Harrow the Ninth

calmly over the comm. Ten minutes until breach. We've got half an hour of aircon left. After that, you'll be working in the oven. Doors down until the pressure equalizes. Conserve your temp, everyone. Harrow, I'm leaving yours closed as long as possible. You staggered to your feet, limpid skirts gathered in both hands, and picked your way over to the comm button. Scanning for something damning and intellectual to say, you snapped. I can take care of myself. Harrowhark, we need you in the river, and while you are in the river, your necromancy will not work. I am a lictor, Lord, you heard yourself say. I am your saint. I am your fingers and gestures. If you wanted a hand who needed a door to hide behind, even now, then I have misjudged you. From his far-off sanctum deep within the Mithraeum, you heard him exhale. You imagined him sitting in his patchy, worn-out chair, all alone, worrying his right temple with the thumb he always worried his right temple with. After a brief pause, he said, Harrow, please don't be in such a hurry to die. Do not underestimate me, teacher, you said. I have always lived. You picked your way back through the concentric rings of ground acetabula you had laid, the fine gritty layers of femur, and you stood in the center and breathed. Deep through the nose, deep out the mouth, just as you had been taught. The frost was already resolving into a fine dew misting your face and the back of your neck, and you were hot inside your robes. You sat down with your legs crossed and your hands laid helplessly in your lap. The basket hilt of the rapier nudged into your hip like an animal that wanted feeding, and in a sudden fit of temper you considered unbuckling the damn thing and hurling it as hard as you possibly could to the other side of the room, only you worried how pitifully short it would fall. Outside, the hull shuddered as a few hundred more heralds assembled on its surface. You imagined them crawling over one another, blue in the shadow of the asteroids, yellow in the light of the nearest star. The doors to your quarters slid open with an antique exhalation of gas levers. But the intruder did not set off the traps of teeth you'd embedded in its frame, nor the gobbets of regenerating bone you had gummed onto the threshold. She stepped over the threshold, with her cobwebby skirts rucked high on her thighs, teetering like a dancer. In the darkness, her rapier was black, and the bones of her right arm gleamed an oily gold. You closed your eyes to her. I could protect you if you'd only ask me to, said Ianthe the First. A tepid trickle of sweat ran down your ribs. I would rather have my tendons peeled from my body one by one and flossed to shreds over my broken bones, you said. I would rather be flayed alive and wrapped in salt. I would rather have my own digestive acid dripped into my eyes. So what I'm hearing is, maybe, said Ianthe, help me out here. Don't be coy. Do not pretend to me that you're here for anything other than to look after an investment. She said, I came to warn you. You came to warn me. Your voice sounded flat and afflictless, even to you. You came to warn me now. The other Lictor approached. You did not open your eyes. You were surprised to hear her crunch through your metrical overlay of bone, to kneel without flinching on the grim and powdery carpet beneath her. You would never sense Ianthe's thanergy, but the darkness seemed to give you an immense attunement to her fear. You felt the hairs rise on the back of her forearms. You heard the hammering of her wet and human heart, her scapulae drawing together as she tensed her shoulders. You smelled the reek of sweat and perfume, musk, rose, vetiver. No, Nagesmus. Nobody is coming to save you. Not God, not Augustine. Nobody. There was no mockery in her voice now, but there was something else. Excitement, perhaps? Or unease?