But after the ceremony came the sword. You remembered so little of Naberius Tern, either of his death or of his life, but from what you had gathered he would have been the last cavalier in the whole starless universe to think his sword-arm better off defleshed. Despite that, Ianthe was cured. It had been your faintest and most childlike hope that Ianthe would consider your bondage over; that your saving her life would be enough to release you from the collar of debt she had placed around your neck.

“As if,” she’d said. “When I ask, you will know you have been asked, Nonagesimus.”

The Saint of Patience had held to his promise to gild the arm, and now you often caught Ianthe marvelling at her metal-shod fingerbones, at the buttery shine of gold upon her triquetrum. Your eldest sister, whose discomfort and annoyance only grew with Augustine’s delight, confronted you about it in the corridors: “Did you really erect that ghastly edifice?”

“Yes,” you said.

“And it’s really self-synthesizing bone?”

“Yes,” you said. “Though I wouldn’t call the process synthesis when the construct is merely perpetually growing to fill a pre-realised skeletal map. It’s yet more proof that topological resonance can be manipulated.”

Mercymorn’s eyes narrowed to hurricane slits with short, thick lashes. Her prismatically white Canaanite robe was wrapped very tightly around her, as though she were cold, and she had bound back her peach-coloured hair as though it were a wimple. She said, “I see,” and then, “I see. I see. What’s two plus two?”

“Four—”

“Smallest bone in the body?”

“The auditory ossicles, but—”

“What’s the name of the Saint of Duty?”

You said, “Ortus the First,” and you were too slow. She reached out and tapped you on the side of the head. What Mercymorn the First could do with a simple tap on the side of the head might have meant your end far more easily than the Saint of Duty, a run-up, and his spear—but she said out loud, “Ortus,” and then hurriedly again, all in one single Ortus—Ortus. The back of your skull ached, and you felt the chilly stab of pain in your sinuses that you sometimes felt in the dry atmosphere of the Mithraeum. You jerked away—your fingers flew to the bone studs in your ears—but she was not attacking you. You, so aware of your body, could sense no gland overworking, nor chemical coursing, nor vessel constricting.

The only change was in Mercy. Her placid oval face had taken on much the same look as you had seen, through a thin veil of viscera, the day you had fed the Lyctors your own marrow. She looked at you, quiet, and perhaps even a little lost; and she said: “I can’t tell if you’re a once-in-a-lifetime genius, an insane imbecile, or both.”