your nightgown, which had been short in the leg when you went away to Canaan House and was a sorry affair now, and your exoskeleton scraped quite loudly in that black silence as you took the bone-sheathed sword from its loverlike position next to you on the bed. You held it with the swaddled blade flat on your shoulder, your hands cupping the bottom of the hilt—still the pommel—and you did not strap on the rapier that the Emperor had given you.
It was lighter outside your rooms, in the corridor. The low yellow panel lights cast warped, skeletal shadows up and down the memorials of the Mithraeum. They had been turned down to faint blue-hued ambers to acknowledge the hours of sleep, and gave texture more than vision. To your Drearburh eyes, however, the passageway was flooded with light. That was why you saw her so clearly.
She stood at the curve of the passage, perhaps fifteen metres from you. She struck weird shadows in that low halo of cold yellow, the softly gleaming whites of her shift glowing like a shaft of light through green water. There were still smudges of petal in her pale brown curls, and her eyes were too dark to see, but you recalled their nightmarish blueness. Cytherea looked at you, turned toward you, and began to walk.
That walk! That shuffling, disconcerting, slithering walk! The body flung its arms before it for momentum, the legs stiff-thighed and lock-kneed, right-side arm moving in time with right-side leg, ridiculous, appalling. Those fixed dead fingers caught a skeletal arm wrapped in gold foil, amethysts studded like so many eyes between the knucklebones, and it clattered to the ground, and Cytherea tripped over it—without the head losing its tracking focus on you, those unblinking eyes adhered to yours—and the body splayed and juddered on the ground. Then the corpse began moving inchworm-fashion, pushed forward by the action of the legs, the forearms banging on the tiles, thrusting the blessed bones of some fallen faithful out the way as though unnoticed. It was as though a magnet were stuck in the meat, a magnet that craved some polar force within you.
This assemblage writhed closer. You were a holy Lyctor: Harrowhark the First, ninth necrosaint to the King Undying, heir to a hard-won power that burnt in you like fusion. It was not arrogance to name yourself one of the most powerful necromancers in the universe. You took one look at that relentless, freakish argument of limbs, and you fled.
You hurled yourself back inside your room and locked the door. You scrabbled inside your mouth—drew blood with your fingernails, bit your tongue—swabbed your reddened saliva on the door in the hasty whorls of a blood ward, and pushed a chair up and beneath the handle, mindlessly. You threw yourself to the ground, your heart rattling the bars of its ribcage prison.
There was nothing but silence. Your body was the greatest source of noise: your chattering breath, your noisily pumping blood, your mashing teeth. Everything else was profoundly dark and still.
And then, from the door, the warded door that should have burst its theorems outward upon even the touch of foreign magic—from the door there came the soft, scraping noise of someone dragging nails down steel. The handle eased downward in its latch, and hit the chair, and stopped.
Great, greasy silence. Then another desperate rattle. And then: nothing.
How long you lay on the cool glassy tiles, forehead pressed into a red welter against clear obsidian glass, one of your fists bunched in the rough knotted fretwork of the rug, you did not know. You could only mark the passing of time when the habitation settings kicked into action and the panels around the room diffused pre-waking light, intended to mimic a circadian sunrise. You were cold all over, shivering in your exoskeleton until the bone cuticles rattled into your skin. At some point you stood, mechanically, and you went and lay back down in bed. There was nothing else you could do.
* * *
It seemed unlikely that you slept. When you thought it was late enough in the notional morning you put on your mother-of-pearl robe and you rapped on Ianthe’s door. It was not late enough; she answered after a long, scuffling minute, with sleep in her eyes and her hair in dilute whey tangles over her neck and shoulders, wearing a bewildering short garment of violet chiffon.