THE FIRST TIME THE Saint of Duty tried to take your life, you did not anticipate it. If you had been a kernel less paranoid, a trifle less disturbed, you might have given Ianthe Tridentarius the pleasure of opening the note labelled Upon the death of Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Your only hope for that note was that it contained a single sentence along the lines of, Get what joy you can from my corpse, you devious bitch, but it was written by a previous self and you could not risk a guess.

It was only a few days into your internment within the Mithraeum. Ever since you disgraced yourself with Cytherea’s midsection you had avoided all social meals, and you tended to scavenge food as you passed through the bizarre space that everyone called the kitchen. It was a long, clean, barren room where electric lights cast long shadows on pots and pans older than Drearburh, yet spared time’s depredations. At this point you had not yet figured out your exoskeleton, but had managed to fix a prototype bone scabbard to your lower back, and spent most of the time limping around with it as though scoliotic. You had taken a portion of some kind of murky stew left warm on top of the stove, ravenous, not yet knowing what the Emperor would tell you later: that a Lyctor could persist perfectly well without food, but would not last long without water. (“Cyrus was half-mummified before we worked that one out,” he would go on to reminisce fondly.)

Your mistake was not spiriting the food back to your rooms. Ianthe’s room was not yet an option. In that first week you were still numb; you were tired, you were hungry, and you sat down at the countertop to eat your tepid supper, and had gotten through maybe five spoonfuls before the sword emerged from the middle of your chest.

The aim for your pulmonic valve was unerring, but he had put himself at the mercy of your third and fourth ribs. This was a mistake your assailant would never make again. Always your bosom friends, they unfurled for you then like the springtime. Thick ropes of costal cartilage burst from your breast to fix your assailant’s sword in place: your ribs became jaws, your sternum the neck of a spring. Your blood sprayed into your indifferent soup, and the rapier stuck fast. You wrestled yourself backward; your phalanx bones burst through your fingertips like knives, and, too frightened for anything sophisticated, you raked blindly into the meat of the fatless and muscular thighs behind you.

Your claws turfed up the meat of his hips and pelvis, but you would come to learn that Ortus the First did not respond to pain. He moved—you were dragged with him, off your stool, away from your blood-spattered soup—and you let his rapier go, dilating the bone so that he stumbled backward and you went forward, rolling over the countertop, spilling your bowl, dislodging pots and pans, and causing a hell of a noise.

A chip of bone floated near where the rapier had clipped your rib. You popped it out of yourself and from that almost-living bone sprang femurs, melted on either side into patella, into pelvis, into a skeleton seething with regrowing ash. You tore one of your construct’s ribs from its cage before it hurled itself at the necrosaint, and the rib you wrenched free had enormous and generous give: the bubbly innards separated from the strong, compact cortex as though created for that very purpose. The centre for shape, the outside for strength. The whole crumbled in your palms when you squeezed. You were borne up by a current of bone, twenty sets of arms sprung from tubercles you had made sticky and thrust into the ground, enfolding you in an armoured nest of skeletal limbs.

You marvelled at how easy it was. You barely had to think of it and it would be done, at a cost you considered negligible. But your blood was pouring out fast, and something bad had happened to some relatively important muscles, and you had no time to do anything but cut the flow and save the damage for later.

At that point, you took your first opportunity to really look at him. This was a fool’s move: why didn’t you run? You chose to watch, as though you could learn anything? A less critical party might’ve pointed out that you’d had a surprise gift of twelve inches of steel through the chest and made your pecs sproing the blade back out with your own ribcage, but you had never been party to excuses. You were startled by him all over again: by this ramshackle, burnt-out Lyctor, by the skin that clung to the skull, by that point-blank, stretched-thin face. Ortus the First did not look as though he needed meat or even water. There was a strangely burnt look to his dark brown skin, a burnt or otherwise oxidised look, not assisted by that shaven cap of rust-coloured hair. You hung, poised, for a moment not sure if you were hallucinating the whole thing. That hesitation cost.

From protoskeletal dust you conjured five full constructs: five constructs only as good as you were, tired and hungry. They scrambled like huge spiders across the counter and went for him. The Saint of Duty shouldered his goddamned spear. That first time you were absolutely affrighted: a spear, a spear for the offhand. He used the butt of his sword—it would be lying to say that you now regularly called it the pommel—to smash the first construct’s skull to powder. The force was enormous. You tried to prop the skeletons back together from within your net, reknobble the spine, mould it with ash as a second skull’s mandible got flicked off into the stovetop. A third construct was beheaded with the spear, swung through the cervical vertebra—it became a shrapnel of bones—and for the last two, your killer lost patience. He sucked the thanergy from their bones and it felt like a slap to your face. They disappeared into gritty puffs of bone smoke.

At this point you finally thought to run. More fool you. The nest of arms swung you around, prepared to be squeezed through the doorway. You shaped the net into a tight fretwork, springy, malleable. Although this was beautiful and worked a treat for mobility, you sacrificed resilience in the process. He threw his spear, almost casually, into this fretwork, and the net deformed fluidly on impact, and so it was through the bone that his spearpoint lodged into your large intestine. This sounded similar to a nail being rammed into a sausage. Your blood gushed like carbonated water. You tumbled through the doorway in a cascade of jostling, bouncing bits of bone, the scabbard jolting you roughly, rolling over and over until you lay bleeding at the feet of—

“Ortus!” said Mercymorn. She did not sound horrified, but deeply peeved. Your vision swam, and you smelled hot toast. “What are you doing??”

You curled on your side. The black haze was already starting to dim around your edges. You were not so apt with healing yourself, back then. You heard: “Is she dead?—Stay there, you idiot! Hands where I can see them! What were you thinking? Oh, he’s going to be furious! You egg!”

It seemed hateful to you that in death you should be treated like a prey animal some domestic predator had brought inside. You heard the Saint of Duty say in his flat, joyless voice: “I don’t answer to you.”

The spear was removed. You still remembered acutely what that felt like. In the midst of that sensation, quick, light fingertips tapped a symphony over your back, arresting the flow of blood, seizing your flesh, cutting off circulatory shock; it was only then that you really began to understand what Mercymorn could do. With another fingertip, she tapped above your eyebrow, and your pituitary gland spewed out a flood of neuropeptides that immediately replaced the adrenaline squirting through your system.

She was saying: “It’s not fair of you to try to bump them off when we’d get in trouble for it. They can die well enough on their own, you toad. This one’s all of twelve years old.”

This was not close to accurate, even given your lie, but fine. He murmured something. She said back, sharply: “Quick enough for anyone’s satisfaction. Look! Look!! She can’t even heal … told him her integration had retarded … said she couldn’t stanch … and I’m not cleaning up this place, you are. Yuck. There’s bone in the grouting.”

Ortus the First said, “The Heralds will be here in eight months.”

“I’m well aware of that, thanks,” said Mercy. “You go flip some planets to give us a firebreak.”

Ortus the First said, “Now you’re telling me my own job.”

“Oh, I hate you! I’ve always hated you, you dreary, repetitive leg,” said Mercymorn passionately, and then you felt her thumb press down on your lower back, and your gastrointestinal tract—so interrupted by spearpoint—flushed, deep and warm, and you felt some of that twisting pain within you. You could barely feel it anyway, you were so running with hormones. It was the best you’d felt since before you’d gone to Canaan House. Then she said, more reasonably: “I know what you’re doing, and it’s not like I don’t understand it, but if you’d wanted to smother the kittens you could do it more cleanly by knocking her out and dropping her out the airlock…”

She trailed off suggestively. The Saint of Duty said stonily, “I do things face-to-face.”