“It was carrying a weapon,” said Dyas. “One I hadn’t seen anywhere in or on the coffin before. I called out, but it wouldn’t stop … I pursued it to the central atrium. The Sleeper’s coffin was open and empty. The figure climbed inside. Pulled the lid down, snapped it shut.”

Abigail prompted, “And then you escaped and raised the alarm.”

The lieutenant of the Second looked at Abigail as though she had suggested And then you went for ice cream.

“I went and got a piece of tubing from the mortuary room,” she said monotonously. “I hit the coffin. I hit the coffin repeatedly. I did so for maybe a minute. You found blood on the glass. It’s mine. I tried my fists and my feet and the butt of my sword—that plex glass isn’t plex. Or glass.”

“That could have easily meant all our deaths,” said Harrow; she had tasted hypocrisy on her own lips so often that she hardly felt the sting.

“Emperor’s breath, Dyas!” said Lady Pent, white lipped, a little more tactful in her shock. “That didn’t—rouse it?”

Dyas said, “No.”

Harrow had only halfway noticed Ortus edging closer, ostensibly to check on Judith Deuteros’s blood-crusted necktie. He had stopped in his ministrations to listen in the dreamy, part-transfixed way he always seemed to listen to everything, with slight tonal differences depending on the person. He listened to Harrow with the happy demeanour of a person far away in his mind palace, unless what she was saying had a direct impact on him, at which point he merely got very sad.

The Lieutenant’s gaze—unsettling and part feral, giving the impression that she was now a bag with ten snakes inside—fell on Ortus, and the stained necktie he had been wringing out. Harrow stepped forward, trying to place herself between the sightline of the Second cavalier and her own. But she moved to protect the wrong cavalier.

Her cavalier cleared his throat—oh, damn:

“My sister, I envy your fortune; fearless you forge yet ahead, through the cold grey flood of the River.

“Fallen in war for the fame of the House is the death every warrior fain would win at the finish;

“Laggard I linger behind; hold fast on the far bank’s beach-head! Blood shall repay your blood spilt.”

Book Eleven. For a moment, at the lieutenant’s expression, Harrow thought that she might draw that practical Cohort rapier and go for Ortus there and then, which his turgid verse probably did not deserve but which his choice to quote it unwanted and in public very much did. She closed her thumb and forefinger over a chip of patella in her pocket. But then Dyas’s hands trembled, and her eyes dropped to the floor, and she said lowly: “I can’t hope for that anymore.”