The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex

Each of the Empire’s houses keeps secrets, even from themselves. For the bookish academics of the
Sixth, every secret is a mystery, and every mystery is a puzzle to be solved or a paper to be
published. Deep in the bowels of their house, one such secret is about to reveal itself. The study of
the famed academic Donald Sex, sealed since the moment of his death, is about to open, and
archivists are ready to dissect what he left behind. They are not ready for the macabre surprise that
awaits them.

Enter Palamedes Sextus and Camilla Hect, age thirteen.

“I count that as the first time we surprised them,” the Warden said whenever he was reminded of it.
He was only a Scholar then. I was thirteen and nine months and he was thirteen and six. Surprised
them was right. A gifted thirteen-year-old necromancer in the Library doesn’t muster interest. Every
thirteen-year-old necromancer in the Sixth House is gifted. Even the presence of really smart ones is
just the system working as designed. But in the Sixth, any necromancer—thirteen or otherwise—who
can solve a problem with their own prefrontal cortex and nothing else is going to rouse comment.

He was wrong to say we, though. It was my shuck we were sitting in when it started. That’s all. I
remember we were already getting too big for it, and he couldn’t sit up straight on the bed because
his head kept grazing the ceiling of the shuck above. It was one meter by two meters and eighty
centimeters high, one and a half bodies by Imperial mez, and he was already one meter sixty. He was
going over his numbers and I was rereading a letter. I’ll reproduce as much of the letter as I care to:

To my dearest pals,

Writing this from PRISON. You were right that massaging the alveolar walls using the intercostal
would help, but too little too late. This one’s my fault. I did pay attention to the diagrams BUT it
took me a while to work out how to get the fluid into my pleural cavity and I may have made things
worse. Sorry, Doc. Can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I am practising daily so do not chide me.

To cut a long story short, I didn’t win the argument and I’m at Pro and Mia’s and ALL my worst
fears are realised. If their poor kids even breathe loudly they are taken out back and summarily
beheaded. They play in whispers and go around on tiptoe. This is the opposite of what I want, as I
desire noise. They all love me, which says less about my lovability and more about how little
company they get this far out of Cypris. It’s beautiful here on the mountain but the scenery is wasted
on your old hag of a correspondent.

Their eldest is about yours and C’s age and brings me flowers. He is a blessed creature and the only
one with aptitude. This means he is unfortunately a shortarse and his siblings are all bigger than
him or just about except for the three-year-old. Very trag.
Understandably I have adopted him as a younger brother and outwardly delight in all offerings,
mostly roses or cups of tea. I do not have the heart to tell him that I wish he were bringing me
anything else, maybe extramural magazines and cigarettes (THIS IS A JOKE).

I can reproduce the letter because I’ve still got it. I kept all of them. He didn’t need to. Palamedes
remembered everything he ever saw.

At some point he finished, and said, “One hundred and forty-one.” And I said, “No. One hundred
thirty-five.”

“Cam, that can’t be possible. Where am I getting six extra points from?”

When he passed me his module notes I found the problem fairly quickly. I’d familiarised myself with
every restructure. I was already in the physical education stream and had no structures to think about.
The Sixth House flowchart for swordsmen entering the Cohort is the one thing that never changes by
committee, with no requirement for bloodline or promotion. Bloodline requirement in the Sixth
would be a waste of time. Consanguinity tables get narrower year by year. I was born with four kids
in my generation eligible to produce children with me. Palamedes had two.

Some context for why I had time to play with. At that point, only two things counted within
Swordsman’s Spire. The first was competency, and it was the less important of the two. It’s not like
that now. The Warden was the first Master Warden to interfere with the Spire in half a myriad. It
says nothing that back at twelve years old I was one of the best in the Sixth, though nobody knew it
but me. They’d only know I was the best at fifteen. Even then, they’d have no idea.

The second thing, the more important one, was your genetic outreach potential. When I was a child
all swordfighters got three unit categorisations, though if you’re not Sixth you wouldn’t be aware of
them. Attractive and competent? You got put in the Alexandrites. They got Cohort recommendations
for out-of-system deployment. Competent? Epeids, and general referral. Just attractive? The Nireids,
who always got offworld reserves. There’s a lot of waiting around in the reserves. Lots of sulky
necromancers with nothing to do. Lots of soldiers who didn’t make the cut, doing a single tour for
their family or because they thought it would be fun. Add Sixth House soldiers at the peak of
physical performance whose last exam was to memorise erotic poetry. They say it’s a massacre.

Don’t think that it’s not a big thing to get in the Nireids. It’s a Sixth House honour. We don’t care
about swordplay, but we always care about diversifying the gene pool.

The Warden used to joke about losing me to the Alexandrites. This was him flattering himself. If I
hadn’t been his cavalier, I would have worked in data.

I said, “Here. You can’t be a Fourth Ring moderand and do Telemetry simultaneously.”

“Oh, God, what? That didn’t used to be the case. Is this the last reshuffle?”

“Think so. They’re moderated by the same examination board.”

“Yes, and? Who cares?”

He took off his glasses. He was hell on spectacles. He used to bend the arms back and forth until they
sat diagonally on his face. He said, “That’s six points I can’t afford. She doesn’t have time, Camilla.”

I was about to tell him that he’d have to drop Bone Morph Resonances, which would have led to an
argument, but someone rapped on the shuck muffling. When we unlatched the curtain and peered
out, we saw that it was Archivist Zeta, so we pulled the whole thing away immediately. Archivist
Zeta didn’t visit juvie dormitories.

Describing Juno Zeta as she was then would be stupid, because it’s the same Zeta as she is now.
Very tall, age anywhere from forty to sixty. Brunette at the front, but iron grey at the end lengths of
the hair, twisted up with black pins at the base of the skull. Round-cheeked and sweet-eyed. Voluble.
Cheerful as a child. The Warden always said that this was a deeply sinister and inappropriate façade
for her brain, which should have required thermal paste to keep from overheating.

She wasted no time, but handed a clipboard through to us. It had only one sheet of fresh blue flimsy
pinned on it, still warm from the stamper. She said, “Scholar, you’ll need to sign and thumbprint.
Aspirant, you only need a signature. I’m taking you as my attaché. Hurry up, both of you, I’m dying
of excitement.”

The Warden was immediately entranced.

“You got that through committee quickly,” he remarked, and bloodied his thumb on the clipboard’s
thumb spike. “Is this a House record?”

“I have been hanging around the Archaeology offices for more than an hour. I sleazed my way in
past the secretaries,” said the Archivist. Her dark eyes were sparkling. She was so excited that her
cheeks were flushed. “I wasn’t about to let anyone else steal it from my clutches. I had Caspar with
me so that he could sign the damn thing the moment they gave me the stamp. He’s owed me ever
since I covered his invigilation last quarter when he was rewriting his footnotes. Anyway, I just
about ran here, and I’ve had this on my calendar for the last five years, and I’ve got to be the first
one through that door.”

I said, “Unsealing?” Educated guess, because it was a blue form.

“Yes. I mean, it’s a very sad story actually—Archeo tried to extend their warrant before Collections
swooped in. The room in question’s been closed for more than four hundred years. And it’s true that
the Archies haven’t been able to do much with it. Master Scholar Marygold Shasta had it under her
demesne and refused to pass it on because she wanted to examine it so much, but her eyes were
bigger than her stomach—goodness knows she had enough to cover and couldn’t do much in her last
years; brilliant mind to the end, but that kind of granular psychometry exhausted her. But they
said no to Archeo transferring the warrant now that she’s been dead for ten years and the limitations
have expired, because—oh, but for God’s sake don’t let me talk; if you haven’t signed by now I’ll go
without you!”
But we’d both signed, and put on our outer robes and palynostatic covers on our shoes so that we
didn’t mix up the thalergy prints on any dust. I remember that the hallways outside the dormitory
were full that day. The dorm halls always were busy, because Library guests inevitably got led there
to admire the old view screens. When I was ten we were put on duty roster to clean them, and my
admiration for the old view screens died quick. The Warden and I had allergic reactions to the panel
cleaner. He didn’t ask for a duty swap because he wanted to “study his contact dermatitis.”

The hallways were full that day because there was something to look at other than space rock
impacts or the scarps. A lot of children were spending their break watching the adepts do routine
maintenance. I used to watch it myself. They attach umbilicals to skeleton servitors and send them
outside the hatches. You can’t do it when the wind’s high off Dominicus, so it has to be when the
temperature is dropping. The constructs are covered in brightly-coloured thermal paste. Sixth thermal
paste is organic—thermalose, from rendered fat and plex—so adepts can manipulate it through the
cord. The younger children like to watch them doing cleanup in the hope that the lines will get
tangled and they all end up in a neon knot. That’s Sixth House entertainment. The Warden said the
whole cleaning system needed modernization, beginning with getting an expert out from the Ninth
House. He never got far with that one in Oversight Body.

Archivist Zeta was impatient getting through the crowd. She elbowed a seven-year-old aside and
said, “As I was saying—the study was Scholar Shasta’s—my old tutor wanted it, because his tutor’s
tutor had been a student of the man in question—passion project—we’re meeting Caspar and the
others there, and you’ve always said you wanted to be privy to an opening, and you’ve made Scholar
so I don’t see why you shouldn’t. You too, Aspirant, you’ve passed the qualification. Oh—how’s
your father?”

This wasn’t to me. Palamedes said, “Enjoying parenting. Enjoying the parenting buyout, I should
say. He’s only doing dissertation supervision—and half a year of Immediate History, of course—but
he’s got his own projects on the go.”

“King Undying knows how he does it. Every time I say I’m going to apply for sabbatical, someone
in my department dies with their affairs completely out of order. It’s always necromancers who get
all startled about dying. You’d think that they of anyone would have half a brain about their own
mortality . . . I told you we actually had to get in a spirit-talker to ask Carolus where he’d left his
marking? I did? It was in the zip-up compartment of his documents bag. Anyway, do give your dad
my regards. Camilla, I see yours all the time, so I won’t ask after them and act like I’m surprised . . .”

I said, “Archivist, where are we going?”

She clasped her hands together and said, “We’re going downstairs—to the study of Doctor Sex!”

The Warden looked at me. I looked at the Warden. I recall that we decided not to.

