To properly identify them, Abigail’s husband-cavalier scared up the only flesh magician he could find. Finding other magicians at all was becoming difficult: the day-jewel and night-rock Tridentarius twins were so elusive that Harrow grew confused even trying to remember when she had last seen them. There was not enough room in the chilly morgue upstairs, and the dropping temperature was not immediately compromising, so they put the faceless bodies out on rubberized sheets in the dining room. It was there the Seventh cavalier brought his adept.

She must have seen them both on that first day—that muggy, sun-struck first day, when Teacher had given them the rings and the keys, and told them about the monstrous hypersomniac in the basement—but Harrow found she was startled when they arrived. It would have been difficult not to have been. The cavalier was bronzed and vigorous, an enormous, musclebound man in green, with a seafoam-coloured kilt and tooled leathers. This well-muscled individual was guiding a wheeled chair down the wide aisles between tables, and in the chair was what appeared to be a dead body, holding a little lacy umbrella of her own to keep off the drips. It was gowned appropriately in spindrift white skirts, and inappropriately in a little crocheted scarf of pilling white wool.

Harrowhark had known Ortus too long not to register the slight curl to his lip and the lack of maudlin suicide in his eyes: he was almost rigid with contempt. She had thought Ortus would find contempt too exhausting an emotion to bother with. The ghost holding the umbrella had her pale, sugar-brown hair cropped short, its curls gathered into a cap of silky ringlets. There was a gracile delicacy to her—a starved, wasted, childlike mien—and when she gave her umbrella to her cavalier, she actually rose to stand. A fine length of tubing emerged from her nose and was discreetly taped into the collar of her dress. Harrowhark had never seen its like before; it was a thin, stiffened cylinder of mucous epithelial tissue.

“It’s great, isn’t it?” she said to Harrow, by way of hello. She had a sweet, modulated voice, only a trifle breathy. “It’s a pulmonary drain. It goes all the way down to my lungs.”

“I have never seen such a thing before,” admitted Harrow.

“You wouldn’t have,” said the Seventh necromancer rapturously. “He came up with it, when he was fifteen.”

It seemed too stupid for Harrowhark to believe, but there could be no ambiguity in that woman’s gesture. Her paper-skinned hand pointed to one of the faceless corpses, the one without a rapier. It oughtn’t to have surprised her anymore that the relationships between every other scion of the Nine Houses seemed intimate, or incestuous, or familiar, or antipathic. She did not feel left out. She merely felt dislocated as Abigail said, “Are you sure it’s him, Dulcie?”