“And somewhere out there, may all the blood of your blood suffer even a fraction of what I have suffered.”

He pushed. The eldest princess of Ida dropped from the side of the docking bay with swanlike ease. She simply tipped off the side, neither folding nor seizing—there one moment, a golden star, and then gone. There was no question of going to her aid. The Eighth House necromancer stood there with the wind flapping his wet alabaster robes, his braid torn to wisps and ribbons, and he did not even look over the side.

But he did look to Harrowhark.

“Defend yourself, Octakiseron,” she called out. “The black vestals have only one answer for murder.”

“The black vestals only ever had one answer for anything,” was the reply, in his profoundly deep, gorgelike voice. He looked at her: from their distance of about five bodies apart his eyes were umbrous in his white and stricken face. “The question came, Why … and the black vestals said, Because. Now you have come to me, you cur of the nighttime, you fry of slavery, you have done what you have done, and you say to me, Defend yourself? How could I?”

“I don’t give a damn about White Glass mysteries or cryptics,” she said. “I care that you just pushed one of the Tridentarii to her death.”

“Death?” said Silas.

He looked out again at all the rolling fog, at the clouds that obscured the grinding sea down to which Coronabeth was most likely still falling. From closer up, Harrow saw that he was all in disarray: his clothes were smudged and a few of his buttons were not done up. The rain and the fog had lashed him terribly.

Harrow took her hands from her pockets and strewed her chips upon the ground. From each chip—she felt a pop, pop, pop at the back of her brain from the thalergy expenditure—she unfurled a full appendicular skeleton, extending the bone in a hurry so that none of the cortex could mix with water. The dull gleam of their compact bone shone like marble in the wet. Silas Octakiseron looked at her five full constructs with his lip curling.

“Her filthiness is on her feet,” he murmured. “She has not remembered her end.”

“For God’s sake, raise your hands, Octakiseron,” she said. “Or make me strike down an unarmed man.”

And Silas said, “Is this how it happens, then?”

He turned away. She saw what he meant to do, and her skeletons skittered forward on the rain-slick concrete of the docking terrace. But it was for nothing: Silas Octakiseron had launched himself fearlessly into space after the tumbling body of Coronabeth Tridentarius. He fluttered in the wind and rain briefly, like a dirty white bird, and disappeared.