God had looked at you, and he had quirked his mouth in something like a smile, and said: “You’re even stubborner than I am. I thought I’d cornered the market.”
There were many days when you felt his disappointment as a vise, as a long-imagined hessian pressure against the bones of your throat. There were equally as many days when his nightmare eyes relieved your dry exhaustion like a long, chilly drink of water. Your love for God was akin to your love of the beautiful riverbed edge of the iliac crest. Your love for God was like those moments of reprieve, immediately after waking, when you were not sure who you were; those moments of living in another Harrow’s skin, a Harrow who understood everything with a purity of completeness. It was a relief, to worship thus. You had once thought your capability for adoration had been consumed when your eyes had bent upon that face in the Tomb, dead and irresistible, the interment of beauty. You were relieved to find some scraps left over.
You raised the hood of your mother-of-pearl Canaanite robe over your head. The sunshine beat down through it and pattered prismatic light over your face. Birds shrieked above. They were not large creatures, and you were not afraid of them, but you almost pitied them. It was an uncomfortable thing, to remove the soul of a planet like this: it would be the first time you had done it, and the first time you had killed any planet alone. The creatures would not die immediately when the planet did. But they would—slowly—come to change, and in the end they would be thanergy mutants who could not reproduce. A rather Ninth House death, and the death that came for all flipped planets, in the end.
The forest floor was gnarled and uneven—for the first hour you walked stoically, and you sipped your water. When you grew tired, you spent the second hour in the arms of a large, hulking, ambling skeleton, and you had to brush away the branches and leaves as a second skeleton stormed ahead, cutting down all this boil of thalergy as it went. It was with an ache like nostalgia that you thought of Drearburh, and home: that you thought of the vast gyre at the very apex of your temple, which seemed like a pinprick from the bottom tier, that thin, watery cloud of pumped atmosphere and the dead of space beyond. You thought of the murmurous prayers within the chapel. You thought of the Secundarius Bell, its booming profundity, its black tongue’s clangour, of waking to the CLANG … CLANG … CLANG.… as some ancient bellringer hyperextended his biceps in trembling, sacred eagerness to yank that rope.
The Body walked beside your construct. The sun did not dry the melted ice upon that indistinctly coloured hair. The moist warmth of the jungle around you did not impede her, and exertion brought no flush to those long, thinly muscled arms, nor to the slender, gracile legs, nor to the dead cheeks. She had been with you very often, of late.
You saw all the signs of your undoing. You had few months to live. It could be quite easily counted in weeks now. God had been correct: you had not changed—you were not fixed. You were the last, lone, assailable Lyctor. The others were now distant from you, looking to the Resurrection Beast that came to punish their mortal sins and kill their Kindly Prince.
And yet—there, in the alien slather of forest, among the ferns, and fronds, and greenery arching against a skyline that was a more reticent verdancy paling into navy blue—you could almost believe that you had the capacity to be happy again. You were an unfilled hole, but even a hole might be content in its emptiness.
At that point, though you did not know it, you were a mere kilometre from this insubstantial contentment’s obliteration. A hole might also be filled with worms.
33
INTO THE FOURTH HOUR, you realized you were being followed. A very dim awareness of some large presence pierced the curtain of so much other thalergy, and you were instantly irritable—Mercymorn had failed to gauge the planet’s character. It was plain there were large mammals in this region, and you’d have to come up with some way to carefully plant yourself so you wouldn’t get chewed on while you severed the planet’s soul. Your annoyance turned to suspicion when it became clear that the thalergy signature was