He was not sweating as she was, but those lashes were damp from the light. “As you see fit, my lady,” he said. His rapier was not belted at his hip. He carried it over his lap, as though it were someone else’s baby. Harrow was pleased, dimly, to see that for his main-gauche he carried his pannier, despite Aiglamene cutting up so rough at the idea; that felt appropriate. She had always desired a helpmeet, not a circus performer.

“Where are we?” Harrow added, in another sudden welter of nervousness. “I thought—perhaps—”

“We must be four hundred kilometres above the surface now,” he said, mistaking her question. “They are securing our clearance to land. We shall leave orbit soon, I trust.”

Harrowhark rose from the placket of House dirt she had been sitting on, which held the merest suggestion of thanergy at this point anyway, and she crossed to where the light was coming in. At the last moment she remembered what she had brought with her and drew a piece of thick voile from within her sacramental vestments. She tied it around her head and pulled up her hood, which still smelled of the salts that Crux had so carefully packed it away with: that herbaceous, acrid, homelike smell, the one that made her eyes smart again with familiarity. Then she looked through the plexiform window.

From space, the House of the First resembled a box of tumbled jewels. Haloed in white, its blues deep and brilliant and oxidised, a planet of water, close enough to the fiery gyre of Dominicus that the water was not allowed to freeze yet nor so close that it burnt away. Insubstantial and ever-shifting ocean, as far as the reddened eye could see. Her smarting eyes fell upon a tiny jumble of squares, ringed around a central greyish smudge.

She turned back to her seat, and found herself saying, restlessly, “At times now I forget … I thought I was dreaming, perhaps.”

“I find it perfectly normal, my lady,” he said. “Perhaps I am right in perceiving that you thought it might surprise me, your being … with the infirmity of…” When she looked at him, he immediately seemed to find the rattle and thump of the shuttle’s mechanisms overpowering, and began a traditional Ortus shutdown. “Your … so-called … the frailty.”

“Nigenad, use your words.”

“The insanity,” said her companion. Her shoulders relaxed a fraction. He mistook her rising relief for an emotion he ought to have known she never felt. Ortus said, distracted: “The only surprise really being in it expressing this way, rather than … No, I am not surprised, Lady Harrowhark. Perhaps you may yet have cause to find it useful.”

“Useful.”

Ortus cleared his throat. This engendered many emotions in her—Ortus Nigenad cleared his throat with the import of a sword being slid from a scabbard, or knucklebones jostling in the pocket of a Locked Tomb necromancer—but it was too late, as he was already declaiming: