by bit, until you felt entirely ready to wake up. I can’t. I mastered Death, Harrowhark; I wish I’d done the smarter thing and mastered Time. I have to ask you to get ready soon, and so I am going to show you something I hope might … trigger your readiness.”
You were deeply and gravely relieved by his understanding, by his tact. It kept you awake and alive all throughout your trip down the elevator, even though the elevator took full minutes to sail through the enormity of the Erebos. You had never seen anything so fresh and new. You focused on the lovely silver-and-black chasing on the metal boards, the inlaid panels of rainbow colour, the skull above the door that some artistic adept had fashioned into the skull of the First; someone’s bones beautifully moulded into that central sign with the eight answering Houses around it. The skull of your House looked plain and silent next to the others. Soft dark hangings obscured the plex and the metal and the antiquated LED gleam of electronics.
Then the doors whispered open to a cavernous, echoing space where an overhead speaker was announcing, “Our God the Emperor sees fit to grace the second cargo hold,” and you perceived many people moving away—stray Cohort officers in their white jackets making themselves scarce, bowing quickly, stopping their work to leave their lord in privacy. Their scuttling footsteps sounded like fleeing animals.
You were on a steel-frame balcony overlooking a field of hundreds and hundreds of oblong boxes. Each was a body long and half a body tall, and all were constructed of bone—their lines and ranks so dizzyingly even that it took you a while to comprehend them, as your eyes kept wavering and crossing. The chill breeze of the recyc air ruffled your smock and goose-pimpled your thighs, but the cold kept you conscious, and you wanted to be conscious. The bone of the boxes gleamed less purely white than the amalgam metal and plasticised panels that made up the sides of the hold, and the bone was topped with a soft transparent skin so taut and fine you could see through it, and through it was—
“My promised gift. Your renewed House,” said the Emperor.
When he looked at your face, he cautioned you gently: “It’s a little under five hundred, and only a third will display necromantic aptitude, and the same for their next generation. They’re all between the ages of fifteen and forty, which I thought was easiest.”
“Oh my God,” you said, forgetting that the deity in question was right there. “The ancient dead. You’ve committed resurrection.”
He said, “No. I haven’t truly resurrected anyone in ten thousand years. But at that time … I set many aside, for safety … and I’ve often felt bad about just keeping them as insurance. They’ve been asleep all this myriad, Harrow, and it’s frankly a relief to my mind to wake them up. I’ll begin the process of bringing them to the surface before they’re shipped off to the Ninth.”
You unpinned your cloth mask so that you could look with your whole face, only a little ashamed to show it so nakedly to the Emperor. He, after all, had seen it before. A sick hope rose in you like nitrogen bubbles in a diver, and you forgot yourself: “Let me go with them,” you said. “Not long. Just enough to introduce them to my House—my seneschal—enough time to tell them—”
“Slow down, Harrowhark,” he said. “We must talk, you and I, before you ask me for that. I only wish I had more time to explain.”
You took the chilly metal stairs two at a time, feeling your heart ram against serous pericardium, feeling the slim covers of the steps chafing your bare feet. Sharpened by the pain, you wandered between the rows of your silent, sleeping people. You paused over their cradles and stared through the blurry films of skin, with their little radiating burses of veins and cells, at each face in turn. You tried to commit each one to memory, but their features blended together in one amalgam, one sea of strangers newly Ninth. You drifted a little, overawed and dizzy. The Body followed, exactly one half step behind, hand dead calm on the small of your back.
The Emperor kept a respectful distance between himself and his handiwork as you and the Body peered into each casket. Eventually the ranks of bone-and-skin boxes terminated in a clearing of their smaller, more colourful siblings. These