In dreaming you would return to your old bed back in the sanctuary of Drearburh—your childhood bed, getting a little bit short in the toes for you now. You prayed at its foot, no longer bracketed by either gruesome great-aunt. Instead, opposite your cot would be the Body, her hands neatly folded on the ancient shawl that your mother had always laid on the bed—the electric light in the sconce shining down on the firm musculature of her forearms, the calluses upon those dead palms. Her eyes she kept closed, each wet and frozen lash brushing cheeks blanched by expiration.

“I’m afraid,” you’d say.

She would say softly, in the voice that prickled each hair on your scalp with a sweet, deep electricity: “What of, Harrowhark?”

“Tonight I am afraid to die.”

“That is the same fear as failure,” she said once. “You don’t fear dying. You can tolerate pain. You are afraid that your life has incurred a debt that your death will not pay. You see death as a mistake.”

You said, a little bitterly: “What else is it?”

The dead corse of the Locked Tomb—the death of the Emperor—the maiden with the sword and the chains, the girl in the ice, the woman of the cold rock, the being behind the stone that could never be rolled away—said, in half-confused tones she had never taken with you: “I don’t know. I died, once … no, twice,” but then she had said no more.

Another time you said, “I’m afraid of myself. I am afraid of going mad.”

Another time, “I am still afraid of Cytherea the First.”

And, “I am afraid of God.”

And again: “Do I have Ortus’s eyes? Are these ones mine? I never really looked at them— Beloved, what were my eyes like?”

Unfortunately, that time she answered. Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she talked to you, quietly, about discursive subjects, and sometimes she didn’t say a thing. But now, that which was buried insensate said quite calmly, “She asked me not to tell you.”

You awoke, flat on the floor in front of the water-pump sink, screaming until your throat was broken. When you stared at your bloodshot eyes in the mirror and tried to remember Ortus Nigenad’s, you couldn’t recall a difference: they were both that deep and fathomless black, the colour Ianthe called black roses, because Ianthe was overfamiliar and frankly a pervert. You tried to imagine Ortus’s sad, heavy weariness staring at you from your own mirror. It did not work. You were both terribly relieved and terribly frightened.

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