She was saying: “It’s not fair of you to try to bump them off when we’d get in trouble for it. They can die well enough on their own, you toad. This one’s all of twelve years old.”

This was not close to accurate, even given your lie, but fine. He murmured something. She said back, sharply: “Quick enough for anyone’s satisfaction. Look! Look!! She can’t even heal … told him her integration had retarded … said she couldn’t stanch … and I’m not cleaning up this place, you are. Yuck. There’s bone in the grouting.”

Ortus the First said, “The Heralds will be here in eight months.”

“I’m well aware of that, thanks,” said Mercy. “You go flip some planets to give us a firebreak.”

Ortus the First said, “Now you’re telling me my own job.”

“Oh, I hate you! I’ve always hated you, you dreary, repetitive leg,” said Mercymorn passionately, and then you felt her thumb press down on your lower back, and your gastrointestinal tract—so interrupted by spearpoint—flushed, deep and warm, and you felt some of that twisting pain within you. You could barely feel it anyway, you were so running with hormones. It was the best you’d felt since before you’d gone to Canaan House. Then she said, more reasonably: “I know what you’re doing, and it’s not like I don’t understand it, but if you’d wanted to smother the kittens you could do it more cleanly by knocking her out and dropping her out the airlock…”

She trailed off suggestively. The Saint of Duty said stonily, “I do things face-to-face.”

“I am not trying to be cruel,” she said cruelly, “but that is what got you into trouble nineteen years ago.”

There were heavy footsteps on the tiles. You were rolled onto your back, where the scabbard made you roll backward and forward, like a tortoise with a knobble on its shell. You were filled with a great sense of calm as the world rolled back into focus. It had been psychologically dreadful to see Mercymorn tapping your chest and your midsection, mouth screwed up as though she were cleaning your vomit, but you were wrapped in a beautiful fug of oxytocin and did not care about other Lyctors, your assassination attempt, or anything much. It meant you could look up fearlessly, and nervelessly, into the eyes of Ortus.

Ortus’s face, stretched too tightly over its frame and locked into a long, lugubrious expression, had no reasonable relationship with his luminous green eyes: a soft, buttery green, less startling or harsh than the green of a shoot or the green of a leaf, but instead liquid and fluvial.