YOU HAD NOT LEFT behind any notes about what you wanted done at your funeral. This was not due to a surfeit of optimism, though you were determined that your end would not come at the end of Ortus the First’s sword or spear: it was because you found the idea of a funeral for you too pitiful—what would be said, and what would be done? What fitting epitaph for your fragile bones? (Perhaps: Here lies the world’s most insufferable witch.)

In the following months the Saint of Duty attempted to kill you, by your count, fourteen times, and you never came to understand the motivation. Often you were saved only by intervention. Sometimes this came from one of the other two Lyctors. Once, vilely, from Ianthe; she had ensconced you in fat and rolled you down the hallway out of danger, and still laughed whenever she thought about it. Once it even came from God. He had walked in as your pelvis was run through by your elder brother’s razor-sharp, scarlet-hilted rapier—so sharp you could never comprehend it—and God had laid you down on the big broad dining table of brown wood, and the world had whited out for you and reverberated up your nostrils and sinus cavities, then arced down the bottoms of your feet, as your skin and flesh closed over whole and perfect. Even your back ache had disappeared. Your body had hissed all over as it sealed, reborn in the hot white light of the Necrolord Prime.

And he had said: “Ortus, have pity.”

“This is my pity, Lord,” said the Saint of Duty.

“She’s your responsibility, not your punching bag.”

“I find the responsibility a hard one.”

You’d lain dazed and stunned on the tabletop, and you heard the Emperor of the Nine Houses say: “I don’t want to argue with you. This is ham-fisted. Get out.”

If you had thought God’s intervention might be final, might enforce some terms of peace, it had not. It had seemed—difficult—to raise the subject, when God did not want to bring it up himself. What would you say? (One of your fingers and gestures is trying to kill me on the reg. Is this … fine with you?) When you finally approached him about it, his wince made you wish that you had not.

The Emperor said, carefully: “He made a pact, with an authority I have no power to gainsay, that he would protect me from all dangers. Now it has been put to him that you are that danger. Harrowhark, forgive me. I need you to face him—each time—knowing your life is in danger…”

Here he broke off, and just said: “Will you wear a rapier, if I give you one?”

“For what purpose, Teacher? I could not use it, having misapprehended the Lyctoral process.”

“Just in case,” he said, and it was the first time you had seen him wretched.