the new blood of my beating heart will tempt them to the surface. Nobody has ever tempted a Lyctor before. I am not even certain where they go. Do Lyctors enter the River? Do Lyctors pass as we pass? I don’t know where they wait. I don’t know how to direct them. But I would so love to try.”
Harrowhark waited, her thumbs pressed together within her sleeves.
From the half a step behind her, Ortus said: “Your indefatigability in the face of ancient death becomes you.”
“Stop flirting with my wife,” said Magnus. (Harrowhark had forgotten that he was Abigail’s husband, and found the concept of making eyes at one’s cavalier too revolting to bear.) When he caught sight of Ortus’s expression over Harrow’s shoulder, which Harrow could only imagine, he said hastily: “Joke! A joke. Wouldn’t suggest it of you, Ninth.”
“I would like to give you something,” said Abigail Pent.
This was to Harrowhark. She watched as the capable hands—strong, for a necromancer’s, beautifully formed and with very even nails—took a bit of folded paper from the table. She passed it to her Ninth colleague as though it did not hurt her to give away such precious material. She was smiling, very slightly.
“Scholarship is best made as a communal effort,” she said. “If you can tell me anything of interest about that paper, I’d be very grateful for it. If you could tell me anything tedious, I’d still be thankful. Bone adepts do have such a notorious eye for detail.”
Harrowhark Nonagesimus was of the Ninth House; if it had been her in possession of Abigail Pent’s resources, she would have kept them all to herself. On dying she would have put them all in a chest and buried them to keep them from the greedy eyes of other scholars for another thousand years. She took the gift with gloved fingers, turned it around in her hands—it was just paper; it had the thanergy of paper, and unlike flimsy, she would be able to feel the seethe of bacteria eating away at it if she pressed it to her bare skin.
“I am—obliged to you, Fifth House,” she said.
Magnus was saying: “Ortus. What does happen to Nonius, after he faces the ensorcelled swordsmen? I assume they fight?”
Harrowhark was surprised at how immediately she could answer in her cavalier’s stead: “He cuts down seven men in about as many lines. Then the leader of the swordsmen approaches, carrying two swords. I would have assumed there was a swift rate of decay in the efficacy of additional swords. The others part to let Nonius and him fight. Nonius wins easily, though he takes eight pages to do so. The remaining onlookers he kills, rather more cursorily, as it only takes around four lines.”
She was surprised to find Magnus looking at her, and not at Ortus; was unsettled by the press of his mouth, of his good-natured and rather foolish expression, of his curly well-brushed hair and slightly wanting chin. She was mostly unsettled by his eyes, which were of a colour suddenly hard to define, and whose focus was on her entire.
“Is this really how it happens?” he said.
“Pardon?” said Harrowhark.
“I say, Reverend Daughter, is it an ancestral Locked Tomb tradition for your spirit energy to be so diverse?” Abigail asked brightly. “I’ve counted up to one hundred and fifty signatures contributing to you, and there’s more—they’re stamps rather than complete revenants, of course, which means their spirits were manipulated to leave marks on you in some way, which is fascinating if it means…”
It took long years of self-discipline not to kill the woman then and there; or at least make the attempt. Against any other ghost-caller, their wards so exquisite and so fatally slow, Harrowhark had no doubt that a single decisive strike would do the job. Abigail Pent introduced doubt. It was that doubt that made her turn and flee—a tactical retreat, as she kept telling herself; Ortus broke into a trot to catch up with her, the rapier clanking at his side. She caught their voices, because she had very good hearing for low, hushed voices of any type. Magnus was saying, “Dear, you didn’t have to…” and Abigail, mildly: “It’s just curious, considering…” and nothing more.
She left the gas-levered autodoors of the library—which were, as far as Harrow could tell, the only autodoors that existed outside of the deep LED-lit basement with its metal grilles and groaning air conditioners—and stalked down the corridor as quickly as possible. It was hard not to