The skull disappeared into dust, the thorax collapsed in on itself like a pricked balloon, and the insides blew out the back almost delicately. It slumped, and when it went still the Lyctor stopped screaming. There were thin runnels of blood coming off her face and I thought she’d been hurt, but then I realised they were coming out of her eyes like tears. She stood there with her shoulders heaving and her hand pressed over her face, pinky-reddish hair coming out of her braid, looking unhurt but pretty sorry for herself.

And she looked right at us, before I could duck back into the corridor.

The Lyctor called Mercymorn stared at your face, and I have never seen anyone so totally shocked by misery. It wasn’t just fear: it was this huge, grief-stricken panic, a welter of unhappy terror. It was the face of someone who had just seen their one true love drop-kicked into a meat grinder and come out the other end as a pile of sausages.

“So now you come to me, First,” she said raggedly. “Now you come … at the end of everything.”

She seemed to be waiting. I didn’t know what to say. No way I could pretend to be you; I knew you too well. As we both waited in idiot silence, her fear changed—her eyes narrowed—her mouth hardened from its softer line of anticipatory terror, and she said, “No,” and then, “No,” again. And she was so old, Harrow, I don’t know how you dealt with all these unbelievably old bastards—she was old like Cytherea was old, and her eyes were absolutely abominable. They made my skin crawl. When she looked at us, it was like she could see right through me, and she was seeing shit I hadn’t even heard of.

The Lyctor said: “You haven’t come, have you? You’re not her. That freak would have gone for me already … she never could act human. But you stand like a human—you gawp like a human—you are human,” she said, with a rising horrified disgust. “But I don’t understand! Harrowhark was meant to be eaten by now! She wouldn’t have died for hours, and the Heralds are everywhere!”

“Lady,” I said, “are you telling me you stabbed my necromancer?”

“Yes, and she should have thanked me for it!!” said the Lyctor, thoroughly distracted. “It wasn’t horrible—I dulled her nerves, out of a misplaced sense of affection—I put her out in the corridor specially so she would be eaten quicker, and once she started getting eaten alive, she would have been mad and not feeling a thing! But you’re the soul—the soul of the cavalier that she stuffed in the back of her brain! What happened to your eyes?”