You thought: I’ll end it. The skeletons—you had made their legs sharpened stakes, driven them into anything soft and jammed and glued them on to anything hard—were tilling up the damned thing with their fleshless hands. You turfed up boiling rock and flesh with your javelin, trying to scrape away the surface, trying to uncover the brain. It was too young and weak to have made a skull. Gathering up your hate, your fear, and your serenity, you thrust your javelin down the moment you perceived a wrinkle of hemisphere, straight through the lobes, and you made the spike a wheel, and you cleaved in half that which was already dead.

Less than sixty seconds later you were curled up on the surface of the planetoid, half-dead with cold, trying to flush your extremities and dilate your blood vessels. Wading out of the River had never been a problem for you; you were always happy to go. The night-stricken planet had not reacted overmuch—you prided yourself on being the knife that cut silently—but the sandstorm had died as though arrested in midair. Particles that had been whipped miles up into the atmosphere were pattering down like rain. It grew exceedingly dark as the suns set in unison, and Mercy had clipped a little light to her ever-present clipboard as she wrote, which created a tiny corona of her pen, and the clipboard, and the softly falling sand.

A shaft of light fell on the dead beauty of the Body. She was always there, when you made the cut. She was always there to welcome you home from the abattoir. She thoroughly screwed up your peripheral vision: at times you panicked and speared her through, and she would only look at you with an unreadable, lifeless expression.

“One fewer for Number Seven to eat on the way in,” said the Saint of Joy. “Eight minutes thirty-four,” she added, because Mercy always lied when one thought she wasn’t going to, and never lied when one assumed she would, and mixed it up every so often to unbalance everyone further. “Not really good enough, Harrowhark.”

You swallowed down large quantities of icy saliva in the cold, in the dark. Within your helmet, frigid strands of hair had glued themselves to the back of your neck with sweat: you were going to need another haircut. You could not keep the querulous note out of your voice when you said, “That’s two minutes off my previous time, eldest sister.”

“Yes,” said the Lyctor, and you could imagine her focus behind the dark plex of her haz mask as she carefully drew another line on the graph she was plotting. “You’ve been improving rapidly. But you could take it down in four minutes, infant, and it would still be not really good enough.”

Your tongue slurred in your mouth: “Because these are so different from the real Resurrection Beast?”

“No,” said the Saint of Joy, and her voice took on the gossamer thinness of a razor blade, poisoned by being perfectly reasonable. “You could take it down in two. You could take it down in one. But what it boils down to, baby sister, is that you’ve got hypothermia and I don’t!”

All the way back to the Mithraeum, in the tiny shuttle, you brooded on that. So many ways you had tried to contravene the inescapable fact that, when you went into the River, your necromancy on the meat side fell apart. Mercy never had to ask the unkind elements for her namesake, but you were unutterably vulnerable, no matter what you tried. Constructs crumbled, even ones you’d made of permanent ash. Your wards faltered. Your theorems failed. Bone you had manipulated would hold shape so long as you removed all artificial stimulation, but it took tedious trial and error to discover how to make your exoskeleton inert so that upon reawakening you would not find yourself weighed down by dissolved collagen. When your brain travelled back to your flesh, your arts would all spring neatly into being as though a valve had been turned to let them flow once more; but until then …

This was the secret of the Lyctoral process. When a normal Lyctor’s soul went to the River, the dead, blank energy that had once been their cavalier kept the lights on in their body. A normal Lyctor’s dormant shell responded with mechanical precision to threats mundane or fantastic. It could normalise its own temperature; it could filter poisons and toxins; it could repair damage with preternatural speed; and, of course, it could fight like a highly disciplined tiger. A Lyctor’s limbs remembered all the training of her stolen second self, and would use it, ruthlessly and perfectly, until the Lyctor came back to reclaim them.

A normal Lyctor’s body could look after itself. But it had become obvious to everyone: you were not a normal Lyctor.

13

NOT A NORMAL LYCTOR was God’s favourite euphemism. Your assigned brothers and sisters favoured different terms. (The Saint of Patience quite liked “diet Lyctor.” You sometimes planned Augustine’s death, and you did not make it quick.) But you found chilly comfort in being within a range of normality, rather than on the wrong side of a binary. Within that range was also Ianthe the First. On that same night, after you came back safely to the arms of the Mithraeum, you found her sat in the tawdry quarters of her forebear glumly eating soup.

Her exquisite Canaanite robe hung from a peg—you noticed that the hem was muddy—and she was wearing one of the ridiculous skirts and shirtwaists she had unearthed from the wardrobe, all of which had Valancy carefully embroidered on the inside seams. The skirts and waists were all beautifully cut for someone of a different height and body type than Ianthe possessed. They were tight where they should have been loose and loose where they should have been tight. They looked like her burial clothes, and she looked as though she had emerged fifty years after that burial.

This particular garment, a deep spinel-tinged satin, exposed one shoulder entirely, and it was the shoulder of what you had come to think of as the arm: the right arm that Cytherea the First had removed just above the elbow, with somebody else’s reattached wholesale. The new limb hung heavy from its olecranal point with a bluish seam. It looked fat and swollen and unused, which was ridiculous, because you had never been able to see anything wrong with it. It had been very nicely matched to the original until she had ceased using it altogether, and the difference was more pronounced each day. Unconscious of your critical eye, she scratched fretfully at the line until red hives appeared.

“Fifteen ten,” said your sister Lyctor, as soon as she noticed you.

You said, “Eight thirty-four,” and she said, “My God! Hark at the creature. Eight thirty-four … and such a dreadful pity that it doesn’t even matter.”

She was in a filthy mood, if she was wearing that thing, with her arm exposed. You were not in the best frame of mind yourself.

“Let us interrogate,” you said. “Does it not matter because despite cutting three whole minutes off your previous time you could never hope to challenge me in this arena, or does it not matter because I’m going to die to Number Seven?”

“You’re being damned optimistic if you think you’ll live to see Number Seven,” she said, blue eyed, those oily little freckles glittering almost pinkly above the dress. They reflected the red rims of her eyelids. You thought that she had been crying. “I’m amazed you made it here from the docking bay without getting assassinated, Harry.”

“I will not answer to that sobriquet.”

“Close the door and I’ll call you Nonagesimus.”

There were a few academic reasons that you closed the door, and from the inside, rather than behind you as you left. Her quarters held some measure of safety for you, as she warded with the paranoid focus of an escaped murderer, and therefore half as tightly as you did. You got better autopsies of her encounters with Beasts than you did from your own, as Augustine was wont to explain significantly more to her than either he or Mercy did to you.

But by the Sewn Tongue, those fucking rooms. Those candied, white-and-gold-striped rooms, those crystal-chandeliered rooms with a bed as big as some of the penitential cells back home. You’d hated them from first sight, as instantaneously as Ianthe took a fancy to them. You despised the cobwebby, overornate furniture, with filigree on curlicue on flourish, the masses of embroidery thread, the hangings on everything, swath of fabric atop another swath of fabric squashed down on a plush divan that rustled if you sat on it; and most upsettingly, the paintings. They were life-sized nudes in languorous attitudes, generally in oils, and all of the same two persons. They were enthusiastically executed. The duo posing held a variety of objects both likely and unlikely. You had once been fool enough to recommend that Ianthe take them down, at which point she had rustled up another from the bathroom and hung it in pride of place above an overpainted dresser. It was not that you were a prude. It was simply that sitting in a room with those paintings was like having a long visit with someone who kept laughing at their own puns.