You said, because again you could see no reason not to: “You should have disciplined Tern better, if he’s still fighting you this way.”

Ianthe considered this. She nudged the confection basket hilt of the rapier at her hip aside, and took out a long knife that, again, ran a hot rill of pain down your temporal bone. It was—though you had never bothered to learn—Tern’s main-gauche, his trident knife, a long blade from which two other blades would spring at the press of some hidden mechanism; she flicked that mechanism now, and with a snickt they burst out like a firework, two hard points of gleaming steel. She flicked it again, and the blades went snickt back into their housing.

She placed her palm before you, outstretched. Without a moment’s hesitation, or sign of pain, or even much give, she thrust the knife through the meat of her palm. It must have done enormous damage—to flexor muscles, to the nest of carpal bones—and ruby drops of blood splattered the sleeves of her shimmering robe.

As she withdrew it, the wound knitted together as though it were nothing. She simply withdrew, and the skin closed up—the meat bounded back on itself, elastic—the hole sizzled to a close, leaving her palm whole and unblemished except for a few wet drops of crimson red. These she shook off, and they disappeared into powder. For the first time, when you looked at her, Ianthe gleamed with thanergy as a coal gleamed red with heat.

“Hold out your hand,” she commanded.

You did, knowing full well what was to happen—you did it without hesitation, as she had done it without hesitation. Ianthe held your hand gently, by the wrist, considered the angle, and thrust the blade home.

Every fibre in your being bent toward not throwing up. The delicate tendons in your palm snapped under the razor-sharp blade; the steel juddered against a metacarpal—chips went flying into the muscle bed—your blood sprayed promiscuously against your face, a hot, salty thickness of it against your lips, your nose, your right cheek. Your eyes rolled back in your head in an ecstasy of suffering. The world rocked. You saw the Body, pressed against the back wall, her hands clasped together as though in prayer; you looked at the blade sunk deep into your hand and looked at Ianthe, and for a moment understood that she was about to press the mechanism and rend your hand utterly—leave your palm a smoking ruin of gore and muscle, of whiteness of bone—that you were being punished both, perhaps, for the kiss, and for something you could not even recall doing.

She pulled the blade clear. This was also agony. Now you understood the object lesson: there was no sewing-up for you. Your meat was left ripped bare and vulnerable, a gaping, heinous hole in your hand, your skin a pitiful red-and-pink mess of shredded dermis. You grasped the wrist she was also grasping with your free hand; you poured thalergy in with embarrassing torrents, a hot, shameless gush of it, flicking free chips of bone and wending muscle back into muscle. This took effort and thought. You refilled the blood; grew new shiny spans of skin; left your palm as whole as before, your nerves screaming, shaking with the memory of pain.

“Harrow,” said Ianthe gently, “don’t fuck with me. I’m not here for your amusement either.”

She turned away from you and walked toward the door. Your mouth was dry. You kept trying to rewet it, but you were afraid that it would come out as bile; your head was swimming. You steadied yourself enough to say, “Is your cavalier a forbidden subject, then?”

Her hand stilled at the pad of the autodoor, standing by the hanging that showed the First House picked out in white thread. “Babs?” she said. “I don’t care about Babs … Just don’t suggest my sister is dead to me, ever again.”

She touched the pad beside the door and crossed the opened threshold. The door closed behind her, leaving you alone. There was blood on your face and the knees of your robes. After a moment you shook them clean as she had done, drying out the blood, rendering it powder. You were weak. You staggered over to the Body, standing so quiet by the wall, and you buried your face in her thighs. The dead cool nearness of her was so close to being real that it rendered itself genuine comfort.

You were close enough to the crates stacked up by the door now to see that they had been placed against the wall hastily, and somewhat ajar. You wobbled to your feet and pushed them down in a domino cascade of clanging plex.

Behind the boxes were hundreds of thick nail fragments, like the broken horns of some weird animal, scattered on the floor and embedded in the wall. Some of them were brown with dried blood. Long, ragged missiles of keratin were, at some points, finger-deep in the panelling. You crawled back to the cot where the Body laid you down on the sheets, placed the heinous sword within your arms, added the letters to this pile, and gave you the go-ahead to fall unconscious.

5

SHE WAS FIRST AWARE OF LIGHT. It poured through the plex windows in lavalike radiance: white and steaming light, making her undershirt stick to her ribs with sweat. In the tiny black confines of the shuttle, the light took up all the space with its irradiating, corneal presence; and Harrowhark cried out as though she were dying from it, and then was tremendously self-conscious and discombobulated.

“Please,” a voice was saying. “Please, my Lady Harrowhark. Be—be peaceful. What can I do for you? What must be done?”

Ortus was almost bigger than the light, filling up the black-and-steel spaces of the passenger seats as much as the radiance did. Harrow realised, smarting, that his expression was that of a man who considered her a source of embarrassment. Somewhere down the years, she had come to understand that Ortus Nigenad, that perfect modern Ninth cavalier—perfectly shaved head, perfectly appropriate paint, perfectly grim solemnity, perfect body of two cabinets nailed together, perfect ability to carry six kilos of bone—considered her a slightly sorry object. How sorry an actual object, he could not possibly conceive.

“Am I making the sign?” she managed. “Am I giving you the signal? No? Then I will remind you that anything else is none of your business, and hope I do not have to remind you twice.”

He was not sweating as she was, but those lashes were damp from the light. “As you see fit, my lady,” he said. His rapier was not belted at his hip. He carried it over his lap, as though it were someone else’s baby. Harrow was pleased, dimly, to see that for his main-gauche he carried his pannier, despite Aiglamene cutting up so rough at the idea; that felt appropriate. She had always desired a helpmeet, not a circus performer.

“Where are we?” Harrow added, in another sudden welter of nervousness. “I thought—perhaps—”

“We must be four hundred kilometres above the surface now,” he said, mistaking her question. “They are securing our clearance to land. We shall leave orbit soon, I trust.”

Harrowhark rose from the placket of House dirt she had been sitting on, which held the merest suggestion of thanergy at this point anyway, and she crossed to where the light was coming in. At the last moment she remembered what she had brought with her and drew a piece of thick voile from within her sacramental vestments. She tied it around her head and pulled up her hood, which still smelled of the salts that Crux had so carefully packed it away with: that herbaceous, acrid, homelike smell, the one that made her eyes smart again with familiarity. Then she looked through the plexiform window.

From space, the House of the First resembled a box of tumbled jewels. Haloed in white, its blues deep and brilliant and oxidised, a planet of water, close enough to the fiery gyre of Dominicus that the water was not allowed to freeze yet nor so close that it burnt away. Insubstantial and ever-shifting ocean, as far as the reddened eye could see. Her smarting eyes fell upon a tiny jumble of squares, ringed around a central greyish smudge.

She turned back to her seat, and found herself saying, restlessly, “At times now I forget … I thought I was dreaming, perhaps.”

“I find it perfectly normal, my lady,” he said. “Perhaps I am right in perceiving that you thought it might surprise me, your being … with the infirmity of…” When she looked at him, he immediately seemed to find the rattle and thump of the shuttle’s mechanisms overpowering, and began a traditional Ortus shutdown. “Your … so-called … the frailty.”

“Nigenad, use your words.”

“The insanity,” said her companion. Her shoulders relaxed a fraction. He mistook her rising relief for an emotion he ought to have known she never felt. Ortus said, distracted: “The only surprise really being in it expressing this way, rather than … No, I am not surprised, Lady Harrowhark. Perhaps you may yet have cause to find it useful.”

“Useful.”