Room 99, Frozen Prior to Ch. 30

[we_bring_hell]

The room is spartan; sufficient to her needs. There is a single painting on the wall, painstakingly straight. It seems to be a mounted jigsaw puzzle of a tower at sunset. There is the faintest smell; some kind of organic ash, mixed with the oil of a mechanism. It's not unpleasant.

Her robe has somehow transitioned to the closet, and there's a skeleton on a stand in the corner; she recognizes the ribs. It grins at her familiarly. In the closet there are rows of long-sleeved shirts much like her usual habit, and some other shirts she frowns at. In a drawer there are trousers and spare niqabs and gloves and socks. Her journal is here on the desk.

This is all burying the lede: perpendicular to the white, crisp bed is a second one. There is also a set of free weights in one corner for some reason.

On the table by the bed is a device she only vaguely recognizes the function of, but it seems to be active. She presses the universal glyph for play. After listening to the strange yet familiar apocalyptic hymn, she lets the songs keep playing, but only the second one holds her interest.

She finds another CD in the drawer and puts it in; the first words send prickles up her spine; it's about running away and checking into a spartan room to hide from loss.

Half the words she hears mean nothing to her, but the other half pierce her through.

I write down good reasons to freeze to death
In my spiral ring notebook
But in the long tresses of your hair
I am a babbling brook

She plays it all the way through, and then again, and then again, and then again, and then she listens to the seventh song until she knows it word-perfect, even the words that are gibberish to her.

---

A new Milliways day finds Harrowhark at a table in the bar, studying her notes, black trousers and shirt and niqab. The key to room 99 is on the table before her, and she sings tunelessly under her breath, when that day is coming who can say, who can say. In Canaan House, time is frozen.

Comments

[glib_tongue]

Dorian Pavus, in contrast, looks askew.

Fresh out of the Emerald Graves, he's ruffled, with a few grass stains on his knees and a curl out of place. He looks tired. His collar isn't perfectly starched. His kohl could stand a little reapplication.

The Herald's Rest is too loud. The Liberalum arrived via Sister Nightingale's little birds in his absence. Dorian very badly wants some decent wine as he starts his work.

Speaking of little birds, the veil might well mean he's incorrect, but -- "Lady Nonagesimus? Ninth?"

[we_bring_hell]

She looks up from her notes; her mouth is invisible, but her eyes have a cool smile in them.

"Indeed. The Bar cannot properly bless my makeup so I'm doing without. Greetings, Pavus."

[glib_tongue]

Dorian hikes the massive tome under his arm so it sits more securely. "And to you, Ninth. I trust you've been well?"

[we_bring_hell]

"I've decided to stay here to steal a little time against my world," she says, which is not at all an answer to the question asked.

"Would you like to sit?" She looks at the book with undisguised nerdery.

[glib_tongue]

"If you wouldn't mind. This is quite heavy." Dorian sits; it's not as though he slams the book down, but there's still a quite solid pfuh as leather hits wood.

She's not troubling to disguise her interest. Dorian figures he might as well save her the trouble. "It's not much that's likely to be of interest to anyone without a reason to be curious about the ancestral lineages of Tevinter's oldest houses. I've a little project I'm working on, that's all."

[we_bring_hell]

Her eyebrows move expressively. "Ah. I have devoted my share of brain tissue to the ruling lines of the Ninth. I will pass."

She continues to stare at the book, though. "Such a profligate use of paper," she marvels.

[glib_tongue]

"Profligate? Perhaps." Dorian squares up the book in front of him, and then carefully opens it to a random page in the middle. The handwriting is crabbed, in a runic-looking script, and tiny. Very tiny.

"It's over two thousand years of inbreeding, internecine conflict, murder, and assorted eugenical fuckery, however, so perhaps it's a true miracle it isn't three times as long." Dorian taps the page. "House Erasthenes. One I'll be examining quite closely -- but not without a bottle of wine or three."

The way he speaks, it's clear he loves him some SAT words. Like tiny throwing stars, aimed at the throat of everything loathsome about his homeland.

[we_bring_hell]

Her eyes brighten. "I'll clarify - I've never seen so much paper in one place."

She gestures at the journal. "Except for the cover, this is synthetic." The cover is all too organic.

"The histories of the Ninth I used to read are written in stone and bone. The contents sounds similar enough, though." At least the interesting parts.

[glib_tongue]

Up goes one beautifully sculpted eyebrow. "Even with all the house's necromantic skill? The histories are reduced to mere begats?"

[we_bring_hell]

"What could be mere about ten thousand years of inbreeding, internecine conflict, murder and eugenical fuckery?" she asks.

She is herself the outcome of murder and eugenical fuckery, in fact.

"We have little enough in the way of martial glory, other than Matthew Nonius. And even those histories are written in the grave markers of Cohort soldiers whose bones could not join the monuments."

"The Ninth's history is based around something not happening," she says with cool irony. "Each year it does not is accounted a victory."

[glib_tongue]

Dorian tilts his head. "I'll come back to that, as a history centered on absence is rather intriguing, but come, Ninth -- you've mentioned theorems. Your work is superlative. Has no one written manuals? Treatises? Your house has methods -- surely those are far more valuable than records of who fucked whom."

[we_bring_hell]

She looks startled. "Oh! Yes, we have those in plenty. I learned to read on the Anastasian Primer."

"I apologise, I did not think of those as in the same categories as histories."

"All but the most venerable and secret of our necromantic studies have been published and captured on synthetics."

[glib_tongue]

"Which I gather are not paper."

Dorian broods on this a moment, prodding gently at the open page in front of him. The paper here is old and yellowed, but finely produced.

"Making excellent paper is difficult, I grant you. And of course there are other methods involving certain other material -- "

An ironical nod at her journal.

" -- so what's gained by using a synthesized material?"

[we_bring_hell]

"Oh!" The startlement of realizing someone is lacking basic context you were taking for granted.

"No trees, you see. There are no trees on the Ninth--indeed, they are exceptionally rare anywhere but the Second."

"What organic materials we can coax from the ground or tanks of the Houses are for eating. Materials for synthetics can be harvested from gas giants, which are much more plentiful."

"I have seen only one proper paper letter in all my life, and that from the Emperor. Oh, and the Fifth showed off with a paper envelope for their dinner party," she adds. Her tone here is muddled; she wants to sneer but the Fifth are dead, so she settles for non-plussed.

[glib_tongue]

Dorian sniffs. "Well! Should you want to show off for anyone, do let me know. I'd be delighted to destroy a few trees in the name of you thumbing your nose at your inferiors. I've had rather enough of trees recently, thank you."

[we_bring_hell]

Her eyebrows vanish into the upper regions of her veil. "A princely gift."

Either she has taken him entirely seriously or her deadpan is perfect.

"How did you manage to become so n weary of your plentiful forests?"