in your arms. You often woke yourself up suddenly, to practise how quickly you could throw yourself into action. Without a properly ingested cavalier, you had only yourself to rely on; you had to work nine times harder. But you thought you at least knew your vulnerabilities.
You were eighteen years old now and a Lyctor of the First House, but in some secret chamber of your heart you clung grimly to the ways of the Ninth. Despite dead Harrow’s insistence that you become a generalist, you were on first instinct a bone magician. Your wards were bone wards; to some extent, blood wards. It was not that you did not account for spirit magicians—you had reasonably warded for everything, for every scenario both certain and uncertain: but your magic was at its heart still the magic of a Ninth House necromancer. This was your downfall.
You were in the bath when it happened. The Mithraeum’s quaint bathrooms had no sonic appliances. You could only bathe in water, which you had grown to accept. Ianthe openly enjoyed it, and kept saying you weren’t running it hot enough; but you did not quite believe that hot water wasn’t injurious. You bathed in a few centimetres of water somewhat below blood temperature, wrapped in your exoskeleton and behind your multiplicity of bone wards, and for some benighted reason you considered yourself safe.
The central ward in your bathroom was near the light fixture, where the protruding light made the ceiling tiles fragile and noncontiguous. You did not notice anything amiss until you saw fine grey grains in your bathwater, until you cupped this water in your palm, thinking it was soap, or that you were unusually dirty. Even when you saw the soft trickle of dying, pulverized bone drifting down from your ceiling ward, you still did not fully comprehend.
The milled bone lay in your hands, unresponsive and inert. Only when you tried to join it together did you realise it was dead, in the way only the oldest bones in the most historical part of the monument of Drearburh were dead: the bones whose remnant thanergy had trickled out of them over nearly ten thousand years, like water from a pinhole in a bucket, leaving behind calcium dust too far gone to answer a necromancer. If the bones interred in the Mithraeum had been subject to time’s full ravages, not stalled by the gentle touch of the Prince Undying, only their most ancient stratum would have resembled the specks in your hands.
It took perhaps five seconds from speck, to trickle, to realisation: your wards had been destroyed. And then you heard a crash from the foyer—and then your bathroom door exploded open.
Your immediate reaction was to cocoon yourself in a thick shell of tendon-fused bone. This would have been a good trick if it had worked. Nothing responded. Your exoskeleton slid off your body as though embarrassed by you. The bone studs in your ears were numb. The bone chips you kept tucked in niches throughout the bathroom did not twitch as you pulled on them. Every bone in reach was dormant and immobile. You were far more naked than if you had simply taken off all your clothes, which you had in fact also done. And the Saint of Duty stood in the doorway with his spear, and his sword, and his tender green eyes in his hard concrete face, as though your wards were nothing.
He drew back his arm and hurled his spear at your heart. You flung yourself so violently to the right that the entire tub swayed and tipped onto its side, with an enormous porcelain crack and a rush of tepid water that sluiced across the tiles to lap against the toes of his boots. The sword you had balanced across the bath, its bone scabbard flaking away in chunks like the candied coating from a sweet, clattered onto the floor. You grabbed for it but he stepped forward and kicked it away.
You were grovelling in half a centimetre of soapy water and gritty skeletal residue at the feet of your assassin. The spear he had thrown, and the sword you could barely use, were out of your reach. Your layers of traps and contingency plans had been rendered abruptly useless. You were soaking wet, and you were naked.
It was probably desperation that saved your life. You had trained your whole necromantic career to move for space: to fight from a distance. The Lyctor must have anticipated that. He