Ianthe rolled away from you, damp with drying blood. You watched as she stood before the amethyst-studded rapier she had left in its scabbard, and you watched her slide it out, slowly, with a soft metallic sound that set your teeth on edge. You watched her web her skeleton hand with a neon pad of fat—not your preference, but she had her own proclivities—and raise the sword behind her, gauging the new weight in an arm substantially lighter than the one on the floor, and close her eyes.

Lunge. The arm answered. The movement was reactive, liquid, smooth. She cut a sweep before her, then flicked her naked wrist; each action was clean. The sword was as light in her hand as the bones in her arm. Her body was not her body—it was strange to you how you could see no trace of idle Ianthe in the parry and the thrust. Instead you saw a cavalier who had known from the cradle what life intended for him, and had a rapier placed in his hands not long after.

You might have changed your clothes, or washed the blood from your body. All your sister Lyctor did was throw her nacreous white robe over her shoulders, where it settled like snow under an aurora—all she did was belt her rapier to her waist, and slide the trident knife into the special scabbard across the hip, and point at you, and say: “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Do not leave the room.”

You were still weary and frightened, and Ianthe leaving reminded you how vulnerable you really were. But Ianthe did not heed your protests. Nor did she take fifteen minutes. You sat yourself back on the bed and pulled the covers up around your shoulders, and very slowly and surely your heart rate returned to normal.

It was fully twenty-five minutes before the door opened again. You coiled for flight, but it was, after all, just Ianthe—an Ianthe who had changed. She was a sorry sight. You had an artist’s fondness for the right arm, but recognised the shocking juxtaposition of it, of the bloodless flesh and then the bloodless bone, that unexpected and violent nudity. Her yellow lace nightgown had dried to a crust of brown, and her hair had dried in patches of much the same colour: a sort of carroty stain at the temples and the ends.

But the expression on her face was that of undressed release. It was the expression of an awed child watching their raised skeleton totter forward for the first time without falling. She was incandescent, softly luminous in a way that gave her bleached skin a creamy colour, and which made the death-mask lines of her blank face animated and alive. Her eyes were blue again, with those mountainous flecks of sea-parted brown, and for the first time you thought how much she resembled her twin.

She was still grasping her lovely Third rapier in her skeleton hand, the blade naked to you, and she said, not bothering to hide her excitement: “It’s shit. It’s going to break.”

“Not in a hurry, Tridentarius. That’s regenerating ash.”

“There wasn’t the same weight behind my thrust.”

“He didn’t compensate?”

She swung her sword in a slow, glittering arc, revolving her wrist. Ianthe said, not unhumourously: “Naberius always compensated.”

You asked, “What did Augustine the First say?”

“Nothing,” she said, and she started to laugh, peals of bell-like laughter. She dropped to sit on the bed, and exulted: “Nothing much. He dropped me into the River, went two rounds against my body—it worked, Nonagesimus. It worked. He says it’s hideous and he’ll gild it for me—” (“Tacky,” you said.) “—but I can fight the same way I fought after I became a Lyctor, before I lost the arm. I’m real, I work. Harry, I am a Lyctor.”

Her jubilance was infectious. It did not hurt you. You were not a Lyctor.

You said, “You may feel free to thank me anytime you so choose.”

Ianthe was suddenly beside you on the bed. She had dropped her rapier among the bedclothes and for the very first time brushed the dry distal tip of her new pointer finger against your cheek. You were vulnerable, but you did not pull away. She tapped you on the cheekbone, and once on the tip of your nose, and then lastly pressed her naked finger to your bottom lip.

“Thank you?” she said. “Harrow, you loved that.”

The smooth claw of the finger joint felt cool against your mouth. Her head was quite close to yours. The lace nightgown gapped, somewhat, at the front. The Princess of Ida said, “I already know how I’m going to thank you,” and you were bemused. You absolute idiot baby, you were mystified. You were tired, and you were embarrassed, and you were riding high from the satisfaction of doing one half-perfect thing—of having committed a low miracle of your own devising—of, for a handful of minutes, being Harrowhark Nonagesimus again, the greatest necromancer produced by your dark and sacred Drearburh.

