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That night you made soup more carefully than ever. The recipe said it had to cook for a long time. You paced up and down the kitchen, distracted and startled by lights as the air grew steamy and a little sweet-smelling. When the alarm sounded to say it was done you nearly screamed. It took you a while to turn it off. You tested the result of your labour, after a moment’s hesitation: you still hated strong flavours, and it took you a while to understand tastes. The soup did not taste like anything very specific, but you did not add Ianthe’s teaspoons of salt.
You transferred it to a big tureen, and when you all sat down around the table, the Emperor served everyone, like he always did: on those first few days in the Mithraeum you had been terrified by the idea of the God of the Nine Houses serving you food, but it was just his way. He was pleased with you. He smiled that rueful, dented smile, and he rested his hand on your shoulder, very lightly, when he filled your bowl. “As I said, Harrowhark,” he said. “Make a meal. Read a book. It’s the little things…”
There were two days left before Ianthe’s deadline, and all the Lyctors ate with a distinct lack of relish. You watched Ianthe take a spoonful of food as you struggled with your cutlery. Your soup did not look like a bad effort, and you had been vaguely proud of it: the thick, translucent gold-whiteness of the pot liquor; the unburnt onion floating in white, stratified wedges; the candy-orange of the stored carrots. You had read up on vegetables carefully, trying to overcome your aversion to their colours: you had not wanted anything that might dissolve entirely in the soup over the length of cooking called for. “Needs salt,” was Ianthe’s judgement.
“Too much water, but not a bad effort,” said Augustine with forced jollity. “Broth needs to thicken over time, Harrow.” (You had let it thicken for hours, then added a great deal of water, in a panic.) “Do not get me wrong, sis. Eating a new cook’s food after ten thousand years is frankly exciting. Let me give you a list of my favourite meals so that you can get them interestingly wrong.”
The Saint of Duty ate your soup at a stolid, uninterested, mechanical pace. You had noticed at previous dinners that he did not like some particular vegetables, so you had put them all in. Deprived of solid choices, he was mostly drinking stock. God had taken a spoonful, eaten it, then put down the spoon, then taken a discreet sip of water. He said nothing. The next sixty seconds were occupied with the wet, semiashamed sounds of people eating soup.
“If we’re going to do these awful shared meals, at least someone provide conversation,” said Mercy waspishly. She was removing thick pieces of root vegetable and eating them delicately off her fork. “I can’t bear to sit here and eat mediocre food in silence. I can do that by myself.”
You said, after a moment to peel up the edges of your words, “Is it mediocre, elder sister? I followed a recipe.”
“Cassiopeia’s? Now, there was a woman who could cook,” said Augustine, and his granite-coloured eyes grew soft and nostalgic in his long, hawk-featured face. “Not without injuring herself, mind. John, d’you remember that time she took half her finger off getting the meat out of that coconut? She didn’t tell anybody until after we’d eaten the meal. That’s a lesson for you, Harrowhark: confess, first thing, before we find a finger in the soup.” (You flinched, then tried to smile; perhaps that was called for. Ianthe looked at the expression on your face and shuddered visibly.) “What’s the meat in here flavouring the broth? If there’s chunks, it’s all rendered down.”
You closed your eyes and tried to think. It was so difficult. You so badly wanted to sleep. You were doing so many things at once—your sole remaining powers of concentration were given over to this moment. For a second or two you forgot the word that you were looking for—it was on the tip of your tongue—while you were building, minutely, stromal cell by stromal cell.
“Marrow,” you said.
The Saint of Duty exploded outward as your construct emerged from his abdomen. Your soup was watery and mediocre, as soup went, but as a delivery method for gelid explosives—marrow rendered through so much water as to not pass comment—it was perfect. Half a dozen arms shattered him in the soft electric light from the overhead panels. You let out your breath, and coalescing scythes destroyed intestines—lungs—heart. Then you fired upward, toward the brain.
And God said, “Stop.”
