AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Now the Reverend Daughter followed more like a cavalier of her House than a necromancer of it. You creaked like a pack skeleton beneath the weight of a burden, following in the Lyctor’s wake. Thankfully, you no longer felt shame. Pride was swiftly becoming a planet you had travelled to once but no longer remembered in detail. The docking bay she led you into was a hive of activity. A speaker gave a belated parp of “Our lady the Saint of Joy is gracing Docking Bay Fourteen,” yet this did not seem to encourage everyone to scurry into the gleaming steel-and-bone culverts of the ship, but rather to take whatever they were doing into double time.
Whatever they were doing involved, primarily, a shuttle. It was not large. It was of a size, in fact, with the type that had used to bring the Ninth House lightbulb filaments and vitamin supplements, manned by a single pilot who always looked as though he had gained the job by losing a bet. There were boxes being carried up into it. You were distracted by the beating hearts and muscles straining all around you, weeping lactic acid as they slid and locked containers and crates into position. At the top of the ramp, sitting on an upturned container in a whisper of opaline skirts and distinct peevishness, was Ianthe; her focus was on the back of the shuttle, not on you. She sat within the sea of heaving stacks and bundles like a pillar.
“All right,” said the Saint of Joy. “Chop-chop. Get in there and don’t move an inch. Don’t get in anybody’s way. Just go in, and sit, and be good.”
The Cohort officers saluted Ianthe as they passed her up and down the ramp. You noticed the ones who reeked of thanergy kiss their thumbs in a gesture you did not recognise. As you dragged your numb idiot body across the bay and staggered up the ramp, you were grateful that nobody did the same for you; you were once again given the wide berth accorded to a Ninth House necromancer.
The inside was as cramped as you’d suspected, and sordidly simple. What arrested you immediately was the source of Ianthe’s fascination and open admiration. Before the back wall of the shuttle, a necromancer of the Cohort squatted; necromantic miasma shone upon her as brightly to you as a torch. There was no fuel here for her to use to commit necromancy. She was in deep space, and she was not a Lyctor. What she could do was put the final touches on an exquisite nullification ward—wet and red with her own blood, which was being pumped out from a long syringe. It would have been difficult and arduous work even had she access to her aptitude. The arms of her robes were rolled all the way up to her shoulders so that the cloth would not touch and blur the pattern as she worked; you noted rucked-up House ribbons of pale seafoam green.
Ianthe saw you, and she startled. Before you could be relieved that there existed one Lyctor who might still startle for you, she made room for you on the upturned crate on which she was perched. You did not like to, but you sat primly on the corner proffered, trying to press your knees together to stop your bodies from touching. Today—and how much time had passed?—her eyes were that washed-out blue, with amethyst lights in them.
“You’ve met our respected elder sister, I see,” Ianthe said. “She accused me of being twelve, called me one of those animaphiliacs, then told me I wasn’t as good looking as someone called Cyrus. It was like being back with Mummy,” she added, with a touch of fond nostalgia.
Your palm remembered the knife, and you resisted the chumminess. You said, “Where is the Emperor?”
“I don’t know, and nobody will tell me anything,” she said, more peevishly. “Everyone has been acting frankly mulish … which I suppose I can’t blame them for, as I might act the same if I were peremptorily dropped from the Emperor’s personal attaché and shipped off to the front … but what is the good of being Ianthe the First, if I can’t even leverage it?”
You hazarded a quick glance to the Cohort necromancer; but the Seventh adept paid you no attention. You noticed that her ward—an expert’s work, and an artist’s, that of genius married to style—was a very familiar one: it was a ghost ward. You tried to wrench your brain back to the words Ianthe had said, and the order she had put them in. This was difficult, as what you knew about the Cohort and the front could fit into a teaspoon. Even that much knowledge had always annoyed you, but something she’d said had rattled your comatose hypothalamus.
You said, “That makes no sense. The Imperial Guard doesn’t see action.”
“Oh, my sweet, you don’t know … Well, how could you? It’s not as though anyone’s told you; you were too busy with your binary of throwing up or being murderous. Well, Nonagesimus, they do see action when the Cohort suddenly loses three warships to as many orbital radiation missiles, which is three more warships than we’ve lost in the past thousand years,” said Ianthe. Were it possible for someone to puff more with self-satisfaction, she would be swollen and gouty and dead; but rather than irritated, you found that Ianthe just made you feel tired. “Eighteen thousand dead soldiers will grab the attention … Corona would love it. She’s mad for military funerals.”
It was difficult for you to muster empathy. You had nobody at the front, or indeed in the Cohort. The last Ninth House chaplains and construct adepts had, as you recalled, been lost in action five years back. The numbers remained numbers, lacking context. You were more interested in the conversation happening outside the shuttle’s docking doors, before the ramp: an unfamiliar voice saying steadily: “Holy Saint, the Erebos is his vessel. I speak for every commanding officer aboard when I tell you how reluctantly we would see the end of his eighty years aboard.”
“Eighty years!!” was the response, again with that articulated extra exclamation point. It was the result of extreme irascibility: the saint had a high, fluting voice, a young voice for someone who had now accused both you and Ianthe Tridentarius of actionable puberty, and it was piercing now. “Eighty is shameful—you knew the writing was on the wall when the call came for more Lyctors. His seat is elsewhere, and there he must return, and should have returned thirty years ago. You’re now Admiral Sarpedon? Really? It is Sarpedon, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said the admiral, whose title had been suggested by the Lyctor in the same tone of voice as might be said Chief Leper. “And it has been … twenty years since we last met, Most Venerated Saint?”
“Around that,” agreed the most venerated saint, whose office had been enunciated by the admiral with the faintest and most well-bred suggestion of motherfucker. “In any case, you’ve had him eighty years, and the Mithraeum has lacked him for a hundred.”
“You are invoking throne silence,” said Sarpedon. “You are removing him from the Empire.”
“I can’t very well invoke throne speech. We’ll be forty billion light years away.”
The admiral said, through a thin rime of ice: “He has expressed, in no uncertain terms, his close personal interest in this war.”
“He can very well maintain a close personal interest in it from forty billion light years away,” said the Saint of Joy, who had just strongly implied the opposite. Her name was sounding increasingly ironic to you. “I do not blush to remove the Emperor from his enemies. I do not blush ensuring the God of the Nine Houses is not molested by those who hate him.”
“I do not recognise,” said Sarpedon, “any such frailty in the God who became man, nor the man who became God, nor the Necrolord Prime who may resurrect a galaxy with a gesture.”
The Lyctor’s voice rose further: “The risen star Dominicus gives light and life to the Nine Houses, and yet I don’t think we should crash anything into it!! You just wore out my last nerve, Sarpedon, and I still remember when there were fewer pips on your shirt, so I would ask that you not mistake a Lyctor for someone you can—”
There was a shout from the other side of the fourteenth cargo hold. It was the voice of the God who became man, and the man who became God. He approached the ramp at a swift clip, making a beeline for the boiling-mad Saint of Joy. Beside you, Ianthe smacked her lips as though in anticipation of a good meal; a sort of mlem, mlem, mlem.
But the Emperor wrapped his arms around his Lyctor as though she were a precious and runaway child; he pressed her to him, drawing down the hood and tousling that overripe rose-tinted hair, heedless of the curtseying, bowing Cohort officers in the wake of his passage. She froze as though dipped in liquid nitrogen. He said something that you couldn’t catch, and then: “Thank you for your work here. You’ve done well.”