Ianthe took her finger from your lips, looked at you, and smiled a phosphorescent and confidential smile.

She said, “I’m going to help you kill the Saint of Duty.”

28

DAYS LATER, THE ENDLESS rain and lubricious fog turned suddenly to ice. Harrowhark woke up in the unfamiliar annex where she now slept, red and chapped with cold. The Second’s chambers had been deemed the least leaky of all their rooms on offer, helped by their placement quite low down Canaan House’s southmost side, and Lieutenant Dyas had invited them to move in with no enthusiasm whatsoever. They had arrayed makeshift beds and mattresses on the floor of her parlour, the broken furniture pushed into corners and stacked up at the sides, and there they all lay like victims after a massacre.

They were a ragtag bunch: Abigail Pent and her husband, who shared the decomposing four-poster that the dead Judith Deuteros had slept in; Protesilaus the Seventh and his intubated adept, who slept like a healthy baby swaddled in carpet rugs, and robes, and all her spare clothes; Dyas, who seemed never to want to sleep again, but only to sharpen her rapier, to the point where it must have held around nineteen edges; and Ortus; and herself. Ortus had placed his mattress between all concerned and the door—“I will be that bulwark,” he’d said portentously, although Harrowhark had noticed that it was the driest and warmest spot. That was that, that was all of them. When she had asked after the remnant Fourth children, Pent had remarked a little cagily that she had already moved them on. Harrow read between the lines and found that she could not resent their being—squirrelled away—so that the rest of the group presented a larger and juicier target.

Her breath sparkled in front of her mouth, and her fingers ached, even though she’d slept in gloves. The sun shone thinly through lacy patches of feathery, tessellated mist on the glass, glass on glass: ice! All at once Harrow was homesick for Drearburh. The fog outside was so thick that Canaan House seemed to have ascended into the heavens overnight—risen up into the atmosphere within a thick wet fleece of cloud and mist, a dirty ovine colour. Harrow could not see the sea or sky. She thought the rain was falling less heavily outside—but then she perceived that instead of the dreary, murmurous fall of precipitation, each drop had hardened into a pellet of ice. The wind whipped them up against the thick plex window, and they sounded like shot from the barrel of a gun.

It was not much past dawn. She’d slept in her paint, and her teeth tasted like pigment. Harrow wrapped her veil around her mouth as a muffler, and rose silently from her bed. The others slept on, in silent hummocks like graves: Ortus before her, a black and faintly whuffling hill; on her right Protesilaus Ebdoma, who slept with his sword on his breast like some soldier’s monument, one where the sculptor had gone overboard on the muscles; on his right, his necromancer, her short buff-coloured curls falling on her childlike cheeks; and on her left, Dyas, who lay with her eyes open and her sword on her breast. Her gloves were very white against the steel hilt of her rapier, and very white against the bared sepia of her wrists.

The door to Pent’s room opened on silent hinges to reveal her kind-eyed, curly-haired, and abominably silly cavalier. He had his slippers on, and two coats over his pyjamas: on seeing Harrowhark, he touched his lips and beckoned her through to his room. Within, Abigail Pent was curled up on an enormous windowsill, a decrepit love seat tattering itself to pieces beneath her, watching the hail come down in calm fascination. There was a roasting smell, like chocolate and dust. A little electric heater blarted out tepid air on the floor, its fans wheezing hotly. To Harrow’s numb fingers, it seemed to be warming approximately jack shit.

“Pretty foul out there,” Pent said in low tones. “Coffee?” (That must have been the chocolate scent. Harrowhark accepted a cup, mainly to warm her hands.) “The pressure’s dropping freakishly … though of course, you aren’t victim to atmospheric conditions on Drearburh, are you? Are you getting any sleep?”

Harrow said merely, “I don’t care about surrounds. It could easily be less advantageous.” Often her cell had been worse.