complexity. The shuttle was gone, but the water was not, and the bodies were everywhere. You were lost in a deep aperture. Hot bloody blisters bubbled up from your skin, and you were aware of yourself, not as a structure, but as a sickly radiance: one sickly radiance among other sickly radiances, one, two, three, four, five, all around you, one beneath. The distant scream coalesced. You realised it was coming from you.
Your eyes opened. You looked at the blanketing bodies of the dead children of the Ninth House, were aware of yourself as an ova cluster of two hundred pinpricks of light. You were a sigil: you were an intermingled fire. The fluid was sucked from your sinus cavities, and with it your brain, soon disassembled. You were made small. You were a throat, you were an oven. The water was boiling hot and your skin was sloughing off you in reddened, shrinking frills; those pinpricks boiled within you, and the bodies boiled without—you were a hunger without a stomach. You felt the thanergetic pit inside the coffin, the curve of a childlike jaw, the pallid bow of a dead mouth. You did not understand yourself as standing, nor understood yourself as walking, but you were doing both. You were dying in that hot water; whatever wanted your meat suit could have it.
“Harrowhark,” said God. “Over here—over here, kid. I daren’t touch you. Come toward me. Toward me—Mercy, as you love me, do not push that button.”
“Thirty seconds,” said Mercymorn, and quietly: “Lord, you doom your Houses.”
You could see everything. The shuttle was a tawdry nest of fuselage and metal sheeting, wiped over with plex and antifriction gels; breakable, startlingly so. You could see in a multiplicity of directions. You could see the dead blood ward churning beneath the water, the metal where it had etched itself curling and seizing beneath superheated steam. You could see your live blood, rising up in bright red plumes before you, leaving streaks of red on your robe.
Mercy said, “Twenty-five. The shuttle is becoming porous. I’m starting to feel drag.”
“Hold it.”
Something hit the shuttle like a closed fist: it spun from side to side, going nearly all the way around like a top, and you fell off and away from that needle. You fell to your knees on a soft dead pile of children and stared over your shoulder where Ianthe lay propped up on the floor, shrieking shamelessly in fright.
Mercy did not pay attention. “Twenty seconds.”
“I’ll grab Harrow. Gun it.”
“Oh, thank God, finally–what do you mean, grab—”
“I’m going to have to touch her. Hit the acceleration.”
“Wait, Lord, if she pulls you away—”
“The throttle, Mercy, in Cristabel’s name!” God roared.
She slammed a lever. Five points of light. Ianthe was staring and insubstantial, shuddering out of her lineation as though vibrating straight out of reality. Everything was borne away into this mad and boiling riptide, and when you followed Ianthe’s line of sight, the plex screen of the shuttle was a mass of dead hands, and trailing guts, and water, and blood. From your kneeling point, someone grabbed you from beneath your armpits and dragged you backward; there was a huge and overwhelming sound like some vast machine backfiring, and you kept thinking, Five? but then there was nothing left of you.
8
THE TEA WAS OVERWHELMING, and tasted too much. By choice Harrowhark had only ever drunk water. When she had been younger, or ill, the marshal had made her sugar-water with a drop of preserved lemon in it, as a treat; even then she’d had to take her time over each sip. Each bright citric burst had been half pleasure, half pain on her tongue; the sweetness so acute as to almost hurt her teeth. This new hot stuff tasted like a forest fire. It was with seriously burnt taste buds and no saliva in her mouth that she froze when the dire little man said, smiling: “And perhaps the Locked Tomb will favour us with their intercession?”
What seemed like a thousand eyes turned upon her. With a great internal fury, Harrowhark blanked. It was her cavalier who opened his mouth in the vast, corpsified atrium of Canaan House, and began: “I pray the tomb is shut forever. I pray the rock is never rolled away…”
She did not join him. If one did not begin a prayer in perfect unison, better not to pray belatedly. She listened as Ortus said words she suddenly doubted he even believed, full of a very weary resentment at