Zeta explained, “Donald Sex—Doctor Donald Sex—you haven’t heard of him? Long before your
time. He was hallowed in the Copper Garden for his work on post-Resurrection psychometry. When
he died the Emperor sent a letter of condolence; it used to be on a plinth by his coffin. We had to
move it out of the light. Some people complained that he should have moved to the Mithraeum in the
first instance, but for goodness’ sake, God never met the man. In any case, he never finished his final
project, which has reached mythological status in some quarters . . . not just in our House, either. We
didn’t even open up his study for a Fifth ambassador two centuries back. He was hot on the trail of
some theorem he’d codged up from Sex’s miscellanea. In the end all he was allowed to do was go to
the coffin and try to ask the ghost some questions, but Donald was too smart to come back . . . Too
right. I think you ought to leave a person well enough alone after they’ve been interred for more than
a couple of decades. I get sick thinking about some idiot trying to wheedle insight on my apparatus
criticus from my ghost long after I’ve forgotten what it was. But just think—Doctor Sex’s study is
ours!”

We still decided not to. The Warden said, “It’s just a study? I thought it would be a laboratory, at
least.”

“No, that old thing was opened up when I was still a child. Incunabula still have their grubby mitts
on it because it was in a very old wing of the Library. I’ve seen it. Horrid little grim place. His study
was much more modern, apparently. Watch out—stairs down.”

There were a lot of stairs down. Doctor Donald Sex’s sealed up study proved to be only one floor
above the Library base. I was fine. The Warden was a little out of breath. Archivist Zeta’s credentials
got us through one of the auto-doors, and then it was just featureless corridors all the way to the
study. The hallways were so narrow we walked in single file. This close to the base of the Library
the walls were very thick. Tectonic rumbles from the volcano that the Emperor Undying raised from
death during the Resurrection would still reach this place. When the Warden asked after it, Archivist
Zeta merely said, “That’s one of the reasons the Archies got to extend their warrant so long in the
first place. Nobody wants the space, you see. I wouldn’t exchange my lovely cool Ossuary office for
this one . . . Oh, good, everyone’s here.”

The Archivist’s four-scholar team were stationed at a door, waiting beneath a nameplate saying D.
SEX. They looked as delighted at the prospect as their leader, and they all issued each other
congratulatory handshakes. Nobody seemed surprised that the Warden and I were there. They knew
who Palamedes Sextus was. One of them said, “They finished sweeping for wards. We’re clear.
Juno, do you want the honours?” and she said, “Do I,” and she sliced the ARCHAEOLOGY
DEPARTMENT tape seal, and she fitted the key within the lock.

“Key fits, door responds—put that down on the record,” said Archivist Zeta, and opened the door
wide.

Everyone filed in. It was a smaller space than a modern Library office, owing to the thick walls and
the fact that each available wall was crammed high with bookshelves. Shadowy floor-to-ceiling rows
of books cramped the already-tight space. The air in the room must have been suctioned at some
point in the last four centuries during base maintenance, but it was still thick with dust. Somebody
said, “Should still be wired. I’m turning on the light, Archivist,” and an overhead bulb lit up the
scene.

Apart from bookshelves, the study had a solid desk—flimsy veneer to look like wood—big and old-
fashioned, with an electronic keypad on top instead of a keyhole for the drawers. There were a few
grey mounds that were probably a sofa and a couple of chairs, covered to keep off the dust. Archivist
Zeta said, “Walking and breathing is fine. We’re not masking up; leave thalergy signatures all you
like. But we’re not cleared to touch anything until we get this examination signed off.”

The Warden had stopped at the threshold. He had a look on his face I knew well. He said, “Archivist,
did the Doctor keep observational bones?”

“What? No; he did softs. Not much of a bone adept, apparently. Ty, any bones on the manifest?”

“Inlay on some of the books and bookcases,” said a team member.

“Then I submit for record: two hand skeletons on the desk,” said the Warden politely.

This caused immediate consternation. Everyone moved forward to look. Six people crowding
together, trying not to touch anything, was a lot to fit. I kept out of it, but I got a good initial
examination.

The Warden had been right. The desk wasn’t cluttered by Sixth House standards, but it hadn’t been
tidied. Donald Sex had put his tools down one day and never returned to get things organised. There
was a pile of flimsy documentation in a tin tray, and a heavy penholder, and a blotter for stamping.
These had all been left at angles to each other. One of the drawers gaped open, empty except for a
nest of crumpled tissue paper. On the blotter sat a jointed brown sphere, perfectly circular except for
one long segment ready to snap in and join its brethren. In the light it looked a lot like wood. Beside
the sphere and the penholder there were, as my necromancer had pointed out, two skeletonised
hands.

There was no trace of fat or muscle. The bones of the fingers, palms, and wrists were still intact
down to the carpal segments, where they ended suddenly: to my eyes, unevenly. At least not cleanly.
They were spread out on the desk, supplicating upwards to the ceiling, the palmar bones lying heavy.
The ivory had a dull orange cast to it in the lamplight.

The Archivist said, “Caspar, Ty, up front. Move to the back, please, everyone else. Put down on the
record that we’ve found remains,” and someone else was saying, “Someone check for more bone
presence in the room.”

“Half these books are inlaid; good luck without gear.”

“If the room’s been vacuumed, the remnant thalergy should’ve gone with it, surely?”

“That’s not always the case. It’s not deep space exposure—”

Archivist Zeta said, with an edged cheerfulness, “The King Undying resurrected us with eyeballs for
a reason, children.”

I’d searched the room already. I hadn’t seen any other bones, but as we didn’t have clearance to look
under the chair covers, it wasn’t exactly a thorough sweep. The Warden made a cursory scan but kept
staring at the hands, then the floor, and then the ceiling. I left him alone. The team were debating
whether or not they were allowed to lift up the rug when the Archivist said, “That’s enough. Make a
note of no other immediately visible remains. Julia, psychometry on the hands, please.”
“What, me? Archivist, I’m not as good as you.”

“You’re better than I am on organics, my child, and I want accuracy.”

The team member eased off their left-hand glove, shook their hand loose, and reached out to the left-
hand set of bones. I wasn’t close enough to see what bone was grasped between thumb and
forefinger. It was something above the metacarpals.

Eventually, they said, “Has anyone got any gel? This can’t be right.”

The Archivist said, “Don’t pass judgment. Tell me the reading.”

“It’s two hundred years,” said Julia.

Another of them said, “Can’t be. The room’s been locked up for four hundred and sixty.”

“I’m really getting two hundred. I wish I had a conductive, but I didn’t bring any.”

“Did the vacuum . . . I don’t know, impair the thalergy degradation?”

Juno said, “That wouldn’t have messed with the cortex measurement. Bone layers can obscure a
reading, but we’re talking single-digit discrepancies, not in the hundreds. This is why I can’t stand
bones; they’re filthy beasts.”

The Warden said, “Here,” and proffered a little tub of sensory gel from the breast pocket of his robes.
He always was organised, even then. Archivist Zeta said approvingly, “Bless the boy,” and the
hapless Julia immediately applied the gel to thumb and forefinger. They grasped again, and after a
moment, removed their fingers—the bone was shiny and whitish where they had touched it, as
though cleaned from contact—and said:

“I was right. What? Two hundred and ten, max.”

Everyone talked at once, except for the Warden, and except for me:

“What’s that, red form? I didn’t bring a red form; did you?”

“It’s not the red form anymore. Incidental bones can file under the greens.”

“Incidental bones—”

“No, it’s back to red. Green flimsy uses more stamper ink.”

“This is ridiculous. It’s going to turn out that he kept his nephew’s unregistered bones on the desk, or
something, and they weren’t listed on the manifest: That’s always how it ends up.”

“His nephew, born two hundred years after he died? Think for half a second, will you?”
“This was so much nicer when you used the white form for everything and attached a coloured bit at
the bottom when you handed it in,” said one of the team, but someone else said, “Not for the admin
staff, which I do understand.”

“Sod admin, honestly—”

“Come on, that’s not very—”

Archivist Zeta said, “Shut up, you lot; this is not a Third House debutant party.” And everyone shut
up.

In the resulting quiet she said, “Yes it’s the red form. Yes, we’ll need some villain from Archeo to
sign off on this, so someone go fetch one. Please try not to get anyone who’s doing work on ersatz
Sixth burial: I don’t want to see my lovely study come under a foreign power again. It’s ours. We
won it fair and square. I’ll stay here to keep an eye out while you get the forms, and also a couple of
hot drinks, please, because this will be a long one.”

Someone else said, “Juno, you don’t have to be the one who stays,” but the Archivist said bracingly:
“Captain goes down with the shuttle, you know. Besides, I’ve got Palamedes and Camilla to keep me
company. Bring a stack of red forms, please—no, I know you don’t have to do them in triplicate, but
I still don’t know how to fill red out properly, and I’m sure to do something wrong.”

When the Collection team had cleared out of the study, leaving the door open, Archivist Zeta said,
“You two don’t really have to keep me company. It’s not in breach of the release form if you go and
do your prep, or take a dinner break.”

I didn’t have to answer. The Warden said, “No. Cam and I want to stay. This is interesting. Archivist,
may I have a look around?”

“With my blessing,” she said. “I’ll finish off the initial report. You know not to touch anything, but
be careful not to trip. This rug looks lethal.”

The Archivist stationed herself in the doorway so that she could have somewhere to lean safely and
write. The Warden, as I had expected, drew me into a corner.

“Cam,” he said, “this is seriously bizarre. The state of that desk bewilders me. Did you get a good
look at those hands?”

I said, “Yes. Wrist bones are uneven.”

“And there’s a lot more material on the radius on the right. I’d say it snapped, but I need another
look. Did you see the pins?”

“Pins?”

“The weight in the hands was at the palms, Cam. That’s not a normal centre of gravity. The radius
was pulling down to the capitate bone. I bet you my entire treat allowance that it’s been pinned.”
His eyes were shining. I demurred from betting. I said, “The bones are discoloured.”

“Yes, I noticed that. Orange. Dyed?”

I said, “It came off when touched.”

The Warden looked genuinely startled. “I didn’t notice that. I was too busy looking at—well, let’s
investigate again, shall we?”

We investigated again. I had started keeping a pocket torch a few years back. We crouched down at
the end of the table—this close I could see that the rightmost radius was very jagged at the end, same
as the ulna—and Palamedes shone the torch from one end of the bones. The gap between bones and
desk wasn’t significant, but the beam picked out a metal gleam in among the lumps. Even, round and
regular, about the size of my thumbnail. The head of a pin. Clear evidence of construct pinning.

