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THE WATER CAME BUBBLING up through the bolted seams in the floor panels, a filthy, rusty red, with a bloom like sewage upon it. It had already boiled up to the front of the shuttle and was to the top of what you could see of the Emperor’s shoes. It seemed unsure of gravity, running this way and that; then it started coming in high-pressure spurts through the sides of the cockpit’s front window.
“Thirty seconds,” said Mercymorn, whose voice had gone so utterly from petulant to clinical that it seemed the voice of a different woman. “Five minutes thirty remaining.”
There was rustling from right next to you. The Emperor said, “Keep flat.”
Ianthe said urgently, “Lord, I can see them.”
Them? But the Emperor said, “Focus on them. Don’t be afraid. Take off your hood if you want to. But think about the details of the shuttle too … where you were, where I am, where Mercy is, where Harrowhark is … the details of the shuttle are a projected memory and they are not all real, but they will dissolve further as you leave your body behind, and I don’t want to lose you.”
To the empty reaches of space, or to Mercy? The Lyctor said, “Four minutes, thirty seconds remaining. Ward has an estimated half a minute left.”
You were too curious to resist. You wrenched the opaline hood from your face and were startled all the way to your soul. Turbid, filmy water was filling up the shuttle at a rate of knots. The floor had gone entirely, and you were affrighted by its wet and corporeal reality: you were soaked through almost to the ribs by tepid, greasy waves. Ianthe had sat up—she never could follow instructions—but she was staring, glassy-eyed, at some point you could not see, rigid and uncomprehending. You scanned around, but the Body was nowhere to be seen.
It was just water. It soaked the hems of the Emperor’s trousers—he sat calmly flicking at his tablet as though it were no inconvenience. You could not quite see the other Lyctor, except her arms, bathed in the glow of the cockpit switches. The water seeped around your neck and started trickling into your ear canals. This did not fill you with the rigid terror it apparently produced in Ianthe: as a child you had been plunged into water by your mother and father, so the sensation was old and familiar, if wretched. The waters swirled and rose. They brushed against your cheeks, and you reflexively held your breath.
“Let that go, Harrow,” said God, tapping on the tablet with his stylus. “You don’t need to breathe.”
You exhaled, trickling it out of your nose and mouth. Your brain panicked briefly as you took a shy lungful of warm, muddy water. The fluid went down your throat in a peculiar and unreal way: it sat there, seething in your craw, peristalsis not coming into play. You filled up with water like a rubber doll dropped into a well. It was with very little joy that you saw this was distressing Ianthe a great deal more than it was you: she had wrapped one arm around herself, leaving the rightmost to trail abandoned in the water, and was shaking in a kind of convulsive spasm of the soul. It was only the memory of the knife and the palm that prevented you from being moved to pity.
God was saying, quite encouragingly: “You’re fine, Harrowhark. You’re doing very well,” which put you in a paranoid panic that you were not, in fact, doing well at all. Something brushed past your ankle, and the water closed over your head. You did not float: you stayed stuck to the bottom like a concrete weight, without buoyancy. Something floated in the water quite close to the pilot’s seat where Mercymorn sat. A long skein of abandoned skin, fresh and virgin, as though taken from someone’s flank and carded of its flesh and fat. The water in which it floated felt warm against your eyeballs, and smarted a little going up your nose.
From the shifting, refracting ripples within this tide, you beheld the ward upon the wall: it was steaming. Its bottom whorls sizzled and sparked like malfunctioning machinery where they touched the water. Showers of blue sparks pattered into the greasy water like rain.
“The ward has lasted for one minute, forty seconds,” said Mercymorn. “One minute forty-one.”
God said, “Two commendations for the lieutenant.”
She called out, “One minute forty-four.… One minute forty-five,” and in the space between forty-four and forty-five, the ward exploded. The dried blood came off the wall in flakes of brown confetti. It left behind a burnt, warped indentation as it slithered away to dissolve in the rising current. Next to you, Ianthe arched her spine so acutely that she folded up in the middle, as though she had been electrocuted. The light from the panels limned her in amber; her hood had come loose and her long pale hair floated about her shoulders like a caul. You propped yourself up on your elbows, distracted by something nudging against the plex viewing panel where Mercy sat piloting the shuttle. The star-pocked blackness of space had retreated entirely: the shuttle looked as though it were sinking down into a murky, obscure ocean.
Another nudge. Then something slapped two wet and rotting hands on the plex.
“Ick! Bleff!!” said Mercymorn, quite calmly. “Three minutes remaining.”
“I hate this part,” said God.
A nude, fish-eaten body thudded down hard atop the plex, leaving a momentary bloom of blood before it bounced off again. Another hit a few seconds later, but this one stayed put; it was a torso with the legs gone and the face eaten away, leaving the shiny skull to bang against the surface. It pressed one hand down, as though beseeching, but was sucked away again into the deep water outside the shuttle. The water inside now sloshed up to the Emperor’s shoulders, washing over Mercymorn’s hands. She did not bother to take her fingers away from the controls.
Ianthe’s face remained slack and unfocused. You rounded your spine up cautiously and looked around the shuttle, underwater, at the dissipating blooms of brown and red in the liquid, as though someone were bleeding out into it. At the back of the shuttle, you thought—you thought you could perceive a high and keening wail, at the very edge of your hearing—but neither God, nor the elder Lyctor, and certainly not Ianthe reacted to it.
The wail was coming from within the shuttle. It had a hard, pained edge to it, like frustration. You cast around trying to figure out from where. There was another big wet thump as a fourth body slammed itself on the plex, and this one managed to hold on, scrabbling gruesomely; but you focused on the thin cry of violence. You found yourself saying, “Someone’s crying, Lord,” but he just made a nonsense sound beneath his breath, a mumbled word that you didn’t recognise.
“Two minutes, thirty seconds remaining,” said Mercymorn, and her voice took on a hard edge of caution.
The Emperor said, “They’re not as numerous as I’d have expected.”
“I do not like this,” said his Lyctor.
Your eyes slid back up to the ceiling. The water, oleaginous and warming, was thick now with the flotsam and jetsam of bits of corpse. When something bumped your foot, you flinched and grasped a fine fleck of bone from your tibia, tried to work it through your skin to ice over your feet. It didn’t precisely succeed. Instead of a fine outer needle of matter, you pulled a wet plug from just above the epiphyseal line, and your shinbone opened like a flower; your blood and cellular matter opened up on your rainbow robe and floated upward, and God turned around, and his face was indistinct in the murk but his voice was not—
“Oh—” He used a word you did not understand. “Harrowhark, no theorems!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. She can’t be using theorems,” said Mercy. “She’d be barely awake and it’s totally beyond her at this poi—John, stop her, she’s using theorems!!”
