Denied of weapons, it had been Harrow who had climbed the Anastasian monument and retrieved the chain of Samael, the sacred relic of the long-dead warrior servant of the original tomb-keeper; for that sin she had been forced to strip before the very altar she stood before now as the Reverend Father whipped stripes into her back, until the Daughter had intervened. Now Harrow had the chain, but the Daughter never let her forget the intervention.

“Harrow,” said the skull-faced cavalier of frightful aspect—upon stepping down from his post five years previous, Mortus had scarified the skull into his son, when the adopted necromantic heir had confirmed Ortus for her cavalier primary; the cicatricial lines showed clearly beneath the paint—“they will never let you go. I truly wish they would. I do not long to travel to the First House—I do not dare imagine to serve a Lyctor, let alone stand against one, as in the days of Nonius.”

“Matthias Nonius never stood against a bloody Lyctor.”

“It is clear in the histories—”

“Half the page was gone!”

“A suggestive emendation makes it clear that—”

“I am the daughter of the House of the Ninth,” she said, cutting off whatever he had to say about suggestive emendations. “I am the unfulfilled vow and the bloody teeth of the unkissed skull. I acknowledge myself as a cruel disappointment. I may have been supplanted—I may be no real heir to the mysteries that belong only to the Reverend line—but I will bear the sword! If I am no adept, it is my right to carry the blade instead!”

Ortus Nigenad wiped the sweat off his forehead. The candlelight limned the carved hurts of his face, but his expression did not match their fearsomeness. The panniers of bone at his back rustled pleasantly, in the manner of a child’s sandpit.

“Harrow,” he said. “You do not even really want to carry the blade for her.”

“No,” she said. “I hope she gets boiled alive in oil. I hope she falls into a hole with a crowd watching. I hope someone takes a large pair of secateurs to the muscles at the backs of her heels. I so genuinely and wildly long to see that. I would buy tickets.”

Ortus said tremulously, “But you know she quite—”

“No.”

“And they say she is petitioning for—”

“Continue that sentence,” she said, “and I’ll make it to the pain.”