Harrow said, “There was nobody else.”

His mask slipped, and not the mask made of alabaster and black paint. Ortus looked at her with his steady dark gaze, and his heavy face flickered; she realised with electrified astonishment that he was exasperated. “You never did possess an imagination,” he said, and, obviously upset with himself, his mask reappeared as swiftly as if slapped back on with both hands. He did not know that she was far more interested than angry. But he added in a hurry, “Forgive me, my lady. I am overset and afraid. I do not yet know how to die. The Locked Tomb is far from here, as are its graces, and so I forget myself.”

“You do, I agree,” said Harrowhark, shortly, and became exasperated herself, though more with herself than him. Ortus could not be blamed for simply being Ortus. “Forget dying, Nigenad, and let’s go. It is obviously my fault if I have failed to impress upon you who I am, necromantically. We serve the great corpse that lies dead and unwaking, and should not let our hearts falter or fail regarding some fiendish somnambulist. In the worst-case scenario you can simply declaim to it, which ought to cure anyone’s insomnia.”

“You are very humourous,” said her cavalier with perfect solemnity. “I understand. I will follow, Lady—and let duty be my pauldrons and casque, and loyalty my sword.”

The skeleton construct gestured to them both as they made the initial step to follow, and Harrow was struck when it opened its yellow-molared mouth.

“Is this how it happens?” it said.

9

YOU COULD NOT SAY with perfect accuracy that you woke up. Having achieved a grotesque mollience and dripped and resolved into a bad-smelling puddle of yourself, you did piece yourself back together again: your eyes opened—you were lying flat on your back—and, slowly, carefully, with great effort of soul, you congealed. A weird, hard wad was present in your lungs, pairing each breath with a hideous trachea whistle. Otherwise you were fine, though dishevelled. Your robes were askew. Your chest was heavy, but not with water, with—the shadow of a memory, or the last remembrance of a dream. For a moment you shivered all over. After your lungs, your eyes were the second thing to connect, and they perceived a room both big and dark, with spatters of quiet yellow light. This light resolved the shadowed angles of a high and vaulted ceiling. You recalled the wetness—you recalled the corpses—but then that recollection slithered away. The only thing you could hold on to was where you had been sat. You would know if all your sensation was removed; you would know if your brain had burnt away. You were the Reverend Daughter, and you had been placed in a pew.

A heavy weight pressed on your hips and legs. You strained to see, chin tucked hard against the top of your chest, and beheld with relief your double-handed sword. Your relationship with it was becoming increasingly complex: you hated its presence, but the world without it would be unimaginable. You smelled blood. You smelled something else more distantly; above the blood hung the crisp, faecal sweetness of a rose. You struggled to sit up: the breath seized in your lungs, and you worried yourself out of a thrusting cough just as a hand touched your shoulder, lightly, in warning. You nearly flinched off your seat.

“Quiet,” said Ianthe, beneath her breath.

She was sitting next to you, an incandescent pillar of white, staring straight ahead. The look on her face was typical of her, a recollection; an icy, exhausted tedium, with top notes of intrigued disgust. You were dazed. You hated her to touch you. You glued the sword to the back of the pew with a push, the bone lifting it and muffling the noise, sticking in hot gobs to the genuine wood as you swung your legs over to press your toes to the floor. And you saw where you were, and you were immediately stricken with horror.

You had been laid in a pew halfway down a small, exquisite chapel. Now that you could look, you recognised the tender and yellow light as that which came from hundreds of candles. They lit an interior of shining charcoal-coloured stone, layered with whorls of bone—bone everywhere, bone enough for a hundred Ninth House tomb chapels: the chancel formed of long carved runnels of bone, fretworked into human lace; the black check tiles polished granite beneath your feet, their white counterparts soft worn squares of femur, orange in that lenient candle light; and the seats of wood—wood like you’d first seen in Canaan House, real, brown, glimmering wood, polished to the particular sheen that neither stone nor bone could take. You stared up at a plex cruciform window: cold stars outside, gleaming with a weird and unearthly light. You stared up at skulls: an ossuary of skulls, a multitude of skulls, set into the wall, overlapping in empty-eyed rows, set cheek-by-jowl to await infinity. Thin sheets of metal had been worked over this lovely mass of faceless dead, in shadowed tints: deep red crimsons, smoky amethysts, lightless navy. House colours. House heroes brought here to rest. Slender columns of white tapers bathed those bones in forgiving lights that made them beautiful in the way only bones could be for you; the candles were wrapped in different colours, which made them look like the dressed-up throats of flowers, or rings on long slender fingers. And great clusters of these candles shone down on a central altar, and on the central altar was a body.

You were at a funeral. You knew its bride; you’d killed her.

You sat in a pew in the chapel where had been laid the time-apprehended body of Cytherea the First. In order to survive the gaucherie of your presence, you sent your brain voyaging elsewhere. You tucked your hands deep inside the veil of your nacreous sleeves and slumped so that the snowy rainbow gauze hid your face. Even the vague pressure of the blade at your back caused the gorge to rise up in your chest and your heart to hammer wildly as though trying to construct a barricade, but at least the threat of coyly spewing kept you present and sane; you weren’t that far gone. It was only the fourth funeral you had ever been to where you had been responsible for the corpse.

The corpse on the altar was covered in little blush rosebuds, scattered thickly over her, a roseate white like seconds-old bone. They lay in sheaves in her arms; they were tucked in her pallid brown curls and pressed to her feet. On her sweet dead mouth there hovered a rueful frown. Once upon a time you might have fallen to position on the kneeler—soft and supple human leather, buttery, lovely—and thanked the Tomb that you had lived to see the death of a Lyctor, enshrined so, in such a place. You would have pressed your prayer beads to your mouth with one knuckle caught between your lips, the knuckle of your great-grandmother that represented the Rock, and the Universe, and God. Now you considered whether or not you could pass out again.

Before the altar knelt Mercymorn. Her shimmering white robe had fallen down her shoulders, and she was weeping—the sound was not articulated aloud, but her shoulders rocked as though her sobs were an explosion. She ground her molars audibly, so much so that they sounded like walnuts going through a rock polisher. You could not imagine the Saint of Joy weeping with anything other than fury or disappointment.

Next to Mercy knelt God. Next to God knelt somebody new. You could only see the back of the head, and you surmised they were fair-haired. That was all. The stranger was tall, kneeling—taller than the Emperor, and taller than Mercy. They wore the iridescent robe of the First House, and you could not sense them: another black hole in a triplet of black holes, scooping out the space in front of you.

After a moment, the new figure said in a light, masculine tenor, “I will have a full psychological meltdown if you don’t stop that ghastly noise, Mercy.”

The Saint of Joy gritted out: “I will kill you if you talk to me right now, you mean-souled little man.”

The God of the Nine Houses said, “Stop it,” and they were silent.

The molar-clunching subsided gradually. You wove your fingers together in your deep pearly sleeves and bent your thumbs backward nearly to the point of dislocation. Ianthe looked at you, and when you looked at her in the candlelight—her eyes not betraying her; right now, they might have been blue—you were struck by her exhaustion. She had been dimmed, somehow. Something had been taken from her since you watched her scream on the floor of the shuttle. Her line of sight flicked to the gap at the front of your robe—you shouldered forward to close it—and she quirked her eyebrows in brief, enervated amusement.

You mouthed, Where are we? But she did not answer.