“As if,” she’d said. “When I ask, you will know you have been asked, Nonagesimus.”
The Saint of Patience had held to his promise to gild the arm, and now you often caught Ianthe marvelling at her metal-shod fingerbones, at the buttery shine of gold upon her triquetrum. Your eldest sister, whose discomfort and annoyance only grew with Augustine’s delight, confronted you about it in the corridors: “Did you really erect that ghastly edifice?”
“Yes,” you said.
“And it’s really self-synthesizing bone?”
“Yes,” you said. “Though I wouldn’t call the process synthesis when the construct is merely perpetually growing to fill a pre-realised skeletal map. It’s yet more proof that topological resonance can be manipulated.”
Mercymorn’s eyes narrowed to hurricane slits with short, thick lashes. Her prismatically white Canaanite robe was wrapped very tightly around her, as though she were cold, and she had bound back her peach-coloured hair as though it were a wimple. She said, “I see,” and then, “I see. I see. What’s two plus two?”
“Four—”
“Smallest bone in the body?”
“The auditory ossicles, but—”
“What’s the name of the Saint of Duty?”
You said, “Ortus the First,” and you were too slow. She reached out and tapped you on the side of the head. What Mercymorn the First could do with a simple tap on the side of the head might have meant your end far more easily than the Saint of Duty, a run-up, and his spear—but she said out loud, “Ortus,” and then hurriedly again, all in one single Ortus—Ortus. The back of your skull ached, and you felt the chilly stab of pain in your sinuses that you sometimes felt in the dry atmosphere of the Mithraeum. You jerked away—your fingers flew to the bone studs in your ears—but she was not attacking you. You, so aware of your body, could sense no gland overworking, nor chemical coursing, nor vessel constricting.
The only change was in Mercy. Her placid oval face had taken on much the same look as you had seen, through a thin veil of viscera, the day you had fed the Lyctors your own marrow. She looked at you, quiet, and perhaps even a little lost; and she said: “I can’t tell if you’re a once-in-a-lifetime genius, an insane imbecile, or both.”
Then she said: “Children as fists! Infants as gestures! Yuck! Pfaugh! I live in the worst of all possible worlds.”
And without saying another word, Mercymorn stalked off down the corridor in the opposite direction, the lights making rainbows of her tightly shrouded robes.
When you reported this conversation to Ianthe, she was not particularly interested. This was, you thought, your sister-saint’s downfall: she had pre-defined a set of things that merited her attention and consideration, and everything else she put aside. (“You brood over everything,” she had said once, to this accusation. “You read unholy omens in the way people say good morning.”)
“She’s a crank,” said Ianthe. “Augustine says she went funny years ago, and that much like a stopped clock, she’s ‘right twice a day, by coincidence.’ Avoid, avoid.”
How you loathed any sentence beginning with Augustine says. “But she touched my head,” you said. “She was changing something, or looking for something—and I have no idea what.”
“Your brain,” suggested Ianthe.
Later you lay together in her lavish bed, far apart enough that if you reached out your hand, you might just brush her with your fingertips. It was, you had admitted, the only place you now felt safe to sleep, what with your wards so eminently destroyable. The mockery you endured for needing her proximity was exquisitely painful, but humiliation was steadily becoming your existence whole and entire.
But sleeping side by side was—awkward. It had been her idea. You would have slept on the carpet, if you hadn’t thought it would leave you more vulnerable to the Saint of Duty—it would have been too easy to see you from the window in the case of a spaceside assault. Trauma prevented you from simply taking a pillow and sleeping in the bathtub. You lay flat on your back in borrowed blankets, wearing third-hand clothes. Ianthe had given you a daffodil-coloured nightgown, rummaged from some ancient drawer of artefacts belonging to a long-dead Lyctor’s cavalier. It made you look like a liver inflammation. You stared glumly at a painting opposite the bed of an exquisite woman with lots of ruddy golden hair, a dreamy smile, and no clothes—though she was holding a rapier and, for no reason you could see, a melon.
