“I did ask you to stop flirting with my wife,” said Magnus, and at Ortus’s face, said instantly: “Joke, man! Joke! Do they not have them on the Ninth? That would explain a lot—”

“Ortus,” Abigail said gravely. This was the first time Harrow had ever seen her even slightly disarrayed. Her hair, normally brushed to mirror smoothness, looked as though she had been dragged backward through the oss. She was wet with sweat. She kept rubbing her hands discreetly, and Harrow saw that they were singed. “Ortus, it should not have worked. We had no right to call the soul of Matthias Nonius. Your sword had no viable link to him—we had no thanergetic connection—we had nothing but the manuscript you gave me, in which I took the liberty of correcting a few spellings, I hope you don’t mind.” (Harrowhark was certain Pent had no idea how terribly she had just wounded Ortus’s gratitude to her; looking at the brief, stricken expression that crossed his face, it would perhaps have been kinder to make him eat the book.) “I find myself in the astonishing position of having created a revenant link through—well—sheer passion.”

That revenant turned to Ortus now. Standing together, Ortus towered head and shoulders above him. Harrow expected that same stricken horror to show on her cavalier’s face; but as Ortus looked at the ghost he had spent his whole life worshipping—yet another thing she and he had in common—he flushed deeply.

“I am unworthy,” he said simply.

“Clearly, that cannot be true,” said Matthias Nonius. “If the Fifth speaks aright—if your art was the anchor that rendered me whole here, and gave me a body and blade for the battle—your art, not my strength, was the ultimate source of our victory.”

Harrow looked away. From far off in the facility, there were more sounds: of melting ice, of snapping viscera. She found her layered robes heavy; so were the others, and they shed coats and gloves even as she watched. The air felt lighter. That reeking fog had gone. As she unwound lengths of fabric from around her neck, she found herself drawn back to the dead face of the Sleeper.

The woman had not died tranquil; her features had settled into an expression closer to determination than the peace of the grave. When rigor mortis developed—would it develop, in this parody of a world?—the whole might harden further into despair. The chin was firm; the jaw stubborn in its lines, the nasofrontal angle of the nose barely present, with flared nostrils like a large cat’s. It was the jaw, and something about the eyes and brows, that kept distracting Harrow.

Something grey protruded from beneath a flap of the orange collar, against the dead skin of the Sleeper’s throat. She crouched down and used one finger to hook it. It was a loop of thin chain. She tugged, carefully, and the rest emerged: plain metal links, unadorned except for a flat steel tag about the length of her thumb. She turned the tag over. The other side had been neatly etched with a single word:

AWAKE.

“Reverend Daughter,” Nonius said courteously.

She stood and turned back to him. The long-dead ghost of her House still looked a mess; he had returned his rapier and dagger to their respective sheaths, but his face and throat were ghastly with drying blood streaked here and there with sweat. His dark eyes were bloodshot, his hair was matted, and his split lip was swelling up. He left sticky red footprints wherever he walked.

He said, “Does aught of the foe yet remain? Are there enemies still who would hasten to harm you?”

“If there are, I don’t know about them,” she said. “Pent, can you sense anything left of the invasive presence?”

“Your soul is your own again, but the ghost will still, I suspect, have a corporeal foothold on the other side. Defeating it here will not have destroyed it there. The only sure way to banish a revenant is to destroy the physical anchor it inhabits before it can escape the shell. Inani mate objects can be destroyed; corpses too, if you remove the brain. But, Harrow, we have other problems on our hands,” said Abigail.

The sounds of the flesh strings hitting the floor had resolved into background noise. But now, Canaan House rumbled again: not with any great ferociousness, but with a sort of timid, rattling unease, as though more of its facade was falling away. A sheet of dust fell from the ceiling, glittering softly in the white lights that winked off and on. The others looked up at the tumbling dust with varying shades of alarm, except for Abigail, who looked grimly expectant.

“Everyone, listen. We don’t have much time. The bubble is deforming,” she said swiftly. “After multiple separate evolutions there are too many places where it doesn’t agree with itself.”

