how to die. The Locked Tomb is far from here, as are its graces, and so I forget myself.”
“You do, I agree,” said Harrowhark, shortly, and became exasperated herself, though more with herself than him. Ortus could not be blamed for simply being Ortus. “Forget dying, Nigenad, and let’s go. It is obviously my fault if I have failed to impress upon you who I am, necromantically. We serve the great corpse that lies dead and unwaking, and should not let our hearts falter or fail regarding some fiendish somnambulist. In the worst-case scenario you can simply declaim to it, which ought to cure anyone’s insomnia.”
“You are very humourous,” said her cavalier with perfect solemnity. “I understand. I will follow, Lady—and let duty be my pauldrons and casque, and loyalty my sword.”
The skeleton construct gestured to them both as they made the initial step to follow, and Harrow was struck when it opened its yellow-molared mouth.
“Is this how it happens?” it said.
9
YOU COULD NOT SAY with perfect accuracy that you woke up. Having achieved a grotesque mollience and dripped and resolved into a bad-smelling puddle of yourself, you did piece yourself back together again: your eyes opened—you were lying flat on your back—and, slowly, carefully, with great effort of soul, you congealed. A weird, hard wad was present in your lungs, pairing each breath with a hideous trachea whistle. Otherwise you were fine, though dishevelled. Your robes were askew. Your chest was heavy, but not with water, with—the shadow of a memory, or the last remembrance of a dream. For a moment you shivered all over. After your lungs, your eyes were the second thing to connect, and they perceived a room both big and dark, with spatters of quiet yellow light. This light resolved the shadowed angles of a high and vaulted ceiling. You recalled the wetness—you recalled the corpses—but then that recollection slithered away. The only thing you could hold on to was where you had been sat. You would know if all your sensation was removed; you would know if your brain had burnt away. You were the Reverend Daughter, and you had been placed in a pew.
A heavy weight pressed on your hips and legs. You strained to see, chin tucked hard against the top of your chest, and beheld with relief your double-handed sword. Your relationship with it was becoming increasingly complex: you hated its presence, but the world without it would be unimaginable. You smelled blood. You smelled something else more distantly; above the blood hung the crisp, faecal sweetness of a rose. You struggled to sit up: the breath seized in your lungs, and you worried yourself out of a thrusting cough just as a hand touched your shoulder, lightly, in warning. You nearly flinched off your seat.
“Quiet,” said Ianthe, beneath her breath.
She was sitting next to you, an incandescent pillar of white, staring straight ahead. The look on her face was typical of her, a recollection; an icy, exhausted tedium, with top notes of intrigued disgust. You were dazed. You hated her to touch you. You glued the sword to the back of the pew with a push, the bone lifting it and muffling the noise, sticking in hot gobs to the genuine wood as you swung your legs over to press your toes to the floor. And you saw where you were, and you were immediately stricken with horror.
You had been laid in a pew halfway down a small, exquisite chapel. Now that you could look, you recognised the tender and yellow light as that which came from hundreds of candles. They lit an interior of shining charcoal-coloured stone, layered with whorls of bone—bone everywhere, bone enough for a hundred Ninth House tomb chapels: the chancel formed of long carved runnels of bone, fretworked into human lace; the black check tiles polished granite beneath your feet, their white counterparts soft worn squares of femur, orange in that lenient candle light; and the seats of wood—wood like you’d first seen in Canaan House, real, brown, glimmering wood, polished to the particular sheen that neither stone nor bone could take. You stared up at a plex cruciform window: cold stars outside, gleaming with a weird and unearthly light. You stared up at skulls: an ossuary of skulls, a multitude of skulls, set into the wall, overlapping in empty-eyed rows, set cheek-by-jowl to await infinity. Thin sheets of metal had been worked over this lovely mass of faceless dead, in shadowed tints: deep red