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The Emperor of the Nine Houses’ face suddenly lit up like the sunrise of an inner-circle planet. “Then you and Augustine the First are talking again?”
Mercy threw her hands in the air, milking an invisible and gigantic cow in order to assuage her feelings, and flung herself to sit down on another secured crate. She put her chin in her hands; her rapier clattered beneath her rainbow-white cloak with the movement. “We were talking,” she said, chilly and measured, “as little as nineteen years ago, if you’d recall. If we talk again now, it doesn’t actually signify, being as speaking is so different from talking. And I am not on speaking terms with—the person you refer to. Nonetheless, your actions moved me to talk to that silly man-shaped worm, and I came here to take matters into my own hands.” Before he could say another word, she said: “Nobody’s answering calls on the Mithraeum. Come home, please!”
“But that’s—”
“Three of us remain,” said the Lyctor simply. “I can’t even confirm the third is alive.”
“He was keeping tabs on—” began the Emperor, and seemed as though he were about to elucidate those tabs; but he caught sight of you and Ianthe sitting quietly, waiting for this dreadful conversation to end (you) or nakedly desperate for more (Ianthe). He set his little shoulder bag down in what appeared to you, wild with panic, to be the Body’s lap. She looked up at him, impassive, and then at the bag, nonplussed. Then he dropped down on his haunches in front of his sullen Lyctor.
What followed was a conversation entirely in shorthand: at one point it was simply conducted in shrugs. He would say a word; she would retort with a totally different word, and the Emperor would grimace or give her sharp rejoinder. On occasion, that sharp rejoinder was simply a quirk of his mouth, and the Lyctor would turn her head, loser of that bout. You were watching two people who had outgrown conversation half a myriad back. It was more a dialogue between arm and elbow; heart and brain, shared via electrical impulse. At no prearranged point, they suddenly returned to normal speech, and God said:
“I was going to wait on the Erebos until we had heard definitively whether or not the launch—”
“I don’t care if it was them or not,” sniffed the Saint of Joy—Mercymorn—whom you now knew possessed two utterly inapt names. “They’re remnants. They can’t do anything. Their leader has been gone for nearly twenty years. You’ve got to prioritise.”
“But this is so obviously—”
“I beg you to recall the stakes, Lord!!” said the Lyctor.
“The Mithraeum is a destination we can reach by only one means,” said God, with the air of a man pulling a final brick out of a wobbling tower. “I cannot yet in good conscience take either of them on that journey.”
You were terribly afraid that either of them had been a hasty replacement for Harrowhark. The elder Lyctor did not assuage your fears when she looked up at him with those unfathomable tempest eyes and said, “If you are that unsure of—either of them—then put them down now! They won’t thank you for keeping them alive! It’s the only test that matters! Thanks!”
The Emperor of the Nine Houses stood up. His Lyctor stood also. Her hand had twitched aside the nacreous folds of her robe to rest on the end of a simple and unpretentious rapier, the mesh nest that formed around the handle unadorned and uncomplicated, no decoration other than a white knob at the very end of the—you didn’t know the exact technical word. It was a pommel though. He said: “Prepare to launch. I’ll make the call,” and you knew that, somehow, Mercy had won the war.
It was with a strange admixture of relief and hard, resentful shame that Mercy stood and leaned over the pilot’s chair, flicking switches, avoiding the Body by a hair’s breadth. The switches made nice haptic clanks within their plex housings, and more lights came on overhead, bathing you all in an unpleasantly orange glow.
Though there was no change in God’s pitch or cadence, his voice had taken on a different cast. It was as though a steel tool had been taken from its housing. He said, “Double-check those boxes. Get them in the straps—make sure that one’s nice and tight—Ianthe, there are belt chairs by that window—Harrow, I want that sword out of your hands and fixed to the floor. Use marrow in the bone; I don’t want it to crack or bend.”
You and Ianthe knelt to fix the containers at his instruction. You reluctantly melted the comb of bone attaching your sword to your straining arm. As an afterthought, you did what you had been told to in the letter from your past self: you iced the whole blade over with a casing of bone, and found the result significantly more pleasing to the eye and brain. You could never castrate its anger, but thus sheathed, the sword—that object of your resentment, and hate, and protective panic—could be dimmed somewhat, like a lampshade dimmed a lamp.
Afterward, you dropped into a pull-down seat next to Ianthe and clicked the safety belt together while your bare feet kept troth with the bone-enamelled sword, and you watched God’s final test of metal hasps and cinches on the boxes. He brushed his hand very lightly over the secured stone of the coffin, the very briefest of touches, before stopping in front of the ward that had been applied to the wall. He pressed the tip of his little finger to one of the whorls, very gently, as though afraid to hurt it. The foetal fingerbones and leaves crowning his hair kept swaying in some nonexistent breeze. “Brilliantly executed … nearly perfect levels of carbon dioxide in the fixative,” he said, taking a stylus from his pocket. “She was much too good to die for it, Mercy.”
“I didn’t tell her to die for it,” said Mercymorn snappishly. With a sudden clunk, the open door to the shuttle started descending, groaning into place where the ramp had disappeared. It fell into its housing with a ker-chunk. “Her going full atria was perfectly over-the-top. The crew on your horrible flagships are always trying to martyr themselves whenever you so much as ask for an orange juice.”
“I’m telling Sarpedon to give her a commendation,” he said, tapping at his tablet. “That will have to do. It’s not exactly an appropriate thank-you for nearly bleeding out.”
The communicator at the pilot’s chair crackled. The admiral’s voice in question said clearly, “My lord, you’re cleared to leave. We await your word.”
“Loose the clamps,” said the Emperor.
“The clamps are set for release,” said Admiral Sarpedon. Then he cleared his throat and began what you now thought of as the common prayer: “Let the King Undying, ransomer of death, scourge of death, vindicator of death, look upon the Nine Houses and hear their thanks—” and from behind him joined in the tinny voices of the entire docking crew: “Let the whole of everywhere entrust themselves to him…”
You peered over your shoulder at the porthole. The dimmed interior of Docking Bay Fourteen was lightening: they were opening up some outer airlock, and the shuttle itself was travelling on rails as though to be offered to space like a sacrifice. The velvety blackness of the outside world became naked; cold stars burnt in the distance. The Body came to stand next to you all of a sudden, and you had to school yourself not to reach for the hem of her dirty white shift, the pallid dimpled flesh of her calf. You were leaving, for where you did not know, and you did not know how to feel.
Ianthe kept her eyes downcast, modest and pliant, as though this sickening and poorly acted r?le would convince anyone with a brain. She sat with her rapier belted at her hip beneath her robe, raising bumps beneath the mother-of-pearl cloth, and when you caught her gaze beneath those pallid lashes you could see the hot anticipation in her eyes—one blue, one purple—of someone about to be announced for an award. She was deeply excited. That starry, far-off gaze refocused on you, and she whispered coyly: “Should we hold hands, in girlish solidarity?”
At your expression, she puffed away a strand of colourless hair and remarked, “You’re the one who investigated my tonsils.”
Over the prayer still crackling through the speaker grille, Mercy said, “Releasing in thirty,” and the Emperor, “Don’t triangulate. We don’t want to put them in danger. We’ll hold course until the Erebos is out of our radius.”