Magnus said, “Another rearrangement? Will it cause a new scenario?”

“No,” said his wife. “The memories have squared themselves away, and the intruder is gone. There is no more grit for the clam to worry into a pearl. And depending on what’s happening outside with— All those external factors are driving the bubble to its natural end. We ghosts must head back to the River, or risk getting absorbed or expelled by Harrow’s soul.”

Another low rumble from somewhere else. The far-off, musical crash of some wall or partition slowly crumbling in on itself, a great particle mass sliding to a heap.

Nonius said instantly: “If I have discharged my duty to you and my House, I am bound by another; a debt from of old that I would repay, if I can. May I leave these halls with your blessing, my lady?”

Ortus said intently: “A debt?”

“A dread beast haunts this course of the River, a king among monsters,” he said. “A rival and ally is fighting against it, alone, and I grudge him the glory of such an impossible combat. Free me to aid him.”

A terrible conviction seized Harrowhark’s heart. She had been here for what seemed like such a long time that she had put to one side the pressing issues of now: the reality that was out there still, and the fact that she was still alive, despite her last coherent moments. A king among monsters in the River. And, perhaps worse, the realisation that she had lost a cherished and decade-long fight.

“You mean a Lyctor,” said Harrow. “You actually fought a Lyctor.”

“The third of the saints who serve as the Hands of the Emperor Undying,” he confirmed. And then, in case she’d missed the point, “The saint who is titled for duty.”

“Why is he fighting alone?” she demanded. A rising panic, strangely detached, was moving up the base of her spine. “Where are Augustine and Mercy? Where’s Ianthe?”

“I do not know these names. Even his own is beyond me. We met long ago, and I fought him,” said Nonius. She very specifically did not look at Ortus. He was being good enough not to say anything; but if he looked at her with anything close to smugness, she was going to kick his ankle.

Another rumble from above, sounding much more insistent. Harrow said, “But you’re half-dead already—the Resurrection Beast terrifies ghosts—”

“I am not half-dead,” he said. “I am dead, nothing more; but I am not afraid. This fight has sharpened my edge and awoken my senses. I am, if you like, warmed up—which in context, I realise, is not the best word choice.”

Ortus said, “I will go with you,” and instantly, Protesilaus said: “So will I.”

“Ortus,” said Harrowhark, “no. You have no idea what you’re speaking of. The Beast in the River is the soul of a dead planet, come to destroy the Emperor. If there’s only one Lyctor standing against it—he’s dead, Nigenad.”

She could not have said anything worse. His eyes shone as he said, “I have lived so much of my life in fear, my Lady Harrowhark. I will not waste my death in it. I now find that I am no longer afraid of anything … of death … of laws … of monsters. I will advance before I can change my mind and become, again, a coward. Even if I cannot do anything more than watch, let me go.” In the face of her stupefaction, he added gently: “What else is there for me, Harrow?”

And she knew that it was useless to hold him. Fearful, Ortus had proved enormously stubborn; it was inevitable that he would be even worse in bravery. She did not know what to say. Should she thank him? Thank him now? Cordially request he not go and waste his ghostly adrenaline on a creature he could not hope to understand?

But Pent, more tactfully, was already speaking: “I genuinely believe the River can be crossed, Nigenad. Come with me and Magnus. We could use your help in finding Jeannemary and Isaac…”

“If there is a way through, you will undoubtedly find it,” he said calmly. “I am relieved that, in my unworthy death, I was able to meet you. I will still write The Pentiad. It may just have to be a shorter poem … very short, if what Harrow says is right. My heart is set to go with the hero of my own House and the hero of the Seventh.”

“I shall be glad to stand beside you, Ortus Nigenad; never again will I doubt the will of the Ninth,” said the unbelievably tedious hero of the Seventh, who then cleared his throat and said:

“In the storm, the tree is glad of the root,

Not of the branch.”

“Well expressed,” said Ortus.