physeal joints. If it had simply been bonework, you would have been able to identify the mischief immediately, and unfuck accordingly. The voices coalesced—
“—can clear this instantaneously, Saint of Saints, once the Holy Prince has finished giving audience to—”
This came from in front of you.
“The meeting! The meeting!!” It was difficult to articulate extra exclamation marks, yet the new voice did so. “Do you think I have time for—for—for the extra hour in which three generals and your Resurrector, the God of Dead Kings, try to schedule another meeting after the first one has done? Do you think I came here to wait for three personal assistants, six calendars, and God himself changing his mind nineteen times??”
This came from behind you, and above. This voice, in all probability, belonged to the person who was pushing your chair.
“Sacred Hand,” said another voice, “forgive me. It was his order that she was not to be touched. There were no allowances; there were no riders.”
The first voice said, “There was no opposition when I ordered the shuttle. Nor to my preparations.”
“The order regarding Harrowhark Nonagesimus was specifically stated by him, Holy Finger, Holy Thumb.”
The voice above Harrow said, “And is my order suddenly not God’s order? Am I no longer Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, the second saint to serve the King Undying? Have I lost my rank among the Four—or, now, as I so horribly find, the Three? Am I not the last sister serving in a charnel house of dead sisters, all of whom gave their long and dutiful lives so that your squalling children and their germ-ridden children’s children’s children could bask in the light of Dominicus?”
The other voice paused. “No,” it said. But then it added, and there was a hint of stoic wretchedness: “Most Holy Saint of Joy—forgive me—I still ask you to please wait until the meeting is done.”
There was an explosive sigh. “It’s all right,” the voice said, quite normally. “It’s all right, Lieutenant, I understand. You’ve only met this baby and the other baby. You’ve never met a Lyctor. You’re not to know … even if you’re in his presence, it’s another thing altogether to understand…”
The voice trailed off, and the person standing behind your chair crossed over to the person in front of it. You were distantly interested in what happened next, if only because you were not used to being granted a front-row seat. You beheld one normal person before you—the other was a black hole, and now you knew why—and that person had two kidneys. A sudden one-two punch of thalergy emerged from nowhere, as far as your senses were concerned—no, not punches: a stiletto, an unutterably focused dart, a syringe—and each kidney was hosed with angiotensins. A perfect spike. Blood pressure plunged. A body joined the shoes and trouser bottoms in front of you as the officer fainted, and the chair was wheeled around the neat human pile.
The voice behind the chair was muttering:
“Horrid … just vile! Erebos placements never do have any horse sense … told him time and time again to rotate them each decade … just a nightmare. My presence ought to have the same effect as a fire alarm … I do not want to wait … I do not want a cup of tea. I am not asking for feudal submission; I am asking for understanding!”
This blast of volume might have made you jump, had your spine been connected. The chair paused in front of one of the elevator shafts; the dark doors whispered open to the rainbow inlay and the hangings of the lift chamber, and the chair was rolled inside. You were busy flexing the ragged end of your dorsal root—you had assumed it must have been severed, which would have been the simplest thing to do, but you realised all at once that it had been tied into a knot. It had been bowed out, twisted, and looped.
The keypad made low, electronic chirrups as somebody pressed down upon it. A mass of fabric whispered past you—you could not feel it on your body, but you felt the air upon your cheek—and then a person knelt in front of your chair. A shining, shimmering billow of pale fabric came into your field of vision, a rainbow-hued whiteness that ran through shades beneath the hot tungsten light, like the reflection of coloured glass on ice, the same stuff that now was draped around you. Then, awfully, your vision was lifted. Someone had pressed a finger