If you’d come back, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up following Ianthe Tridentarius to see God. But you didn’t; you were gone. Might’ve been a good thing in this instance, honestly. I still didn’t know if you were going to kick my ass for that conversation, or if you would be sorry for me. I knew which one would have been worse.

49

“I am the Emperor’s Hand; do not thou persist in this combat; matchless am I with the long blade—”

Ortus Nigenad’s voice reverberated around that ice-rimed, organ-swagged facility like one of the Sleeper’s gunshots. The great body, the one that Harrowhark had in her crueller youth assumed would look best once the man was dead and his bones settled in the family monument, proved to possess a pair of lungs that could declaim to wake the dead.

Abigail’s voice rose with his, though hers was desperate and somewhat wild: “Nigenad, you think too much of me!”

“Never, lady!—Matchless alike in my magecraft. Fall to your knees and be glad that I spare thee; thy courage is mighty:”

Book Five. Harrowhark’s least favourite.

“Oh, God,” she heard Abigail say. “God, please help me.”

Heavy, booted steps approached the coffin. Harrow dared not poke her head around its bulk, and anyway she knew what she would see. Instead, she scattered a fistful of crushed ash in a wide half-circle around herself and Ortus and raised it into a jagged wall of calvarial bone, six feet high and an inch thick: the toughest and thickest posterior parietal she could manage in her pre-Lyctoral state. The shell absorbed some of the force of Ortus’s declamation, rendering it flatter and less thunderous, but it was still impressively resonant as he continued: “‘Mightier yet is thy folly if thou think’st yet to oppose me.’ The Lyctor spoke, and was silent—”

The bone fence shattered. It was impossible. Harrow now clearly remembered the wall of bone she had summoned up around herself, Gideon, and Camilla Hect, in those dreadful final moments on the garden terrace. She had been almost spent, and yet her barrier had held off a determined onslaught by one of the Emperor’s fists and gestures for at least a minute. Cytherea had been ten thousand years old and heir to limitless necromantic power. The Sleeper had a baggy orange suit and a gun collection. Yet now she shouldered her way through Harrow’s wall with irritable, disgusted motions, as if it were an unexpected curtain of cobweb in a catacomb archway. The bone barely even seemed to break; it simply flaked away in chunks, like old plaster from a ceiling. The Sleeper forced her upper body through the crumbling wreckage, gun thrust out before her, and shot Ortus in the belly.