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.”

“You agree with me. Good. I thank you for your mercy, Your Grace. I cannot represent you in a formal duel, not with the sword, nor the short sword, nor the chain. I cannot stand in a row of cavaliers primary and call myself their peer. The falsehood would crush me. I cannot begin to conceive of it. I will not be able to fight for you, my Lady Harrowhark.”

“Ortus,” she said, “I have known you my entire life. Did you really think I entertained any delusions that you could be mistaken, in the dark, by a dementia-ridden dog raised with no knowledge of bladed objects, for a swordsman?”

“Lady, it is only to honour my father that I call myself a cavalier,” said Ortus. “It is for my mother’s pride and my House’s scarcity that I call myself a cavalier. I have none of a cavalier’s virtues.”

“I am not sure how many times I must relay to you how truly I am aware of that,” said Harrowhark, picking a tiny fragment of jet thread from her fingernail. “Given that it has constituted one hundred percent of our exchanges over the years, I can only assume you are coming to some new point, and begin to feel excitement.”

Ortus leant forward on the edge of his chair, his restive, long-fingered hands locking together. His hands were big and soft—all of Ortus was big and soft, like a squashy black pillow—and he spread them open, beseeching. She was intrigued, despite herself. This was more than he had heretofore dared.

“Lady,” ventured Ortus, voice deepening with timidity, “I would not venture it—but if a cavalier’s duty is to hold the sword—if a cavalier’s duty is to protect with the sword—if a cavalier’s duty is to die by the sword—have you never considered ORTUS NIGENAD?”

“What?” said Harrow.

“I feel as though we have had this conversation before,” said Harrowhark, pressing her thumbs together, testing with risky pleasure how malleable she might make her distal phalange. One misstep, and her nerves might split. It was an old exercise her parents had set her. “Each time, the news that you have not spent your life in acquiring martial virtues comes as a little less of a shock to me. But have a go. Surprise me. My body is ready.”

“I wish that our House had produced some swordsman more worthy of our glory days,” said Ortus meditatively, who always found enthusiasm for alternate histories where he was not pressed into service or asked to do anything he found difficult. “I wish that our House had not been diminished to ‘those who are fit but to hold their blade in the scabbard.’”

Harrowhark congratulated herself on not pointing out how this lack of production was directly due to three things: his mother, himself, and The Noniad, his ongoing verse epic devoted to Matthias Nonius. She had a vile suspicion that the quotation, around which he had somehow contrived to pronounce quotation marks, was from that very same verse epic, which she knew was already on its eighteenth book and showed no signs of slowing down. If anything it seemed to be gaining momentum, like a very boring avalanche. She was composing a rejoinder when she noticed that a serving sister had arrived in her father’s library.

Harrow had not noticed her knocking, or her passage in; this wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the sister’s ashen paint was decorating the lovely dead face of the Body.

Her palms felt wet. In this scenario, either the sister was real and her face was not, or the sister was herself unreal. One couldn’t simply gauge all the osseous mass in the room and do a best guess; bones in meat generated so much deceptive soft thalergy, only a fool would try. She flicked her eyes over to Ortus in the faint hope that he would betray her reality one way or another. But his gaze was still levelled at the ground.

“Our House has received good service from ‘those who are fit but to hold their blade in the scabbard,’” said Harrowhark, keeping her voice even. “Which is not a line that scans, just so you know. Nobody will be surprised to find you a laggard.”

“It’s enneameter. The traditional form. Those who are fit but to hold their blade in the scabbard—”

“That’s not nine feet of anything.”

“—never to draw it forth for the battle.”

“You will train with Captain Aiglamene for the next twelve weeks,” said Harrowhark, rubbing her fingers back and forth, back and forth, until the pad of her thumb felt very hot. “You will meet the very minimum that is expected of a Ninth House cavalier primary, which is now, fortunately, that you be as broad as you are tall with arms that can carry a weight. But I need … significantly more from you … than the edge of a sword, Nigenad.”

The serving sister shadowed the edge of Harrow’s peripheral vision. Ortus had raised his head and did not acknowledge the sister, which complicated things. He looked at Harrow with the faint kind of pity she always suspected he held her in: the pity that marked him as an outsider in his own House, and would mark him as all the more an outsider in the House of his mother’s line. She did not know what made Ortus Ortus. He was a mystery too boring to solve.

“What more is there?” he asked, a little bitterly.

Harrowhark closed her eyes, which shut out Ortus’s tremulous, worried face and the shadow of the Body-faced serving girl that fell over the desk. The shadow told her nothing. Physical evidence was often a trap. She shut out the new and rusty rapier that now creaked in the scabbard at Ortus’s hip. She shut out the comforting smell of dust made hot by the whirring heater in the corner of the room, mixing with the just-milled ink in her inkwell. Tannic acid, human salts.

“This isn’t how it happens,” said the Body.

Which gave Harrow a curious strength.

“I need you to hide my infirmity,” said Harrowhark. “You see, I am insane.”