She must have seen them both on that first day—that muggy, sun-struck first day, when Teacher had given them the rings and the keys, and told them about the monstrous hypersomniac in the basement—but Harrow found she was startled when they arrived. It would have been difficult not to have been. The cavalier was bronzed and vigorous, an enormous, musclebound man in green, with a seafoam-coloured kilt and tooled leathers. This well-muscled individual was guiding a wheeled chair down the wide aisles between tables, and in the chair was what appeared to be a dead body, holding a little lacy umbrella of her own to keep off the drips. It was gowned appropriately in spindrift white skirts, and inappropriately in a little crocheted scarf of pilling white wool.
Harrowhark had known Ortus too long not to register the slight curl to his lip and the lack of maudlin suicide in his eyes: he was almost rigid with contempt. She had thought Ortus would find contempt too exhausting an emotion to bother with. The ghost holding the umbrella had her pale, sugar-brown hair cropped short, its curls gathered into a cap of silky ringlets. There was a gracile delicacy to her—a starved, wasted, childlike mien—and when she gave her umbrella to her cavalier, she actually rose to stand. A fine length of tubing emerged from her nose and was discreetly taped into the collar of her dress. Harrowhark had never seen its like before; it was a thin, stiffened cylinder of mucous epithelial tissue.
“It’s great, isn’t it?” she said to Harrow, by way of hello. She had a sweet, modulated voice, only a trifle breathy. “It’s a pulmonary drain. It goes all the way down to my lungs.”
“I have never seen such a thing before,” admitted Harrow.
“You wouldn’t have,” said the Seventh necromancer rapturously. “He came up with it, when he was fifteen.”
It seemed too stupid for Harrowhark to believe, but there could be no ambiguity in that woman’s gesture. Her paper-skinned hand pointed to one of the faceless corpses, the one without a rapier. It oughtn’t to have surprised her anymore that the relationships between every other scion of the Nine Houses seemed intimate, or incestuous, or familiar, or antipathic. She did not feel left out. She merely felt dislocated as Abigail said, “Are you sure it’s him, Dulcie?”
“Give me a minute,” said Dulcie, apparently, though who would have let themselves be called Dulcie unless faced with water torture was a question Harrow did not want the universe to answer. “I took a swab from the doorknob—I’ve got two prints, so if they correlate, that will tell us something…”
The grossly named Dulcie sat back down in the chair, and her cavalier pushed her alongside one corpse, and then the other. Harrowhark watched her work. She gently grated a bit off the heel of each stiffening hand—she took a minute sliver off each thigh, unbuttoning both sets of trousers without a blush or grimace—she cleaned under the fingernails (“Just for bacterial thalergy, you know”), and, in the end, sighed.
“The one on the left’s Cam, the one on the right’s Pal,” she said, proving her desire to saddle the world with diminutives. “Did the Sleeper get them?”
“Only by assumption,” said Harrowhark, while Abigail’s dolt of a husband said, “I bloody hope so.”
“Magnus,” Abigail said, a touch disapprovingly.
“Well, if the Sleeper didn’t, that’s two maniacs with an ancient weapon and a love of blowing off faces, dear,” said Magnus.
Maniac did not seem apt. The first death was maniac. Deuteros was riddled with far more holes than necessary. This had been a simple execution. The effects were grisly. It would be difficult ever to get a clear picture of what Sextus’s and Hect’s faces had looked like, as they were now sprayed indiscriminately across the back wall of the mortuary. From what Harrow had been able to reconstruct, and the relative time stamps of the deaths, it looked as if both representatives of the Sixth House had stood quietly with their backs to the wall, about an arm’s length apart from each other, and had their faces forcibly removed from very short range. First went one; the second had waited; then the other.
Harrow said, “The projectile exited out the back of the skull, and we haven’t been able to dislodge it from the wall. Fragments suggest a similarity. There is reasonable doubt, and then there’s unnecessary caution. I say the Sixth were killed by the same entity that killed