your grief into six feet of steel. You had loathed that thrice-damned blade from sight, which might have been unfair before you knew it loathed you in return.
You kept trying to wield it, all the same. Each touch ended with the contents of your stomach splattered colourfully on the floor. Your days dissolved like ashes in front of a fan—scattered beyond any hope of retrieval—blown back into your face or fluttering upward beyond your grasp. Sometimes you would rise, and you’d take up the blade, as though in expectation of something. Nothing ever happened; you felt nothing except the sword’s enormous, empty hate of you, which you knew to be real, even then. You and the sword would seethe in your mutual bitterness and fury, and then you would end up with blistered hands and a floor’s worth of vomit.
Details sat at awkward angles to one another. You’d been in this bed some time, wearing clothes that weren’t yours. Occasionally ticklish rasps at your ears or forehead would frighten you numb before you realised it was your own hair. Away from Drearburh shears, it grew in a way that was almost debauched. You would cut it yourself and still find irregular little licks of it tucked behind your ears—or maybe you had not cut it at all. Sometimes, in reaching up to it, you would then recall that you had no robe or skeletal mask. Nobody had given you any paint and there wasn’t a stick of grease on board the whole ship, though even if there had been it would not have been blessed properly. The first time this happened, in your hot upset and shame, you ripped a sheet to shreds and covered your head with that. This still left most of your forehead nude, discounting the hair. Also, you were wearing a bedsheet. You took the poetic way out and used a black vestal’s last-choice gambit: you opened a vein and, trembling neither from pain nor blood loss, daubed blind upon your skin the sacramental skull of the Inglorious Mask.
The uniformed attendants were always busy with things that weren’t you. Sometimes you were humbly prevailed upon to sit up and part your ad-hoc veil to struggle through a bowl of clear soup, though those memories were doubtful fragments. It did not seem right that you could ever eat again. Sometimes people would move all around you, and you lay supine on your cot, astonished and shivering before the vista of stars out the window. The thick plex barrier seemed too light and frangible to keep you safe. Beyond it the great black throat of space bared itself to you, which frightened you beyond sense. At these times you fell in and out of sleep, somehow. You had long since ceased to care for human voices, which only talked nonsense: they would murmur their prayers of Three thousand units—replenish, that’s on the provision list—dump that stock, munitions will take it.
In your old life you might have been curious. But other noises haunted you, quite apart from the ones occurring to your ears. There was a great unmusical straining aboard ship—the sounds of wet drums—which had panicked you before you’d realised, with settling calm, that you were hearing the heave of seven hundred and eight beating hearts. You heard seven hundred and eight brains, thrumming in their cerebral fluid. You knew without checking that three hundred and four of those straining hearts belonged to necromancers; a necromancer’s heart myocardium flexed differently to your ears, worked worse, squeezed more feebly. You were sensing the living. Once you worked out what you were hearing, you became aware of everything immediate to you: the dust settling on the gleaming black plaques of the floor; the roiling of your pulmonaries; the soft marrow of your bones sucking up oxygen. Despite all this cacophony, you could not stay awake.
Sometimes you found yourself standing, gorge risen, staring at the great sword left untidy and naked on the floor. You would not remember rising. You would not remember how you had come to be there. Sometimes you would forget who you were, and at recalling yourself, weep like a child.
In these digestions of time the Body would come. She would put her cool, dead hands on your forehead and close your pumping eyelids with her fingertips, so that you could not see the sword nor the people.
This was great honour. This was great mercy. She always came to you now with such easy forbearance, and you