Any reply she might have made was aborted by a sudden gust of rain through a broken window. A curtain of murky water splattered through the glass maw. The water carried with it a handful of flashing brown-and-steel objects, which fell in a tumbled heap on the rotten Canaan House corridor carpet. When they came to rest, she and Ortus stared down at a collection of large, rusted pipette needles, the hard plex type with measurement markings up the side.

“Would you like to know if I can see them also?” Ortus asked humbly, after a long rain-swept pause.

22

THE NIGHT AFTER YOU killed your thirteenth planet, you were beset by a dream wherein you sat down to dinner opposite the Body. This was far better than the normal travails of dinner, with its partakers all wearing the filmy mother-of-pearl Canaanite robes that clung to Mercymorn like starlight, turned Augustine ethereal, gave Ianthe jaundice, and rendered you a sacrificial parsnip; that trial where, if you did not eat enough, the Emperor of the Nine Houses told you kindly, “Try just a few more spoonfuls, Harrowhark,” as Ianthe repressed not her smirks. But in the dream you wore your thick dark vestments of the Ninth House, and sat only opposite the monstrous dead of the Locked Tomb, who wore the shabby black shirt and trousers of some particularly slovenly penitent. Both of you wore the sacramental skull paint, and you talked comfortably of very little—yet it felt as though it meant very much. And nobody made you eat.

Then the Body looked at you with those direct, incalculable eyes, and she said: “Harrowhark. Wake up.”

“Pardon?”

“Wake up. Now.”

You opened your eyes to the ceiling the long-lost Anastasia had never seen, twisted in the bedclothes she had never slept in. The thickly insulated blackout hangings covering the plex windows projected the high ceilings into an eternity of shadows, and you could barely perceive your hands in front of your face. You pushed away the coverlet. You were cold beneath your nightgown, which had been short in the leg when you went away to Canaan House and was a sorry affair now, and your exoskeleton scraped quite loudly in that black silence as you took the bone-sheathed sword from its loverlike position next to you on the bed. You held it with the swaddled blade flat on your shoulder, your hands cupping the bottom of the hilt—still the pommel—and you did not strap on the rapier that the Emperor had given you.

It was lighter outside your rooms, in the corridor. The low yellow panel lights cast warped, skeletal shadows up and down the memorials of the Mithraeum. They had been turned down to faint blue-hued ambers to acknowledge the hours of sleep, and gave texture more than vision. To your Drearburh eyes, however, the passageway was flooded with light. That was why you saw her so clearly.