come to think of as the arm: the right arm that Cytherea the First had removed just above the elbow, with somebody else’s reattached wholesale. The new limb hung heavy from its olecranal point with a bluish seam. It looked fat and swollen and unused, which was ridiculous, because you had never been able to see anything wrong with it. It had been very nicely matched to the original until she had ceased using it altogether, and the difference was more pronounced each day. Unconscious of your critical eye, she scratched fretfully at the line until red hives appeared.
“Fifteen ten,” said your sister Lyctor, as soon as she noticed you.
You said, “Eight thirty-four,” and she said, “My God! Hark at the creature. Eight thirty-four … and such a dreadful pity that it doesn’t even matter.”
She was in a filthy mood, if she was wearing that thing, with her arm exposed. You were not in the best frame of mind yourself.
“Let us interrogate,” you said. “Does it not matter because despite cutting three whole minutes off your previous time you could never hope to challenge me in this arena, or does it not matter because I’m going to die to Number Seven?”
“You’re being damned optimistic if you think you’ll live to see Number Seven,” she said, blue eyed, those oily little freckles glittering almost pinkly above the dress. They reflected the red rims of her eyelids. You thought that she had been crying. “I’m amazed you made it here from the docking bay without getting assassinated, Harry.”
“I will not answer to that sobriquet.”
“Close the door and I’ll call you Nonagesimus.”
There were a few academic reasons that you closed the door, and from the inside, rather than behind you as you left. Her quarters held some measure of safety for you, as she warded with the paranoid focus of an escaped murderer, and therefore half as tightly as you did. You got better autopsies of her encounters with Beasts than you did from your own, as Augustine was wont to explain significantly more to her than either he or Mercy did to you.
But by the Sewn Tongue, those fucking rooms. Those candied, white-and-gold-striped rooms, those crystal-chandeliered rooms with a bed as big as some of the penitential cells back home. You’d hated them from first sight, as instantaneously as Ianthe took a fancy to them. You despised the cobwebby, overornate furniture, with filigree on curlicue on flourish, the masses of embroidery thread, the hangings on everything, swath of fabric atop another swath of fabric squashed down on a plush divan that rustled if you sat on it; and most upsettingly, the paintings. They were life-sized nudes in languorous attitudes, generally in oils, and all of the same two persons. They were enthusiastically executed. The duo posing held a variety of objects both likely and unlikely. You had once been fool enough to recommend that Ianthe take them down, at which point she had rustled up another from the bathroom and hung it in pride of place above an overpainted dresser. It was not that you were a prude. It was simply that sitting in a room with those paintings was like having a long visit with someone who kept laughing at their own puns.
But despite the violently awful nudes—the excess of latticework—Ianthe—you were a frequent visitor to her den. You took such a pitiful pleasure in Nonagesimus, now that you had spent months being Harrowhark the First. As God said, you might be the ninth saint, but you could never be Ninth again—except when you closed Ianthe’s door.
“It’s down to your want of ambidexterity, Tridentarius,” you said, giving her the same sickly pleasure in nomenclature. “It’s not exactly mathematics. You are trying to fight with a sword in your wrong hand. I am not even trying to fight with a sword. As I’ve been told tiresomely often, a half-cocked version of something is significantly worse than not being cocked at all.”
Despite the fact that you had said not being cocked at all, Ianthe only slurped angrily at her soup, making a sound like custard going down a flute. “Tell me to stop breathing,” she said. (“I have, on multiple occasions,” you said.) “You won’t understand. It’s utterly instinctual. It doesn’t matter if I try to fight from a distance. I’ll flinch at something, and then Babs will kick in, and the arm won’t work—”
“You cannot pass the blame on to your burnt-up soul. It’s psychological.”
“Bullshit,” she said, with vehemence.
Babs indicated a very