He took off those thick lenses and looked at you with diamond-grey horror. His face was homely; he looked somewhat like a beak, a chin, and a jaw put together as a joke—but the beauty of his eyes made the whole attractive, as though they were a mould colonizing the rest of the stratum.

He spluttered, “Eight months?”

“I don’t have an exact record, but—”

“What? Why did it take you so long? It should have taken you a week, tops.”

“Excuse my apparently sluggard pace,” you said, feeling that this was an unjust accusation, “but your cavalier only just brought me your bones, and regarding that I have more than one question to ask her—”

His brows were crisscrossing like swords. “How did you and Cam get separated in the first place?”

“I was not aware I owed a debt of care to—”

“I mean she wouldn’t have left your side, if you’d given her half a chance—”

You lost your patience. It was difficult to say if you’d ever had any; you’d just spackled over the hole with curiosity.

“Warden of the Sixth House,” you demanded, “why are you acting as though I should know you? Why are you acting as though your cavalier knows me? I am Harrowhark the First, formerly and in everlasting affections the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh: I am the ninth saint to serve the King Undying, one among his fists and his gestures. I did not know you in this life, and I will not know you in the next one.”

He stopped dead.

“You became a Lyctor,” he said.

“That was always the plan.”

“Not for the Harrowhark I knew. Tell me you did it correctly,” he said, and there was a quick, questioning eagerness to his voice, something beneath the confusion. “Tell me you finished the work. You out of everyone could have worked out the end to the beginning I was starting to explicate. Your cavalier, Reverend Daughter—”

“Has become the furnace of my Lyctorhood,” you said.

The dead Warden stopped. He looked at your face as though his eyes could peel through dermis, fascia, and bone. And he said, quietly: “How God takes—and takes—and takes.”

There was an enormous rumble overhead. It sounded like some great mechanism grinding against itself with unlubricated joints, a turbulence of machinery sobbing to life. There came another, farther off, and a bright white light at the window that made you think of the Emperor. Thunder, and a sweep of lightning. Palamedes’s lovely eyes widened, and he said, “That’s not possible,” and darted to the window.

You went with him. A squall of rain tossed itself at the window like a bird. Through the smeared glass—the still and static light outside was suddenly overcast—you looked down.