“You say you misapprehended the process,” said your Teacher, leaning forward and crossing his shabby-sleeved arms over his knees. “I don’t believe you did, Harrowhark. I really don’t believe you did. I’ve only seen one person get it … fundamentally wrong … and I hope I never see what happened to Anastasia and Samael again.”

And thus, unintentionally, you also confronted him with Anastasia. You could not trip in the Ninth House without falling over an Anastas, an Anastasia, or an Anastasius; or, in later years, bumping into their niche. Anastasia had been the mythic founding tomb-keeper and grandmother of the House, and the subject of at least two Nigenad poems (’Twas deep in Anastasia’s time, I wot). She was namesake of the deep inner monument where lay the sacred bones of tomb-keepers past and those who fell in battle. You were profoundly upset to learn that she had been real; that the rooms you inhabited—the empty, tintless, quiet rooms—had been intended for her.

As you often sat, mute and still, a statue of yourself, opposite the Emperor of the Nine Resurrections, caught between pleasure and pain at listening to him speak, he did not wait for you to ask. He said, “Out of all of us, only Anastasia got it wrong. She’d researched it too much. Typical Anastasia. She’d seen some pathways in it that simply didn’t exist. She spoke the Eightfold Word, and it didn’t … work. After we—cleaned up—she asked me if I might end her life. Of course I said no. She had so much more to give. Later I would ask of her a greater and more terrible thing. I had a body and I needed a tomb … you might know of the body, Harrowhark, and you will know far better the Tomb.”

At the time the Body had stood at the curtained plex window that stared out onto the field of slowly spinning asteroids, the mother-of-pearl robe slipping from her supple, naked shoulders, still moist as though just taken from the ice of her grave. You watched a droplet of water trickle down the column of her spine.

“The tomb that was to be shut forever,” you said, and found the words so strange. “The rock that was never to be rolled away. That what was within should remain buried, insensate, with closed eye and stilled brain. Every day I prayed for it to live, I prayed for it to sleep.”

Your voice dredged up from your brain, which dredged up from your heart, which dredged up from the oily, filth-stricken depths of your soul, and you said: “God, who did you bury?”

Teacher worried his temple with his thumb, and then worried his other temple with his other thumb. He took a biscuit and dipped it into his cooling tea, then ate it, then swirled the tea around in the cup and set it down again. “I buried a monster,” he said.