“A thesis I agree with,” said Ortus heavily. “The Sleeper, who sleepeth not. Perhaps a better name would have been.… the Waker.” (She searched her cavalier thoroughly for any evidence of humour, but found none, as per usual.) “It lies in an impervious coffin. It kills with a legendary weapon. What can we do against such a supernatural assault?”
The dreadfully named Dulcie was stroking a soft, wet lock of very dark hair between thumb and forefinger, quite close to the ruined ear of Camilla Hect. “The only thing you can ever do, when faced with an enemy too great for yourself,” she said. “Fight like a trapped animal in a sack.”
“I agree,” said her bronze statue of a cavalier. “Better that we make the first move. What is impervious? What is coffin?” (Harrow was astounded to hear the older man beside her mutter, “An adjective and a noun.”) “I say we muster all able-bodied cavaliers for an initial assault.”
“And die,” suggested Ortus ponderously.
“Better not to die as Deuteros and Sextus and Camilla the Sixth have died,” said the man. “If you think of the enemy as unassailable, shadow-priest, then the battle is lost already.”
Then this bronze statue cleared his throat, and added:
“I held to the faith of my fallible flesh;
Why should I think of the irradiating star?”
Harrow’s cavalier swung his head to confront this act of spoken poetry. He looked like a man who had stood on the bailey, beheld the enemy at his gates, and found them manifold and terrible. He stared as though the Seventh cavalier had revealed himself to be the Sleeper, done awful and inadvisable acts with Ortus’s mother, and compared Matthias Nonius to two shits.
“And that is how you would have your master end,” said her black-swaddled swordsman, “with her cavalier filled with shot, before a box that does not open?”
“Interesting hypocrisy, from a black cavalier of the Ninth sepulchre,” said his equally tedious opposite.
“All right, gentlemen,” said Magnus Quinn, with a slightly forced cheer. “Protesilaus, if I’m not wrong? I’m not? Good— Respectfully, I don’t agree with either of you. Ninth, you’re too good a man to roll over and wait for another death. Seventh, the last time I attacked a box I couldn’t open, it was my birthday and my wife had tied the ribbon too tightly. Let’s get everyone on side, inasmuch as that’s possible. Duchess Septimus. The Reverend Daughter. Lieutenant Dyas. United we stand, divided we fall, or so the saying goes.”
“I don’t know how much I can do,” confessed Dulcie, who was most likely Duchess Septimus, and who had wrinkled her nose when a fat drop of rain had fallen on it. The gleaming Protesilaus thrust the umbrella over her head. “I’ve … I didn’t really prove myself … there was nothing much to prove, on Rhodes. When I came here I thought it might be my chance to do something.”
She finished this rather helpless little speech by playing with a fold on her virginal white skirts. Harrowhark said bluntly, “Listen to your first instinct. There’s a tube in your chest, and you can barely walk.”
“I’ve felt heaps better since I got here,” Dulcie said defensively. “I’ve coughed a few times, but it’s mainly for show, isn’t it, Pro?”
“Do not mistake the thaw for the spring.
Our bud is not yet certain,”
quoth her cavalier.
Harrowhark deliberately did not watch for the hot flash of murder in her own cavalier’s eyes, though it at least leavened his thick, porridgy sadness. It must have been traumatic to see his only cultivated personality trait co-opted by someone who looked like the hero of his very own epics. It was more interesting to look at Abigail Pent—to look at those slender, workaday hands turning over the forearms and elbows of the body that was apparently Palamedes Sextus, examining. “No defence wounds,” Pent murmured. “Just like Judith … I wonder.”
The wind had picked up. It suddenly screamed shrilly over the glass-covered, vine-choked roof, bringing bullet sprays of hard rain in its wake. For a moment, Abigail shuddered. Then she straightened up and clapped her hands together, as though she led a class of unruly small children. “We’re all in this together,” she said, which was a typically Fifth assumption. The Ninth didn’t think anyone was in anything together, or if they were, they all had to disperse as soon as humanly possible to avoid splash damage. “I am beginning to suspect I know where the danger lies. Or at least, I’ve got a perfectly baseless assumption, and