and now Harrow thought she seemed dazed. Her fingers kept working the hilt of her rapier, from which hung a neat scarlet riband. “That’s not … Don’t know why I thought … No.”
“You have faced down a monster that is likely to be the doom of many, and many less able than Captain Deuteros,” said Ortus. Harrow regretted not making him take a solemn pledge of silence, to walk the place as the mute and intimidating bulk his father had been; but only a very obedient idiot of a cavalier would have stuck to that. “I include myself among the latter. Is there no hint of our salvation?”
Abigail said, “Ortus the Ninth is right, Lieutenant. If there are any details, anything else you might be able to tell us—you’ve taught us so much already, even if the price was too high.”
The lieutenant drew herself up again. Her mouth was now a calm line that betrayed nothing but classic Second House stoicism. Harrowhark admired her for that.
“One,” she said crisply. “The Sleeper can move from its coffin. Two, the Sleeper can pass through necromantic wards. Three, Teacher told us not to wake it. I don’t know what does. Noise doesn’t.” (“Not necessarily, no,” said Pent, who never did truck with unconditional statements.) “Four, it’s carrying a rifle.”
“Like something from an old story,” suggested Ortus.
“Like something. That’s all the facts I have,” said the lieutenant. “Don’t want to guess. One more thing—I’m not saying this with absolute certainty. I only got a glance before the lid closed and the plex fogged up again. But there’s something else in the coffin. The Sleeper’s lying on it.”
The lieutenant closed her eyes, though her precise posture did not shift. When she opened them, she said, “I don’t know if this matters. But it looked like a standard-issue infantry sword.” She added, with Cohort precision: “A two-hander.”
19
TEN MONTHS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
THE FIRST TIME THE Saint of Duty tried to take your life, you did not anticipate it. If you had been a kernel less paranoid, a trifle less disturbed, you might have given Ianthe Tridentarius the pleasure of opening the note labelled Upon the death of Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Your only hope for that note was that it contained a single sentence along the lines of, Get what joy you can from my corpse, you devious bitch, but it was written by a previous self and you could not risk a guess.
It was only a few days into your internment within the Mithraeum. Ever since you disgraced yourself with Cytherea’s midsection you had avoided all social meals, and you tended to scavenge food as you passed through the bizarre space that everyone called the kitchen. It was a long, clean, barren room where electric lights cast long shadows on pots and pans older than Drearburh, yet spared time’s depredations. At this point you had not yet figured out your exoskeleton, but had managed to fix a prototype bone scabbard to your lower back, and spent most of the time limping around with it as though scoliotic. You had taken a portion of some kind of murky stew left warm on top of the stove, ravenous, not yet knowing what the Emperor would tell you later: that a Lyctor could persist perfectly well without food, but would not last long without water. (“Cyrus was half-mummified before we worked that one out,” he would go on to reminisce fondly.)
Your mistake was not spiriting the food back to your rooms. Ianthe’s room was not yet an option. In that first week you were still numb; you were tired, you were hungry, and you sat down at the countertop to eat your tepid supper, and had gotten through maybe five spoonfuls before the sword emerged from the middle of your chest.
The aim for your pulmonic valve was unerring, but he had put himself at the mercy of your third and fourth ribs. This was a mistake your assailant would never make again. Always your bosom friends, they unfurled for you then like the springtime. Thick ropes of costal cartilage burst from your breast to fix your assailant’s sword in place: your ribs became jaws, your sternum the neck of a spring. Your blood sprayed into your indifferent soup, and the rapier stuck fast. You wrestled yourself backward; your phalanx bones burst through your fingertips like knives, and, too frightened for anything sophisticated, you raked blindly into the meat of the fatless and muscular thighs behind you.