When we straightened up, I said, “But that means . . .”

“Yes,” said the Warden. “Let’s get more evidence. What about that discolouration?”

In the light of the torch beam, the discolouration on the finger bones was more pronounced. They
were seriously orange, deeper in hue where there were divots in the bone. The greatest concentration
was in the knuckles and creeks that ran between the palm bones. Where the bone had touched the
desk, the veneer was also streaked with faint orange, like a reflection. The only place that was
normal bone colour was where the team member called Julia had pinched the thumb phalange. It was
still greasy with gel.

I said, “Looks younger than two hundred.”

“Yes. Something retarded the oxidation process,” said the Warden. He had on his thinking
expression.

“They said the room was deoxygenated.”

“That’s a few hours at a time over centuries.”

“If the bones were pinned to hold together, stands to reason they would have been treated too.”

“They have.” He flashed the torch to the very tips of the finger bones. In the light, they threw more
shiny orange reflection than the rest of the phalanx extensions. “See those distals? They always get
more coats, because they’re fragile. What else do you notice about them?”

The Warden loved to teach. Always did. I was an early experiment. I took the flashlight and braced
myself against him so that I could lean down without touching the desk: He held my shoulders so
that I could examine the distal fingertips. The beam picked out the gloss coating where they had once
been given extra coats of preservative. But it wasn’t evenly done. It was thinner at the tops, where
the fingers pointed towards the ceiling, and there were dull patches like callouses where the sealant
had worn down. Down the middle phalange, honeycomb patches in the bone had developed in spots.
Didn’t look like disease fragility. It looked like something had eaten through the bone. When I said
that, he pulled me back up by the shoulders, and he stared at me.

I said, “I need to start carrying around a microscope.”

“Yes, sure, but—‘eaten through’? That’s suggestive of . . .” He shook my shoulders. “Cam, you’ve
made a breakthrough. I was going about this the wrong way.”

“Have I?”

“You’re absolutely brilliant.”

“Great.”

“You are a genius.”

“Okay. Why?”

“All will be revealed in time,” he said, and took the flashlight from me again. “But we need an entry
point. The door was sealed. But there had to have been another aperture if they suctioned it . . .”

The Warden directed the torch beam directly above us. Neatly camouflaged in one of the ceiling tiles
was a grille. It looked like an old-model air conditioning vent. He raised his voice and said,
“Archivist!”

“Yes?”

“Is there a service tunnel above the room?”

Archivist Zeta, to her credit, didn’t blink, or ask why we wanted to know. “Hang on. I brought a map
of this level, just in case. The Archie ones are rubbish and never show you anything.” (“Of course
you did,” murmured the Warden.) “Come and have a look.”

We stepped out into the hallway with her. The map above the study showed an interconnected
network of tunnels for air compressors and dryers. “Yes, right here,” said the Archivist, tapping her
finger on the map. “They put an accessway in a hundred years back when they started updating the
basement. There’s a door next to the stairs, but you’ll need a maintenance code. Don’t worry—I
memorised all the codes beforehand.” (“Of course you did,” murmured the Warden.) “We just have
to make sure it’s safe to traverse.”

I said, “Is there atmosphere?”

“Not always. We’d need to check the panel,” she said, and the Warden said, “Right, because if I’m
reading this map correctly, there’s a connector exhaust outside the Library?”

“Right on,” said the Archivist. “Context for the questions now, please; I’m in charge here.”

The Warden said, “Archivist, we want access to the tunnel right above the study.”
“Do we?”

“Yes,” he said. “Because I am fairly sure that if we go there, we’ll find more bones.”

Archivist Zeta looked at him, and her gaze took on a steely cast.

“Palamedes,” she said, “this will all go in the written report. I can’t crack a maintenance door
without filing it, and the review panel will want to know my reasons. You may be only thirteen, but
you’re wearing the Scholar’s robe. I’m obliged to ask: Are you certain? Because if not, this is your
reputation and mine on the line, despite your age.”

He didn’t hesitate. “I’m certain.”

“Is this all above board and within regulations?”

“Utterly.”

The steely look disappeared. “Right, then,” said the Archivist cheerfully. “We’ll have to be quick.
Let’s have a look on the panel. We may want to wear masks if it shows the air quality’s bad. There
won’t be a hell of a lot of conductive thalergy or thanergy up there, so be judicious . . .”

But the maintenance panel light was green, and nobody needed masks. The door opened up to a
ladder, and the ladder led to a small square room with a number of waist-high hatches leading from
it. Archivist Zeta looked on the map to see which hatch corresponded to Donald Sex’s study, flipped
aside the safety latch, and tugged it open. A puff of stale air came out.

“I can’t do this one. Claustrophobia,” said the Archivist. “There’s only room for one in there,
anyway.”

I said, “I’ll go.”

The Warden said, “Cam,” but I said, “It’s dusty. You’ll sneeze.”

“Genetic allergy. You’re lucky you missed out on it,” said the Archivist.

The Warden didn’t want me to, but in the end he agreed. I wasn’t sure if he was nervous about me or
if he just wanted to observe whatever was in the tunnel. He wasn’t prone to anxiety when it came to
the big things. It all came out in bursts over the little struggles. I went in headfirst, and the last thing I
heard was Zeta say, “Remember, Aspirant, if you do discover anything, don’t make contact if you
can possibly avoid it.”

The tunnel was square and dark. I could have squatted and walked forward like that, but it was
quicker to go on my elbows and knees. I’d told the Warden it was going to be dusty, but it wasn’t.
The air smelled like old pressure units and steel. The only light was from a green luminescent strip
set into the corners, so I didn’t have much visibility.

Zeta had said that I had about forty meters to go, with one corner, to the grille over the top of the
study. Once I rounded that corner, I saw what the Warden had wanted me to find. The light from the
study below shone up through the bars of the grille. Set on the other side of the grille, facing towards
me, was a skull.

I spent some time contorting myself so that I could get the flashlight out of my pocket. When I
flicked it on, I saw much more than a skull. There was a whole skeleton crumpled in the knees-and-
elbows posture I’d had to adopt. The right arm had been wedged in the grille, tucked underneath the
otherwise-collapsed skeleton. It was at an angle, so we never would have seen it from the room
below. The wrist matched the right skeleton hand, the one with the ugly, ragged end. I cast my beam
over the rest of the bones. Securing pins glittered in the shoulders and all down the vertebrae. I
couldn’t go further to make it out, but I was ninety percent certain that at the back of the skull there
would be carved an identifying construct number and a list of dates of maintenance awled into the
surface.

I didn’t see the number, but there was a perfectly round mark on the frontal bone. Like a sucker
mark, or from a round cutter. It wasn’t deep. In the flashlight beam it was gleaming white where the
rest of the skull shone the same orange cast that the hands did, down on the desk below.

I didn’t have a measuring tape. (I always carried measuring tape after that.) Instead I did a basic
assessment using my hands, testing the space between the bars of the grille. Then I began to wriggle
those forty meters backwards, which wasn’t hard, except for the corner.

Once Palamedes and the Archivist pulled me out by the feet, I took the flashlight out of my mouth
and turned it off. I said, “Skeleton servitor, missing its arms from below the olecranal point. Matches
description of the bones on the desk.”

“We’re going to need so many forms,” said the Archivist.

“That’s not all,” I said.

Zeta exclaimed as I relayed everything I had seen to them, in detail. Palamedes was very still when I
described the position of the arm, stuck in the grille.

“Levering posture,” he murmured.

But when I described the white circle on the skeleton’s forehead he went dead silent and put on his
thinking face. The Archivist said, perplexed, “What in the River could have happened?” but the
Warden said, “Can we go back down to the study, please?”

“Of course—this mystery is going to take a team of adepts and plenty of time in the archives. The
rest of our lot ought to be back with the new Sex form shortly, anyway,” said the Archivist.

The Warden and I again decided not to.

The team hadn’t returned to the study. Palamedes made a beeline for the desk. He looked up at the
grille where the servitor skeleton lay in the tunnels above, then back at the desk. He said, “Cam, the
grille—”

I said, “Easily big enough for the arms to fit through.”

His gaze fell upon the desk again. I thought he was looking at the penholder. The Warden was a
fiend for stealing pens. But I’d misapprehended the angle. He wasn’t looking at the penholder at all.

When the Archivist’s team came back, they had forms and two members of the Archaeology
department with them. These were bewildered, then horrified. I think they had only half believed
Data Collections’ story. They went with Zeta to look at the desk as we hung back.

“No, it was sealed,” one of them said. “Sex was famously cagey about passcodes and keys. Shasta
inherited the only key, and we never got clearance to cut another. Anyway, the door’s on the central
system. It opened today, and it opened four hundred and sixty years ago—when they went in to put
slipcovers over the furniture and sign off on the manifest, a few days after the Doctor died.
Apparently he wanted to be moved back into the study after he’d had his fall, but he was dead within
days. That’s it. This is really bizarre.”

“There’s more, I’m afraid,” said Zeta, and told them what we had found in the service tunnel.
Everyone talked a lot. They pulled out more forms.

“There goes my break-in theory,” said one of the Collections team. “Damn. I love a heist.”

One of the Archaeology duo said to the Warden, “You didn’t touch anything, did you?” He didn’t
know who the Warden was, not by sight anyway.

“Not at all,” said the Warden. “But I know what happened now.”

It took a few seconds for people to realise what he’d said. When they did, everyone turned to look at
him and me. I said, “I don’t.”

“Don’t you, Cam?” said the Warden.

I demurred, “Well, not the why.”

One of the Archaeology people said, “What is this? Student presentations?” and someone from the
team shushed him, but another one from our team said, “Scholar Sextus, it’ll be hell to pay if you’ve
used psychometry,” and the Warden said, “It’s obvious, if you think.”

“Nobody likes a smug child, Scholar; pony up,” said the Archivist.

Palamedes took off his spectacles, cleaned them on the front of his robe, and said:

“It was Doctor Sex himself, of course.”

In the puzzled silence that followed, he added, “Look. Add the different pieces together. Here are the
hands of a servitor skeleton; the rest of it is up in the tunnel above. It’s had two very interesting jobs,
and those interesting jobs let us know how it got here. The last job it had was doing external
maintenance. The job before that was common area maintenance—specifically the Copper Garden.
That’s how it met the Doctor—so to speak.”
He slid his glasses back on to his face.

