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You were beginning to note the register of his Teacher voice. This was familiar ground, untouched by magma. The ward undulated in the shadows a little, which was a trick of the light and the blood. You said, “It’s just a ghost ward,” and after a second regretted speaking like a provincial bone witch.
Thankfully Ianthe was even more petulant, and a dyed-in-the-wool flesh magician, as she added: “It’s not even a sophisticated ghost ward. I mean, it’s exquisite, impeccable right down to the coagulation. But I was doing those when I was five.”
“That ghost repellent will keep our ship from shaking apart,” said the Emperor. “That ghost repellent will have every lonesome spirit for kilometres screaming away. For a time.”
“One minute, thirty-three seconds,” said Mercy.
He said, “Give or take.”
The Emperor came to drop on his haunches in front of you and Ianthe, as he had squatted before Mercymorn earlier. It still hurt you in an undefinable way, to see him lowered so: as though he offered a compliance test where you ought to flatten yourself in front of him as low as you could go. The white ring around his pupil was so white. “Your job is simple in the way most very tough things are. I will push us into the River, and I’ll push the ship with us. You’ll have to keep your minds—I can take your physical bodies, but your souls won’t go with them, not without you holding them steady.”
“Physical transference past the liminal boundaries,” you said, and were surprised by the knowledge coming out of you, as though it weren’t your own. “This is deep Fifth spirit magic.”
“And I bless the Fifth House and I bless their long memory,” said the Emperor. “They only go far enough to tempt lost ghosts to them. They stand on the sidelines and wave around bits of meat and anchoring material. But they don’t even approach the shore.”
Ianthe sounded much more like her twin sister when she said, wonderingly: “But if applied universally, this would revolutionise the fleet. We could expend no fuel or effort, travelling instantly. We would be truly unstoppable.”
Mercy laughed a nasty trill of laughter. “A powerful necromancer at the peak of their game could last ten seconds in the River,” said God, pushing himself up to stand. “Soul magic is the great leveller. In the first few seconds their thanergy would all be stripped away … then their thalergy, and then their soul. They wouldn’t have time for the ghosts to get to them. They cannot, returning to our analogy, live in magma.”
“We can live in magma,” said Mercymorn, then pressed one elbow into the pilot’s deck and pressed her head into that elbow, and complained: “Now I’m doing it.”
“A Lyctor has a metaphorical sitting temperature of over a thousand degrees,” said the Emperor. He had gone to check the boxes again, and the clasps. Space rotated slowly past the windows, inordinately black and dizzying. “We have this incomparably done ward, exquisitely created by an expert who gave her heart’s blood for it—it may last for around a minute and a half. I’m hoping for upward of a minute forty, with work like that—and we’re on our own from there … No Lyctor has lasted longer than seven minutes in full physical submersion. And that was a titanic effort on the part of Cassiopeia the First, who was brilliant and sensible and careful—she thought she could bait physical portions of the Resurrection Beast into the current. She was right. It followed her.”
You said, “And?”
Mercy said lowly: “It turned out that being sensible and brilliant and careful doesn’t keep you from getting ripped to shreds by ten thousand feral ghosts.”
Ianthe said, “But the Beast—?”
“Emerged unscathed twenty minutes later,” the Emperor said. And: “Life’s a bitch.”
He looked out the window to the stars, and to the jewelled gleam of a planetoid in the distance, which looked a sooty red from your position. “Unbuckle your belts,” he said. You both did so. “Lie down on the floor.”
You and Ianthe said as one, your voice a parched whisper, hers low and cool: “Yes, Teacher.”
Self-conscious of your limbs, you lay down on the floor. The Kindly Prince said very evenly: “Start slowing your breath. I want it at two per minute. If you need to flush yourself with oxygen, do it now. It has been a long time since I have thought about teaching this trick, and I barely know where to begin.”
“You should start with Pyrrha’s trial,” called out the other Lyctor immediately.
“Right,” said the Emperor. Then: “I mean, I was being more or less facetious, Mercy, but yes, I’ll probably begin there— Do you both recall the projection trial, back at Canaan House? It would have been in Lab Three.”
