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She ground her molars audibly, so much so that they sounded like walnuts going through a rock polisher.
And: “How must we understand potato?” “As your closest vegetable relative,” said Harrowhark, who’d never seen one in real life. “You are a ready wit,” her cavalier said, with no apparent rancour and every sign of appreciation. “I have always admired your facility for repartee, my lady. Oftentimes someone will say something to me, and later I will think up the perfect riposte—so perfect the hearer could not help but wilt, and be ashamed that they had set themselves up to receive it—but by that point it is often hours after the fact and I am lying in my bed. And in any case, I hate conflict, all
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“Harry,” she said, and she said it tenderly, “have you never read a trashy novel in which the hero gets a life-affirming change of clothes and some makeup, and then goes to the party and everyone says things like, ‘By the Emperor’s bones! But you’re beautiful,’ or, ‘This is the first time I have ever truly seen you,’ and if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral,’ et cetera, et cetera, the word mewled fifteen pages later, the word nipple one page after that?”
But you were always too quick to mourn your own ignorance. You never could have guessed that he had seen me.
From the end of the table, his white-ringed eyes still bent down upon his papers, the Emperor said quietly: “His was the action of a hero.” “Oh, but the problem is that heroes always die,” said Augustine, who was worrying an edge of tablecloth between his long and elegant fingers. “You can’t even really pronounce one a hero until they die heroically.
I think you are one of the only Lyctors who can really and truly understand apocalypse … It is not a death of fire. It’s not showy. You and I would almost prefer the end, if it came as a supernova. It is the inexorable setting of the sun, without another hope of morning.”
