“You come to claim a body,” she said, and upended the jug, and shook out the last pale drops. “This is all we know. You helpless ghost, this is not supplication … We came at invitation; whither did you? I am a spirit-caller of the House of the Fifth. I am Abigail for my mothers, Pent for my people. I who died am come in the fullness of my power, at the bidding of the Lyctor you seek to supplant. I will sever the thanergetic link you have to this woman, and I bid you—get the hell out.”

Abigail withdrew her hand from the fat glove and laid it bravely, bare, on the icy front of the glass-covered coffin. She did not wince from the cold. A chill blue light emanated from beneath that hand, as though somebody were shining a light from beneath the necromancer’s fingers. Harrow was struck by a thirst for her rightful power—to understand the theorem through a Lyctor’s eyes. All she could do was watch with her senses dulled.

After a moment, the adept said: “The ties lead outside this place, Harrowhark. The spirit is linked to some physical object.”

Harrow said, “Then—what?”

“Oh, we can get the spirit out of you,” said Abigail. “But we can’t kick it out of its other anchor. In other words, just because we banish it here doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily banish it there, outside the River … but let’s give a good, hard pull and see what emerges.”

The candles flared. Where before they had burned with a meek yellow flame, now they burned as strong and blue as the spirit-magic emanation from Abigail’s hands.

Abigail asked: “Who are you?”

And with a sodium flare sparking from Abigail’s fingers, the lid of the coffin swung open so wide that it wrenched itself off and crashed to the floor. One of the ice-fogged glass panels that had withstood all of Lieutenant Dyas’s violence burst into a shower of fragments. Abigail stumbled backward, then regained her footing.

There was nothing inside.

From the passageway just behind Harrow—the corridor that ought to have led to the mortuary—a voice crackled through its haz mask: “Nice try.”

A dry, unassuming click; an enormous blast that rattled around Harrowhark’s ears, and a crunch as the projectile meant for her cracked into the sheet of solid bone she flung upward from behind her feet. The sheet exploded with the impact, sending chips flying through the air and knocking her forward onto that freezing cold floor and its carefully wrought diagram. A familiar spike of pain went through her head, and her temples prickled with blood sweat. Had raising a simple shield really cost her so much? Had her reserves ever truly been so shallow, even in childhood?