crawl like a worm to whatever clinging scrap of solace she would give you. All your slithering, degraded desperation for condolence you would give to your sister Lyctor with a brazen thirst that you would never come back from. She would be your end, as surely as the hammer to the oxygen-sealant machine of your childhood. You would have reached for her with the mindless desire of an infectious disease. You would have whored yourself to her as necrosis to a wound.
So maybe it was for the best that after a pregnant pause the Princess of Ida said: “Wow! Not how I imagined this happening, at all,” and you heard her hasty footsteps retreat, away, back down the corridor whence she came. Then she was gone.
You lay prone on the cool black tiles, staring up at the smears on the ceiling where your wards had been—dazed and despairing, nearly too dead to sew yourself back up. In the back of your head you heard the Secundarius Bell pealing, pealing, extents beyond any Ninth sacred composition, and never called by any Tomb ringer.
Aloud, you said through swollen lips: “The Saint of Duty must die.”
And on the bed, the Body said, “Yes.”
25
YOUR LETHAL OATH WAS not reflected in any more general solemnity in the Mithraeum. Despite the apocalypse you had suffered, not much seemed to change. Everyone was far too busy to care. The next time you sat down to talk to Teacher, your heart in your throat and your tea stubbornly undrunk, he did not even mention it. Surely he knew. Surely he must have known everything. You were too prideful to beg salvation, but too stupid not to blurt, as a diversion from your own panic: “Lord, I saw the Saint of Duty kissing the body of Cytherea the First.”
Part of his biscuit dropped off in his tea. He looked at it with genuine consternation, then at you with equally genuine consternation, then back at the biscuit. “Harrow—Harrowhark, I hate to ask, but are you certain?”
Even God distrusted you. “Teacher, I swear by the Locked Tomb.”
“I wouldn’t swear by that in this instance,” he murmured, and took his dented teaspoon to fish out a quivering and deliquescent glob of ginger biscuit. Then he looked at you. There were sleep marks beneath his eyes, he was not wearing his halo of infant phalanxes and pearl-coloured leaves, and his hair looked only hastily brushed. He ran one hand through it, as though conscious of your critical gaze. “Well,” he said, eventually, “that’s unfortunate.”
“Is it not a sin?” You knew you sounded like a quisling. You knew you sounded like a prattling gossipmonger. What you really wanted to say was: Lord, I was in my bathtub, and he drank my wards dry of thanergy, and I burst his eyeballs before he could destroy me. I have not slept in forty-eight hours. I asked Mercymorn how best to stimulate my own cortisol, to keep me awake. Lord, she did, and I fear I have done something to my hypothalamus. “Don’t you think it’s strange?”
“Only in that the closest thing to interest Ortus ever showed in anybody was in Pyrrha, and in the criminals he hunted,” said the Emperor of the Nine Houses. “When he kicked that Edenite commander out an airlock, it was like seeing a man on his wedding day. Not exactly romance though … Harrow, over ten thousand years I’ve known that man, and he is legendarily unamorous. I have watched six other Lyctors carry out a myriad’s worth of inadvisable love affairs with one another, because it is a very long time to be alone, but never him. He was unassailable. I won’t believe he’s doing anything to Cytherea. Everyone liked her, he liked her, but there’s a huge leap between liking and—corpse compulsion.”
You stared, feeling mildly drunk and unutterably pitiful, at your repeatedly uneaten biscuit.
Teacher said quietly, “You must think us all a depraved set of immortal criminals.”
You said nothing. He pressed, “Harrow, do something normal. Learn how to make a meal. Read a book. Go ahead and prepare—our lives revolve around us all preparing … but take the time to rest. Have you slept lately?”
It was the first time you realized God could not understand you.
And nobody cared, and nobody paid you the slightest bit of attention, including the Saint of Duty, who was as whole, and as normal, and as two-eyed as ever. You had not held out much hope that you had done anything permanent. The only