counted as the eighth saint? Your obedient servant, Harrowhark the First—ninth saint, then, looking at you I can tell that’s appropriate. Your allegiance is to one House now, and one House only. Behind you is your eldest sister.”
“We’ve met,” said Mercy impatiently. “Can we not do this right at this moment?”
“I imagine she didn’t have the grace to introduce herself, so I must: Mercymorn the First, the Saint of Joy, would you believe. She is a Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, the second finger on those two hands so outspread, that pray to the Kindly Prince. And she is all your sisters now—the one in front of you being, alas, completely dead—and I am the last of your brothers, excepting…”
He trailed off, as though expecting God to fill in, which God did not. He finished with, “Teacher, d’you think he knows about the missile strikes?”
“He’s never been particularly interested in the day-to-day,” said the Emperor.
“But he is interested in you-know-what, and I’m just thinking, if he’s heard, and maybe put two and two together…”
God said, “He had a mission. The Saint of Duty reflects his name.”
“Right, right,” said Augustine. “Unlike Joy and Patience. Quite right. Just—coming back here, and not seeing him—it gave me the heebie-jeebies, to be perfectly honest with you. I can’t quite shake the feeling that something’s wrong.”
“Can we get back to this blasted funeral,” said Mercy. “Sitting through six of these is worse than dying myself. I will let you know now that the plan for my funeral is in my top drawer, and I’ve got it down to a minute-by-minute framework, and it’s only twenty-four minutes, and it’s just lovely.”
“I can only imagine,” said her brother Lyctor fervently.
This excruciation was cut short when the doors at the back of the chapel banged open. Everyone alive swung around in a hurry, and in walked the next terrible part of your life.
It was a man. The missing Lyctor—as empty to you as all assembled, more still even than the frozen corpse of Cytherea the First. Unlike the other Lyctors, all of whom skewed hungry, soft men and women of the necromancer build, his frame carried nothing but muscle. He was sinew over bone. He was a walking tendon. He had a raw, stretched look to him like an idiot’s construct, bones that had been slippered in meaty fibrils to keep them moving. A metabolized, contracted striation, without fat, the only curve a hollow tautness from rib to stomach.
The Emperor’s face cleared. “Well timed,” he said with naked relief.
The stranger wore the Lyctoral robe of office slung over his shoulders rather than enveloping him, and it was a shabby thing with a ragged hem that did not look very well cared for. He strode down the centre aisle too swiftly for you to see his eyes. In that brief glimpse you beheld a blunt brown face, skin too close to the skull, all shabby defeated features with its lineaments more temporalis muscle than anything else. His skull was a bumpy, knobbled, close-capped thing, hair shaven nearly to the bone. This hair gleamed a dull and unappealing russet, like a vague and bloody shadow on his head.
The Emperor had risen to stand with his arms open in offered embrace. The muscle man walked into it briefly—enough to let God press one hand familiarly to his back, enough for him to clasp God round the shoulders—then pulled roughly away and directed his gaze to the figure lying bookended by Mercy and Augustine.
“She’s dead?” said the stranger. When the Emperor nodded, he closed his eyes, very briefly. Then he opened them and said bluntly: “So are we. Number Seven’s at the rim.”
At this statement Augustine suddenly leant heavily against the altar. He looked as though he might fall over, like a drunk. Mercy’s lips turned to snow. They became an exaggerated painting of tragedy: a lithograph of the moment before shirts were rent and hair was torn and blood rain pattered over the scene.
The Emperor had turned his terrible eyes on the stranger, and they looked like dead planets in the pitch of space, and the white ring was like dying. He was no longer human. He was immortal again.
“It can’t move that fast,” he said. “It never has. You must have seen a Herald, or a pseudo-Beast. Look, don’t scare the children. Come into my quarters and let’s talk this out, all three of you.”
The new arrival was immovable.
“It’s Number Seven,” said the stranger. “Run, or fight?”