She stood at the curve of the passage, perhaps fifteen metres from you. She struck weird shadows in that low halo of cold yellow, the softly gleaming whites of her shift glowing like a shaft of light through green water. There were still smudges of petal in her pale brown curls, and her eyes were too dark to see, but you recalled their nightmarish blueness. Cytherea looked at you, turned toward you, and began to walk.

That walk! That shuffling, disconcerting, slithering walk! The body flung its arms before it for momentum, the legs stiff-thighed and lock-kneed, right-side arm moving in time with right-side leg, ridiculous, appalling. Those fixed dead fingers caught a skeletal arm wrapped in gold foil, amethysts studded like so many eyes between the knucklebones, and it clattered to the ground, and Cytherea tripped over it—without the head losing its tracking focus on you, those unblinking eyes adhered to yours—and the body splayed and juddered on the ground. Then the corpse began moving inchworm-fashion, pushed forward by the action of the legs, the forearms banging on the tiles, thrusting the blessed bones of some fallen faithful out the way as though unnoticed. It was as though a magnet were stuck in the meat, a magnet that craved some polar force within you.

This assemblage writhed closer. You were a holy Lyctor: Harrowhark the First, ninth necrosaint to the King Undying, heir to a hard-won power that burnt in you like fusion. It was not arrogance to name yourself one of the most powerful necromancers in the universe. You took one look at that relentless, freakish argument of limbs, and you fled.

You hurled yourself back inside your room and locked the door. You scrabbled inside your mouth—drew blood with your fingernails, bit your tongue—swabbed your reddened saliva on the door in the hasty whorls of a blood ward, and pushed a chair up and beneath the handle, mindlessly. You threw yourself to the ground, your heart rattling the bars of its ribcage prison.

There was nothing but silence. Your body was the greatest source of noise: your chattering breath, your noisily pumping blood, your mashing teeth. Everything else was profoundly dark and still.

And then, from the door, the warded door that should have burst its theorems outward upon even the touch of foreign magic—from the door there came the soft, scraping noise of someone dragging nails down steel. The handle eased downward in its latch, and hit the chair, and stopped.

Great, greasy silence. Then another desperate rattle. And then: nothing.