for poetry—could still hear Teacher’s verse, in his low, soothing, ordinary voice, chase itself round and round your head:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
* * *
THE EMPEROR OF THE NINE HOUSES, THE PRINCE UNDYING (WHILOM??? JOHN???)
Who was A.L.?
21
RAIN STARTED FALLING ON Canaan House early one morning, and it never stopped again. For the first few hours it was the normal, leaden fall of water Harrowhark had become used to in her time at Canaan House. She found it merely unnerving now, not a killer of peace and sleep. Around midday a fog began to boil off the saw-toothed waters at the bottom of the tower. It rose up to the lower levels of Canaan, and kept rising. The fog was bitterly cold, and the rain stank like engine lubricant and blood; it tasted indescribable. Teacher and the other priests unearthed great spiny patchwork compasses of oilcloth and metal struts, which unfolded at the press of a button, and Harrowhark and the others were obliged to walk around with them over their heads even inside the main atrium, where the water leaked through the walls and ceilings.
At first, she trusted her hood and veil and let the rain wet her where it would. She was soon forced to acknowledge how difficult it had become to dry clothes. Ortus spent half his life wringing out tents of black fabric into the bathroom tub. Harrow was forced in bad grace to consent to him standing over her with one of these umbrella constructions, and listen to the hateful, arrhythmic PLUT … PLUT … PLUT-PLUT-PLUT of water on its waterproof skin. This incidental noise was very difficult for her: it was fertile ground for the false symphony inside her head, and those banging doors and murmurous half-heard ghosts were now joined by a thin background wail, which sounded for all the world like the mewling of a newborn baby.
“This has never happened before,” Teacher complained at meals, fretfully, as though they were not Lyctors-in-waiting but instead sympathetic building inspectors. “The rainy season won’t be on us for months. It ought to be ten degrees warmer than it is. I have had to bring in all the herbs and put them under a lamp. And this fog … I guess I might as well die,” he concluded, something he now suggested hopefully at least three times a day.
Harrow found this a suggestion that lacked grace or tact, especially after they found the second round of bodies.
There were no witnesses to question, when they found the grey-wrappered figures of Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus laid on the stained, brushed-steel slabs in the mortuary. They had been arranged as though whomever found them had wished to present them scientifically. That they were Sextus and Hect was at first only educated conjecture: they were wearing their librarian greys, and one had the battered old rapier that had seemed to be all the Sixth House could proffer for this trial, and the other had ink stains on his fingers. Their faces had been obliterated by point-blank gunshots.
It was grim. Harrowhark was surprised by her own tranquillity, but concluded she was grateful for it. A strange, tomblike calm had fallen over her when Abigail had first taken her to see the bodies, walking briskly past the Sleeper’s silent coffin with a lantern held high. Harrow admired her for that, for her lack of tiptoe or hush. Harrow had never seen Sextus or Hect except from afar, and had formed an impression that was all abbreviations: grey clothes, hushed voices, angles. It was Ortus who mourned for them, but Ortus was one of the Emperor’s natural mourners. His mother had been the same. They’d both loved a funeral, which had been lucky for them, as funerals were one of her House’s natural resources. When they brought both facially obliterated corpses upstairs under the direction of Lady Pent, she watched Ortus weep stolid, stony-faced tears, which once again turned his sacramental paint into an underwater skull.
To properly identify them, Abigail’s husband-cavalier scared up the only flesh magician he could find. Finding other magicians at all was becoming difficult: the day-jewel and night-rock Tridentarius twins were so elusive that Harrow grew confused even trying to remember when she had last seen them. There was not enough room in the chilly morgue upstairs, and the dropping temperature was not immediately compromising, so they put the faceless bodies out on rubberized sheets in the dining room. It was