I went.
We crossed the chamber. We crossed a passage I had not seen last night, marble going to deeper marble, the gold veins under our feet running quicker, all of them converging on the high hall. The tone moved through again. Quieter this time. A second strike on the same bowl.
He stopped at the high arched door of the hall.
“Stay close,” he said.
It was the first time he had spoken since the terrace.
“To my left. Half a pace behind. If he speaks to you, you do not have to answer. If you wish to answer, answer. If you wish to leave the chamber, you will say to me I am tired, and I will hear it, and you will be returned to your chamber within a quarter-turn of an hour. Do you understand me, precious one.”
“Yes.”
“Good girl.”
The two words struck my chest with the tone’s force. There was no time to do anything with them. He had already turned and was crossing into the hall.
The hall was not as I had left it last night.
Last night the colonnades had been open to the lavender sky and the wind had moved through them clean. This morning the wind was gone. The light had dimmed by a fraction. The columns stood in their soaring rows and the marble ran with gold and the throne sat empty on the dais at the far end, and in the middle of the long floor, alone, hands folded loosely in front of him, a man was waiting.
Not a man. A demon.
He was tall. Not as tall as Pride, but tall. He was lean—the lean of a person who has decided, on principle, not to take up the room their body is allowed to take up. Pale skin. Not the luminous cream-marble of Pride; matte, faintly cool, the pale of something kept out of the sun. Dark hair, neat, cut close to the skull. He wore a long unornamented coat of a charcoal so deep it ate the light around it, and underneath the coat a high-collared shirt of pale silver-grey, and at his throat a single small ornament of dark stone on a thin chain. No gold on him anywhere. No color.
His eyes lifted as we came in.
They were pale. Pale and flat and the precise color of nothing in particular — a grey-blue, or a green-grey, like shallow water refusing to commit to a hue. Before they reached us, they surveyed the hall with the cool appraisal of a man pricing furniture at an estate sale.
Beside me, Pride had become a different being.
Not warmer. Not colder. More himself. He had drawn his magnificence around him like a cloak. The fabric of him fell exactly. His chin was a quarter-inch up.
“Brother.”
Pride said it first. He let it carry across the floor with the easy unconcern of a host who has not summoned the visitor and is not, on the whole, pleased.
“Brother,” the other one said back. His voice was not what I had expected. Quiet. Almost gentle. The voice of a man who had spent a long time learning to make himself easy to be near.
“You felt the tone, then.”
“The citadel announced you,” Pride said.
“And so politely. Mine clatters.” The thin smile was thinner than the voice. “You always did have the better staff. I’d love to take some off your hands.”
“Why are you here, Envy?”
The hair on the back of my neck stood. Envy looked, mildly, around the hall. He looked, mildly, at the throne. He looked, mildly, last, at me.
The eyes settled. The back of my neck chilled. He looked at the marks on my wrist where the sleeve had ridden up again. He looked at the loose hair at my temple. He looked at the white shift, and the bare feet, and the small inward fold of my shoulders that I had not been able to entirely undo since I had sat down at the table.
He was appraising me.
“So,” he said. Softly. To Pride. “It is true.”
“It is.”
“The Rite has chosen.”
