it with the little silver arc lighter he kept in his breast pocket, and pass it silently to his brother Lyctor. Ortus was impassive. There was not a trace of blood on his clothing. There was not a stray lump of viscera upon the shabby shirt, nor on the mother-of-pearl cloak still slung over his shoulder. There was no betrayal of any emotion on his face: not the surprise that had dawned over his heavy-lidded eyes earlier, nor anger, nor even dissatisfaction. He caught your gaze. You held his.
And the Saint of Duty lifted his lit cigarette to you in an unmistakable salute.
26
ONE DAY, HARROWHARK’S EYE was caught by the rain drizzling outside on the docking terrace, and by black figures rising in the fog. They were on the very edge of the terrace. She tugged her hood deep down over her head, walked outside into the rain—she kept bone chips clutched between her knuckles so that they would not grow wet from sweat or weather—and approached. One of the black figures resolved itself in that grey, stinking blanket of cloud: large and imposing, like the midday sun amid clouds. It was Coronabeth Tridentarius.
She was turned away from Harrow, and her riot of hair—half-caught in a fillet, half-escaping—was soaking wet, a dark and crinkling amber in the rain. She was not fighting or arguing. She was still as a statue, and ready and waiting as a dog.
The figure behind her was much smaller and slighter, the aseptic robes of his office a bleached, blued grey with the water. The braid pinned high on his head was so pale as to be white, and his rain-sodden chainmail kirtle gleamed, wetly, amid the fog. At her creeping pace, Harrowhark had covered only half the distance when she heard Silas Octakiseron say, clear above the patter of falling drops:
“And somewhere out there, may all the blood of your blood suffer even a fraction of what I have suffered.”
He pushed. The eldest princess of Ida dropped from the side of the docking bay with swanlike ease. She simply tipped off the side, neither folding nor seizing—there one moment, a golden star, and then gone. There was no question of going to her aid. The Eighth House necromancer stood there with the wind flapping his wet alabaster robes, his braid torn to wisps and ribbons, and he did not even look over the side.
But he did look to Harrowhark.
“Defend yourself, Octakiseron,” she called out. “The black vestals have only one answer for murder.”
“The black vestals only ever had one answer for anything,” was the reply, in his profoundly deep, gorgelike voice. He looked at her: from their distance of about five bodies apart his eyes were umbrous in his white and stricken face. “The question came, Why … and the black vestals said, Because. Now you have come to me, you cur of the nighttime, you fry of slavery, you have done what you have done, and you say to me, Defend yourself? How could I?”
“I don’t give a damn about White Glass mysteries or cryptics,” she said. “I care that you just pushed one of the Tridentarii to her death.”
“Death?” said Silas.
He looked out again at all the rolling fog, at the clouds that obscured the grinding sea down to which Coronabeth was most likely still falling. From closer up, Harrow saw that he was all in disarray: his clothes were smudged and a few of his buttons were not done up. The rain and the fog had lashed him terribly.
Harrow took her hands from her pockets and strewed her chips upon the ground. From each chip—she felt a pop, pop, pop at the back of her brain from the thalergy expenditure—she unfurled a full appendicular skeleton, extending the bone in a hurry so that none of the cortex could mix with water. The dull gleam of their compact bone shone like marble in the wet. Silas Octakiseron looked at her five full constructs with his lip curling.
“Her filthiness is on her feet,” he murmured. “She has not remembered her end.”
“For God’s sake, raise your hands, Octakiseron,” she said. “Or make me strike down an unarmed man.”
And Silas said, “Is this how it happens, then?”
He turned away. She saw what he meant to do, and her skeletons skittered forward on the rain-slick concrete of the docking terrace. But it was for nothing: Silas Octakiseron had launched himself fearlessly into space after the tumbling body of Coronabeth Tridentarius. He fluttered in the wind and rain