The soft ripples within the bubble had not claimed the Seventh. She stood there amid the falling dust and the noises of shrieking steel, her skin like thin awful gossamer and her short sugar-brown curls stuck to her scalp with the ghost of sweat and blood. Harrowhark, bewildered and stricken, drew closer to her as the world fell all around them.
“Oops! It’s me again, never doing what I’m told,” said Dulcie. “One more moment, please.”
Harrow said, curt with bemusement, “Hurry up and go. If I ever stand before Palamedes Sextus again, I have no desire to explain to him why I put Dulcinea Septimus back in danger.”
“I’m going to risk staying here for a moment and getting squashed into nothingness instead, actually,” she said. “The Seventh says nothingness is the only truly beautiful thing anyway, so nyah.”
“Septimus, if this is about ensuring I get back into my body safely, you can trust me not to change my mind.”
Dulcinea, with that strange face that was at once the twin to Cytherea’s and yet nothing like it, smiled an extraordinarily rueful little smile that never would have fit the Lyctor’s face. She reached up and clasped one of Harrow’s hands between her own as one of the corridors to their left came down completely.
“Actually, I’ve got something to tell you,” she said.
50
THIRTY MINUTES BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
THE WHOLE TIME IANTHE was leading me down those creepy, rainbow-swagged corridors, Harrow, I was wondering what the fuck had happened to you. I’d been pretty convinced that at any moment I’d find myself floating back down in the water, and there you’d be, ready to save my ass from shaking hands with the Emperor of the Nine Houses. I’d never wanted to meet God. Nobody ever met the Emperor in any of the comic books. God only ever appeared as a letter to somebody getting written out of the story, because they had to go serve the Prince Undying. I was irrationally convinced that the act of seeing God—that was the end of the story. Space was being cleared for a new character.
We stopped before a totally nondescript door, halfway open—and I mean nondescript, the doors to the rooms of the Emperor could’ve been mistaken for broom cupboards—and Ianthe stopped dead.
I cottoned on; that door wasn’t meant to be open. Ianthe pressed a finger to her lips and noiselessly pushed that door further open; we crept into a dimly lit and equally boring little foyer, with another half-open door on our left into a weirdly familiar sitting room. It nagged at the back of my brain: I knew you’d been there, but it was strange how some memories were like my own and some memories were whispers through a hole in the wall. Tridentarius pressed herself up against the wall next to the sitting room, so she could see through the gap, and I did the same because yes, okay, pretty curious.
In the room was Cytherea. Cytherea’s body, her back to us. She had been neatly tied to a chair with a band of angry-looking tendon. I couldn’t see whoever was talking to her.
“—not a difficult question,” someone said, without any particular concern. “It’s not as though you have anything to hide. I just want to know—how? Seriously, I’m more impressed than angry.”
The voice was still gravel. “I charge you with acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the human race—”
“Commander.”
“—for which the only sentence is death; repeated mass killings, the utter disintegration of institutions political and social, languages, cultures, religions, all niceties and personal liberties of the nations, by use of—”
“Commander Wake,” he said. It sounded like he scrubbed a hand over his face; there was a muffled exhalation. “I’ve heard this all before.”
“Call me by my full name, or don’t name me at all. I’ll be damned if I pass up the chance to hear you speak the words.”
The Emperor of the Nine Houses sighed.
“Commander Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead,” he said.
“All of it.”
“I can’t believe you feel like you’re in position to demand things of me.”
“All of it, Gaius!”
There was the preparatory sound of indrawn breath.
“Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity,” he recited, all in one breath. “Correct?”
“They’re dead words—a human chain reaching back ten thousand years,” said the corpse. “How did they feel?”
“Genuinely sad, bordering on very funny,” said God. “Can we talk?”