Harrowhark deliberately did not watch for the hot flash of murder in her own cavalier’s eyes, though it at least leavened his thick, porridgy sadness. It must have been traumatic to see his only cultivated personality trait co-opted by someone who looked like the hero of his very own epics. It was more interesting to look at Abigail Pent—to look at those slender, workaday hands turning over the forearms and elbows of the body that was apparently Palamedes Sextus, examining. “No defence wounds,” Pent murmured. “Just like Judith … I wonder.”

The wind had picked up. It suddenly screamed shrilly over the glass-covered, vine-choked roof, bringing bullet sprays of hard rain in its wake. For a moment, Abigail shuddered. Then she straightened up and clapped her hands together, as though she led a class of unruly small children. “We’re all in this together,” she said, which was a typically Fifth assumption. The Ninth didn’t think anyone was in anything together, or if they were, they all had to disperse as soon as humanly possible to avoid splash damage. “I am beginning to suspect I know where the danger lies. Or at least, I’ve got a perfectly baseless assumption, and every scholar knows that this is where you begin. Dulcie—Lady Dulcinea, do you mind if I ask you to get Silas Octakiseron with us? He’s neither to hold nor to bind to me, but he might listen to you.”

“Fine,” said the woman in the chair, drying her nose carefully with her crochet necktie, so as not to disturb her shunt. “I don’t love you for asking, but I won’t say that the renowned Abigail Pent asked something of me and I didn’t do it. And you’ve been kind to Cam and Pal. I’ll go.”

Abigail said, “Magnus, will you ask the lieutenant—” (“Anything for you, even that,” he said promptly.) “—and, Reverend Daughter, if you can, when you can, Coronabeth Tridentarius. And her sister, of course,” she added, though Harrowhark thought that addition a bit belated. “With the cavalier. Again, if you can. I haven’t been able to check … I’ll get any leftovers. Ask everyone to leave the facility alone, to come together. And find out whose room doesn’t leak,” she added, struck by inspiration, “so we can put down mattresses, as—I tell you for free—we’re flooded.”

It was left to the cavaliers to transfer the faceless body of Camilla Hect back into the frozen morgue—Abigail had removed all of the cavalier’s effects from her pockets, and was brooding over them like a crossword—and the intubated flesh necromancer wheeled herself over to the grisly remains of the skinny Sixth boy. He was a perfectly normal sight, except from the neck up.

“Is this how it happens, Lady Pent?” she asked soberly.