The side room they put Cytherea in was not so decorated. The door was always open to reveal her laid out on a stretcher, with candles all around her that never seemed to go out or melt down, covered by those chubby blush rosebuds that also never seemed to open or rot. In these two miracles you detected the hand of the Emperor Divine. Every so often you saw him in there, having a quiet conversation with the body in the same way one would talk to a sleeping child; sometimes Augustine was there, and once Mercy. You never saw the other. You had ventured in there yourself often, even though it was gauche, even though you had done enough damage. Something about her troubled you, and you thought it was the paranoid madness, but you couldn’t be sure. Your brain told you that the arms so chastely crossed over that skewered chest had been moved a little. Your brain told you that the lips were a little too parted. When you had told Teacher of your worries—you little imbecile—he had grimaced, and worried his forehead with his thumb momentarily, and said:

“Nobody would touch her, Harrow. I haven’t.”

“I know, I just—”

“Augustine wouldn’t, out of love,” he said. “Mercy wouldn’t, out of superstition. And Ortus…” He looked at you carefully, as always when he mentioned the other; the name always came awkwardly to his lips. “Ortus wouldn’t out of respect, believe me. He wouldn’t even think of such a thing. Doesn’t sound Ianthe’s style either.”

“But I thought…”

“I think perhaps you should try to avoid that room,” he had suggested, sympathetically.

You had burned: you had been molten with shame and resentment: you had been reduced entirely to flame. Yet for all that you now walked devoutly past the doorway where lay the peaceful corpse of Cytherea the First, you entered that doorway in your waking nightmares: watched, lost in the hallucination of your mind’s eye, as those frozen fingers twitched into arcane formations, as each bare toe on each chilly foot shivered as though the corpse had been touched with an electrified wire.

Your mistake was the time you stopped just outside the room, arrested by muffled creaks at the edges of your hearing; tortured past any shame, you turned to Ianthe and said:

“Do you perceive any sound from within the mortuary chapel?”

She said, “Do you try to sound as portentous as possible, or does it just sort of happen naturally?”

“Answer the damn question, Tridentarius!”

You did not call her Tridentarius outside of a locked room; so she looked at you queerly, and said, “No,” and then, as though more enlightened by what she saw in your face, gently: “No, I don’t, crazycakes.”

And you did not ask her again.