You recalled the enormous construction of regrowing bone, your hands encased in it so that you could not wrench yourself free, your mind voyaging nauseously into the chamber of another person’s brain. God said, “You’ll need that skillset now. Your mind and body won’t couple automatically in the River. You have to hold them together, and any wrong move will see your consciousness stuck on the outskirts of Dominicus, wondering how the hell to get home. Most of the time you won’t even bother taking your body into the waters—it’s too dangerous—but for physical travel, we’ll need mind and body both.”
Your mind was racing, and you cursed yourself, not for the first time, for not continuing your advanced studies into spirit magic. You said, “What happens to a Lyctoral body without a soul?”
God hesitated. “Being separated from your soul won’t kill you,” he said. “Not immediately. But—”
“But we’ll kill you,” said his saint. “Immediately. A Lyctor’s body, empty, with its battery intact but nobody in the driver’s seat? Do you know what could take up residence? Anything could get inside you—any horrible or evil or lonely thing, any miserable revenant, or worse—and you, you Ninth House child, are not remotely qualified to fight an outside predator. You are like a little baby. Listen to this: if we get to the other side and find you’ve gone and left your soul behind—I will separate your brain from your skull without waiting for you to catch up.”
And God said nothing.
“When do we start?” Ianthe’s voice was clinical, like she was waiting for a tooth extraction.
“Start?” said Mercymorn. “He began submerging thirty seconds ago.”
God said, “Timer?”
“Set at five minutes.”
“We need a slower pace. Set it to six.”
“Five minutes thirty,” said Mercymorn, but God said: “I am not negotiating. Call out the increments once we hit waterline.”
The Saint of Joy said, with unexpected obedience: “Done. Be careful, Teacher.”
In the depths of space, now the depths of the River, the shuttle was a false gravity cocoon. You did not know which way was up, or down, or in what direction you were going. You were lying on the floor, trying to stop your lungs from expanding too quickly. Slowing your breath was blurring you out. You did not feel at peace, but rather numb and transfixed, heavy eyed, until God said, “Keep conscious,” and you stretched out the muscles of your calves until they strained, down to the tendons above the balls of your feet.
You lay on your mummified sword, which skulked sullenly beneath its caulk of bone. You stared at the ceiling. You tilted your head and found Ianthe looking through you. She was lying bracketed between her own rapier and her own offhand, and you were close enough for discomfort. Mercy said, “Hoods over your heads. They’re translucent for a reason,” and the Emperor added, “It’s easier when you can perceive light, but not get distracted.”
You were not sorry to do this. Your vision softened into a jumble of lights, like looking into a headache or white noise. There were no shapes or shadows. Ianthe faded into a mother-of-pearl lump beside you. It was impossible to tell which visual sparks of colour were due to the cloak, and which were your own shimmers of migraine fright.
Your breath sounded an unlovely peal. Ianthe’s sounded like a bellows. You could not hear that of the Emperor of the Nine Houses—maybe you never had—nor that of the elder Lyctor. The shuttle’s habitation controls had either been turned off or set low even by Ninth House standards: beneath the thin robes and minty smock, your thighs were pimpled with cold. And nothing happened. No thanergetic flush, no thalergetic wane. You’d never been a spirit adept, and you did not feel now any subtleties of transition; it was very cold. That was all.
You were dead weight in that heavy chill, each breath a ponderous inflation of the lungs, in and out, in and out. You were aware of yourself, of each juncture of energy inside you; you were aware that your feet had blisters, that your throat was stripped by too much upchucking, and that you felt alone in your head. You were embarrassed by your distraction. The physical body had never occurred to you so much in previous meditation. The light from the ceiling above had dulled to a sooty orange glow like that from a lit furnace; you fell into a numb, half-alive, half-dead reverie, your anxiety stifled and calcified, until you heard Ianthe cry out.
You stared through the minute slit where your hood brushed your cheeks. You made no sound, because you were not sure you were seeing what Ianthe was seeing: for your part, you saw the water.
7
