When she spoke at last, she sounded frozen and numb. “I see. I understand. Lipochrome. Recessive. You are the evidence. He lied to us … and you are all the proof I needed. I don’t have to breach anything. I don’t have to go back.” She exhaled. “Good God … Cytherea would have known as soon as she looked at you.”

And I said: “What the fuck are you talking about? What the hell are you talking about? What other Gideon?”

“The Lyctor sent to kill your mother,” said Mercymorn.

“But Harrow’s mother—”

“I’m not talking to Harrowhark, you facile dead child,” she said disdainfully. “I am talking to you … Nav … Gideon Nav … Gideon! What a laugh … you abomination, you heresy, you failed ambition nineteen years too late.”

I’m sorry, Nonagesimus. I didn’t know what to do. Maybe I should’ve turned and gotten the hell out of there, holed up somewhere to wait until you came back. But I said: “What—about—my mother?”

“Excuse me. I am wrong. I should not use that term,” said the necromantic saint. She rolled both her shoulders back and wiped those thin dilute tears of blood off her cheeks. “How she would have hated the word mother.”

And she raised her rapier, and she slowly unwound that net from her wrist, and it fell to the floor in great billowy shining knots. Mercy said: “Now I will clean up my mistakes. Cristabel always said I was tidy.”

She darted forward with her rapier close to her body, the net trailing behind—fuck, she was quick—knocked away my sluggish counter, easily a second too late, and she stabbed us neatly through the heart. An easy thrust, with enormous strength behind it, straight past the right breastbone and right to the very centre of your heart, which had been fucked up one too many times in my keeping. It was a surgical, exact thrust. Her rapier was a slender needle, and if you’d carved us open you probably would have found that the slim blade had gone right through the central mass of the aorta. Mercymorn withdrew with the same precise, swift movement and stepped backward, rapier dripping with blood. That was her mistake.

Your heart closed over the rapier as it punctured: your heart closed over the rapier as it withdrew. The slit so close to your breastbone sealed over instantaneously, just as fast as her stab, like an immunisation jab in Drearburh.

I readied my sword, and I saw her eyes widen, just a fraction.

“It’s too late in the game to have learned that trick, infant,” said the Lyctor.