He stood in the liminal space between dining room and kitchen, the biscuit tin clutched in his hands. There were crease marks on his clothes from too much wearing, and there was a faint smudge of blue where he had been writing with ink and touched his temple. He said, “A genuinely chaotic space—chaos in the meaning of the abyss as well as unfathomable … located at the bottom of the River. The Riverbed is studded with mouths that open at proximity of Resurrection Beasts, and no ghosts venture deeper than the bathyrhoic layer. Anyone who has entered a stoma has never returned. It is a portal to the place I cannot touch—somewhere I don’t fully comprehend, where my power and my authority are utterly meaningless. You’ll find very few ghosts sink as far as the barathron. If I believed in sin, I would say they died weighted down with sin, placing them nearer the trash space. That’s what we’ve been using it for, in any case. That’s where we put the Resurrection Beasts. The rubbish bin … with all the other dross.”

Then he said, “So who wants a bikkie?”

37

THE ATMOSPHERE ON THE Mithraeum crystallized into hot, waiting agony. You would walk down a hallway and find Augustine and Ortus fighting—their eyelids glued together in pink, smarting lines as they sparred blind, in tight corners, rapiers flashing like light over water—then stopping apparently at random, before the Saint of Patience would say something like, “Okay; again, but airless,” and you would hear a sudden pounding wheeze as both of them emptied the air from their lungs. Generally, you then took another corridor.

The Lyctors also did what they perhaps should have from the very start, and organised loosely planned, often contradictory sessions of instruction for Ianthe—and for you. You went en masse into the River, leaving your bodies behind to slump into C-curves—or at least, yours did, the rest of them stood—and crunched the silvery sand of the bank beneath your feet as the three saints led you both to assemble wards. No blood or flesh or bone here: the first two might be scavenged, the last swept away by the capricious tide. You collected bits of dried wood—dried wood?—and empty-coloured stones—stones?—from the banks of the River beyond death, and you collected armfuls of the sharply unkind osiers and tall, feathery plants, the ones with long fibrous stems as tall as you were and thin, tangled leaves. Filthy salt wind whipped your faces as you formed wards from the flotsam that grew, apparently, on the bank. And no ghosts passed you to wade down to the water—no ghosts heaved themselves out of the waters of the layer that Mercymorn had called the epirhoic—they had fled for different climes.

“The poor bastards are terrified,” said Augustine.