As I stood with that sword grasped between your hands, the hilt of the two-hander bit our skin, but not fatally. There were a couple of callouses now on those soft necromancer’s palms, and I was proud of you.

When I met the first strike of that poison-dripping stinger, our limits became obvious—the first strike ripped your extensors to shit, clanged down your forearms and up into your feeble upper arms like a miniature strike team had entered the tendons and set the whole thing to blow. The pain came in waves. But some ancient engine had revved to life for me in a way it never had done for you, probably because I am a good girl and you are an evil nun, and it tore through us almost simultaneously: renewed those shredded muscles, tied back together that multitude of miniature rips. My first overhead strike shattered the stinger, and the heinous thing reared and then sheared our cheek open before I could duck—but the only thing I cared about was the superheated steam feeling in our arms, and the swing, and the arc of my broadsword as I cleaved a neat arc through that creepy insectoid waist.

The creature toppled into halves. It curled up horribly in a death throe; those humanlike fingers and toes on the bottom of the frame curled in on themselves, and all the meat parts depuffed and shrivelled, and putrid-smelling guts squeezed out of the skull’s mouth hole. In that panting dark heat, the death reek was intense. And your shoulders wouldn’t stop shaking, even when I leaned against the bed.

It was only when I saw us in the mirror by the dresser—saw me, in you—still not saying anything—that it hit home what you had done. Your face was a mess. It was such a weird goddamn melange of us: your pointy-ass chin, your stubborn-featured, dark-browed face, less battered than the last time I’d seen it, but—wearier than I’d ever known it to be. Your eyes had little smudgy lines next to them, and they were there at the corners of your mouth, marks of this huge, exhausted sadness. You could always leave everything else behind, but you never got rid of being so absolutely fucking goddamn sad.

The skull paint dripped down your cheeks from the sweat, and from the blood, and from where I’d wiped it accidentally. Your hair was way too long. It was plastered down your neck, and it was seriously itchy. All of that was the same Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Angular. Ferocious. Terrible. But at the same time, it wasn’t.

Main reason: my eyes stared out of your face. The shape was yours, but the yellow-amber irises were as out of place in your face as my sword was clutched in your thin, straining arms. The expression wasn’t right either—my what the fuck? face was very different from your what the fuck? face. It was like watching a shell of you walk around; like the empty puppets you’d made of Pelleamena and Priamhark. Except that would’ve been easier. This was your shell, but it was all filled up with me. God, the double entendres were hard to resist.

I said hoarsely: “Get back here. Get back here right now, or I’ll make you say the worst shit I can think of. Just mean and gross. Beneath even me, is what I’m saying.”

No response.

“Oooooh, Palamedes. I am measurably less intelligent than you. Put your tongue in my mouth, and I’ll flop my tongue against it.”

Nothing.

“I think bones are mediocre.”

Maybe you were dead.

“Ohhhhhrr, Gideon, I was so dumb to think a tub of ancient freezer meat was my girlfriend. Please show me how to do a press-up. Also, I’m very obviously attracted to y—no, damn it, this is just sad. This is garbage.” My temper was going. Maybe your temper was going. “Come back. I hate this. Eat me, and let’s go full Lyctor. I didn’t fall on a fence for this, Nonagesimus.”

Sound. Motion. Another chittering scamper, close to the door. Then another.

I had forgotten there were going to be more of them. Your memory hadn’t happened to me, and even if I’d had a front-row seat for most of it, it was like watching a play through a blindfold. If I wanted to know something, I had to deliberately go looking through your shit. And I’d forgotten because I was an idiot. It was so hot in that room, and my insides—your insides—felt so cold. I shrugged off that stupid white robe—which looks dumb as hell, by the way, like Silas Octakiseron got into the glitter drawer—and I tried to get you back through sheer force of hope, and sheer force of want.

No dice. I shouldered my sword. Your arms blazed in response.

“Whenever you’re ready,” I said. “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll keep the home fires burning.”

And the Heralds piled in.

