she had stopped midstride. “The letter in question is constructed from six short marks stacked vertically three by three. There are two triangles on the top and bottom, which, along with some diagonal strokes, form a calligraphic S.”
“Nigenad,” said Harrow, without turning. “I did not ask you.”
“Three people are dead, my Lady Harrowhark,” said her cavalier. “One ranked Cohort necromancer. Two scions of the enigmatic Sixth House, quick in learning and wisdom if not in martial prowess. Am I to act only on your command, when the Sleeper comes for me?”
“Were you planning to do anything other than lie down and die?” she said, waiting for rage; dying for rage; hoping for the simulacrum of rage, if nothing else. “What do you think you can do, Ortus? Did you have a tactic, beyond stopping bullets with your body?”
“It would be within the family character, I agree,” said Ortus, meditatively. “My father died, simply because your mother and father asked him to. He took his own life when your parents handed him the rope, though he had a wife at home and, if he acknowledged it, a son.”
Harrow lowered the flimsy more out of instinct than intent. She found herself turning around to look Ortus full in the face, as best she could with the umbrella over his head, and the hood half-plastered to his scalp with rain despite the oilcloth’s best efforts, and his painted skull now a sad melange of alabaster grey and black. She looked at his underslept, roly-poly face, his deep black Drearburh eyes. They were not true black, as she had usually thought: in the shadow she could finally see a deep earthy undertone, like the ploughed-up additive ground in the planter fields. His grown-up features were suddenly ancient to her. She wanted to panic, to feel the icy knives of despair.
“You knew,” she said. “You knew the whole time that Mortus the Ninth died at their command.”
Now Ortus’s face changed. It slid a second time into paint-splattered, black-irised, hooded contempt. He looked at her as though she were tedious. He looked at her as though he did not know who she was. His contempt made the doors she heard in her ears slam in an orchestra of unfathomable sound. He looked at her as though she were a squalling infant; as though she had not spoken, but rather opened her mouth and vomited.
“Harrow,” he said curtly, “you are not the only person who can add up two and two, and arrive at four.”
Any reply she might have made was aborted by a sudden gust of rain through a broken window. A curtain of murky water splattered through the glass maw. The water carried with it a handful of flashing brown-and-steel objects, which fell in a tumbled heap on the rotten Canaan House corridor carpet. When they came to rest, she and Ortus stared down at a collection of large, rusted pipette needles, the hard plex type with measurement markings up the side.
“Would you like to know if I can see them also?” Ortus asked humbly, after a long rain-swept pause.
22
THE NIGHT AFTER YOU killed your thirteenth planet, you were beset by a dream wherein you sat down to dinner opposite the Body. This was far better than the normal travails of dinner, with its partakers all wearing the filmy mother-of-pearl Canaanite robes that clung to Mercymorn like starlight, turned Augustine ethereal, gave Ianthe jaundice, and rendered you a sacrificial parsnip; that trial where, if you did not eat enough, the Emperor of the Nine Houses told you kindly, “Try just a few more spoonfuls, Harrowhark,” as Ianthe repressed not her smirks. But in the dream you wore your thick dark vestments of the Ninth House, and sat only opposite the monstrous dead of the Locked Tomb, who wore the shabby black shirt and trousers of some particularly slovenly penitent. Both of you wore the sacramental skull paint, and you talked comfortably of very little—yet it felt as though it meant very much. And nobody made you eat.
Then the Body looked at you with those direct, incalculable eyes, and she said: “Harrowhark. Wake up.”
“Pardon?”
“Wake up. Now.”
You opened your eyes to the ceiling the long-lost Anastasia had never seen, twisted in the bedclothes she had never slept in. The thickly insulated blackout hangings covering the plex windows projected the high ceilings into an eternity of shadows, and you could barely perceive your hands in front of your face. You pushed away the coverlet. You were cold beneath