalier primary, which is now, fortunately, that you be as broad as you are tall with arms that can carry a weight. But I need … significantly more from you … than the edge of a sword, Nigenad.”
The serving sister shadowed the edge of Harrow’s peripheral vision. Ortus had raised his head and did not acknowledge the sister, which complicated things. He looked at Harrow with the faint kind of pity she always suspected he held her in: the pity that marked him as an outsider in his own House, and would mark him as all the more an outsider in the House of his mother’s line. She did not know what made Ortus Ortus. He was a mystery too boring to solve.
“What more is there?” he asked, a little bitterly.
Harrowhark closed her eyes, which shut out Ortus’s tremulous, worried face and the shadow of the Body-faced serving girl that fell over the desk. The shadow told her nothing. Physical evidence was often a trap. She shut out the new and rusty rapier that now creaked in the scabbard at Ortus’s hip. She shut out the comforting smell of dust made hot by the whirring heater in the corner of the room, mixing with the just-milled ink in her inkwell. Tannic acid, human salts.
“This isn’t how it happens,” said the Body.
Which gave Harrow a curious strength.
“I need you to hide my infirmity,” said Harrowhark. “You see, I am insane.”
ACT ONE
1
NINE MONTHS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
IT WAS IN THE CLOSE of the myriadic year of our Lord—that far-off King of Necromancers, that blessed Resurrector of Saints!—that you picked up your sword. This was your first big mistake.
The sword hated you to touch it. The long hilt burnt your bare hands as though heated to starlike temperatures. The vacuum of space outside yielded no thanergy and generated no thalergy, but it didn’t matter. You no longer needed either. You iced your palms over with thick bands of cartilage, and you tried again.
Now the grip seemed cold as death, and it was just as heavy. You lifted, and your elbows locked, and you grasped the pommel to try to steady yourself. You tried a new trick—you slipped a narrow ribbon of bone up from your living metacarpal and eased the fragment gently around the flexor tendon, and you pierced it through the back of your hand. You didn’t flinch. It was never your way. From there you unfolded long fingers of bone to grasp the handle, then more, to grasp it again; you lifted it, in a manner of speaking, assisted by a seething, clattering basket of eight phalanx articulates.
So now you could wobble the sword up in an obtuse angle before yourself. You waited. You felt nothing: no understanding, no mastery, no knowledge. You were just a necromancer, and it was just a sword. It fell away from your hands and clattered to the floor, and you folded in half, and you upchucked violently all over the hospital tiles.
There were many uniformed people in that room, but they were used to these antics. Harrowhark the First, ninth saint to serve the Emperor Undying, might throw up as much as she cared to. You were a walking sacrament, even if your early contributions to Lyctorhood seemed to be finding new and different ways to puke. They only intervened if it looked like you might choke to death on your own vomit, a mercy that you always vaguely thought a shame.
* * *
The first time the man you called God had delivered you the sword—in what seemed to you his aspect of the Kindly Prince, intending only gentleness—you’d fallen into a deep stupor from which you had never really risen. Maybe the sword had reified