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He took the lovely rainbow shawl and draped it over the pilot’s chair, and Mercymorn daintily sat down upon it, belting herself in. The Body was gone. Little clusters of bone set over the cockpit window tinkled musically with the displaced air. The Emperor stood behind Mercy, one hand on the chair back, himself a light plex jangle of styluses whenever he moved, and he leant down to press down on the comm button. The prayer stopped as though everyone praying had lost the air from their lungs.
“Our enemies have once more raised their hands to those who would be at peace with them,” he said. “Again, we are a violated covenant, and again we are struck at with anger, and with fear, by those who cannot reason and those who cannot forgive what we are. You who have served on the Erebos—my soldiers and necromancers of the Nine Houses—if you find yourselves on the battlefield, remember that I will make even the dying echo of your heartbeat a sword. I will make the stilled sound on your tongue a roar. I will recall you when you are a ghost in the water, and by that recollection you will be divine. On your death, I will make the very blood in your body arrows and spears.
“Remember that I am the King Undying.”
He lifted his hand off the communicator button, cutting short the primal, triumphant howl that had echoed from the docking crew. You were painfully aware of the lamplights of thalergy signifying the Cohort officers in the dock—ten of them in a cluster a mere forty metres away: too close to be doing anything to aid the shuttle, but praying, maybe. There were more of them, farther away. An orderly line, flushed with blood, pattering with gut flora. They were perhaps working the mechanisms. There were muffled booming sounds as the shuttle clamps were loosed.
The engines behind the blood-daubed wall groaned to life in a huge, dull roar; those thalergy lights fell farther and farther away as you were lowered out the airlock on long struts of plex and steel. Mercy eased a lever upward, nose wrinkling in concentration, and then the thalergy rose away entirely. You dropped through space. The shuttle might as well have been empty for all that you could sense within, except for that single foetal bundle of thanergy lying still inside the coffin. As you looked through the plex window behind you, you saw the Erebos, and for the first time you got a sense of the enormity of the flagship: its scintillating, dark, and rainbow-hued steel, like an oil spill; the interlocking skeletons tessellated over the whole boxy structure, so that the vessel seemed an enormous moving ossuary. The iris of light from the fuel ignition hurt your eyes as it sped away.
Artificial gravity meant you were perfectly still and stable, but you still felt ill from the idea that you were drifting and tumbling through space like an abandoned piece of cargo.
God said, “Children, attend.”
You hardly needed the invitation. The Emperor was drumming his fingers on the back of the pilot’s seat, his curious black-on-black eyes not focused on you. He said, “You are both going to have to listen to me very carefully. The Mithraeum is far away, and our route is not typical. I’m about to teach you the first lesson, and this lesson will be the foundation of the most important lesson you will ever learn as a Lyctor. There will be a time for you to learn through questioning—a time for you to learn through trying and failing—but right now you’ll learn by doing exactly what I ask of you. The only other option is your destruction.”
This did not give you much pause. You were a daughter of the Locked Tomb. The option of destruction had been your constant companion since you were three years old. Ianthe, whose voice was low with barely suppressed excitement, said: “I thought there might be a stele.”
“A stele is eight feet tall, covered in the dead languages by special Fifth adepts, and continually bathed in oxygenated blood,” said Mercymorn from the pilot’s seat. “The type of thing where, if there is one on board, you say quite soon, ‘Oh, look, a stele!’”
“Thank you, elder sister, I so love to be educated,” said Ianthe.
“Where we are going there are no obelisks for a stele to hook on to,” said the Emperor, whose fingers had ceased drumming on the back of the pilot’s seat (after his Lyctor had told her God, repressively, “That’s quite annoying, thank you,”) and were now restlessly adjusting one shabby shirtsleeve. “I am taking you both through the River.”
There must have been no small measure of blank incomprehension on your faces. He said, a little abstracted now: “It’s the only way. Faster-than-light travel turned out to be a snare—the way it was originally cracked, anyway. The first method destroyed something to do with time and distance, rendering it unusable for any good purpose…”
“I’ve always thought it should be correctly managed with wormholes,” said the Saint of Joy, doing something obtuse with the controls, “or spatial dilation.”
God said, “It’s in that wheelhouse. We came up with the stele instead, and the obelisk, which are less to do with travel than they are to do with transmission. But there will be times in your future when you will have to move unfettered by needing an obelisk, and even times yet to come when you will fulfil the sacred Lyctoral duty of setting obelisks, and that means travel through the River. I like to think of it as descending into a well.”
There was a small noise of upset from the pilot’s seat. “Teacher,” said Mercy, “it is the River. There is a perfectly good water metaphor waiting for you.”
“Well, I want the idea of two depths, and I don’t want to confuse them with the idea of speed where none—”
“—it’s the River, which perfectly well lets you say, Imagine the River—”
“Mercy, either you don’t like my previous, perfectly good river phrasing, or you do. Pick one.”
“I will not help you to make hyperpotamous travel happen, thank you for the option, my lord,” said Mercy.
“In that case, despite hyperpotamous being a perfectly good word that both catches the ear and does what it says on the tin, let’s deviate,” said the Lord of the Nine Houses, who apparently existed within a complex power dynamic. “I’ll use Cassiopeia’s.” (“Oh, no, the lava,” said Mercy.) “Girls, imagine a rocky planet with a magma core beneath the mantle.
“Travelling overland from point to point might take a year. If you understood your journey and the relative spaces well enough, you could instead drop into the magma, which would carry you to your destination in an hour.”
He paused. The inside of the shuttle seemed very silent to you; there was no sound from its internal apparatus, excepting an occasional huge creak from its rudder mechanism. Ianthe’s voice broke this mechanical, cold-steel silence by saying, quite carefully for Ianthe: “Teacher, the River is an enormous liminal space formed from spirit magic, populated with ghosts gone mad from hunger.”
“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. His divinity earned God, you thought, about sixty more seconds. But then he said, more quietly: “We are about to travel forty billion light years, to where we first ran … myself, and my remaining six. One of our number was dead already, and another had been removed from play. We needed somewhere to lick our wounds, somewhere far away from anything we loved, to wait—to disperse—without fear that the eyes turning upon us would plough straight through the Nine Houses as they went. It’s a dark and cold and unlovely part of space, and the stars there are old and were nearly dead then. We nuked them with thanergy and now they’ll shine forever, but the light is not the same … It would take us years to get there if we went from stele to stele. How far away from the system was Number Seven at last reckoning, Mercy?”
“Counting down, five years,” said Mercymorn, whose hands had at last stilled on the board of buttons and switches and enamelled bone. “Five years, six months, one week, two days.”
“The merest blink of an eye,” said the Emperor, beneath his breath. He pushed himself away from the pilot’s chair and said, “We worked out a while ago—I say we, but I had little to nothing to do with it—that distance is different down there. The River doesn’t flow through the time and space we’re experiencing right now; the River is—well, it’s a current below us, as in the magma analogy. Distance in the River doesn’t map to distance above. If I drop us into it we can emerge almost immediately across the universe, home. The station, our refuge. We call it the Mithraeum.”
He spread his hands wide: ordinary hands, ordinary fingers, ink-smudged nails. “Look at the ward. What is it?”
