But even a genius could only maintain the status quo. The House had never had the tech, nor the understanding, nor the on-duty flesh magicians to work a vat womb. The womb-bearing populace was too old to have babies, barring two of their number, one of whom was herself. Harrow could only thank God that duty had never fallen to her. The only viable source of healthy XY had been located in her House’s cavalier primary, a boy seventeen years her elder. Back then she had considered him a walk-around man suit surrounding some quite good calcium carbonate, and she knew he considered her with an awful respect, the same type one might have for a hereditary cancer that one knew was on its way. Thankfully, their marriage would have mingled the Drearburh cavalier and scion lines beyond any hope of repair: Ortus Nigenad was an only child. Harrowhark had her parents quash the idea so enthusiastically that she cracked her father’s molar. The only virgin who could possibly be more relieved was Ortus himself.

So the years passed, unshriven, crusting up and drying as they went. Harrowhark watched Crux get older, and older and older, and tried all the tricks in her box to keep him upright—there was terrible plaque in his arteries, and he pretended that he did not notice her scraping them. She knew that when she finally laid her nursemaid in his niche, it would be the death of the only other person invested in her sanity. And if she went mad again, then what? At any point she could have asked for assistance from her sister Houses. At any point she could have asked for Cohort intervention, and they would have been there the next day with foetal care boxes, and volunteer penitents, and loans, and plant samples—and with incontrovertible suggestions that Harrowhark really ought to marry this son of the Second, or this daughter of the Fifth—and she could have watched coloured banners get strung up next to the black skull of the Black Anchorite. And that would be the end of the Ninth House, even more completely than a hammer to the oxygen-sealant machine.

They needed a resurrection. They needed a miracle. Harrowhark had been studying miracles for years, and then one landed squarely in her lap: the chance to become a Lyctor. The chance to serve the Emperor her God, the chance to become a fist and a gesture, the chance to become an immortal servitor and advocate for Drearburh; to refresh the Ninth House on her terms, with the rock never rolled away and the love of her life and her death quiet and unmolested in her deadly shrine of stone. Another ten thousand years of solitude. Another long and snaking line of Reverend Mothers, Reverend Fathers. Harrow took the unready cavalier from her House, and she snatched the chance with both hands.