The Saint of Duty was not there. Neither was the body of Cytherea the First. A trail of blood emerged from the open doorway, smiled on dimly by the electric lights. It led away from the bier where once the necromantic saint had slept so restively. Your heart and brain responded when you bade them both be still, and for a few seconds you stood before that continuous ribbon of blood, almost without thinking—and then you retrieved them both, along with whatever madness-tattered sense you retained.

You crouched. The blood was minutes old, a tangled skein of oxygen-rich carmine and oxygen-poor scarlet: blood from the right atrium, expelled straight from the heart. You stood and stepped carefully into the room on your bare feet. Behind the abandoned altar there was a criminal crimson splatter of blood on the back wall, more sprayed across the incorrupt petals of the increasingly blush roses. And discarded on the floor lay Ortus’s spear, slick and red from its point to almost halfway down its shaft.

You did not need a Sixth House dust-botherer to reconstruct this particular tableau. Someone had stood behind the bier, their back to the wall; the spearhead had been thrust through their chest and exited their back with one almighty push—blood had spurted from the exit wound, and then sprayed forward when the spear was pulled back out, with that same prodigious strength. Judging by the mess it had made of the roses, the attacker must have received a liberal coating. Then the victim had been dragged past the altar and out into the atrium, and from there to who knew where.

The weapon belonged to Ortus; but to whom belonged the blood? You had wet your hands before with the blood of Cytherea’s unbeating heart; this was not hers. One possibility was that Ortus had stabbed a third party, and then chosen to abscond for reasons of his own with both their body and Cytherea’s. That might be the most plausible explanation. But it was not the simplest.

You followed that long, snaking trail back out of the room. It led down the hallway, then turned an abrupt corner into a feeder corridor to an inner ring. You spurred your exoskeleton into a trot; your chilled feet spattered through the still-warm blood, and you left cooling crimson prints behind you as you ran. You moved along a dimly lit statuary corridor, between the gilded and bejewelled skeletons of Third and Seventh heroes dressed in gold and green robes of necromantic office, with amethysts and topazes and emeralds for eyes; you turned abruptly, skidding a little in the blood, through a low service doorway.