The Saint of Duty looked down at you, sprawled so awkwardly in a pool of blood, free of the two new punctures he had given you in such a short space of time. He took his spear and shook it like a bedsheet, and the bone haft folded in on itself until it was no longer or thicker than a mace handle. This short, fat handle and spearhead he shoved into his belt, then he sheathed his rapier, turned around, and left.
His sister-saint bawled after him: “I mean it! You clean this place up!” but he was already gone. She stood and smoothed out the front of her beautiful mother-of-pearl robe—the blood came off it in great gouts of reddish powder, dwindling to nothing—and she said, her placid face creased in complaint: “This place has gone to the dogs … What did you say, to make him try to kill you?”
“Nothing.” The hormones were beginning to cease their pleasant flow, but you were still preternaturally calm when you said: “I came in to get some food. I did not perceive his entrance. The first thing I knew of him was when he stabbed me.”
“Oh. Then he just wants you dead,” she said, with perfect unconcern. “Good luck! Not!! That man is Teacher’s attack dog … If he thinks you’re a threat then I would advise you to settle your affairs.”
You stared up at the ceiling and noted the bone-strewn scrollwork between the frames of the panelling, all about the long planks of electric light. And you said: “But why does Ortus the First want me dead?”
“Who?” said Mercymorn, indifferently.
20
YOU HAD NOT LEFT behind any notes about what you wanted done at your funeral. This was not due to a surfeit of optimism, though you were determined that your end would not come at the end of Ortus the First’s sword or spear: it was because you found the idea of a funeral for you too pitiful—what would be said, and what would be done? What fitting epitaph for your fragile bones? (Perhaps: Here lies the world’s most insufferable witch.)
In the following months the Saint of Duty attempted to kill you, by your count, fourteen times, and you never came to understand the motivation. Often you were saved only by intervention. Sometimes this came from one of the other two Lyctors. Once, vilely, from Ianthe; she had ensconced you in fat and rolled you down the hallway out of danger, and still laughed whenever she thought about it. Once it even came from God. He had walked in as your pelvis was run through by your elder brother’s razor-sharp, scarlet-hilted rapier—so sharp you could never comprehend it—and God had laid you down on the big broad dining table of brown wood, and the world had whited out for you and reverberated up your nostrils and sinus cavities, then arced down the bottoms of your feet, as your skin and flesh closed over whole and perfect. Even your back ache had disappeared. Your body had hissed all over as it sealed, reborn in the hot white light of the Necrolord Prime.
And he had said: “Ortus, have pity.”
“This is my pity, Lord,” said the Saint of Duty.
“She’s your responsibility, not your punching bag.”
“I find the responsibility a hard one.”
You’d lain dazed and stunned on the tabletop, and you heard the Emperor of the Nine Houses say: “I don’t want to argue with you. This is ham-fisted. Get out.”
If you had thought God’s intervention might be final, might enforce some terms of peace, it had not. It had seemed—difficult—to raise the subject, when God did not want to bring it up himself. What would you say? (One of your fingers and gestures is trying to kill me on the reg. Is this … fine with you?) When you finally approached him about it, his wince made you wish that you had not.
The Emperor said, carefully: “He made a pact, with an authority I have no power to gainsay, that he would protect me from all dangers. Now it has been put to him that you are that danger. Harrowhark, forgive me. I need you to face him—each time—knowing your life is in danger…”
Here he broke off, and just said: “Will you wear a rapier, if I give you one?”
“For what purpose, Teacher? I could not use it, having misapprehended the Lyctoral process.”
“Just in case,” he said, and it was the first time you had seen him wretched.