All the way back to the Mithraeum, in the tiny shuttle, you brooded on that. So many ways you had tried to contravene the inescapable fact that, when you went into the River, your necromancy on the meat side fell apart. Mercy never had to ask the unkind elements for her namesake, but you were unutterably vulnerable, no matter what you tried. Constructs crumbled, even ones you’d made of permanent ash. Your wards faltered. Your theorems failed. Bone you had manipulated would hold shape so long as you removed all artificial stimulation, but it took tedious trial and error to discover how to make your exoskeleton inert so that upon reawakening you would not find yourself weighed down by dissolved collagen. When your brain travelled back to your flesh, your arts would all spring neatly into being as though a valve had been turned to let them flow once more; but until then …

This was the secret of the Lyctoral process. When a normal Lyctor’s soul went to the River, the dead, blank energy that had once been their cavalier kept the lights on in their body. A normal Lyctor’s dormant shell responded with mechanical precision to threats mundane or fantastic. It could normalise its own temperature; it could filter poisons and toxins; it could repair damage with preternatural speed; and, of course, it could fight like a highly disciplined tiger. A Lyctor’s limbs remembered all the training of her stolen second self, and would use it, ruthlessly and perfectly, until the Lyctor came back to reclaim them.

A normal Lyctor’s body could look after itself. But it had become obvious to everyone: you were not a normal Lyctor.

13

NOT A NORMAL LYCTOR was God’s favourite euphemism. Your assigned brothers and sisters favoured different terms. (The Saint of Patience quite liked “diet Lyctor.” You sometimes planned Augustine’s death, and you did not make it quick.) But you found chilly comfort in being within a range of normality, rather than on the wrong side of a binary. Within that range was also Ianthe the First. On that same night, after you came back safely to the arms of the Mithraeum, you found her sat in the tawdry quarters of her forebear glumly eating soup.

Her exquisite Canaanite robe hung from a peg—you noticed that the hem was muddy—and she was wearing one of the ridiculous skirts and shirtwaists she had unearthed from the wardrobe, all of which had Valancy carefully embroidered on the inside seams. The skirts and waists were all beautifully cut for someone of a different height and body type than Ianthe possessed. They were tight where they should have been loose and loose where they should have been tight. They looked like her burial clothes, and she looked as though she had emerged fifty years after that burial.