bone here: the first two might be scavenged, the last swept away by the capricious tide. You collected bits of dried wood—dried wood?—and empty-coloured stones—stones?—from the banks of the River beyond death, and you collected armfuls of the sharply unkind osiers and tall, feathery plants, the ones with long fibrous stems as tall as you were and thin, tangled leaves. Filthy salt wind whipped your faces as you formed wards from the flotsam that grew, apparently, on the bank. And no ghosts passed you to wade down to the water—no ghosts heaved themselves out of the waters of the layer that Mercymorn had called the epirhoic—they had fled for different climes.
“The poor bastards are terrified,” said Augustine.
There was nothing to see in the River yet; no brain, no hint of Beast, no far-off haze that indicated anything amiss. When you came around, you found that you were the only one sitting in a circle of standing Lyctors, their faces like blank flimsy, their rapiers in their hands, their offhands at the ready. The Saint of Duty with his spear. The Saint of Patience with his smallsword. The Saint of Joy with her net. Ianthe, with her trifold knife. You stared numbly at these faces, wondering which one would betray God at the last.
At the beginning of that last week, you still believed you might live, despite the briefing’s assumption that you would not. In the middle of that last week the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, invited you to his rooms after supper, to talk; when you sat in that now-familiar armchair before that now-familiar coffee table—the great window now a flat darkness, the ship a belly you were all nestling within—he surprised you by only offering you water and a very plain cracker. You found yourself able to nibble its edges, and tasted only flour and salt.
“I know you said no, the last time,” said Teacher. “I respected it. I won’t offer again, except to say—if at any point, before the final shutters come down—if at any point before Mercymorn locks me in—you come to me and ask to get locked in with me, it will be done. You have ten thousand years before you, Harrowhark.”
You did not address this. Instead, you said: “Lord?”
“Teacher.”
You said, “You are the Prince Undying. You are the Necrolord Highest. Why do we lock you inside an airless room?”
He rested back in his chair and locked his fingers together over his belly. “You’ve hit upon a sore spot, Harrowhark,” he said affably, brown brows crinkling together. “I am your salvation and your light. Who should I fear?”
“I never meant to,” you said, leaning forward. “I just want to understand. Please.”
“What happens to your body when you go under, Harrow? When you go into the River?”
You had long passed the point where you needed to think about it. “The body enters a senseless state. The Lyctor doesn’t perceive anything around them in any sense; even their necromancy fails. Instead, the secondary soul comes to the fore—the protection mechanism—that can wield a sword even if their mind is gone … without conscious thought or awareness of its own, but with a perfect sword-hand.” If they were functional.
The Emperor of the Nine Houses drummed his fingers over his belt. It still hurt you a little, to look into his terrible eyes: the irises like black shadows of the Canaanite white, that iridescent absence of colour, a shade rather than a tint; the purity of the white ring; then the matte black of the sclera. You had never become used to it.
“A myriad ago, I resurrected nine planets,” he said. “And I reignited the central star, and I called it Dominicus. As a reminder. Dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea, quem timebo? God is my light. Harrowhark, if I went under—I’d enter that senseless state, and I am God. What if, forty billion light-years away, my people looked up to see Dominicus falter and go out? What if the very House beneath their feet died all over again, as I turned my back upon it?”
You said, “So if you die, the Houses die with you. The star warming our system fails, and—becomes a gravitational well, as I understand it?”
“Yes. A black hole, like the one that took out Cyrus,” he said. “I can only hope you’d all be dead already. Oh, there’d still be Cohort ships … hold planets … a scattering of us … but we would be so few, and so many people