What confronted you was Ortus the First, his back bare to you, in a pair of soft flannel sleeping trousers and nothing else, so that you could see the protruding, tumorous knobbles of his spine and the wads of muscle atop his shoulders. Cytherea’s limp corpse was propped upright, her fingers dangling over his forearm, the dead-dove whiteness of her face, half-covered by his own, rosebuds crushed to deep yellow shadows at his feet. His palm supported the exhausted lily stem of her neck; the press of his fingers on that faded skin was so gentle that it left no mark. You, who had been so familiar with his hands in all their violent attitudes, had not thought them capable of that kind of gentleness. It made them seem alien from the rest of the man. And he was …

Crimson heat scoured your neck all the way up to your ears. The Lyctor who so often tried to kill you did not turn around, though you had in a split second already thickened your exoskeleton to double density and slapped big layers of enamel over your heart.

Ortus stiffened to the point that his shoulder blades showed real danger of bursting through his back. He had become one enormous hunch. You were frozen in a welter of adrenaline confusion, ready only for his inevitable murderous blow: you were not ready for the un-Ortuslike tenor of his voice when he said, calmly, back so vulnerably offered to you: “Close the door, and go away.”

You closed the door. You went away.

“I caught the Saint of Duty in the throes of grave lust,” you told Ianthe, about a minute later: she was not asleep either, but sitting up in bed with the lamp on, making complicated notes in a little journal.

“Oh my God,” said the Princess of Ida. She looked enchanted. In the lamplight, the bags beneath her eyes were very pronounced. Two apple cores sat in a perpetual state of perfumed rot by her bedside: her attempts to halt decay had progressed admirably. “The classical vice. Oldest sin in the book.”

“All flesh magicians,” you said coolly, “should be drowned in boiling blood.”

“Don’t tell me the Ninth never—”

“We do not.”

“Ah, but my beautiful naïf—”

“No.”

“Never mind that. Was he actually…?” (Here she made an evil gesture with her hands, which you took a moment to comprehend.) “You know. Waxing necrolagnic? Committing the love that cannot speak its name?”

You told her what you had seen, and she was immediately dismissive and mildly crestfallen.

“Oh, but who hasn’t done that,” said Ianthe. She reopened her small journal; you noted that whatever she was doing involved some quite substantial mathematics. “Dull. You obviously walked in too early. At least now you know who’s been moving her—so to speak.”

She did contentious things with her eyebrows, and then, apparently no longer interested, turned back to her mathematics. “Good night, Harrowhark.”