But by the Sewn Tongue, those fucking rooms. Those candied, white-and-gold-striped rooms, those crystal-chandeliered rooms with a bed as big as some of the penitential cells back home. You’d hated them from first sight, as instantaneously as Ianthe took a fancy to them. You despised the cobwebby, overornate furniture, with filigree on curlicue on flourish, the masses of embroidery thread, the hangings on everything, swath of fabric atop another swath of fabric squashed down on a plush divan that rustled if you sat on it; and most upsettingly, the paintings. They were life-sized nudes in languorous attitudes, generally in oils, and all of the same two persons. They were enthusiastically executed. The duo posing held a variety of objects both likely and unlikely. You had once been fool enough to recommend that Ianthe take them down, at which point she had rustled up another from the bathroom and hung it in pride of place above an overpainted dresser. It was not that you were a prude. It was simply that sitting in a room with those paintings was like having a long visit with someone who kept laughing at their own puns.

But despite the violently awful nudes—the excess of latticework—Ianthe—you were a frequent visitor to her den. You took such a pitiful pleasure in Nonagesimus, now that you had spent months being Harrowhark the First. As God said, you might be the ninth saint, but you could never be Ninth again—except when you closed Ianthe’s door.

“It’s down to your want of ambidexterity, Tridentarius,” you said, giving her the same sickly pleasure in nomenclature. “It’s not exactly mathematics. You are trying to fight with a sword in your wrong hand. I am not even trying to fight with a sword. As I’ve been told tiresomely often, a half-cocked version of something is significantly worse than not being cocked at all.”

Despite the fact that you had said not being cocked at all, Ianthe only slurped angrily at her soup, making a sound like custard going down a flute. “Tell me to stop breathing,” she said. (“I have, on multiple occasions,” you said.) “You won’t understand. It’s utterly instinctual. It doesn’t matter if I try to fight from a distance. I’ll flinch at something, and then Babs will kick in, and the arm won’t work—”

“You cannot pass the blame on to your burnt-up soul. It’s psychological.”

“Bullshit,” she said, with vehemence.

Babs indicated a very bad day. She so rarely mentioned her cavalier. “Augustine is critical, I take it.”

“Augustine told me they might as well smother me along with you.”

You were only astonished that you had any ego left to bruise. She took another spoonful of soup and said, her whey-coloured face dissatisfied: “He says the same thing you do … psychological … says I persist in being damaged for my own enjoyment.”