was no sound from its internal apparatus, excepting an occasional huge creak from its rudder mechanism. Ianthe’s voice broke this mechanical, cold-steel silence by saying, quite carefully for Ianthe: “Teacher, the River is an enormous liminal space formed from spirit magic, populated with ghosts gone mad from hunger.”
“The magma metaphor falls apart from here,” said Mercy, eyes still on the pilot’s switches.
The Emperor responded with perfect gravitas: “Let us imagine the magma is full of unkillable man-eating magma fish. Two problems arise. The first is that beings made of flesh and blood immediately die in magma. The second is our vulnerability to man-eating fish.”
Your tolerance for man-eating magma fish would have been tested sorely by anyone who was not God. His divinity earned God, you thought, about sixty more seconds. But then he said, more quietly: “We are about to travel forty billion light years, to where we first ran … myself, and my remaining six. One of our number was dead already, and another had been removed from play. We needed somewhere to lick our wounds, somewhere far away from anything we loved, to wait—to disperse—without fear that the eyes turning upon us would plough straight through the Nine Houses as they went. It’s a dark and cold and unlovely part of space, and the stars there are old and were nearly dead then. We nuked them with thanergy and now they’ll shine forever, but the light is not the same … It would take us years to get there if we went from stele to stele. How far away from the system was Number Seven at last reckoning, Mercy?”
“Counting down, five years,” said Mercymorn, whose hands had at last stilled on the board of buttons and switches and enamelled bone. “Five years, six months, one week, two days.”
“The merest blink of an eye,” said the Emperor, beneath his breath. He pushed himself away from the pilot’s chair and said, “We worked out a while ago—I say we, but I had little to nothing to do with it—that distance is different down there. The River doesn’t flow through the time and space we’re experiencing right now; the River is—well, it’s a current below us, as in the magma analogy. Distance in the River doesn’t map to distance above. If I drop us into it we can emerge almost immediately across the universe, home. The station, our refuge. We call it the Mithraeum.”
He spread his hands wide: ordinary hands, ordinary fingers, ink-smudged nails. “Look at the ward. What is it?”
You were beginning to note the register of his Teacher voice. This was familiar ground, untouched by magma. The ward undulated in the shadows a little, which was a trick of the light and the blood. You said, “It’s just a ghost ward,” and after a second regretted speaking like a provincial bone witch.
Thankfully Ianthe was even more petulant, and a dyed-in-the-wool flesh magician, as she added: “It’s not even a sophisticated ghost ward. I mean, it’s exquisite, impeccable right down to the coagulation. But I was doing those when I was five.”
“That ghost repellent will keep our ship from shaking apart,” said the Emperor. “That ghost repellent will have every lonesome spirit for kilometres screaming away. For a time.”
“One minute, thirty-three seconds,” said Mercy.
He said, “Give or take.”
The Emperor came to drop on his haunches in front of you and Ianthe, as he had squatted before Mercymorn earlier. It still hurt you in an undefinable way, to see him lowered so: as though he offered a compliance test where you ought to flatten yourself in front of him as low as you could go. The white ring around his pupil was so white. “Your job is simple in the way most very tough things are. I will push us into the River, and I’ll push the ship with us. You’ll have to keep your minds—I can take your physical bodies, but your souls won’t go with them, not without you holding them steady.”
“Physical transference past the liminal boundaries,” you said, and were surprised by the knowledge coming out of you, as though it weren’t your own. “This is deep Fifth spirit magic.”
“And I bless the Fifth House and I bless their long memory,” said the Emperor. “They only go far enough to tempt lost ghosts to them. They stand on the sidelines and wave around bits of meat and anchoring material. But they don’t even approach the shore.”
Ianthe sounded much more like her twin sister when she said, wonderingly: “But