Abigail said, “She should be incapacitated. It’s marvellous that she isn’t. But her flesh magic is inward-supporting—she says the Master Warden of the Sixth House gave her instruction when they were children, though goodness knows he would have been what, nine years old—and that she neglected her other studies. You, the lieutenant, and Protesilaus the Seventh constitute our front line.”

Harrowhark very specifically did not look at her cavalier to see how he took this pronouncement. He had formed a violent passion against the heroic knight of the Seventh House; she thought it was nice that he had a hobby. She said, “If the temperature drops further, I am in danger of becoming less useful. I have been experimenting with heating marrow to stop it from freezing, an art I have as far as I can tell only just invented, but it is fiendishly difficult. I do not admit this lightly.”

“Oh, damn!” the Fifth necromancer said softly. “Damn, damn! I hadn’t even thought of that. I mean—gosh, that’s fascinating, you ought to tell me the details at some point, but—damn!”

Harrowhark rubbed her hands against her ribs through her robes and gloves, and said: “This is all precaution. I’m still fit for purpose, so long as the temperature doesn’t fall.”

“Then time is against us,” said Ortus.

“Time was always against us,” said Abigail.

“Oh, time … time,” said a voice from the doorway. “Time means very little … mastery does. This temple stood for ten thousand years untouched by all but time’s clumsiest pawing … but then its master was the Master, for whom even the River will part. Time is nothing to the King Everlasting.”

It was Teacher. He wore his white woollen tunic with its beautiful rainbow sash, and his sandals and a little white half cape, but nothing else to keep out the cold. He had a bottle of apple-coloured liquid in his hand that he took a pull from every so often, the sharp reek of which made Harrow’s nose crinkle.

To their silence, he added: “I believe we are now being punished for what they did. Even the devil bent for God to put a leash around her neck … and the disciples were scared! I cannot blame them! I was terrified! But when the work was done—when I was finished, and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price—they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm … Oh, but it is a tragedy, to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time. It happened to me, but I was only a man, or perhaps fifty men … Reverend Daughter, your whole House treads upon a knife’s edge, as keepers of such a zoo.”