Outside the plex, the stars were blocked by the skittering, buzzing Heralds of the Resurrection Beast, beating their wings furiously to roast everything inside. From very far away you thought you heard the ring of swords, and you flinched at each bright scream of striking metal. You had loathed that sound from birth.

You prepared to die with the Locked Tomb on your lips. But your idiot dying mouth rounded out three totally different syllables, and they were three syllables you did not even understand.

PARODOS

FOURTEEN MONTHS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER

IN THE MYRIADIC YEAR OF OUR LORD—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, our Resurrector, the full-pitying Prime!—the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus sat on her mother’s sofa and watched her cavalier read. She idly fretted her thumbnail into a decaying brocade skull on the cover, carelessly destroying in a second long years of labour by some devoted anchorite. The mandible unravelled beneath the pad of her thumb.

Her cavalier sat very upright in the study chair. It had not taken anyone of comparable bulk since his father’s day, and was now in danger of a final fatal sag. He had tucked his considerable frame tight within its borders as though breaching them might cause Incident; and she knew full well that Ortus hated Incident.

“No retainers. No attendants, no domestics,” read Ortus Nigenad, folding the paper with obsequious care. “Then I will wait on you alone, my Lady Harrowhark?”

“Yes,” she said, vowing to keep her patience as long as possible.

“No Marshal Crux? No Captain Aiglamene?”

“In fact, no retainers, no attendants, and no domestics,” said Harrow, losing her patience. “I believe you’ve cracked the elaborate code. It will be you, the cavalier primary, and me, the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House. That’s all. Which I find … suggestive.”

Ortus did not seem to find it suggestive. His dark eyes were downcast behind their thick black lashes, the sort Harrowhark had always fancied you might get on some nice domestic mammal, like a hog. He was perennially downcast, and not out of modesty; the faint crow’s feet trampling each eye were lines of sadness; the fine creases at his forehead were a careful act of tragedy. She was glad to see that someone—maybe his mother, the mawkish Sister Glaurica—had painted his face as his father had once painted his own, with a solid black jaw to represent the Mouthless Skull. This was not because she had any especial love for the Mouthless Skull, as paint sacrament went. It was merely because any jawéd skull he affected became a wide white skull with depression.

After a moment, he said abruptly: “Lady, I cannot help you become a Lyctor.”

She was only surprised that he dared to offer an opinion. “That’s as may be.”