“Take the Erebos to them. And give her a new name—Seat of the Emperor.”
“My lord—”
The Saint of Joy muttered something beneath her breath. The Emperor did not bat an eyelid. “Yes, I know it’s lowly to captain a chair,” he said. “But I won’t have anyone in the Admiralty forget what she was, and what I hope she will be once more. In any case, the name ought to get you to the head of orbital queues, even if I’m not in residence. I’ll miss her like fury, Sarpedon, but she’s got thicker plates than anything else in the fleet, and when she’s refitted she’ll carry two thousand.”
“Yet, Lord—”
“As for you, your bones will be hallowed in the Mithraeum, for all that you’ve done in my service. If I don’t see you before then, all I can do is hope you get a chance for retirement.”
The Emperor of the Nine Houses reached out to clasp Sarpedon’s hand. The Cohort admiral looked as though he were being branded. The Emperor held this grasp, and the admiral’s gaze, for a long time; then he turned back to the ramp up the dock, followed—a little reluctantly—by his Hand.
As he drew closer, you could see that he looked as though he had prepared in a hurry; he carried a small bag, hastily packed, slung over his shoulder—the ever-present tablet peeked out of his pocket, along with what seemed to be at least five styluses—and he was dressed simply, as per usual, in a black shirt and trousers. The lack of tint had always pleased you. It was very Ninth, even the collar and the cuffs of his shirt that were scruffy and pilled from too much wearing. But he wore a crown of office that you had not seen before: a wreath of ribbon and pearlescent leaves in his dark hair, rustling prismatically in the windless docking bay. Each leaf was intertwined with a match-sized infant fingerbone. He turned and strode up the ramp toward you, and he said very normally, like you’d never fainted before him in a lather of pre-puke: “Are you all right, Harrowhark?”
“I am perfectly capable, Teacher,” you said.
“That’s not the same thing.”
Ianthe said, with a close approximation of winsomeness: “Put her under my care, Teacher,” and you were disgusted to hear God reply, “I will. Keep an eye on her. Now—”
He turned to find the beautiful ward completed on the wall, and the Seventh adept quietly dying on the floor. There was a whorl of blood down her front; at some point she had levered her syringe deep into her subclavian artery. After finishing the final touches on the perfect nightmare spiral, which betrayed no trembling from myocardial trauma, she had sprayed fixative across it, then silently collapsed. She lay with her eyes rigid on the ceiling, hands clasped over the growing stain on the front of her robes, which were turning Second House scarlet with blood.
The Emperor mumbled something that, you would swear on the rock before the Tomb, sounded like For fuck’s sake. After a moment’s consideration, he pressed his hand to his mouth, as though in thought. The bloom that followed blinded you beyond unpicking, or even comprehending.
The stain crumbled to dust. The blood ceased flowing. The Seventh adept’s hands clutched clean robes. Her expression changed from glassy-eyed expectation to resignation; she rolled over to kiss the dusty floor of the shuttle. You and Ianthe were left blinking, eyes and noses streaming, as though you had just eaten something slightly too spicy.
“Most Holy Lord,” she said, but there was half a question in it.
“Not today, First Lieutenant,” said God. “We need necromancers like you now more than ever.”
She kissed her fingers at him, a little mechanically—and then to the Saint of Joy, and then to Ianthe, and then, after a pause, to you—half a dozen times, and then curtseyed to the point where she nearly folded herself right in half. She rose and escaped down the ramp, booted footsteps bouncing in her wake, the only sign she had been there the enormous whorl of the ward. The Saint of Joy watched her go with an unreadable expression on her placid portrait of a face.
With two more aboard, you could see how small the shuttle really was. To your left, there was a partitioned area that might have been for bodily functions—or going to the toilet, as everyone else in the known universe would have put it—but otherwise the space was bare. There were no beds. There