“Archivist Zeta, you told us that a Fifth scholar tried to call back the Doctor’s spirit for research
purposes, and didn’t get anywhere. I think he did get somewhere, just not quite far enough. He must
have created enough of a connection for the Doctor’s ghost to establish itself as a revenant in its own
body—but, of course, it couldn’t get out of its copperwork. So it jumped across a thanergetic link to
one of the cleaning servitors. Sixth bloodlines probably helped, presuming the corpus was a distant
relative, although either way his success implies copper is more thanergetically permeable than we
thought, which might have applications.”

No one asked him about the applications. He looked momentarily crestfallen, and then said,
“Anyway, the Doctor takes himself down to his study—but the door’s been mechanically sealed. So
what does he do? Makes his way to external maintenance and brazenly goes out with the other
servitors. The staff would have assumed that he was assigned there, and suited him up accordingly.
When he didn’t return, they never would have noticed, because he wasn’t on the outside manifest in
the first place. You’ll find that a skeleton assigned for external maintenance went missing two
hundred years ago, when you cross-check that. Once he got extra muros, the Doctor climbed around
to an outside exhaust, and crawled through. The hatch would have been locked, but we never change
the exhaust codes, so I bet he still knew what they were. The final hurdle was the grille. No way he’d
fit through. But he only needed his hands, and the bars had space for those—Camilla checked—so he
broke off the left, cleanly, and levered off the right, not so cleanly. I don’t think I’d do a better job if
I was trying to snap off my remaining hand with a grille.”

One of the Collections team found their voice and said, “Scholar Sextus, this is all conjecture. Unless
you’ve used psychometry, in which case it’s a breach.”

I was pleased they’d called him Scholar Sextus. He said crisply, “Nonsense. Using necromancy for
everything makes you soft. I can prove all of it, and you can double-prove it with thanergy signatures
once it’s cleared the Oversight Body—which will be what, next year?”

Zeta said, “Less of the sass, please. You can make jokes about the Oversight Body once you’ve
served on it. How can you definitively show that the bones are from a cleaning servitor?”

“They’re pinned,” I said. I started putting my weight on one foot, rolling my centre of gravity
forward, then on the other. Helps me think.

“Yes, Aspirant, but we pin skeletons for any number of reasons. You learnt anatomy on a pinned
skeleton.”

The Warden said, “The only way into the study is through the door, or through the outside exhaust
vent.” One of the Archaeologists interrupted, “Or the accessway,” but Palamedes said, “It hadn’t
been built at the time. This was two-hundred-plus years ago. So there’s the door—which he couldn’t
breach, as there was only one key—and going through the outside—and the Library doesn’t let you
climb outside willy-nilly. Then look at the bones. They were covered in orange thermalose, and it
degraded over time.”

I said, “You can’t definitively say it’s thermal paste.” I said it before anyone else could say it.
“No, but the fact that it’s all over the skeleton is suggestive. That by itself would just be conjecture, I
agree, if not for the umbilicus mark on the forehead. That plus the fact that there is literally no way
into the study otherwise adds up to external-maintenance construct. Test the powder all you want.”

Someone else said, “The Copper Garden part is guesswork.”

“No,” I said. “Examine the fingertips. There’s light to medium acid damage.”

“For any heavy chemical job they would have gloved the servitor,” added the Warden, looking at me
warmly. “But there’s one menial job where they wouldn’t have bothered, and where the cleanser is
acid, not bio—cleaning big breadths of copper.”

The first speaker said, “Come on,” but another replied, a little unwillingly, “That adds up.”

The man called Caspar said, “All right, it’s a cleaning servitor. But why Donald? Why would he
have come back to his study? What was so important that he made himself a revenant, which does
not exactly happen every day? Much more likely someone went full Ninth and puppeted the servitor
to gain unauthorised access.”

“The Fifth researcher came to try to raise the Doctor around the time the skeleton was dated,” said
Palamedes simply. “If you prise open his copper coffin, I bet you’ll find something to confirm my
conclusion. In any case, the Doctor was the only one who could have opened that drawer.”

Everyone turned to look at the open drawer. The Warden added, “This office was locked up. They
covered the furniture. The drawers would have been shut. And as you just said—the Doctor was
cagey. Who else would have known his passcodes?”

The tension in the room changed. They were looking at him with a different kind of suspicion: the
terrible suspicion that he was right.

Archivist Zeta burst out with, “But why? Revenants come back out of passion, Sextus! It must have
been his final theory—his final project, but there’s nothing that looks like that here.”

I said, “What was his final project about?”

One of the Collections team said, “It was post-Resurrection thalergy fluctuations, wasn’t it? Wasn’t
his crackpot theory that there was greater thalergy and thanergy saturation right after the
Resurrection?”

“He was doing archaeological forensic thalergy,” said someone else. “Destroying the Archeo budget
grinding up paper.”

And another person said, “Lots of object requests.”

“I’ve got a theory,” said the Warden, and this time, they looked at him the way they would have
looked at a colleague. He said, “But it’ll involve touching something—just the one thing. Isn’t there
provision to do that in the handbook, if I’m gloved, and it’s in service of retrieving more important
material? May I?”
Archivist Zeta said, “You’re pushing it,” but the man called Caspar said, “It’s a gamble, Scholar.
Still—quick vote in favour? Show of hands?”

The hands went up, at varying speeds. There was a brief argument between two of them regarding
best practice and policy. But that’s the Sixth. Their hands went up too in the end. And so, last of all,
did Archivist Zeta’s. I assume she felt she had to be extra careful. I raised my hand with her as her
attaché.

“Thank you for the opportunity,” said the Warden.

They gave him thick plastic gloves, pure oil derivative, no organic material. He surprised me by not
reaching for the bones. He reached past them to the sphere, and when he nodded at me, I held the
flashlight beam to it. I had never seen wood close up before. Later on they would confirm that it was
real. He weighed it between his gloved hands, and said quietly, “This must have been a bastard to
solve. Thank you, Doctor.” Then he put the tip of one gloved finger on the extended bar of wood,
and pushed.

The bar slid home, leaving a perfect and unbroken wooden sphere. There was a click.

“He must only have worked out how to do it after his death,” said the Warden.

“That’s so Sixth that I might be ill,” said Zeta. “But why did he leave it with one move to go?”

The click had heralded part of the top of the sphere coming loose. There was a seam in it now, like a
lid. The Warden opened the lid, and he stared at something within, fragile and white.

When the others saw what it was they immediately pulled us back. The Sixth House machine sprang
to life. One of the Archaeologists shrieked. We got hustled outside, and half of them rushed off for
barrier tape and a containment team with tweezers and a lithograph maker. They immediately turned
off all the lights to avoid hurting the box’s cargo. Everyone was slapping each other on the back.
“Oh, thank God it’s us,” they kept saying. “If this had gone to the Repository they might have never
opened it at all.” Everyone was as pleased as though they had just been invited to a party. Archivist
Zeta’s Collections team kept hugging like they were back at their matriculation ceremonies.
Everyone was happy, and talking over each other, and kept shaking my hand and the Warden’s, even
if they had already shaken them twice.

At some point they remembered that the Warden and I were thirteen. We got sent off late to dinner
hour with a note of apology while they started preparations. I was pretty hungry. The Warden was
too busy scribbling on a piece of flimsy and it was a pain getting him to eat. By the time we were
finished the dining hall was abandoned except for the wait staff and the servitors on dish duty.

Archivist Zeta showed up when I was done and the Warden was mostly done. “Well, you were bang
on right,” she said. “We bagged up the hallway skeleton, and found an ancient AWOL tag on it from
two hundred years ago. It went missing from—guess—Copper Garden duty. Worse, the committee
gave us on-the-spot permission to exhume Doctor Sex—they do move quick when you use
the R word—and would you believe it? His finger bones were worn down! He’d tried to open that
thing from the inside. Ghoulish. Sex was one intense revenant.”
The Warden said, “That’s been nagging at me. If he was that intense, why did he stop at the last leg?
Why not open the box all the way?”

The Archivist fiddled with one of the hairpins at the back of her bun, eyes distant. Then she said,
“His study had been sealed. He knew that the Archies might not get to him for years and years and
years. What’s inside that sphere is paper . . . real, delicate paper . . . and even if he didn’t know
precisely what it was, he may have had a good idea. Opening the sphere would have meant exposing
it to the elements. He preferred to defer the satisfaction of solving the puzzle fully so that someone in
the future could benefit from his final deduction.”

“That’s conjecture,” said the Warden.

“Oh, entirely,” said Zeta. “But it’s what I hope to God I’d do in his position. Maybe the last burst of
spirit energy left him after he destroyed part of his host body, and he was just too exhausted to
continue. Who knows?”

We all fell silent for a moment. Then the Warden said, more brightly: “Any hope of extracurricular
points, if I do a Scholar’s report? I’ve got the right to submit one.”

“You’ll have to submit it to the committee. I won’t pull strings. They might give you one point,
considering,” said the Archivist.

“One?”

“Greedy! I would have been overjoyed to receive a full extra grade point when I was your age,” said
the Archivist. “What is your ambition, Palamedes? Wait—don’t tell me. I don’t want to know, and I
won’t let myself influence you. Don’t expire in a fit of hubris.”

“I don’t think I should take that from someone who made Scholar at fifteen,” he said.

Archivist Zeta reached forward and, in a rare moment of affection, ruffled his hair. “Like mother,
like son, eh?” she said.

“Dad likes to say so,” admitted Palamedes.

“Tell the man Juno Zeta never scared the local wildlife as you just did—or at least, I waited a whole
seven years longer. You’re going to have to present this to the Oversight Body, you know, you poor
young fool. The biscuits they’ve been serving in the break are really awful. Good luck—and I’d like
that report within six study days, please. You know where my pigeonhole is.”

When she had safely left, we looked at each other. Then we gave each other a ringing high five.

“A whole extra bloody grade point,” he said. “God, we’re good. Cam, you’re brilliant. The greatest
future cavalier. My favourite second cousin in a very wide field that you nonetheless dominate.”

“Palamedes,” I began.

“Yes, Camilla?” he said.

We burst out laughing. We laughed so hard that every time one of us stopped, the other one started
us going again, just with a look, to the point where we were in real physical pain. The kitchen staff
kicked us out, but the Warden was still wheezing—

“Doctor Sex!”

They took the paper in the puzzle box away from the Warden before he could see the full page. But
the Warden remembers everything he ever read. He only saw a scrap of it, and that would have been
more than enough. Over the years, he always maintained it was a love letter.

He should know. He wrote a lot of them, and never got any back.

Darling girl,

Tomorrow you will become a Lyctor and finally go where I can’t follow. I want you to keep this
letter when you are far away and think of me and want me and can’t have me, and know that no
matter how far you travel, nor how long the years feel, the one thing that never stays entombed is

I don’t have a copy any more. He and I burned the transcript to keep from getting caught with it. He
didn’t need one anyway. Nor did I. Palamedes remembers everything: That was his problem.

I always remember him. That’s mine.

As Yet Unsent

Culled from Judith Deuteros’ secret report on Blood of Eden activities, this story was originally
published in the trade paperback edition of Harrow the Ninth. COHORT INTELLIGENCE
FILES

As outlined in emergency planning guidance regarding kidnapping or hostage taking of any member
of the Cohort, this report is made:
To the best of detainee’s capacity, while minimising additional risk of harm to detainee or other
Cohort personnel;

Covertly, in such a way that hostile actors cannot develop or implement the report to use against the
Nine Houses, or encourage a ransom strategy;

For the purposes of assisting the Cohort, should the detainee be killed or incapacitated.

This report has been created in code and stored in a subdermal implant under Cohort procedures, in
the hope that if the body is recovered the Cohort may use intelligence received to counteract later
threats to the Nine Houses.

This report has been assembled by Captain J. Deuteros (Dead Fleet, Dve Territorials 12th
Necromancer’s Unit). This report is created during Hostage Doctrine Phase Three: the period of
captivity.

UNTITLED ENTRY

At the time of this entry I am five months into forced captivity by enemy insurgents. This is my
continued attempt to create a report. My current opportunity has been enabled by our move from
spaceflight to what appears to be a ground encampment. I have not been privy to enough
geoinformation to compile any useful positional data. The area surrounding the enemy encampment
is temperate with two dominant layers of green foliage. There are animals. Birds cry at night. When I
am taken out to look at the sky there is a large ringed planet visible from daylight to dusk, but my
attempts to measure its angular diameter are at best imprecise.

I’ve recovered from my initial relapse after gut alteration. My weight has levelled out. My captors’
procedures were conceptually primitive but sophisticated in execution. They have still failed to
regrow my stomach or bowel, as they lack the basic techniques required to do so, but have
outsourced their functions to apparatus outside my body for the interim. I have endured multiple
infections since but have not yet managed to die. The stomach pouch was removed on a previous
excursion to what they said was an abandoned “steal planet.” I understand that they use the word
“steal” for what we would term “shepherd.” They were willing and able to coerce me into assisting
in surgery with my necromancy. Camilla Hect told them that if they left me unsedated during the
operation I would be able to facilitate the joining of a nonorganic implant to the damaged
oesophagus and body of the stomach. I attempted dissembling to ask her to convince them to leave
both hands free, not one. This failed to work on Camilla Hect.

The operation went ahead. Severe reflux required another landing in order to fix it. I was sedated for
the majority of the time. Hect provided competent guidance. The ambient thanergy was thin.
The corpse has still failed to rot. The princess says they are leaving it outside in significantly
fluctuating temperatures, under observation, and it still fails to rot.

ENTRY: CAMILLA HECT

I will not retread old reports. My fears for Camilla formerly the Sixth persist. She is not given as
much leeway as the princess, but she is no longer kept in confinement. Security anklet only, wired to
a severe but not fatal electrical shock. Since my previous report they used it on her once, which
hospitalised her for a week.

Camilla Hect is in the process of being converted to their cause. Their breakthrough was the Blood of
Eden commander they refer to as We Suffer. I can give no identifying description of We Suffer; I
still haven’t seen any of the ranking officials unmasked. Ever since we were moved into We Suffer’s
remit, Hect has let herself be persuaded into listening to propaganda. The crucial element was from
something they call Source Gram, which Hect told me about firsthand. To believe Hect, Blood of
Eden has been consorting with elements from within the Nine Houses for much of the last myriad.
As this is exactly what Blood of Eden would want us to believe, I remain sceptical. Hect repeats We
Suffer’s claim that Source Gram came from within the Sixth House around six thousand years ago,
an incident that apparently even We Suffer admits has fallen into Edenite mythology. We Suffer and
Hect often mention a “break clause.” What this refers to I will not speculate.

To be fair, Hect was open in her discussions with me during her hospitalisation. I do not imagine that
this is due to any deference toward my rank. She says that Blood of Eden knows things about the
Sixth House that an outsider could not possibly know, but that their references are all incredibly
antique. She said that if the Sixth House saw fit to discuss something with insurgents, even in its
infancy, then she wanted to know what. I told her that whatever it was would mean nothing and be
nothing and only shadows on the wall. I reminded her that radicalisation was a fate worse than death
not only to her but to the Sixth House. I also reminded her that she had been hospitalised because an
official said they wanted to take her bones away and said that they would not serve in a cell where a
necromancer’s minion was allowed to carry “wizard bones” around, direct quote. I was there when
they tried to forcibly take the bones away and they were forced to shock her. I could do nothing.

All Camilla Hect said when I reminded her was Yes, Captain, I know.

And I said to her, Then what? What is pushing you toward this? Why are you letting them pour this
poison into your ears and taint the memory of a House you love? And she said, Well, the Warden
would want to find out.

Once Hect mentions Palamedes Sextus there’s no reasoning with her. Both the princess and I now
understand this. During our hospitalisation when I could not get information out of her we played
chess using the ceiling tiles and our imaginations. Hect has a good memory for where the pieces are,
which helped when the sedative they gave me dulled my mind. I will admit with all honesty that
even had I been in perfect physical condition I would be no match for her in chess. Only the princess
gives Hect a good game.
Out of curiosity I once asked her if she had played her necromancer. She said that it bored him
because two moves in he knew how the match would go. I asked her why she enjoyed playing in that
case. Hect called it an act of meditation. She said it was good to play out the game even if you knew
how it was going to go.

As I recall Lieutenant Dyas also enjoyed chess. Many of my cavalier’s habits are becoming the work
of recollection; others are indelible.

ENTRY: CORONABETH TRIDENTARIUS

There is no way of softening this. Coronabeth Tridentarius has already been radicalised.

The princess, always so quick to sympathy and so quick to violence, was an easy mark from the start.
I told her this once and she struck me. I was grateful at the time that she still viewed me as strong
enough to strike. The princess cries over every sob story and her blood boils at any perceived
injustice. She has already been weakened from a life spent pretending to be a necromancer. I am
humiliated to have never seen through the lie. I have known the princess since childhood and I am
sorry to say I assumed what everyone else assumed: her strength, rather than her weakness. Camilla
Hect’s opinion is that the whole Tridentarii stratagem was the initiative of Ianthe Tridentarius.
Though I was taken in by the twins’ swindle I am not taken in by this. Coronabeth Tridentarius has
never been party to anything she did not want to do, and never successfully carried out a plan she
didn’t think up first.

They started by letting the princess receive our meals, a classic tactic forcing her to recognise them
as caregivers. They also let her be the one who fed me, obviously another tactic to force me to do the
same. This one backfired, as I would have always refused to let Camilla Hect, whose bedside manner
I admit is impeccable, nurse me in my weakness. To have Coronabeth Tridentarius near me in my
suffering only hardened my heart. All the while she would tell me the things they had told her, as
though she wanted me to argue her down. At first I tried. Then I realised she was just using me to
sharpen her own reasoning.

Their main grievance is the resettlements. They are outraged that thanergenic conversion of a planet
makes it no longer habitable for its previous organic life. Given that conversion happens over
centuries and that all inhabitants are moved to a new planet with full economic support from the
Nine Houses, I argued against sympathy. They accuse us of unprovoked war. Now that I understand
more of the dark commonalities in the insurgencies the Houses face, I’d be ashamed to talk about
provocation in Eden’s shoes. The princess and I debated that one until she had to be removed from
my bedside. Their other line of attack is the business contracts. They claim that the services asked of
them by the Emperor were set down in lifetime contracts by previous generations, who assumed the
contracts would be terminated upon the Emperor’s death. When I pointed out that his primary title is
the Emperor Undying and that this was a crime of assumption the princess called me a number of
names I will not reproduce here. The main takeaway, that I am a shill and a stoolie, only serves to
demonstrate how open she was to this, and from how early on. She didn’t want to be convinced, but
to convince me.
I will attempt her defence and her condemnation together. The princess was abandoned by her sister
for a Lyctorhood I still do not understand. Prince Naberius Tern was killed before her eyes by that
same sister. Tern’s role in her life as a cradle cavalier cannot be overstated. Just because every
cavaliership does not look like Palamedes Sextus and Camilla Hect’s enmeshment does not mean
that a less obsessive bond is more lightly ended. What happened at Canaan House was not something
she had been trained for and she should have been debriefed and assisted by Cohort specialists
afterward: it was a combat situation. Yet it was a situation completely brought about by Blood of
Eden pawns, if what Hect says about the Lyctor impersonating Dulcinea Septimus is true. Much of
my information about what happened at Canaan House is cripplingly secondhand. My failure in the
operation is down to a lack of imagination and leadership and a complete unreadiness to serve the
Cohort in the capacity they granted to me. My father in his capacity as Fleet Admiral asked me
beforehand if I was ready to serve. I answered yes and I have made myself a liar. And if I was
unready, with all my preparation, then how could the princess be ready—a woman who never left the
Dominicus system? One might as well damn the dead Duchess Septimus.

The Edenite selection of Crown Princess Coronabeth Tridentarius as their main target is also critical
to her indoctrination. I was never an option, as a Cohort soldier and nearly dead. There was a
significant argument early on whether to put me through interrogation and then kill me, or just to kill
me. Camilla Hect also made herself unattractive for coercion. The first four weeks she remained
nonverbal. The princess was inevitably their mark. Under concerted pressure in such a situation,
focused specifically on her, how could she fail to be moved? She has enough education and
intellectual interest to latch on to their talking points, but no firsthand knowledge of what service is
like.

Hect maintains I am incorrect. Hect maintains that Coronabeth’s intervention kept us all alive, and
that the princess deliberately put herself in harm’s way. What am I to believe? That the princess was
and remains an innocent victim, or that the princess maintained the pose of innocence and has
become a victim anyway? She sincerely believes that the Houses have done wrong, and worse, that
they are being led incorrectly. The tips of her ears go pink when she is genuinely impassioned.

