Only an idiot would have stopped there. Your quarters had windows. If you had wanted to invade anyone’s space, you would have put on a haz—you knew a real Lyctor didn’t even need that—crawled over the outside of the habitation ring, and found the inevitable gap in the room’s armour. There were no such gaps in your quarters. You had studied the floor plan and spent hours perched atop a ladder of skeletons, sliding hot gobbets of your blood and spit into the crawlspaces above the wall panels. You had stood at the docking bay and opened the airlock on a sack of bones, and walked back inside with them pattering parallel over the outside hull as you guided them to your windows and warded the plex with them. You had sent them down the plugholes in your pump sink and in the shining white edifice of the tub. You got the beginnings of a tension headache merely from the wards’ reaction to Ianthe Tridentarius visiting your bedroom. If she had noticed the fine bone dust you’d blown all over her clothes—a glitter of thanergy on all her robes—she had not said a word, which made you suspect that she knew and was doing worse to you in secret. You’d found none of her traps, and it made you jittery.

Naturally, none of your spaces could be considered safe. You slept with your sword in your arms. You often woke yourself up suddenly, to practise how quickly you could throw yourself into action. Without a properly ingested cavalier, you had only yourself to rely on; you had to work nine times harder. But you thought you at least knew your vulnerabilities.

You were eighteen years old now and a Lyctor of the First House, but in some secret chamber of your heart you clung grimly to the ways of the Ninth. Despite dead Harrow’s insistence that you become a generalist, you were on first instinct a bone magician. Your wards were bone wards; to some extent, blood wards. It was not that you did not account for spirit magicians—you had reasonably warded for everything, for every scenario both certain and uncertain: but your magic was at its heart still the magic of a Ninth House necromancer. This was your downfall.

You were in the bath when it happened. The Mithraeum’s quaint bathrooms had no sonic appliances. You could only bathe in water, which you had grown to accept. Ianthe openly enjoyed it, and kept saying you weren’t running it hot enough; but you did not quite believe that hot water wasn’t injurious. You bathed in a few centimetres of water somewhat below blood temperature, wrapped in your exoskeleton and behind your multiplicity of bone wards, and for some benighted reason you considered yourself safe.