The world slowed down. Augustine and Mercymorn stopped, arrested in the act of half-rising from their seats. Ianthe stopped, left arm paused, outflung, to shield her face. You stopped, sitting upright in your chair: your bones somehow rigid and still, and your flesh chilly and rigid around those bones. The shrapnel spray from the Saint of Duty did not stop—it cascaded across the table like the crest of a pink waterfall, pitter-pattering down on bowls and the tablecloth and the polished dark surface of the wood. But what remained of him stopped too, half man, half rupture—his prurient details hot and white, naked insides clothed with the sinus-drying burst of the power of God.
The Emperor of the Nine Houses—the Resurrection—the First Reborn—sat at the end of the table, his plain face splattered with gore, and his eyes were the death of light.
The Necrolord Prime said, very calmly, “Ten thousand years since I’ve eaten human being, Harrow, and I didn’t really want an encore. Now tell me what you have done.”
Your body was unyielding, but your mouth had purchase. You said, “I reconfigured a clump of marrow stem cells into sesamoid bone. From the sesamoid bone, I made a construct.”
“Harrowhark,” he said, “you cannot have perceived foreign bone marrow within the body of a Lyctor. I’m not sure Mercy could perceive it with her arms draped around Ortus the whole time.”
“The cells weren’t foreign.”
“What?”
“I sectioned my tibia for the soup,” you said.
God’s eyes closed, very briefly. He pushed his bowl another fraction away. You stared down the table at him: at the blank, remote faces of your two nominal teachers—at the frozen ivory stillness of Ianthe, her hair now whitish pink—at space outside the window, where the asteroids themselves seemed to hang in tranquilized arrest. He said, “You must know that I won’t let either of you kill the other before my very eyes, Harrow.”
“He attacked me in my rooms. He drained my personal wards.”
“Coming from the Saint of Duty, that’s a compliment.”
You said, “Lord, I am hunted. I perish.”
“Harrow—”
“I don’t come to you as Harrowhark the First,” your mouth said. “I come to you as a supplicant. I can’t live like this. Lord, do I displease you, that you shield him and not me? I understand that I am a sharpened twig beside your keenest sword, but why do you suffer this twig to live? I can’t live this way. I cannot live this way. I have nowhere to go. I have nobody to turn to. I am a nonsense.”
You looked at each other down that long, bloody table.
God said, “Harrowhark, when was the last time you slept?”
It was with all the dignity of the Locked Tomb, the chill of the stone that had been rolled and of the bones that had been laid, and of the still salt water that shimmered before the whitened monument where your holy monster lay, that you said, “Six days ago.”
The Emperor of the Nine Houses stood.
The spell, whatever it had been, dropped like a white sun setting. Your body collapsed back into your chair. The construct gamely clambering out of the Saint of Duty dwindled to a powder of pink dust. The shard you had been driving up the cervical vertebrae to the base of the spine and the brain within its casing simply disappeared: destroyed or removed, you could not tell. The concatenation of Ortus the First’s insides, laced and crocheted over the dinner table, sizzled away to a soft mist. Everyone’s breath spewed from their lungs in one unholy gasp. Ortus’s hands flew to his middle.
The Emperor did not give anyone time to react further. He said evenly: “Dinner is over. Let us leave the table. Ianthe—take your sister to bed.”
Everyone began clattering out of their chairs in a wild scraping of wood and tile. Augustine said, “My lord—?” and God said, “Go. Just go.”
You felt strange and unreal as a white-lipped Ianthe hauled you up from your seat. The skin she touched was merely a thin and pervious netting keeping in your meat, which consisted of ten thousand spiders. She slung your arm across her shoulders, as though you were an invalid. Perhaps you were. Your legs did not feel correct. Your eldest sister, looking distinctly green around the gills and checking long strands of her overripe-rose hair for globs, had also risen—but the Emperor said, “You. Stay,” and she froze.
There was no thought in you of fighting Ianthe as she walked you away. You could have gone meekly to the slaughter without a muzzle or a leash. Behind you, the Kindly Prince was saying, in far more ominous tones than you had ever heard him use: “Six days. No sleep. She still manages a full skeleton commencement from diluted marrow. What else have you failed to see, Mercymorn—?”
You were already at the door when her peevish response came: “But this is insane! She’s only nine years old!”
* * *
