“It caught up with us,” said the stranger. “The brain is already in the River. If we drop through the waters we’ll run into it no matter what direction we go. The corpus will be here in just under ten months, and it will be full of Heralds. Run, or fight?”
“We need to think about—”
“No thinking,” said the stranger, cutting Augustine off without hesitation. “Run? Two of us take the Emperor and hike to the nearest stele. The one left stays as a distraction, then leads it away. Or fight: we all make a stand. John, I am your servant. Tell me to stay and die, and I’ll stay.”
You recalled that name from the shuttle, but had ignored it at the time. There was a ghastly moment now when you realised that he had looked at the Resurrecting Prince when he said John; that God had responded to so banal and cursory a word as John; and that he was looking at the rope-made man with something closer to despair than you had ever seen in him.
“We’ll fight,” he said. “We made the choice years ago to increase our numbers and fight these things. Five years, ten months … in the end, perhaps it is the same.”
“Stay?” said the stranger.
“Yes,” said God. “Stay, I do think.” And, lowly: “Thank you for making it home, Ortus the First.”
Something pooled inside your ears, culminating in a hot and intense dripping down your earlobes. You touched it and your fingers came away wet; it was blood. Ianthe was staring at you through a fine curtain of achromatic hair, the whitened curve of her lips a tight and careful line. You silently crumpled up in the transept and hit your head quite hard on the tiles before you were rendered senseless. Under the circumstances it took people quite a long time to notice.
10
“Then Nonius spake full wroth; thunder’d his voice as the black sea roars on the tomb-gate of Algol,
“Blazing his eyes with the fell light thrown from the Emperor’s corpse-fires; answer he gave, and he told them—”
“Stop,” said Harrowhark, from behind.
This did not go down well with the audience. The steel-panelled, split-floor library of Canaan House was perhaps one of the strangest rooms within it: it was the only room above the facility that evoked the same blunt sense of utilitarian workspace. It was like entering a modern chamber only to find an ancient artefact in the centre. The panelled floors were spread over haphazardly with old and hairy rugs, and the shelves were plain laminated metal. When Ortus declaimed, his voice rang through the place like the Secundarius Bell, except significantly more embarrassing.
“No, no, Reverend Daughter,” protested the curly-haired moron from the Fifth House, the one whose clothes could have provided the Ninth with material resources for a decade. “Please. Nonius is about to give the rebels what-for. I never got what-for in school. Fifth poetry is very much I come from climes of sulphur gas/I shine in plasma sheet/Er-hem-er-hem-er-hem, surpass/My spot a crimson feat, and by then I was always comatose. One little stanza of what-for, I beg of you.”
Harrowhark knew from experience that no what-for was in the offing. Matthias Nonius never did battle in The Noniad (Matthias hight Nonius his Deeds and Accomplishments) without a significant amount of talking first. He generally spent at least fifty lines destroying his opponents in speech before he began to destroy them physically, wading through the giblets of the immoral for another two hundred or so. This part was no exception. It was hardly to be borne that Ortus would launch into The Noniad in company; she had been subjected to so much of it herself because she knew he hoped that one day she would be deeply moved by it, release him from the duty of cavalier primary, and make him a Ninth bone skald. The idea that he would give a public reading ought to have been a whipping offence.
Now he stood, wide and black and shadowy among all the brushed-steel shelving. The necromancer and the cavalier of the Fifth sat at a table spread wide with books, and fragments of delicate loose-leaf paper safely slipped into plex covers, and browned-out flimsy, and pens. The necromancer looked entertained, and the cavalier looked beside himself. The necromancer, the woman who had been so delighted with the idea of independent research, a grown woman with a very even smile, did not put Harrowhark in any