then looked down at you. The relief was gone; the distance remained.
“I have asked the Emperor multiple times why he has allowed himself to sit, exposed, for this long on the edge of the place he must not come back to,” she said. “And the reason turns out to be you. Some lost Ninth scrap who never had anything to do with anything … a nobody. But he acted so surprised … I said, Put an age requirement in the letter! I said, Everyone will be pubescent if you don’t! And now we reap what he sowed. Hiss.” (For a moment you thought you’d had an aural hallucination, that nobody who had lived ten thousand years—that nobody who had lived—would verbalise the word hiss.) “Well, you have three options: you can walk with me now to the shuttle, I can wheel you, or I can drag you. Which do you pick, you half-grown juvenile? I will tell you: the other one walked.”
You stood up. It cost you.
“Good,” she said, looking at you critically. “You look like a bat stuck in a birthday cake and you need at least two haircuts, but you are—you will be—you were—God’s breath, and God’s bones.”
The Lyctor rearranged your hood a little bit and smoothed out the shoulders of your robe—for this you vowed to one day take her dorsal nerve—then looked at the sword webbed into your arm, bent nearly double beneath its weight and your weariness. Her expression said quite clearly what she thought of it, but she had seen your naked face and perhaps seen something there. Perhaps your plans for her dorsal nerve.
“You’re not as pretty as Anastasia” was all she said.
Now the Reverend Daughter followed more like a cavalier of her House than a necromancer of it. You creaked like a pack skeleton beneath the weight of a burden, following in the Lyctor’s wake. Thankfully, you no longer felt shame. Pride was swiftly becoming a planet you had travelled to once but no longer remembered in detail. The docking bay she led you into was a hive of activity. A speaker gave a belated parp of “Our lady the Saint of Joy is gracing Docking Bay Fourteen,” yet this did not seem to encourage everyone to scurry into the gleaming steel-and-bone culverts of the ship, but rather to take whatever they were doing into double time.
Whatever they were doing involved, primarily, a shuttle. It was not large. It was of a size, in fact, with the type that had used to bring the Ninth House lightbulb filaments and vitamin supplements, manned by a single pilot who always looked as though he had gained the job by losing a bet. There were boxes being carried up into it. You were distracted by the beating hearts and muscles straining all around you, weeping lactic acid as they slid and locked containers and crates into position. At the top of the ramp, sitting on an upturned container in a whisper of opaline skirts and distinct peevishness, was Ianthe; her focus was on the back of the shuttle, not on you. She sat within the sea of heaving stacks and bundles like a pillar.
“All right,” said the Saint of Joy. “Chop-chop. Get in there and don’t move an inch. Don’t get in anybody’s way. Just go in, and sit, and be good.”
The Cohort officers saluted Ianthe as they passed her up and down the ramp. You noticed the ones who reeked of thanergy kiss their thumbs in a gesture you did not recognise. As you dragged your numb idiot body across the bay and staggered up the ramp, you were grateful that nobody did the same for you; you were once again given the wide berth accorded to a Ninth House necromancer.
The inside was as cramped as you’d suspected, and sordidly simple. What arrested you immediately was the source of Ianthe’s fascination and open admiration. Before the back wall of the shuttle, a necromancer of the Cohort squatted; necromantic miasma shone upon her as brightly to you as a torch. There was no fuel here for her to use to commit necromancy. She was in deep space, and she was not a Lyctor. What she could do was put the final touches on an exquisite nullification ward—wet and red with her own blood, which was being pumped out from a long syringe. It would have been difficult and arduous work even had she access to her aptitude. The arms of her robes were rolled all