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Your narrow foyer was a necromancer’s dream: easy to ward, and to ward thoroughly. You had washed the whole little vestibule with a gossamer-thin layer of regrowing ash, and pressed bone of each type into whorls in the walls. On breach, anyone passing through would have their arms ripped from their sockets and their legs whirlpooled down into deep bogs of boiling-hot bone that crept up their bodies like incendiary gel. To follow up, they would be run through with 4,987 sharpened, flexible needles of your own temporal bone: unbreakable, reactive, instant.

Only an idiot would have stopped there. Your quarters had windows. If you had wanted to invade anyone’s space, you would have put on a haz—you knew a real Lyctor didn’t even need that—crawled over the outside of the habitation ring, and found the inevitable gap in the room’s armour. There were no such gaps in your quarters. You had studied the floor plan and spent hours perched atop a ladder of skeletons, sliding hot gobbets of your blood and spit into the crawlspaces above the wall panels. You had stood at the docking bay and opened the airlock on a sack of bones, and walked back inside with them pattering parallel over the outside hull as you guided them to your windows and warded the plex with them. You had sent them down the plugholes in your pump sink and in the shining white edifice of the tub. You got the beginnings of a tension headache merely from the wards’ reaction to Ianthe Tridentarius visiting your bedroom. If she had noticed the fine bone dust you’d blown all over her clothes—a glitter of thanergy on all her robes—she had not said a word, which made you suspect that she knew and was doing worse to you in secret. You’d found none of her traps, and it made you jittery.

Harrow the Ninth - Act Three, Chapter Twenty-Four