45

AN AMOUNT OF TIME BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER

THE ROOMS OF CANAAN HOUSE were thick and silent with falling snow: red with new blood, and brown or black with old. Ductile, organic tubes and lymphatic nodes pulsed pinkly everywhere: in the corners, bubbling up along the doorframes and the pillars. Outside the windows, stretched webs of organ had wrapped themselves around the tower like nets of sticky venous spiderweb. They choked the stone. They burst through windows, and every so often they would tremble uncertainly and erupt in floods of bloody, foamy water.

That was wretched; but Harrowhark was more interested in the strange garbage littering the snow and the rotting furniture and the underfloor squish of tube and fossa. Pipettes, again; broken glass-fronted containers filled with dark fluid, mysterious lumps floating suspended within; and shattered skeletons, lying in the slithering mass of tubes or on mountains of what looked to be capsules or pills. At first her brain skimmed over the skeletons—it was Canaan House, ergo, there were skeletons—but then the familiarity dawned on her: some of the skeletons were not wearing First House sashes or raiment, but bearing Drearburh tools.

“Keep moving,” said Magnus Quinn, with the friendly and unyielding iron of a parent taking a small child to the bathroom. “No time to take in the scenery.”

She fell in step again and said, “Where is this room?”

Abigail said, “Close by. The others will be there already, if all’s gone according to plan—take my hand; we’re heading outside.”

The cold hit like a slap in the mouth. The snow was falling in driving, vision-obscuring sheets, smarting the skin, with a smell that made them all retch. The Fifth led her along a rope attached to an outside terrace—the obscuring fog could not disguise the roar of the sea below, nor the fact that most of the terrace had gone. Then down again, into a corridor so choked with gurgling pink tubes that they brushed Harrowhark as she followed close at heel, to descend a flight of stairs.

This was familiar territory. A vestibule, dark and claustrophobic. Malfunctioning lights overhead, fizzing madly. At the bottom of the stairs, glass doors showed the space where the pool had once been—filled now with bloody water, dark, bobbing shapes within. River water. Abigail turned to a tapestry that had been pinned up over one wall, and shouldering it aside revealed a cramped entryway to a hall that Harrowhark knew well. She said, “Surely not.”

“It’s not locked,” said Magnus. “And it’s been left alone—no blood rains, nothing jiggly.”

Harrow was bewildered by another layer of recognition and realisation as Abigail approached the great heavy-pillared Lyctoral door with its reliefs of horned animals and its crossbar of black stone and carved marble, and rapped a sharp sequence of knocks on it that were, after a moment, answered by a scrabbling from within. This was not simply one of the locked rooms of old; it was a person’s room. And as for whose—

The door yawned open. The rail of electric lights shone down on the old laboratory area: a row of benches with scoured, pitted composite tops; books and ancient ring-binders pushed into a far corner; the inlaid tessellation of bones in the walls; and the flimsy poster of a six-armed construct with a hulking body and a flat-skulled head, the old ruler of the Response chamber. The real Septimus was here, poring over a sheaf of flimsy, flipping through it as though looking for something. Nearby was a pushed-together arrangement of chairs, a leather-covered sofa, and a long table where Lieutenant Dyas was laying out the ancient, rusted collection of guns. And then the little staircase up to the split-level platform with its bookcase, and its armchair, and its two beds; sitting in the armchair was Ortus Nigenad, her first—second?—cavalier.

Septimus’s cavalier had opened the door. Harrowhark was bemused all over again by Protesilaus Ebdoma, whom she had never seen alive; if anyone had seen him alive, they never would have mistaken that shuffling zombie for his real self. Cytherea was a Lyctor and could have easily done better; she simply hadn’t bothered. Harrowhark had thought from the start the woman showed signs of suppurating ego, but she had never convinced Gideon to see past the appealing eyes and softly clinging dresses. Protesilaus bowed cordially to them, and he said in his deep and resonant voice: “Teacher declined to join us.”

“Oh, dear. Still hanging out to die, I suspect.”