That first night in her bed, you’d placed your bone-dressed sword between you, and felt better; she had, unsurprisingly, ragged you for it. “Relax,” she had said. “I haven’t invited you to an orgy, Harrow.”
From this lying-down angle, the painting of the nude and obstreperously beautiful woman was in full sightline. You had murmured, “I believe you … albeit many wouldn’t.”
“This is why I cultivate you, Harrowhark,” she had remarked, “the suspicion that you might possess a sense of humour.”
You had said, “I’m not so gullible to think that your only reason.”
“Of course I want something from you. But it’s not personal,” Ianthe had said. “Understand me, Harry. I always take the smartest option first … burn any bridges that need to be burned … try to get in before anyone else can. It was the first thing I ever admired about you, back at—well, I promised not to talk about that … I’m very good at seeing the big picture. And your being alive is, right now, part of my big picture.”
Both of you had stared, in the bedtime silence of blankets and darkness, at the big picture in front of you.
“They’re all self-portraits, you know,” she had said gloomily. “Cyrus the First and his cavalier constantly painted portraits of themselves and each other in the nude, hung them up everywhere, and gave them out to people for their birthdays. Augustine said Cyrus had them all brought over from Canaan House.”
“Why do you keep them around?”
“It is the type of energy I wish to take into my future,” Ianthe had said.
You both lay now in the low blue habitation light of the sleeping hours, not so close that you could semantically be said to be lying together. You were very aware of her nonetheless: of her skimmed-milk hair and discontented mouth, and of the amber satin she wore that made her arm so gold and her veins so green.
“The Saint of Duty is killable,” she said. “You’ve shown that you’re capable of killing him, even if you’re not a genuine Lyctor. So if it were up to me, he’d be dead already.” (You did not remotely believe this.) “The real problem is Teacher. I’m not sure you can kill Ortus quickly enough to avoid Teacher bursting through the wall with a merry, ‘Not on my watch!’ and bringing him back from a deathblow.”
You said, “Then what do you propose? Distracting God?”
“That is exactly what I propose,” said Ianthe. At the sound you made, she continued eagerly: “I mean it. Augustine says he’ll do it … I asked him as a favour to me, and he said yes.”
“Augustine said yes? Augustine agreed to the murder of his brother Lyctor?”
“There are very complex power dynamics on this station,” said your sister Lyctor, with whom you had a very complex power dynamic. “I told him the whole story—don’t make that face, Harry, it’ll stick that way—and he said Ortus was on too long a leash and what he thought he was doing Augustine didn’t know, but that gunning for you was stupid when you’re just going to be eaten by Heralds anyway … Sorry, direct quote.”
You said flatly, “I appreciate the sentiment.”
“In any case, he said they can get by with just three Lyctors to take down Number Seven, so if I can step into Ortus’s shoes now that I’m not ‘problematic’—you can see I took my lumps, Nonagesimus—he can buy you an hour, after dinner.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“How?”
“Didn’t say—but it’s Augustine the First, my child. He’s the first and oldest Lyctor. These three are all the oldest—and the last—that’s why they’re Patience, Joy, and Duty … three virtues. If Augustine is going to distract God, that means he’s going to distract God. He’s very old, and I hate to admit it, but he’s enormously quick … and sophisticated … and devious. Anyway, I’ve taken care of him, and he’ll take care of Teacher, and you’ll take care of Duty.”
“You’ve really—ensured this?”
“Fight him and win, Harry. Call it payment for the arm … You sound surprised.”
You found yourself murmuring, almost more surprised with yourself than with her: “Warrior proud of the Third House! Ride forth now as my sister.”
There was a rustle from her side of the bed, and you saw that she had sat up a little, her exposed and metal-skinned humerus garishly propped on the covers.
“Was that poetry?” she demanded.
“Debatably,” you said, and she lay back down. Then you said: “I accept your help. I am forced to admit that I cannot do this alone.”