Note to self: rewrite this. The sedatives are making you discursive and worse.

UNTITLED ENTRY

The corpse is still as it ever was. I asked Hect if the scavengers had got at it. She said that animals
refused to touch it even when encouraged.

My corpse, however, has decided to live. My body has made that decision for me over the past five
months, first under triage and then after the multiple operations. Accepting a body that no longer
works is akin to what I imagine amnesia is like. I am slow in understanding my new limitations. I am
not mobile, although Hect is ruthless in encouraging the exercises for my legs. She says eventually
walking will not pose such a threat to my insides, which still remain partially outsourced to
machines, and that I will be independent and able to move. I cannot envision this future. I never
experienced the physical vitiation that some necromancers suffer. The Second House’s signature
thalergy transferral does not burn the necromancer’s tissue so viciously, especially in necromancers
who enjoy more competency than genius. I could run a kilometre in ten minutes, which was among
the fastest for my adept group in the junior reserves. Marta could run it in five.

The planet is a typical thalergy planet, but when the princess asks to take me outside in the chair they
still cuff my hands first. They have a very gestural idea of “wizardry,” which is the kindest term they
use for necromantic aptitude. I’m grateful for the outside visits. It is in these moments I attempt to
get my bearings of the world around me for these reports. The princess sourced me paper, as these
people have such a wealth of organic textiles at their command that they see no shame in processing
it to waste on writing. I refused it. This wasn’t on moral grounds, but because I can’t stand to make
use of the stuff. The princess and Hect and I all agree we hate the texture. The princess takes me
outside to some suitable spot and tries to be charming and I ignore her, which is my last defence.
Inevitably we have an argument that opens my staple wounds back up.

Her approach varies. I don’t understand it. On one desperate occasion she offered to kill a local
animal so that I could use the thanergy to try to heal myself. When I rejected this she offered that she
would do bodily injury to herself “if I liked that better.” We had an argument. On another occasion in
a particularly foul and quixotic mood she told me that Blood of Eden commandos must each kill a
wizard, as they put it, in order to graduate to special operation units. She said she thought I could be
her first kill. I indicated she should go ahead if she was so satisfied with fish in a barrel. We had an
argument.

I asked her why she listened to these people, why she was throwing off her contentment and her faith
when she owed them so much. The princess told me that she had felt for a long time that the Cohort
movements didn’t make sense to her. She said what would be most economically productive was
intermingling with these people, allowing immigration and absorption into the Nine Houses; that
shepherd planets got more costly the further the Houses extended themselves, and that instead of
creating long-lasting industry we were doing little more than slash-and-burn trading. Scattershot, she
said. Notwithstanding the moral issue.

She said she and her sister had always been interested in the way the Houses were being run, and that
Ianthe had encouraged her interest. She had always thought we were being wasteful. I told her this
wasn’t ideology, it was economics. I asked her if she was ready to sell her birthright for economics.
She said as a Second I should be more than willing to sell my birthright for economics. We had an
argument. Afterward she said it was much more than theory. She said she had groomed herself for
something and all it had done was make her unfit for the purpose. What purpose?

I said, Princess, these people cannot stand us, they can’t stand even the concept of us.

She was silent for a long time, and then she said, That’s the only sticking point. When I tried to talk
to her about it, seeing this wedge of daylight, she said, Don’t talk to me about this one yet, Judith.
I’m still fighting myself. Wait and see who wins.

As though it were a duel.

Coronabeth Tridentarius is too easily moved by her passions, whatever she says about the theory.
She is being taught how to fire a gun by some of We Suffer’s underlings. They give her low-bore
ammunition and teach her how to hit a target. Camilla says she has a good eye.
 UNTITLED ENTRY

Coronabeth and Camilla and I are forced into close quarters and our relationships have undergone
many changes over the past months. We are prisoners, even if the two of them do not express it this
way to each other. We are all different people. I doubt Camilla Hect would ever have sought out my
company in any other circumstance, nor I hers. Her necromancer and I never thought much of each
other. In a different time I would have found ways to apologise to Palamedes Sextus, whom I at the
very least critically misjudged, but even then I doubt we would ever have found close or common
ground.

What Camilla Hect and I understand is that we do not begin to understand each other’s grief. She
does not mince her words. In many ways she was wasted on cavaliership to the Master Warden, but I
cannot think of anything I could say to her that would meet with a less impressed response, and I
can’t honestly judge a cavalier who saw their cavaliership as their entire life. I think Camilla the
Sixth and her adept failed to reach the critical point that many cavaliers and their adepts have to
reach, where they understand the scope and the limits of what they will be to each other for the rest
of their lives. I thank the Emperor’s mercy that I had a cavalier who taught me that so early.

The princess has by turns tried to charm Camilla, play with Camilla, flirt with Camilla, and cajole
Camilla. Camilla is currently unmoved. This lack of response might have been dangerous except for
the pouch around Camilla’s neck: the princess knows that she would have better luck flirting with the
earthly remains of Palamedes Sextus. I asked Coronabeth bluntly if she had designs on Camilla, who
at the end of the day, is an attractive human being at the peak of physical health, contemporary in
age, and also unexpectedly knows the value of quiet. Oh no, she said, and she seemed surprised I
would ask. She said, one half plus one half is only ever half. I questioned her mathematics.

She said, Do you have designs on Camilla? I said that romance was the furthest thing from my mind
and should be the furthest thing from hers. I said that in such a febrile atmosphere it was for the best
if we did not make any connections that Blood of Eden could exploit. The princess asked me if at
any point blood had ever flowed in my veins or if it had always been graphite shavings. We had an
argument.

The princess said Blood of Eden thinks necromancers keep wide and witless harems of nonaptitude
House citizens whom they have sex with, often after their death. We agreed they must have procured
a piece of niche pornography and gotten the wrong idea, although she was amused and I was not.

UNTITLED ENTRY

I did not understand why they were interested in my physical health, enough to employ practitioners
of their medical arts in my care. I initially assumed they were gathering data, but judging by their
stories they have gathered enough dead necromancers to conduct anatomy lessons for the rest of
time. As they have no adepts themselves, what secrets could they hope to glean from my body? Now
I understand what they want from me. It’s become obvious that I must find a way to end my own
life.

They blindfolded me and cuffed my wrists to the gurney. I am impressed they think me capable
enough to warrant these precautions. The princess kept telling them that necromancy doesn’t work
this way; I’m only grateful that she did not remind them that blindfolds mean nothing and handcuffs
very little, in case they decided I didn’t need my eyes nor my hands. They ignored her. They gave me
the sedative. They had to give me the counter-sedative when they took me on board another vessel,
the injection between my thumb and forefinger, and by the time I had stopped palpitating I saw they
had wheeled me on board a Cohort ship.

The ship was a Gorgon-class vehicle. Even partially sedated I could recognise at once what class it
was; Gorgons fell out of use before I was born, but my father said he always had a soft spot for them.
When I was nine he pulled rank to take me on board one at the sidereal museum on Trentham. He
always called the Gorgon neither fat nor flesh nor good dry bone: it was the last time they had tried
to design a light craft that still had room for a stele. Blood of Eden must have captured or stolen one
intact.

The moment I saw the stele I underwent the phantom reaction, which I hadn’t had since I was very
young. I shed phantom reactions when I was an auxiliary. Too many adepts took months to
overcome aptitude dyspraxia in space, which the lieutenant always called arse over elbow: dropping
cups or missing chairs or overcorrecting, the laziness of a body accustomed to necromantic backup.
When I saw the stele I attempted to get out of the chair by drawing on any thanergy pooled around
me, which had the effect that I tried to fall out of the chair.

They said to me, Do you know how to use this? I gave the Cohort interrogation response until they
brought in Camilla and put their gun to her head. Either Camilla Hect is as good as a Cohort veteran
under the gun barrel, or she simply doesn’t know how quickly a bullet can kill, which I doubt. Under
this duress I told them I understood how the stele worked but had no ability to use it myself. I said it
needed to be bathed in thanergy-enriched blood by at least three adepts and that the carvings needed
to be kept clear of crusts or clots. I said one necromancer alone would not be able to use it as an
anchor and that it needed to be energised on a thanergenic planet, so it would never be of any use to
them.

Blood of Eden convened for a while. Their commander, We Suffer, was brought in. They talked with
her and then they applied what they said was deoxygenated blood. The stele spluttered. They asked
me why it did that. I said that I didn’t know. They applied the usual pressure, but not so much that it
degraded my condition. I told them all I could offer was theories and my limited understanding. I
told them that the stele had a number of bone cylinders within that would retain some thanergy, to
help with deep-space transitions. I wouldn’t say any more.

They blindfolded me again and re-sedated me. Camilla told them I’d already had too much. I wish
Camilla would stop acting on my behalf.

Blood of Eden have a stele-capable ship. My only hope is that I am the only necromancer they have
in their possession. I keep telling myself this has to be the case. I keep coming back to the idea that
their safeguards would have been better if they’d ever had a live necromancer in captivity, that they
would understand the aptitude better. I reason that no necromancer in better physical condition
would have failed to kill themselves. I convince myself that any necromancer in worse physical
condition would be dead.

But why did they let me live? Why have they kept me other than to use me? They have no interest in
my potential as leverage. I hoped to keep my father’s identity from them, but Camilla Hect told me
they knew from the start. Why do they know all this? How are they getting their intel? How were
they not noticed travelling to the heart of the Nine Houses?

You think you live behind a shield and then it comes to light that you have been cowering in a fog,
and I will never be able to correct things, I will never be able to tell anyone of the danger. I must end
my life as a mystery, not as an object lesson. There is a grace to dying as a prisoner of war.

UNTITLED ENTRY

I asked the princess and Camilla Hect to kill me before Blood of Eden can do worse.

Camilla said no. The princess said she would think about it. I am desperate.

UNTITLED ENTRY

I don’t feel particularly well, but that’s not related to anything. Sweating a lot at the moment. I can’t
seem to get warm.

Camilla Hect is getting on whatever final nerve keeps trying to nourish itself in my body. I realise I
am a terrible patient. If I had an ounce more social charm I would apologise to her for my obvious
resentment, which we both know is deferred and humiliating self-hatred. The lieutenant used to say
that my greatest virtue was that I would always recognise when I was wrong, and my greatest flaw
was an inability to communicate or even acknowledge that recognition to anyone else.

But I am not wrong here. The Edenite We Suffer cannot protect Camilla from the wrath of the others.
The command chain is not clear to me. They call Suffer “Commander” and defer to her, but she
appears to be a tagalong in a group that is not originally hers. The Edenites keep throwing around
words like “wing” and “cell” and “jurisdiction,” and quarrel with We Suffer when she makes
decisions. I would have said that the Nine Houses had nothing to fear from such a group except that
we so obviously do.

We Suffer has told Camilla to stop carrying the bones. The princess has asked Camilla to stop
carrying the bones. She has not responded.

I have not asked Camilla to stop carrying them, as I have no desire to act like her commanding
officer. But I was angry at myself and scratching about for allies and knew Camilla Hect was a
valuable asset and something essential to save from Blood of Eden’s grasp. I was embarrassed and
angry at her while she was treating the sores on my legs that come from lying down too much. I
controlled myself by trying to reach out.

I told her that I had served a long time with Lieutenant Dyas. She asked, How long? I said, Eight
years, with formal cavaliership for seven. I said, I knew her before that but it took me a while to
catch her eye. Hect seemed interested in that and asked, so I felt it might be the rare time to
elaborate. I told her that the lieutenant, five years my senior, had always been an object of interest to
the trainees but kept herself to herself. Obviously this engendered near-hero worship among us. I told
her the truth: that Dyas never sought me out nor gave me any deferential attention as the Fleet
Admiral’s child. A consummate professional, always. We first partnered on the Dominion for a
training exercise after her original partner went out early on an injury. Meeting in person did not, as
it so often does, inoculate against hero worship. I found Dyas to exceed my impossible teenage
standards. We found out that we liked the same books.

I said to Hect, I hadn’t actually read them as closely as I’d made out to the lieutenant, in that initial
conversation. I had to go back and reread all of them in a hurry.

Hect said, That’s the first human thing you’ve ever told me about yourself.

I didn’t know what to say to that. Camilla Hect every so often says something that is impossible to
reply to. How have I represented myself as anything other than fallible? But I told Hect about how
Dyas and I started our friendship. How when my father visited me a few months from then and gave
me the list of probable cavalier nominees to look over, I had the guts to suggest Marta Dyas. He was
surprised—he’d heard of her, but my father hears about everyone. I told Hect that he’d shot me
down. Said that a promising soldier like Dyas wouldn’t want to interrupt an extramural career for
something that would keep her intramural; would see it as a millstone not an honour. Said he’d
investigate but that I was wrong to hope.

I told Hect about how Lieutenant Dyas had agreed to a year’s trial to see if I suited her. My father
said he had never seen me so happy. I told her how good a year that was. I was fifteen at the end of
it. Lieutenant Dyas was everything a cavalier ever should have been, and in her private life
thoughtful, considerate, insightful. Everything she did, she did well. Everything she didn’t do well
she threw herself against so that she could do it better, or understand her weaknesses. I said, She
loved music. She was an excellent dancer. She never took a seat when we were enduring a Fifth or
Third ball. And she never let weakness master her. I said to Hect, The night after you and she fought
the duel at Canaan House, when I took her upstairs and asked how she was, all Dyas said was: I need
a drink.

Camilla Hect smiled over that. I hastened to reassure her that the lieutenant wasn’t chemically
obsessed or vulnerable in that way, she just appreciated a beer. Camilla said she thought as much,
that Dyas didn’t seem the type. I will admit that I was glad that Camilla didn’t ask what she might
have had cause to ask; that she didn’t autopsy my decision-making. She didn’t ask me what I had
been thinking during that fight.

Having gotten Hect to smile and having maintained one of the longest conversations we had ever
had, I thought it was time to draw blood. I said to Camilla that I had esteemed Lieutenant Marta
Dyas more than anyone I had ever met since. I told her what was true: that if the lieutenant had lived
instead of me, Camilla and the princess would currently be better off.

Camilla said, I know the feeling.

I asked her if I could tell her something private. Camilla said, Sure.

I told her that when I was seventeen I was overwhelmed by the cavalier relationship. I told her that I
hadn’t expected it to feel that way. I told her, using efficient and unsentimental language, that the
love Lieutenant Dyas showed me as my cavalier—in all the ways she had made us one flesh—turned
my head completely. I told her how deeply I had fallen for Marta Dyas as a woman, to the point
where one evening I tried to make things different between us. At this point I tried to find the words
with Camilla, honourable words, and Camilla Hect said: You propositioned her?

I said, Yes. She was the age I am now; I was seventeen. I’d been secretly reading material . . . I was
convinced . . . I thought it was a natural development, or at least, one nobody had to know about.
Lieutenant Dyas was so handsome, so attractive, so alive. In my childhood I had already developed a
taste for . . . strength, physical vivacity. What’s more, it’s a necromancer’s privilege to see their
cavalier in moments of vulnerability. I was very susceptible.

Camilla said, She turned you down.

The Sixth House is renowned for its quick and accurate conclusions, but I’m still dismayed by this
reality coming to live so completely in Camilla Hect.

I said to Camilla, Yes; and it was the best and kindest, most honourable thing Marta could have done
for me. She didn’t have to tell me in so many words what we both knew, that the relationship
between cavalier and necromancer could so easily curdle into codependency . . . a loss of self on
both sides. An obsessive fusion of halves, not two complementary forces. We were both Cohort born
and bred; I should have known better. She forgave me instantly. The fog cleared much quicker than I
deserved. I knew without having to be told what I’d done wrong . . . And I didn’t err, ever again.

Camilla said, Captain Deuteros, why are you telling me this?

I said, I wanted to let you know how lucky I was. She and I could have made that mistake together. It
was such a near miss. I wouldn’t hold it against anyone else, except that I would want them to know
that such a thing is never determined, never inevitable, like all the things I told myself that night
when I was seventeen. If it had happened it would have been wrong and it would have hurt both of
us.

Camilla said, I can’t comment.

I said, Hect, I was lucky. I was so lucky. I’ve been fortunate my whole life—tested my whole life—
and I’ve always managed to pull through by the grace of others. I’ve taught myself those hard
lessons, and you can learn those lessons from me if I have nothing else to offer you . . .

Camilla said, Captain. Come out and say it.

And Hect withdrew from me and was silent for a long time, if not still. Eventually she said, At least
when the Warden acts like he knows everything, he generally does.

I tried to tell her that what she had just said was indicative of everything that was going wrong,
referring to him in the present tense, but she turned away from me and crossed to the door. She said
at the threshold, Thank you. I’ve had enough education. Then she left.

Much later the princess came into my cell to talk to me and asked me what the hell I’d said to
Camilla, her words. There is no way in this universe or in the universe contained within the River
that I will ever tell Coronabeth Tridentarius the finer points of anything that went on between Marta
Dyas and myself, so I just said I’d tried to help her.

She said, For God’s sake, Judith, you can barely help yourself.

I said I, who had had a healthy relationship with my cavalier, was obliged to help others who hadn’t
had my privileges.

She said if that was the way I had put it to Camilla then I was lucky to be alive.

UNTITLED ENTRY

I have an internal infection. My gut fused correctly to whatever grisly artificial thing they put inside
me, but I’m dying. The princess says after the disappointment of the stele and the Gorgon they are
arguing over whether or not to let me die. I thank the Prince Undying my God, merciful in justice
and gentle in remembrance, for this being so. I haven’t thanked God enough over my life. It always
seemed incredibly sentimental. And I didn’t wish to presuppose his interest.

They won’t let Camilla Hect in to see me, whether or not she would want to, on the belief that she
might try to give me antibiotics. They are letting the princess in reluctantly. She says the Edenite
commander We Suffer is of the opinion that I should live no matter what, but she is faced with the
opposite opinion from literally every other Blood of Eden soldier. The princess says they all fought
at Lemuria and have set opinions. (It won’t help at this stage, but Lemuria is their term for New
Rho.) Commander We Suffer has demanded I receive pain treatment. I would prefer it if I didn’t.

The princess said to me, in frankly imperious tones, that I had to live. She said she always expected
me to become Fleet Admiral Deuteros. I said I had never lived in any such expectation. I said I
hoped if I ever had to take on such a burden I would be old enough not to feel oppressed by it. I told
her she wouldn’t understand. When she asked me why not, I said I was just an administrator; she was
a princess. A king.

She said there was no king but the Emperor. I said her problem was a lack of job opportunities. She
laughed a little and said, Too right.
I am ready to die rather than be used as a weapon against my Houses. I am not depressive, and I have
not begun thinking I have no more to offer. I have a long life ahead of me and I want to use it in
service of the Emperor, as I am not fitted for anything else. But at this point, I would rather die.

UNTITLED ENTRY

In and out of a new delirium. High fever. I don’t feel anything. I’m almost peaceful. I wish Marta
had been allowed this death.

UNTITLED ENTRY

Awoke very calm to discover the princess. Too weak to argue. Asked her instead from my position
as a Cohort captain and a fellow child of the Nine Houses, and on the strength of our childhood
acquaintanceship, not to lose the faith and give in to Blood of Eden.

Instead of making promises the princess said, Acquaintanceship? I’ve known you since I was eight.

I said, I know.

She asked me if I remembered the first season my father came to visit her mother and father, when
I’d been nine and she and Ianthe had been just a year younger. I said, Yes (because I haven’t ever
forgotten). She said, smiling, You were so hard to play with! I only got you to unbend by the end of
the visit. I remember running . . . falling headlong, smashing flat on my face . . . You came over to
help me up, so I pretended I was hurt much worse than I was. I always used to fake to Babs that I
was about to die to make him cry when he was little, but he’d stopped really buying it, and I found
myself doing it for you . . . I couldn’t believe you fell for it. It was wonderful, like being in a play.
You were so cute, so chivalrous. I’d thought you would be boring to the core, but there you were,
playing the sad soldier when I pretended I was like to die.

I said, I knew you were lying the whole time.

She said, laughing, You did not! You just don’t remember! You were holding my hand and saying
you’d stay with me until it was all over! You just don’t remember!

I didn’t call her a hypocrite. The princess has never indicated she remembered anything. It’s not like
we reminisced about childhood much; a letter here and there, cursory thank-you notes.
Congratulations on promotions. I never had a promotion without sooner or later the arrival of flowers
—if I was at home—or if I was shipside, a bundle of dizzyingly coloured flimsy, painstakingly
folded into petals and sepals. Blatant shades of red and purple.

She said, Did you know? Every birthday we got to have one person we’d invite and our mother and
father would get to invite the rest, and Ianthe always invited whoever Babs didn’t want to see at the
time, and I always invited you.
I said, I assumed your parents made me the invitation.

She said, It was always me. I had so much fun seeing you. You were the only person who acted like
they had to get through the party for duty’s sake, and everyone else was there acting like they’d
rather die than be anywhere else. Even your cav pretended she was having fun . . . But there you
were, wearing your uniform, freezing me out. Perfect Captain Deuteros. Perfectly boring Judith
Deuteros. Mummy said you were just the most completely Second House specimen ever to live. I
went over to you when everyone else at the party would have eaten glass to talk to me . . . I had put a
lot of effort into making them feel that way. There you were, and you weren’t even grateful. You
were immune. You wouldn’t even tell me any good war stories when I’d been researching wars for
days just because I knew you were coming. Jody, you can’t die on me. I’m so alone now.

I said, It’s been a long time since you called me that.

She said, You won’t die on me, Jody. I won’t allow it.

I said, Better death than being hooked up to that stele.

The princess was crying. She said, Won’t you say one real thing to me? Won’t you show me one
single solitary human thing? Or are you going to die talking to me like it’s just another party you
wish was over already?

I told her, Don’t cry over me, Coronabeth. You and I both know there’s no reason to.

She dried her eyes with her fists and said, Ianthe always said we were born cursed.

The princess hunted around the room for a while for antibiotics. She said Camilla Hect had told her
what to look for. But Blood of Eden don’t leave themselves open: if this report is ever read by
anyone, and I am beginning to hope that it will simply die with me, I want that to be understood.
They don’t make stupid mistakes. As I wasn’t allowed to take too many liquids by mouth she wetted
some soft wadding and wiped my lips with it, which brought me some relief. I tried to thank her, but
she told me she didn’t want those to be my last words. So I said nothing.

She would have sat there for hours if they had not come to take her away. I recorded this when she
was gone, in the last of my strength. If this document is found after all, I’ll say this: I understood
Princess Coronabeth Tridentarius better than she knew—just not entirely. I think it is hell to entirely
understand any other person.

UNTITLED ENTRY

I am alive. I would to the Undying God it were different.

When I came back to consciousness I had no sight, which was fine by me. I heard voices. Someone
said, You absolute idiots, she’s very nearly dead.
It was not one of the voices of the other Blood of Edenites. It was new, and spoke perfectly accented
House, pitched high. It was this voice that said, Who gets a toy they have been desperate for, then
breaks it immediately?

There was another voice; I don’t remember what it said, or I didn’t hear it. The first voice said, It’s
called handcuffs!! It’s called careful handling!! Why am I having to tell you your own business?!
Why are you people always such a curious mix of the competent and the completely deranged?! It
never changes, and it never has changed!! I think they just clone you all out of the same vat!! Out of
my way, you wretched, cack-handed children, and let me fix it.

I felt hands on my abdomen. My shirt was pushed up, then my abdomen was opened.

I had not been entirely conscious before, and the feeling of my belly being opened up brought very
little pain and then no pain at all. But it was being done to my body, and it was being done close up,
with thanergy. I had not even been opened up with a knife, but with clean thanergetic unstitching. I
can’t describe the process. It was beyond me, and the planet dulled my senses. But I fought my way
back to consciousness the moment I felt the bloom.

The voice was very close. It said, Ugh! Then it said, Eugh! This is the best you can do, you
primitives? Next time just get her to eat a rock marked “Bowel,” it’ll be about as good and inevitably
cheaper. Tubing . . . tubing . . . is this plastic? God, I hate having to go rummaging . . . There!

Something dropped lightly onto the gurney, close to my thigh. Once the voice said, There, I felt that
same complex thanergy bloom roll out through my entire body. I have been under the knife and lived
through multiple necromantic processes, some of them internal. Nothing had ever been like what was
done to me. My body was convulsed with paraesthesia. The voice said, Much nicer, much neater.
This is how to do it. If you want to keep her weak, dismantle the immune system. You need her to be
able to keep up a sustained thanergy field for the stele.

I understood then what was happening. My lips and tongue weren’t functioning properly. All I could
say was, No, and I reached out blindly.

Someone brushed my arm away and the voice said, Oh, such heroic nonsense. It isn’t cute, you
know. I really ought to have an ulcer by now . . . Maybe I should give myself one.

Someone else said something indistinct. The voice said, Yes. The ship will move if you put this thing
in the station controls.

Someone else said more clearly, How will we know where the anchor is? And the voice said, I’ve
given you the blasted co-ordinates, haven’t I? It won’t be in the ship’s stellar registry, so you’ll have
to do the input work yourself. And you must follow the route I’ve given you afterward. You
understand that if the stele is discovered by God, this is all over. I’ve tried to make it look like it
wasn’t my work, but that’s not going to hold up at all on close inspection.

Another voice said something, but the shrill first voice said, I’ve facilitated your extraction mission
and that is frankly as far as I am willing to go! I said twenty years ago that I’d give you a stele if you
turned up the means to use one, and this is what I call cashing in abominably late. What do you think
you’re going to do, march on the Mithraeum? Good luck!! Not!!! I’m done here . . . Keep this thing
clean and don’t expose it to people. Make sure you wipe down its surfaces. I can’t do any more for
you.

Then the voice said, Now show me this wretched body. I don’t believe this story for a second. What
you’ve done is accidentally kept it airtight . . .

The door slammed when the voice had gone. At this point I tried to reach up to my head to take off
the blindfold, but whatever had been done to me was half-paralytic, half-stimulant. I couldn’t reach
up past elbow level. My fingertips were trembling when they found something wet and cooling on
the bed. I closed my fingers around it and for the longest time could not work out what it was. It was
the artificial oesophagus part.

UNTITLED ENTRY

This is the last entry I will be able to make for a long time. They intend to leave this planet in the
next twelve-hour window.

The Gorgon’s stele is active. They put me in the control seat. The blood oxygenates itself through
two huge organic chambers at its base: half open-work heart, half fountain. It is a miracle of its art.
They keep it behind mesh and won’t let me touch it in case I somehow siphon away its properties. I
know I won’t be able to do so. Its thalergy and thanergy reaction is so complex that my ability to
scaffold thanergy from it is almost nil. I would sooner be able to extract eggs from a baked cake. If I
can work out some way of leveraging its power for myself then I will use it, but that day is not today.
And I am so weak still. I can walk, but only with help, usually from the princess. Camilla Hect says
she’ll work out some kind of assistive.

I said to Camilla, It was a Lyctor.

Camilla said, Yes.

I said, Then the Houses are all doomed.

And Camilla said, The Warden and I know they can die like anyone else.

The princess took me outside this last evening. I wanted to walk, now that I could without the
machine. The Edenites let us do a circuit around the makeshift camp within sight of the central ships.
They put one of my ankles in an electronic cuff like Camilla the Sixth’s. One of the suns had set on
the planet’s horizon. The light became multicoloured and strange. The sky was streaked with fiery
green and yellow. The birds sang shrilly in the undergrowth and from far away in the high hills there
was a repeated howl of thin timbre, very high and lonely. We did not argue. We didn’t even talk, just
stood in that two-starred dusk together before the tree line and listened to that creature until its cries
died in the night. She stopped me before the plex table where they had set the corpse in the bag of
thick canvas, its zip unzipped, having been carried in from the forest where they’d left it.

I wonder if they will stop the experiments now. The corpse of the Ninth House cavalier is as pristine
as when Camilla Hect convinced them to take it on board. She never explained herself fully to me.
Some business about a note. When questioned, I confirmed there was nothing on the body to
preserve it, no secret process I knew of, no deep flesh magic I could detect—not that I had much
ability to detect. Whatever the case, she’s now some object of weird superstition among them. Hect
says she was no older than seventeen.

I attended the funerals of Cohort soldiers younger than myself. I never found them poignant.

When the princess and I looked down at her face, clean of her House’s ritual cosmetics, I envied the
dead cavalier her incorruptibility. The princess reached over to touch one dead cheek, whimsically
smooth the red hair. I didn’t envy the dead cavalier that.

The princess said to me, I have her rapier, you know. I picked it up that day I went to find you; I
found it in the skeleton rubble. The Cell Commander says to keep it locked up, but I’ve got it. I
didn’t want them to throw it out.

When I told her that even a dead cavalier still had rights to their sword, she said, Oh, I don’t think
she’d mind. The Ninth was sweet. She was never anything but nice to me. Then the princess said
unnecessarily, She was yummy, too. Fantastic body. Makes a beautiful corpse. Don’t you think she
looks just like a body in a picture book?

I said, She looks like someone who died fighting.

The princess turned to me then and took my hands. I kept my balance. She said, Jody, if I offered
you that sword, wouldn’t you take it? I know how to use it. I know what it would mean. Lieutenant
Dyas is dead. My own necromancer wouldn’t have me. Won’t you let me be your cavalier? Here,
now, at the end of the world? Save me, Jody. Bind me to you, or who knows where I will go? What
throne will I mount, if you don’t bind me down?

When I looked at her, she was not even smiling. She was eager and afraid. Yes, and beautiful, but
nobody who has seen Coronabeth Tridentarius in the flesh wastes time with an adjective.

Where we are going, I know there is little hope that I will ever make a report in person. I don’t
expect to stand before the Cohort again. If my report is ever found it will hopefully be by people who
live very long after me, who won’t even have the tools to translate it, and for whom it will be some
kind of interesting relic and not a shame of those who have lived in my time or even those who
remember them firsthand. When I started this report it was in the spirit of optimism. I can now
recognise it more as a prayer from a soldier who has never been good at praying. And if it is a prayer,
it might as well be a confession.

It is not a confession of temptation. I wasn’t tempted by Coronabeth’s offer. There was never any
possibility of it. I committed the understandable crime of desire for Lieutenant Marta Dyas, having
joined my hand to hers with the best and most pure of intentions. Why would I ever knowingly take
Coronabeth Tridentarius’s, having desired her already for twelve long, stupid, fruitless years?

And I said, Thank you for the offer, Your Highness, but not in this life or in any other.
FILE ENDS HERE