The Saint of Duty could bypass your wards at any time. The Saint of Duty was a thanergy void. The Saint of Duty was the ultimate nemesis of a bone adept. You would never be able to sleep again.

It was at this point that someone, obviously drawn by the noise from down the corridor, tiptoed over the mess at your front door and peered inside. You did not have to feel her presence to know it was her: you knew the sound of her shoes.

“Harrow?” Ianthe ventured, from somewhere near the door. Then she obviously stopped and saw you naked, bloodied, flayed in your own anguish, with soapsuds still on your feet. You hallucinated that you could smell her: sweat, musk, vetiver.

You saw your probable future clearly. You had not until that point understood the danger.

If Ianthe Tridentarius knelt beside you then, no matter with what sugary contempt or filigreed Third condescension, you would press your diminished bloody terror into her; you would creep naked into her lap, shamelessly, and weep. You would 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 surety that it had even happened was the lasting smell of damp on your carpets.

So you went to Ianthe, and you asked her how to make soup.

“Oh, it’s easy,” said the Princess of Ida breezily. Despite Augustine’s increasing critiques she showed no signs of temper, as might have been anticipated; in fact she seemed to get more carefree with every failure. “You cut up an onion, burn it at the bottom of the pot, put in a few vegetables, and then some meat. It won’t taste like anything, so put in a few teaspoons of salt, and then it’ll taste like a few teaspoons of salt.”

In obedience to the Emperor, you made soup. You had never seen anybody cook before. You did not like it. There were technical manuals on the subject in a kitchen drawer, and you pored over those, rather than attempting Ianthe’s air on the theme of salt. By the evening of the third day after your interrupted bath, you had not slept for eighty-six hours, but you had read a book, and you had made soup three times. During sleeping hours you lay beneath your bed, in the dark, hardly breathing, staring up at the dustless ribs of the steel mattress slats—you prayed to the corpse of the Locked Tomb, or you said to yourself, “Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” until it slurred together on your tongue and joined the orchestra of whispers that thrummed between your ears, waiting for the assault that did not come.

It was also on the third day post-Ortus that the tension in the Mithraeum gained weight and sharpness, like salt water forming crystals. This had nothing to do with you. It was the countdown that Augustine had issued to Ianthe.

“Five more days,” he had said to her. You knew, because he had said it over breakfast, right in front of you and Mercy. “You’ve five days left, my chick. If you don’t start using that sword arm properly by then, I shan’t bother to teach you a damn thing more. I’m not interested in charity cases. If I were, I’d be teaching Harrow.”

In another lifetime you might have been icily furious, or at the very least chagrined. In this one, you were simply looking at your knife, and your fork, and your spoon, and trying to remember which did what. The spoon, with its concave pit, was probably for transferring liquids. In its back you caught sight of Ianthe, who had put her colourless chin in her hand and was leaning her head into it, as though listening without much interest to a bedtime story.

“As you will it, brother.”

Everyone was snappish and cross—except Ianthe, and except you. You drifted through the Mithraeum with your great sword on your back and your hand never far from the end—pommel—of your rapier. And you made soup.

Two days after Augustine’s ultimatum, perhaps impressed with your newfound understanding of soup or hungry for social cohesion, a frazzled God asked you to make everyone dinner. You opened more of the recipe books—you spent some time cleaning out your weights and measures, and picking through the warehouse-sized supply rooms for the most appropriate ingredients—and, for a long time, you locked yourself in the bathroom, to do what you had to do. One hundred and twenty-six hours. You no longer felt pain. Sometimes your jaw rattled to itself, but it was almost musical.