the way up to her shoulders so that the cloth would not touch and blur the pattern as she worked; you noted rucked-up House ribbons of pale seafoam green.
Ianthe saw you, and she startled. Before you could be relieved that there existed one Lyctor who might still startle for you, she made room for you on the upturned crate on which she was perched. You did not like to, but you sat primly on the corner proffered, trying to press your knees together to stop your bodies from touching. Today—and how much time had passed?—her eyes were that washed-out blue, with amethyst lights in them.
“You’ve met our respected elder sister, I see,” Ianthe said. “She accused me of being twelve, called me one of those animaphiliacs, then told me I wasn’t as good looking as someone called Cyrus. It was like being back with Mummy,” she added, with a touch of fond nostalgia.
Your palm remembered the knife, and you resisted the chumminess. You said, “Where is the Emperor?”
“I don’t know, and nobody will tell me anything,” she said, more peevishly. “Everyone has been acting frankly mulish … which I suppose I can’t blame them for, as I might act the same if I were peremptorily dropped from the Emperor’s personal attaché and shipped off to the front … but what is the good of being Ianthe the First, if I can’t even leverage it?”
You hazarded a quick glance to the Cohort necromancer; but the Seventh adept paid you no attention. You noticed that her ward—an expert’s work, and an artist’s, that of genius married to style—was a very familiar one: it was a ghost ward. You tried to wrench your brain back to the words Ianthe had said, and the order she had put them in. This was difficult, as what you knew about the Cohort and the front could fit into a teaspoon. Even that much knowledge had always annoyed you, but something she’d said had rattled your comatose hypothalamus.
You said, “That makes no sense. The Imperial Guard doesn’t see action.”
“Oh, my sweet, you don’t know … Well, how could you? It’s not as though anyone’s told you; you were too busy with your binary of throwing up or being murderous. Well, Nonagesimus, they do see action when the Cohort suddenly loses three warships to as many orbital radiation missiles, which is three more warships than we’ve lost in the past thousand years,” said Ianthe. Were it possible for someone to puff more with self-satisfaction, she would be swollen and gouty and dead; but rather than irritated, you found that Ianthe just made you feel tired. “Eighteen thousand dead soldiers will grab the attention … Corona would love it. She’s mad for military funerals.”
It was difficult for you to muster empathy. You had nobody at the front, or indeed in the Cohort. The last Ninth House chaplains and construct adepts had, as you recalled, been lost in action five years back. The numbers remained numbers, lacking context. You were more interested in the conversation happening outside the shuttle’s docking doors, before the ramp: an unfamiliar voice saying steadily: “Holy Saint, the Erebos is his vessel. I speak for every commanding officer aboard when I tell you how reluctantly we would see the end of his eighty years aboard.”
“Eighty years!!” was the response, again with that articulated extra exclamation point. It was the result of extreme irascibility: the saint had a high, fluting voice, a young voice for someone who had now accused both you and Ianthe Tridentarius of actionable puberty, and it was piercing now. “Eighty is shameful—you knew the writing was on the wall when the call came for more Lyctors. His seat is elsewhere, and there he must return, and should have returned thirty years ago. You’re now Admiral Sarpedon? Really? It is Sarpedon, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said the admiral, whose title had been suggested by the Lyctor in the same tone of voice as might be said Chief Leper. “And it has been … twenty years since we last met, Most Venerated Saint?”
“Around that,” agreed the most venerated saint, whose office had been enunciated by the admiral with the faintest and most well-bred suggestion of motherfucker. “In any case, you’ve had him eighty years, and the Mithraeum has lacked him for a hundred.”
“You are invoking throne silence,” said Sarpedon. “You are removing him from the Empire.”
“I can’t very well invoke throne speech. We’ll be forty billion light years away.”
The admiral said, through a thin rime of ice: