012. conversation

[outsidebones]

You are in the library, speaking with Magnus Quinn and Abigail Pent, the Fifth House cavalier and necromancer. You have been wary of them from the start, but they have been friendly with you, sharing their books, even. You let your guard down, and when they mention again how long it has been since they have seen the Eighth House necromancer, you tell the truth.

“Silas Octakiseron is not hiding,” you said. “He’s dead.” Both of them looked at her.

The Fifth necromancer’s glasses were misting up with the cold, so that her tranquil brown gaze was seen as though through a filmy cataract. “Pardon?” she said.

“So is Coronabeth Tridentarius,” you added. “I cannot confirm the fates of the rest of the Third House.” She told the story of what she had seen - how Silas had pushed a placid Coronabeth from the walls of Canaan House before jumping to his death in the fog.

"Reverend Daughter," said Abigail, "you say this was nearly a week ago? A week, and you didn’t think to tell us?”

There was a slight accusatory note in Pent’s tone. You did not feel great about it, but neither did you feel particularly bad; you just felt small and empty and hard, like the hail battering itself so fiercely on the window outside. “I had to be sure,” you said.

“Of what?” said Magnus.

This did not require an answer, so you did not give one. You merely held your hot coffee between your hands and stared with what you knew to be a slightly smeared but still discomposing painted face, with all the white and black of Ninth House sacrament. It was not difficult to win a
staring match against Magnus Quinn; he wilted in about five seconds, and stared out the window, and sighed very heavily.

“We didn’t need him,” he said bracingly.

Abigail said, “We need everyone.”

“Tridentarius’s loss is the greater here,” you said repressively, and you thought Abigail sounded somewhat distracted when she said, “Yes —yes, I do think so. I just hadn’t expected … If she’s gone, then perhaps that means … Reverend Daughter, will you do me a very great favour?”

“That depends on what the favour is.”

“I would like you to read this for me,” said Lady Pent.

She set down an empty cup of coffee on the frigid windowsill, and she took a little flimsy bag from her pocket. She unzipped the plex tab on the top and removed, delicately, a piece of yellowing paper. The Fifth adept used the very edges of her fingernails to unfold it, carefully and tenderly.

You stood up at once, but the cavalier was somehow between you and the door. The sweat beaded behind your knees and prickled behind your ears as you glanced down at the paper.

You said, “I would like to bring my cavalier into this conversa—”

“You need Ortus the Ninth to read a piece of paper with you?” said Magnus Quinn, with broad good humour, the type that was as resolute and inflexible and polite as a summons. You had been stitched up. You were a fool. You had lost your fear of the Fifth House, and now you had been boxed in as only the Fifth House might box you: smiling the whole time, and acting as though the whole thing might be a bit of a joke. You made your face imperturbable, and swallowed slowly, so that your throat did not so obviously gulp.

You stalled. “The text is small.”

Pent said, “Do you think so?”

The Fifth necromancer did not let go of the paper. You looked down at its bloodred, panicked writing: a hasty, furious scrawl, written with such fury that the pen had bitten the paper:

I WILL REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU KISSED ME—YOU APOLOGISED—YOU SAID, I AM SORRY, DESTROY ME AS I AM, BUT I WANT TO KISS YOU BEFORE I AM KILLED, AND I SAID TO YOU WHY, AND YOU SAID, BECAUSE I HAVE ONLY ONCE MET SOMEONE SO UTTERLY WILLING TO BURN FOR WHAT THEY BELIEVED IN, AND I LOVED HIM ON SIGHT, AND THE FIRST TIME I DIED I ASKED OF HIM WHAT I NOW ASK OF YOU I KISSED YOU AND LATER I WOULD KISS HIM TOO BEFORE I UNDERSTOOD WHAT YOU WERE, AND ALL THREE OF US LIVED TO REGRET IT—BUT WHEN I AM IN HEAVEN I WILL REMEMBER YOUR MOUTH, AND WHEN YOU ROAST DOWN IN HELL I THINK YOU WILL REMEMBER MINE

Reluctantly, you read the words outloud, knowing these words were almost certainly a product of your madness. You handed the paper back to Abigail Pent. "Read it to me," you said, hoarse.

Abigail turned the note back to herself, still with the care reserved for some priceless antique.

“I still get an erotic charge from snakes, sorry to say,” she read.

There was a brief silence. The hail slapped at the window’s glass as though wanting to hurl itself through. There was a growing rime of pale blue frost at the edges, and a cleared mist from where Abigail had sat.

“It differs mildly, then,” you said, and Abigail admitted, “Somewhat, yes.”

Magnus said, “But why—”

“I am mad,” you interrupted. “I have always been mad, since I was a child. I hallucinate sounds. I see things that do not exist. Ortus has masked much of it, but as you have identified and exploited, my vulnerability only requires his removal. I did not tell you of Silas Octakiseron’s death because I was not sure I was an accurate reporter. I am insane.”

Abigail Pent took off her glasses and popped them down into the top fold of her robe. She reached out to touch your arm, and your flinched away; she winced a little in sympathetic apology, and removed her hand.

“You have kept that close to your chest,” she said. “I would like to hear more sometime, if you are ever inclined to tell me. But, Harrowhark, that squares perfectly with another theory I have, if all this time you only looked to your own frustrations—have you ever considered the fact that you might also be…”

“Here it comes,” said her husband wearily. “The ghost agenda.”

“Magnus! Haunted,” his wife finished, in triumph. “Harrowhark Nonagesimus—I really think you should consider the idea that you might also be haunted.”