Harrow the Ninth: 2 (The Locked Tomb Series) by Tamsyn Muir

Author:Tamsyn Muir [Muir, Tamsyn]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781250313225
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2020-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

How much God believed your side of events—how much you believed, in relating the story, hot with adrenaline and regret and the helpless self-doubting rage of the psychotic who knew what she saw and was still able to dismiss it—was not clear. He was very weary. The buttons of his shirt had been done up with the wrong buttons in the wrong holes. You were acutely aware of his displeasure, but did not entirely understand it.

As God, Mercymorn, and Augustine looked over the incinerator, they left you alone, sitting in the filtration room with Ortus. You did not often trust instinct, but you were not afraid of him then, seeing him sit on an upturned box the same way you were sitting, wiry, and empty-faced, and defeated. You were just angry.

“You saw what you saw,” you said. “You must have seen her stab you. The blow was from the front, with your own spear.”

Ortus said, “I don’t know.”

“You were conscious. You spoke to me.”

He said, “I don’t know.”

“We had a conversation. I want to know what it meant.”

He said, “I don’t remember.”

You looked into his clear green eyes; his expression had not changed, and neither had his voice. You could not keep the disbelieving contempt from yours when you said, “You don’t remember?”

The Saint of Duty turned his body toward you. He was clutching his rapier; but it was idle, in the crook of his elbow, in more the manner of an abandoned broom than of a weapon ready for war. His eyebrows were very slightly drawn together, a sort of exhausted crinkle. He looked at you, and he said in a voice you had known since you were eight years old: “I sometimes—forget.”

It was the tone—clinical, enamelled, half-defensive, half-endangered—the tone of someone admitting a final frailty. It was familiar because you had used it yourself. Understand I am insane.

Later on, when the Mithraeum was searched, Cytherea’s body was no longer on its altar; and God said he could not detect it anywhere on the station at all.

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