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The Saint of Joy was ramrod straight and still, as though her feet had been fixed to the docking-bay floor with big steel pins. The Emperor of the Nine Houses turned from her to the admiral, who was half into his own genuflection, pressing a hand to his shoulder and immediately embarking on a low conversation you could only catch in bits: “—no hurry going around the belt. If the wind off Dominicus gives you problems, take the same route back … Subluminary speed’s fine. After you do your deliveries, stelitic travel will get you out of the supercluster and back to the second arm of the fleet, but you’re going to have to go a lot slower than you have the past two weeks…”
“Then you do intend to leave us, Lord,” said Sarpedon. He had moved so that now you could see him properly; your new hood, unlike good Ninth House furze, was transparent enough to let you see quite clearly, albeit through a stippled violence of rainbow light. You beheld a man of middling age in a sober Cohort uniform, perennial white jacket and scarlet neckerchief. The two pips on his collar were ringed around with mother-of-pearl. If you had not heard his rank, you would not have known what they signified. Necromantic vapour rose off him in roiling waves like sweat, unused and impotent in the vacuum of deep space. “I confess that I had not prepared for it.”
“I hate to, Admiral,” said God. “The Erebos has been my home.”
The admiral said, a little stiffly: “We are unworthy of such love.”
“I am unworthy of this pitiful goodbye,” said the King Undying. “What I planned on telling you, I will tell you now, swifter and more gracelessly. Don’t get caught up in the drama of the Cohort command. I know exactly who is behind this terrible blow, and they were fools to show their hand. They have revealed themselves to be as coarse and juvenile and foolish as the act they have just committed. But our retaliation should not be swift. Let them understand the inevitability of the Nine Houses.”
“As inexorable as death,” said the admiral.
“And as kind,” said the Emperor. “You have shown your loyalty to me, Sarpedon, and I have never questioned you. You made the Erebos my respite. But—as I imagine you have just been told—” (Did the Saint of Joy writhe at that, or were you imagining it?) “—my station is my seat, and the Erebos is needed elsewhere.”
“But to go unaccompanied, Lord—with the stele, a transport ship could be out as far as the Hadals in two years.”
“Eighteen thousand good soldiers,” the Emperor said gently. “Take the Erebos to them. And give her a new name—Seat of the Emperor.”
“My lord—”
The Saint of Joy muttered something beneath her breath. The Emperor did not bat an eyelid. “Yes, I know it’s lowly to captain a chair,” he said. “But I won’t have anyone in the Admiralty forget what she was, and what I hope she will be once more. In any case, the name ought to get you to the head of orbital queues, even if I’m not in residence. I’ll miss her like fury, Sarpedon, but she’s got thicker plates than anything else in the fleet, and when she’s refitted she’ll carry two thousand.”
“Yet, Lord—”
“As for you, your bones will be hallowed in the Mithraeum, for all that you’ve done in my service. If I don’t see you before then, all I can do is hope you get a chance for retirement.”
The Emperor of the Nine Houses reached out to clasp Sarpedon’s hand. The Cohort admiral looked as though he were being branded. The Emperor held this grasp, and the admiral’s gaze, for a long time; then he turned back to the ramp up the dock, followed—a little reluctantly—by his Hand.
As he drew closer, you could see that he looked as though he had prepared in a hurry; he carried a small bag, hastily packed, slung over his shoulder—the ever-present tablet peeked out of his pocket, along with what seemed to be at least five styluses—and he was dressed simply, as per usual, in a black shirt and trousers. The lack of tint had always pleased you. It was very Ninth, even the collar and the cuffs of his shirt that were scruffy and pilled from too much wearing. But he wore a crown of office that you had not seen before: a wreath of ribbon and pearlescent leaves in his dark hair, rustling prismatically in the windless docking bay. Each leaf was intertwined with a match-sized infant fingerbone. He turned and strode up the ramp toward you, and he said very normally, like you’d never fainted before him in a lather of pre-puke: “Are you all right, Harrowhark?”
“I am perfectly capable, Teacher,” you said.
“That’s not the same thing.”
