were no real seats for passengers, except for a few pull-downs at the side. The boxes brought on were quite small; the biggest was a stone square strapped down with lengths of steel rope. Displaced from its fellows, the tiny rosebud gone, it took you a moment to realise that it was a coffin, and another moment to recognise whose.
To your right was a cockpit with empty seating for one pilot, spread with a wide and beautiful wrap of embroidered pearly material—and with a lurch in the back of your brain you saw it wasn’t empty at all: the Body had taken up residence on that rainbow shawl, sitting there with her hands prim in her lap and the chain of welts clearly visible. The gorgeous and severe angles of her face were softened as though in recognition, and her lips were a little parted, enough to show her dead black tongue. When you followed her line of sight, she was looking at the entryway, and the Emperor.
The Emperor pressed a button next to the door and the ramp sucked up into the shuttle with a great mechanical slarp. Then he turned to his Lyctor and said, in a tone of thinly sprinkled sugar upon infinite salt: “Well, this looks a great deal like forcing my hand.”
“Lord, I would never dare—”
“My flagship, to my admiral, among my people. Is the Erebos really the best place to publicly gainsay your Emperor, Mercy?”
She rounded on him. The canvas of her portrait face was now scrunched up in passionate fury. You had expected that ten thousand years would be enough to school a face whenever one wanted it schooled; apparently not, or Mercy had never bothered with schooling.
“The only one who forced your hand is coming home with us in a box,” she cried out. “And it’s ugly of you to use my name in front of the infants. We agreed our names were sacred—we let them all be forgotten—”
“Mercymorn,” said the Emperor, “you know as well as I do that keeping your name from your rightful sisters is ridiculous. Also, you are trying to start a fight with me to get out of the fight I am trying to have with you, which is a painfully domestic tactic.”
“You are nearly in Dominicus’s halo—it looks suicidal—”
“You know why I came, and my reasons for waiting are out of—”
“Some would call it madness, or ego, or both—”
“Who’s some in this instance, and does their name rhyme with Nercynorn—”
“It rhymes with Naugustine,” said the Saint of Joy, with no small amount of hauteur.
The Emperor of the Nine Houses’ face suddenly lit up like the sunrise of an inner-circle planet. “Then you and Augustine the First are talking again?”
Mercy threw her hands in the air, milking an invisible and gigantic cow in order to assuage her feelings, and flung herself to sit down on another secured crate. She put her chin in her hands; her rapier clattered beneath her rainbow-white cloak with the movement. “We were talking,” she said, chilly and measured, “as little as nineteen years ago, if you’d recall. If we talk again now, it doesn’t actually signify, being as speaking is so different from talking. And I am not on speaking terms with—the person you refer to. Nonetheless, your actions moved me to talk to that silly man-shaped worm, and I came here to take matters into my own hands.” Before he could say another word, she said: “Nobody’s answering calls on the Mithraeum. Come home, please!”
“But that’s—”
“Three of us remain,” said the Lyctor simply. “I can’t even confirm the third is alive.”
“He was keeping tabs on—” began the Emperor, and seemed as though he were about to elucidate those tabs; but he caught sight of you and Ianthe sitting quietly, waiting for this dreadful conversation to end (you) or nakedly desperate for more (Ianthe). He set his little shoulder bag down in what appeared to you, wild with panic, to be the Body’s lap. She looked up at him, impassive, and then at the bag, nonplussed. Then he dropped down on his haunches in front of his sullen Lyctor.
What followed was a conversation entirely in shorthand: at one point it was simply conducted in shrugs. He would say a word; she would retort with a totally different word, and the Emperor would grimace or give her sharp rejoinder. On occasion, that sharp rejoinder was simply a quirk of his mouth, and the Lyctor would turn her head, loser of that bout. You