She pulled the blade clear. This was also agony. Now you understood the object lesson: there was no sewing-up for you. Your meat was left ripped bare and vulnerable, a gaping, heinous hole in your hand, your skin a pitiful red-and-pink mess of shredded dermis. You grasped the wrist she was also grasping with your free hand; you poured thalergy in with embarrassing torrents, a hot, shameless gush of it, flicking free chips of bone and wending muscle back into muscle. This took effort and thought. You refilled the blood; grew new shiny spans of skin; left your palm as whole as before, your nerves screaming, shaking with the memory of pain.

“Harrow,” said Ianthe gently, “don’t fuck with me. I’m not here for your amusement either.”

She turned away from you and walked toward the door. Your mouth was dry. You kept trying to rewet it, but you were afraid that it would come out as bile; your head was swimming. You steadied yourself enough to say, “Is your cavalier a forbidden subject, then?”

Her hand stilled at the pad of the autodoor, standing by the hanging that showed the First House picked out in white thread. “Babs?” she said. “I don’t care about Babs … Just don’t suggest my sister is dead to me, ever again.”

She touched the pad beside the door and crossed the opened threshold. The door closed behind her, leaving you alone. There was blood on your face and the knees of your robes. After a moment you shook them clean as she had done, drying out the blood, rendering it powder. You were weak. You staggered over to the Body, standing so quiet by the wall, and you buried your face in her thighs. The dead cool nearness of her was so close to being real that it rendered itself genuine comfort.

You were close enough to the crates stacked up by the door now to see that they had been placed against the wall hastily, and somewhat ajar. You wobbled to your feet and pushed them down in a domino cascade of clanging plex.

Behind the boxes were hundreds of thick nail fragments, like the broken horns of some weird animal, scattered on the floor and embedded in the wall. Some of them were brown with dried blood. Long, ragged missiles of keratin were, at some points, finger-deep in the panelling. You crawled back to the cot where the Body laid you down on the sheets, placed the heinous sword within your arms, added the letters to this pile, and gave you the go-ahead to fall unconscious.

5

SHE WAS FIRST AWARE OF LIGHT. It poured through the plex windows in lavalike radiance: white and steaming light, making her undershirt stick to her ribs with sweat. In the tiny black confines of the shuttle, the light took up all the space with its irradiating, corneal presence; and Harrowhark cried out as though she were dying from it, and then was tremendously self-conscious and discombobulated.