“Give me a minute,” said Dulcie, apparently, though who would have let themselves be called Dulcie unless faced with water torture was a question Harrow did not want the universe to answer. “I took a swab from the doorknob—I’ve got two prints, so if they correlate, that will tell us something…”

The grossly named Dulcie sat back down in the chair, and her cavalier pushed her alongside one corpse, and then the other. Harrowhark watched her work. She gently grated a bit off the heel of each stiffening hand—she took a minute sliver off each thigh, unbuttoning both sets of trousers without a blush or grimace—she cleaned under the fingernails (“Just for bacterial thalergy, you know”), and, in the end, sighed.

“The one on the left’s Cam, the one on the right’s Pal,” she said, proving her desire to saddle the world with diminutives. “Did the Sleeper get them?”

“Only by assumption,” said Harrowhark, while Abigail’s dolt of a husband said, “I bloody hope so.”

“Magnus,” Abigail said, a touch disapprovingly.

“Well, if the Sleeper didn’t, that’s two maniacs with an ancient weapon and a love of blowing off faces, dear,” said Magnus.

Maniac did not seem apt. The first death was maniac. Deuteros was riddled with far more holes than necessary. This had been a simple execution. The effects were grisly. It would be difficult ever to get a clear picture of what Sextus’s and Hect’s faces had looked like, as they were now sprayed indiscriminately across the back wall of the mortuary. From what Harrow had been able to reconstruct, and the relative time stamps of the deaths, it looked as if both representatives of the Sixth House had stood quietly with their backs to the wall, about an arm’s length apart from each other, and had their faces forcibly removed from very short range. First went one; the second had waited; then the other.

Harrow said, “The projectile exited out the back of the skull, and we haven’t been able to dislodge it from the wall. Fragments suggest a similarity. There is reasonable doubt, and then there’s unnecessary caution. I say the Sixth were killed by the same entity that killed Deuteros.”

“A thesis I agree with,” said Ortus heavily. “The Sleeper, who sleepeth not. Perhaps a better name would have been.… the Waker.” (She searched her cavalier thoroughly for any evidence of humour, but found none, as per usual.) “It lies in an impervious coffin. It kills with a legendary weapon. What can we do against such a supernatural assault?”

The dreadfully named Dulcie was stroking a soft, wet lock of very dark hair between thumb and forefinger, quite close to the ruined ear of Camilla Hect. “The only thing you can ever do, when faced with an enemy too great for yourself,” she said. “Fight like a trapped animal in a sack.”