herself and at people, everywhere. In that rotting hall there were people of all different sizes and postures; apart from the three priests they were all young, or young enough to eyes accustomed to her grey congregation, and they were dressed in a nightmare spectrum of colours and fripperies and materials. Classic constructs stood by dressed in white. She hated it when people dressed constructs; it smacked of whimsy, like making one’s hammer wear a hat. They had provided escort into the hall, dropping big handfuls of something green and white for people to gingerly crush beneath their feet as they walked under the cracked marble arches of the First House dock. She had realised with a thrill of frugal, exotic horror that it was plant matter. Some of those assembled had given fleeting, backward-shoulder glances to her, and to Ortus; and she was aware that she was not imposing—was acutely aware that she might be mistaken for younger, was aware of the optics of Ortus, whose bigness and sadness filled rooms she was already minute within—and their gazes held flickers her eyes were too sore to translate. Fine. That was manageable; that was their mistake to make, whole and entire.
O corse of the Locked Tomb, she prayed silently to herself, the cold death to anyone who looks at me in pity; the heat death to anyone who looks at me in amusement; the quick death to anyone who looks at me in fear.
As Ortus finished, the priests of the First smiled, just a little, and only with their mouths. It occurred to Harrow that the First and the Ninth were the only two Houses that understood how to wait for a thing that would never happen. Her cavalier rounded off the prayer, dolefully: “And so hail to the Lord of the Sharpest Edge, and the gossamer thinness of his blade, and the cleanness of his cut.”
“An ancient epithet!” said the ghastly old man that Harrow would come to curse as Teacher. He looked near death with excitement. He looked close to capering, which filled Harrowhark with a dry and powdery despair. “A classic, unuttered for years even in this House! How may I bless you for that, Ortus the Ninth?”
“Pray only that my bones be one day interred in the Anastasian monument, where even the ghost of the light does not go,” said Ortus, in front of everybody, like an absolute shit. Even in the shadow the heat slapped down on him, and beneath his veil some idiot had painted him with the Skull of the Anchorite Dying, that idiot probably being Ortus. As he wept from the sunshine the alabaster wounds of the Anchorite turned to big runnels of paint. No First priest’s blessing could get him inside the Anastasian, the tomb reserved for warriors: Ortus was only likely to die with a heretic’s blood still wet on his sword if he found a very slow heretic. “That is the only blessing I desire.”
The other priests murmured. “Incredible,” said Teacher. “I love it. I bless you that way, twice. Now, won’t somebody fetch me the box?”
What followed was a long and incomprehensible parade of cavaliers, starting with Marta the Second. After Teacher called out, “Ortus the Ninth,” Ortus went up for his prize and returned to present it to his necromancer, as he ought. He placed within Harrow’s gloved hands a ring with a single key laced upon the iron: a singularly dull and uninteresting key, with two teeth and a triangle head. It sat very heavy in the black leather of her palm.
The little man eased himself down upon his stool, from the sides of which no small amount of stuffing was emerging, like a sat-on cream-filled roll. He said comfortably: “Now I will tell you something new, something you are not meant to know: about the First House, and about the research facility.
“The base of Canaan House dates back to before the Resurrection. We first built upward, to get away from the sea; then we built outward, to strive toward beauty … This was meant to be the palace of the Kindly Master, where he might work and hold court and live for always, and oversee all the rebuilding that had to be done. For the Resurrection did not resurrect every broken thing, you understand, and nor did it create anything new. There was hard work ahead—fixing, or designing, and it took a great deal of blood and sweat and bone. Yet those were lovely years,