Ianthe said, with a close approximation of winsomeness: “Put her under my care, Teacher,” and you were disgusted to hear God reply, “I will. Keep an eye on her. Now—”
He turned to find the beautiful ward completed on the wall, and the Seventh adept quietly dying on the floor. There was a whorl of blood down her front; at some point she had levered her syringe deep into her subclavian artery. After finishing the final touches on the perfect nightmare spiral, which betrayed no trembling from myocardial trauma, she had sprayed fixative across it, then silently collapsed. She lay with her eyes rigid on the ceiling, hands clasped over the growing stain on the front of her robes, which were turning Second House scarlet with blood.
The Emperor mumbled something that, you would swear on the rock before the Tomb, sounded like For fuck’s sake. After a moment’s consideration, he pressed his hand to his mouth, as though in thought. The bloom that followed blinded you beyond unpicking, or even comprehending.
The stain crumbled to dust. The blood ceased flowing. The Seventh adept’s hands clutched clean robes. Her expression changed from glassy-eyed expectation to resignation; she rolled over to kiss the dusty floor of the shuttle. You and Ianthe were left blinking, eyes and noses streaming, as though you had just eaten something slightly too spicy.
“Most Holy Lord,” she said, but there was half a question in it.
“Not today, First Lieutenant,” said God. “We need necromancers like you now more than ever.”
She kissed her fingers at him, a little mechanically—and then to the Saint of Joy, and then to Ianthe, and then, after a pause, to you—half a dozen times, and then curtseyed to the point where she nearly folded herself right in half. She rose and escaped down the ramp, booted footsteps bouncing in her wake, the only sign she had been there the enormous whorl of the ward. The Saint of Joy watched her go with an unreadable expression on her placid portrait of a face.
With two more aboard, you could see how small the shuttle really was. To your left, there was a partitioned area that might have been for bodily functions—or going to the toilet, as everyone else in the known universe would have put it—but otherwise the space was bare. There were no beds. There were no real seats for passengers, except for a few pull-downs at the side. The boxes brought on were quite small; the biggest was a stone square strapped down with lengths of steel rope. Displaced from its fellows, the tiny rosebud gone, it took you a moment to realise that it was a coffin, and another moment to recognise whose.
To your right was a cockpit with empty seating for one pilot, spread with a wide and beautiful wrap of embroidered pearly material—and with a lurch in the back of your brain you saw it wasn’t empty at all: the Body had taken up residence on that rainbow shawl, sitting there with her hands prim in her lap and the chain of welts clearly visible. The gorgeous and severe angles of her face were softened as though in recognition, and her lips were a little parted, enough to show her dead black tongue. When you followed her line of sight, she was looking at the entryway, and the Emperor.
The Emperor pressed a button next to the door and the ramp sucked up into the shuttle with a great mechanical slarp. Then he turned to his Lyctor and said, in a tone of thinly sprinkled sugar upon infinite salt: “Well, this looks a great deal like forcing my hand.”
“Lord, I would never dare—”
“My flagship, to my admiral, among my people. Is the Erebos really the best place to publicly gainsay your Emperor, Mercy?”
She rounded on him. The canvas of her portrait face was now scrunched up in passionate fury. You had expected that ten thousand years would be enough to school a face whenever one wanted it schooled; apparently not, or Mercy had never bothered with schooling.
“The only one who forced your hand is coming home with us in a box,” she cried out. “And it’s ugly of you to use my name in front of the infants. We agreed our names were sacred—we let them all be forgotten—”
“Mercymorn,” said the Emperor, “you know as well as I do that keeping your name from your rightful sisters is ridiculous. Also, you are trying to start a fight with me to get out of the fight I am trying to have with you, which is a painfully domestic tactic.”
“You are nearly in Dominicus’s halo—it looks suicidal—”
“You know why I came, and my reasons for waiting are out of—”
“Some would call it madness, or ego, or both—”
“Who’s some in this instance, and does their name rhyme with Nercynorn—”
“It rhymes with Naugustine,” said the Saint of Joy, with no small amount of hauteur.
