“There were nine. We called them by number. Over ten thousand years, we have managed to take out a grand total of five. Number Two fell soon after the Resurrection. Number Eight cost a man’s immortal soul, and—I still see that day in my dreams. Number Six died because one of my Hands—Cyrus—drew it into a ultramassive black hole, and Number Six had better be dead, because Cyrus won’t be coming back.”

Before you could do anything—exclaim, or question his mathematics, which did not hold up even on first acquaintance—he did something dreadful. The Emperor of the Nine Houses pushed himself away from the plain coffin with the rose and he stood before you at the Third’s, with his monstrous eyes and his ordinary face, and he took both of your hands in his. He patted them gently, as though you were a child whose pet had been squashed in a tragic accident. It would have been preferable for him to rip your ribs from their costal cartilage and waggle them around. It would have been preferable for him to take your throat beneath his hands and snap your neck. There were bright lights in your vision. You were deeply distressed.

“The choice I offered you was always a false one,” he said. “I’m sorry. The Resurrection Beasts always know where I am, and wherever I am they turn themselves to me and start moving … slowly … but never stopping. And they don’t turn to me alone, though they focus on me most strongly. They hunt whoever has committed the—indelible sin.”

You stared at him. He dropped his hands.

You said, “Which indelible sin?”

“The one you committed when you became a Lyctor,” said the Emperor.

You heard, dimly, the doors of Drearburh close. You perceived the grind of their mechanism and their indelible clang, the echo of their shutting ringing throughout the bottom atrium and upward into the tunnel shaft. Then your memories of it muddied and disappeared, back with the rest of your unsorted collection.

“They will be coming for me,” you said, and you said the words only because you thought you ought to make them come true. “If I returned to my House they would follow me there.”

He said, “No Lyctor has ever returned home, once we understood the repercussions … no Lyctor except one, who knew I would come to intercept her for that very reason.”

You looked at her plain coffin again. It was not particularly large; the body it held was not tall or broad, nor imposing, nor grand. You found yourself saying distantly: “And so the intention is to teach me how to fight these things?”

“Not before I teach you how to run,” said the Emperor. “It’s a rough lesson to learn. It’s never complete. But I’ve been running for ten thousand years … so I will be your teacher.”

After a moment he laid his hands on your shoulders, and you found yourself looking up into his weird and ordinary face.

“What he is saying,” said the Body distinctly, “is that you have to learn that sword.”

You looked at her, over his shoulder. The Emperor instinctively followed your gaze, but he could never have seen what you saw: the weals where the chains had passed around the other girl’s wrists, neck, ankles. He would not perceive that long hair hanging wetly over her shoulders, that resinous colour that in death might have been brown or might have been gold or might have been anything. He could not have heard the voice—low, husky, musical—or its dry and uncanny echo of other voices you had known: your mother’s, Crux’s.

He would not know that in truth the Body of the Locked Tomb had not spoken to you since the night you massaged the purple, swollen clots of blood out of the necks of your dead parents, so that their strangulation might not be so obvious. He would not know that you had only walked with her one tranquil year, and trysted with her afterward only in your dreams. He could not possibly know that in your youth her eyes had often been black, like yours were, but that ever since you had writhed in Lyctoral agony her eyes had turned a yellow that made you dizzy to behold: a bronzed, hot, animal yellow, as amber as the inside of an egg.

When you were ten years old, the Body was quiet and rigorous, practical and merciful. At fourteen the Body was tender and serene, and sometimes smiled. When you were sixteen the Body was resolute and impassioned. In all these incarnations, she had preserved her vow of silence. Now the sound of her voice meant the madness had returned to you in full.

“I can’t,” you said, as carefully as possible. “I can’t, beloved. It’s gone.”

The Emperor said, “Harrow?” but you’d mostly forgotten he was there.

“You are walking down a long passage,” said the Body. “You need to turn around.”

“I am standing in the dark,” you told her. Each of the Body’s eyelashes was wet with frost. “I lost it. It’s gone. There’s nothing there. I must have misapprehended the process. I am half a Lyctor. I am nothing, I am pointless, I am unmanned.”

Hands fell heavy on your shoulders. You looked from the face you loved to the face of the Resurrecting King.

“Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing,” he said.

As he spoke, his mouth looked strange. A hot whistle of pain ran down your temporal bone. Your body was numb to grief; perhaps you had felt it once, but you did not feel it anymore. “Ortus Nigenad died thinking it was the only gift he was capable of giving,” you said, “and I have wasted it—like—air.”

The Resurrecting King took on the expression of a man working out a very difficult and emotionally taxing anagram. He said, “Ortus,” again, but the bile was sputtering up into your throat, your mouth, before the Body passed her hand over your eyebrows and the bridge of your nose and you slipped from his imperial grip. You fell almost senseless to the floor.

“Ortus Nigenad,” said the Emperor again, almost wondering; but then you knew nothing more, except that you hadn’t thrown up on God, which had to count as consolation.

3

THE REVEREND DAUGHTER Harrowhark Nonagesimus ought to have been the 311th Reverend Mother of her line. She was the eighty-seventh Nona of her House; she was the first Harrowhark. She was named for her father, who was named for his mother, who was named for some unsmiling extramural penitent sworn into the silent marriage bed of the Locked Tomb. This had been common. Drearburh had never practiced Resurrection purity. Their only aim was to keep the necromantic lineage of the tomb-keepers unbroken. Now all its remnant blood was Harrow; she was the last necromancer, and the last of her line left alive.

Her birth had been expensive. Eighteen years ago, in order to wrench a final bud from this terminal axil, her mother and father had slaughtered all the children of their House in order to secure a necromantic heir. Harrow had been created in that hour of pallor mortis, while the souls of her peers were fumbling to escape their bodies, her genesis their ignition of thanergy as they died with a simultaneity her parents had agonised to calculate. None of this had been kept from her. It had been explained to Harrow, year after year, right from the time she knew both when to speak and when to not. This skill came early to Ninth House infants.

As a child, she was allowed to pull down the coverlet and get into bed only after she had worked her way through forty-five minutes of evening prayers, bracketed by her wretched great-aunts Lachrimorta and Aisamorta. They had been strict with her infant catechism, and their presence was a strong motivation for Harrow to get her prayers exactly right and not start over, as they smelled like incense and tooth decay. She had enunciated clearly—no lisping—devotions of their own devising: The Tomb I will serve till the end of my days, and then see me buried in two hundred graves … which they’d thought sweetly whimsical, just right for a little girl.