crimsons, smoky amethysts, lightless navy. House colours. House heroes brought here to rest. Slender columns of white tapers bathed those bones in forgiving lights that made them beautiful in the way only bones could be for you; the candles were wrapped in different colours, which made them look like the dressed-up throats of flowers, or rings on long slender fingers. And great clusters of these candles shone down on a central altar, and on the central altar was a body.
You were at a funeral. You knew its bride; you’d killed her.
You sat in a pew in the chapel where had been laid the time-apprehended body of Cytherea the First. In order to survive the gaucherie of your presence, you sent your brain voyaging elsewhere. You tucked your hands deep inside the veil of your nacreous sleeves and slumped so that the snowy rainbow gauze hid your face. Even the vague pressure of the blade at your back caused the gorge to rise up in your chest and your heart to hammer wildly as though trying to construct a barricade, but at least the threat of coyly spewing kept you present and sane; you weren’t that far gone. It was only the fourth funeral you had ever been to where you had been responsible for the corpse.
The corpse on the altar was covered in little blush rosebuds, scattered thickly over her, a roseate white like seconds-old bone. They lay in sheaves in her arms; they were tucked in her pallid brown curls and pressed to her feet. On her sweet dead mouth there hovered a rueful frown. Once upon a time you might have fallen to position on the kneeler—soft and supple human leather, buttery, lovely—and thanked the Tomb that you had lived to see the death of a Lyctor, enshrined so, in such a place. You would have pressed your prayer beads to your mouth with one knuckle caught between your lips, the knuckle of your great-grandmother that represented the Rock, and the Universe, and God. Now you considered whether or not you could pass out again.
Before the altar knelt Mercymorn. Her shimmering white robe had fallen down her shoulders, and she was weeping—the sound was not articulated aloud, but her shoulders rocked as though her sobs were an explosion. She ground her molars audibly, so much so that they sounded like walnuts going through a rock polisher. You could not imagine the Saint of Joy weeping with anything other than fury or disappointment.
Next to Mercy knelt God. Next to God knelt somebody new. You could only see the back of the head, and you surmised they were fair-haired. That was all. The stranger was tall, kneeling—taller than the Emperor, and taller than Mercy. They wore the iridescent robe of the First House, and you could not sense them: another black hole in a triplet of black holes, scooping out the space in front of you.
After a moment, the new figure said in a light, masculine tenor, “I will have a full psychological meltdown if you don’t stop that ghastly noise, Mercy.”
The Saint of Joy gritted out: “I will kill you if you talk to me right now, you mean-souled little man.”
The God of the Nine Houses said, “Stop it,” and they were silent.
The molar-clunching subsided gradually. You wove your fingers together in your deep pearly sleeves and bent your thumbs backward nearly to the point of dislocation. Ianthe looked at you, and when you looked at her in the candlelight—her eyes not betraying her; right now, they might have been blue—you were struck by her exhaustion. She had been dimmed, somehow. Something had been taken from her since you watched her scream on the floor of the shuttle. Her line of sight flicked to the gap at the front of your robe—you shouldered forward to close it—and she quirked her eyebrows in brief, enervated amusement.
You mouthed, Where are we? But she did not answer.
After a moment, the Emperor spoke at the corpse, in the smiling cadence of a man giving a talk at a dinner party:
“When they first brought her to Canaan House, I thought there’d been some mistake. You know that I’d been to Rhodes, to see the miracle, but I asked not to see the woman—just so I could be a disinterested party—and of course once I saw that she was necromantic I said yes, she should come to me to be a disciple. She was just shy of thirty then, I recall. And I knew she