A figure stood in the hallway, breathing hard into the crook of his elbow. He hadn’t even drawn his rapier, though somebody obviously had at some point, as piles of dead bees lay in the corner segmented neatly. It was the Lyctor you called the Saint of Patience, alive and unhurt, apart from a gleam of sweat and blood on those snobby, aristocratic features. I was struck again by how almost-unreal Lyctors always looked—or like they were more real than anyone else was, more present, painted in more saturated colours. He kept running one hand over his flat combed-back cap of fair, greyish hair, and looked as though he was thinking seriously about power-chundering. When he saw us standing in the doorway, he approached and snapped: “Chick, we have to get back in there. Gideon hasn’t surfaced, so he’s fighting the damn thing alone. Help me find your elder sister—wait, Harrow?” His surprise shifted almost immediately to distracted annoyance: “For the Emperor’s sake, Harrowhark, if you lived could you not, at least, have dropped in to assist—”

But he had stopped dead, and he was looking at us.

At your face. He looked at my eyes in your face in the same way the other Lyctor had, and any colour in his own drained straight away.

I’ve seen a lot of things in my time—swords, pictures of ladies who lost their clothes in an accident, a bunch of corpses—eclectic, maybe, though now I think about it maybe not the widest variety—but I have never seen anyone look at anything the way those Lyctors looked at us. Mercymorn looked at us like we were the picture in the dictionary next to unhappiness. Augustine looked at us like we were the last thing he’d ever see.

“John,” he breathed. And: “Joy.” And then—he fucking legged it.

When I turned us around to look at her, Ianthe was watching us with cautious, half-suspicious curiosity. She never did show all her cards. It was pretty shitty the way she towered over you—over a head above your height, a bleached and charmless reed of a human. She’d never seemed that tall back at Canaan House, but I wasn’t used to your eyeline.

“Mystery on mystery,” was all she said. And then: “How I hate seeing you in her face.”

“You’ve got two short minutes left before I punch you right in the butthole,” I said.

“Follow me. We haven’t got much time—quite apart from your hurtful threats of sexual violence,” she said. “Why, your fist is so big, and my butthole is so small.”

“Just move, Tridentarius! I’m not ready to laugh at your goddamn jokes!”