in the vents above you with a thump—the Saint of Duty followed the flow of a nozzle spraying transparent liquid before his feet—and you wrenched the door from its hinges; you tossed it down the breadth of the room, in a mad, idiot, beautiful rush, and you walked straight into the petals of a chemical fire. An alarm shrieked overhead as though it too were roasting to death.
In the second that you saw the ruddy white surge of flame, you did not know it was hot enough to melt steel. You only saw the steps of what you had to do. One of the arms with the liquid-ash fingertips had resolved into two skeletons behind you, their outside layers wet with regenerating ash. You rocketed them forward to drag Ortus by the legs. You exploded their spines into a solid wall of regrowing bone, into a rushing avalanche of reeking, liquid, perpetual marrow, plunging it into that fire as a thousand-layered barrier, the fire versus the bone, unfolding and unfolding and unfolding as the flames burned and burned and burned. You stripped the fucking enamel from your own teeth and added that to the squelching, scorching layer. It was the first time, as a Lyctor, exploding such tonnage of bone into an incinerator’s flame, that you looked upon the limit of your power: and that limit still stretched so far out into the goddamn distance that it was out of your sight.
The incinerator buckled. The alarm screamed. You grabbed Ortus and pulled him down the side of the room as a mass of hot melted bone sludged from the door. You dragged him away from that singeing, choking, killing mass, and you laid him against the bulkhead.
He was almost totally incapacitated. His eyes were closed. You moved his hands away and looked more closely at that shattered heart; the wounds were closing, but slowly, far more slowly than you would have expected. His cyanosed lips bespoke terrible effort as his heart knit back together. He was a myriad-old Lyctor. You did not understand.
The Saint of Duty said, with a kind of hoarse solemnity: “Fresh blood wards. Every night.”
You said, too surprised not to sound like a moron: “What?”
He said, “Can’t bleed thalergy … not fresh thalergy. Thanergy, easy. Mixed with thalergy … much harder. No bone wards. Blood wards. Understand? Fresh blood wards. Each night. Can’t break those.”
This was all said in staccato, at the apex of each wheezing breath. The incinerator continued to spew out a white-hot lahar of semi-liquid bone, and it smelled ferocious. The Saint of Duty did not open his eyes. He just concluded doggedly: “You’ll be safe from us.”
There were smarter questions to be asked in response. The one that came to you first—and in your defence it was not a bad one—was: “Why?”
He did not answer. He buckled as he turned his head and coughed, more wetly. Then he reached out, and he put his bloody hand to your head, nearly covering your face, the tips of his fingers to your temples and your cheeks, like a smothering, or a benediction.
“I know you’re there,” he rasped. “Kill me all you like. I would know you in the blindness of my eyes … in the deafness of my ears … as a shadow smudged against the wall, annihilated by light … stop. Not here. Not now. Let it go, love. I just want the truth … after all this time.”
Ortus dropped his hand and said, with intent: “Just tell me—back then—why you brought along the ba—”
A voice down at the other end of the room bellowed: “Harrow!”
It was God, at the stairs. Mercymorn, dishevelled, was beside him. A few steps behind was Augustine, even more dishevelled, with lipstick on his collar. Ortus did not continue. You stood, the air sizzling the ends of your hair, slapping your face. The Emperor stood on the bloodied steps opposite you, amid the wail of the alarm. The incinerator wheezed dolefully—someone was moving in the little plex office—and then clanked off. With a sudden white shock to the sinuses the bone gunge melted to fine powder, and then, as you looked, dwindled to invisible soft dust.
You said insistently, “Why I brought along what? What do you mean?” but Ortus had opened his eyes now, with all their bizarre green sweetness, and he was staring up through you and up through the ceiling as though he could see through the very hull of the Mithraeum; and he looked up, and