the Body, her hands neatly folded on the ancient shawl that your mother had always laid on the bed—the electric light in the sconce shining down on the firm musculature of her forearms, the calluses upon those dead palms. Her eyes she kept closed, each wet and frozen lash brushing cheeks blanched by expiration.
“I’m afraid,” you’d say.
She would say softly, in the voice that prickled each hair on your scalp with a sweet, deep electricity: “What of, Harrowhark?”
“Tonight I am afraid to die.”
“That is the same fear as failure,” she said once. “You don’t fear dying. You can tolerate pain. You are afraid that your life has incurred a debt that your death will not pay. You see death as a mistake.”
You said, a little bitterly: “What else is it?”
The dead corse of the Locked Tomb—the death of the Emperor—the maiden with the sword and the chains, the girl in the ice, the woman of the cold rock, the being behind the stone that could never be rolled away—said, in half-confused tones she had never taken with you: “I don’t know. I died, once … no, twice,” but then she had said no more.
Another time you said, “I’m afraid of myself. I am afraid of going mad.”
Another time, “I am still afraid of Cytherea the First.”
And, “I am afraid of God.”
And again: “Do I have Ortus’s eyes? Are these ones mine? I never really looked at them— Beloved, what were my eyes like?”
Unfortunately, that time she answered. Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she talked to you, quietly, about discursive subjects, and sometimes she didn’t say a thing. But now, that which was buried insensate said quite calmly, “She asked me not to tell you.”
You awoke, flat on the floor in front of the water-pump sink, screaming until your throat was broken. When you stared at your bloodshot eyes in the mirror and tried to remember Ortus Nigenad’s, you couldn’t recall a difference: they were both that deep and fathomless black, the colour Ianthe called black roses, because Ianthe was overfamiliar and frankly a pervert. You tried to imagine Ortus’s sad, heavy weariness staring at you from your own mirror. It did not work. You were both terribly relieved and terribly frightened.
16
IN THE FIRST FEW weeks you had created a new cipher, based off the original with a few mathematical changes just in case Ianthe had gleaned too much data from the envelopes. In this you started to collate your thoughts and findings on the Lyctors around you: a pitiful memorandum of opinion and perceived fact, mostly useless, gathered in the hope that by examining your findings in aggregate you might somehow receive wisdom. You had always liked to write notes. You grieved the loss of your diary from Canaan House, but your things had been filtered through Ianthe back to you, which meant that all you got was a small supply of sacramental paint and your old clothes. When you inquired about the diary, you received the blunt response that it had been burned on your own orders.
Your section on Ianthe was very short:
IANTHE (WHILOM TRIDENTARIUS) THE FIRST
Unworthy of trust. Suspects me mad.
You should have known the former, and the latter was all your own fault. The first slip was the matter of Cytherea’s tomb.
The Emperor had laid the corpse of Cytherea the First in a small chamber off the central residential atrium, a little too close for comfort. This atrium was a well of corridor shafts off to other rings of the station, and its floor was an exquisite mandala of hand bones under glass—each metacarpal dyed the colour of its House, dominated by ombres of white to crimson for the Second and white to navy for the Fourth. Around the mandala were tiles of raised brown stone that rapped sharply when one stepped on them. There were no windows to speak of, just strong electric lights from round holes in the ceiling, and in the middle hung a delicate chandelier of white crystals. The room was pillared with three massive steel-edged columns on either side, each a cacophony of exposed wire under smoked glass. These wires were thronged about with bone, with glistening strands of fat wrapped around some of the threads of copper, instead of plex; they reeked of naked thalergy, and their purpose was still not immediately apparent to you. Every so often a whole arm bone would peek out of this nest of soft yellow fat-wrapped wire. You assumed it was not another memorial.