You said nothing. He pressed, “Harrow, do something normal. Learn how to make a meal. Read a book. Go ahead and prepare—our lives revolve around us all preparing … but take the time to rest. Have you slept lately?”

It was the first time you realized God could not understand you.

And nobody cared, and nobody paid you the slightest bit of attention, including the Saint of Duty, who was as whole, and as normal, and as two-eyed as ever. You had not held out much hope that you had done anything permanent. The only surety that it had even happened was the lasting smell of damp on your carpets.

So you went to Ianthe, and you asked her how to make soup.

“Oh, it’s easy,” said the Princess of Ida breezily. Despite Augustine’s increasing critiques she showed no signs of temper, as might have been anticipated; in fact she seemed to get more carefree with every failure. “You cut up an onion, burn it at the bottom of the pot, put in a few vegetables, and then some meat. It won’t taste like anything, so put in a few teaspoons of salt, and then it’ll taste like a few teaspoons of salt.”

In obedience to the Emperor, you made soup. You had never seen anybody cook before. You did not like it. There were technical manuals on the subject in a kitchen drawer, and you pored over those, rather than attempting Ianthe’s air on the theme of salt. By the evening of the third day after your interrupted bath, you had not slept for eighty-six hours, but you had read a book, and you had made soup three times. During sleeping hours you lay beneath your bed, in the dark, hardly breathing, staring up at the dustless ribs of the steel mattress slats—you prayed to the corpse of the Locked Tomb, or you said to yourself, “Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” until it slurred together on your tongue and joined the orchestra of whispers that thrummed between your ears, waiting for the assault that did not come.

It was also on the third day post-Ortus that the tension in the Mithraeum gained weight and sharpness, like salt water forming crystals. This had nothing to do with you. It was the countdown that Augustine had issued to Ianthe.

“Five more days,” he had said to her. You knew, because he had said it over breakfast, right in front of you and Mercy. “You’ve five days left, my chick. If you don’t start using that sword arm properly by then, I shan’t bother to teach you a damn thing more. I’m not interested in charity cases. If I were, I’d be teaching Harrow.”