her, use everything you had ever learned from watching Mercymorn the First, and fuse her spine like a hangman’s rope.
Ianthe looked at you, and in the paleness of her skin and in the shadows of her lips was her death, and yours.
Then she rolled over and covered her head with her satin pillow.
“Go ahead. Kill me,” she said, muffled through a thick layer of down and pillowcase. “I have to train with Augustine in less than five hours anyway and I’ve stayed up too late. Death is preferable.”
There was no answer to that, naturally, except to sheath your sword, return to your bedroom, and put yourself to bed, defeated.
24
IT WAS NO SECRET TO YOU, or to anybody in the claustrophobic, smothering schoolroom that was the Mithraeum, that Ianthe’s sword-fighting training was at the end of the line. The Saint of Patience had none left for her. Her ineptitude would have been a negligible problem had it not continued when Ianthe was in the River—had her doubts not gummed up the mechanism of Naberius Tern’s mindless sword-arm. You had watched the submerged Ianthe’s strong, upright, boyish posture flounder as the right arm dropped the sword. A psychological block, certainly, but one projected into the dead soul that stood to defend her body when the mind went voyaging.
There was more pressure on her than on you. The eyes that fell on you were now less critical, because in those eyes you were a woman already dead.
Your eighteenth birthday passed without anyone noticing, even you. One night before you went to sleep you thought to yourself, restlessly: another year. You recalled it as you always did: the memorial to the two hundred who had died seizing, kicking, and choking as their neurotransmitters were poisoned into overdrive. You silently begged them to stay their hands, as you always did. You never asked for forgiveness. Then you slept. Most people would have iced a cake, or something.
It was soon after your seventeenth year passed that you acknowledged a truth you had known for some time: Ortus the First had to die.
His Ninth House name no longer bothered you, now that you knew about Anastasia. It seemed reasonable that the foundress responsible for establishing many of your House’s naming conventions had chosen to honour her fellow Lyctors, in the days before their names were veiled in holy secrecy. It was just a banal and uncomfortable coincidence, as though he’d carried the name of a dead childhood pet.
The Saint of Duty’s death went from option to necessity the day you realised his true power.
Your narrow foyer was a necromancer’s dream: easy to ward, and to ward thoroughly. You had washed the whole little vestibule with a gossamer-thin layer of regrowing ash, and pressed bone of each type into whorls in the walls. On breach, anyone passing through would have their arms ripped from their sockets and their legs whirlpooled down into deep bogs of boiling-hot bone that crept up their bodies like incendiary gel. To follow up, they would be run through with 4,987 sharpened, flexible needles of your own temporal bone: unbreakable, reactive, instant.
Only an idiot would have stopped there. Your quarters had windows. If you had wanted to invade anyone’s space, you would have put on a haz—you knew a real Lyctor didn’t even need that—crawled over the outside of the habitation ring, and found the inevitable gap in the room’s armour. There were no such gaps in your quarters. You had studied the floor plan and spent hours perched atop a ladder of skeletons, sliding hot gobbets of your blood and spit into the crawlspaces above the wall panels. You had stood at the docking bay and opened the airlock on a sack of bones, and walked back inside with them pattering parallel over the outside hull as you guided them to your windows and warded the plex with them. You had sent them down the plugholes in your pump sink and in the shining white edifice of the tub. You got the beginnings of a tension headache merely from the wards’ reaction to Ianthe Tridentarius visiting your bedroom. If she had noticed the fine bone dust you’d blown all over her clothes—a glitter of thanergy on all her robes—she had not said a word, which made you suspect that she knew and was doing worse to you in secret. You’d found none of her traps, and it made you jittery.
Naturally, none of your spaces could be considered safe. You slept with your sword