Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

“I think ‘bone frenzy’ might be a term open to coarse misinterpretation, personally.”

“The magma metaphor falls apart from here,” said Mercy, eyes still on the pilot’s switches. The Emperor responded with perfect gravitas: “Let us imagine the magma is full of unkillable man-eating magma fish. Two problems arise. The first is that beings made of flesh and blood immediately die in magma. The second is our vulnerability to man-eating fish.” Your tolerance for man-eating magma fish would have been tested sorely by anyone who was not God.

“Harry,” said Ianthe, thankfully also a trifle strangled, “when three people start kissing, it is always a cue. A cue to leave.”

Harrowhark was learning that a scion of the Fifth House might busy themselves politely during a murder, or an orgy.

She was beyond pity, beyond the tenderness of a member of her congregation rendering her down into a neglected child. The problem was that she had never been a child; she and Gideon had become women before their time, and watched each other’s childhood crumble away like so much dust. But there was a part of her soul that wanted to hear it—wanted to hear it from Ortus’s lips more, even, than from the lips of God. He had been there. He had witnessed.