I said, Harrowhark,” he said. “Make a meal. Read a book. It’s the little things…”
There were two days left before Ianthe’s deadline, and all the Lyctors ate with a distinct lack of relish. You watched Ianthe take a spoonful of food as you struggled with your cutlery. Your soup did not look like a bad effort, and you had been vaguely proud of it: the thick, translucent gold-whiteness of the pot liquor; the unburnt onion floating in white, stratified wedges; the candy-orange of the stored carrots. You had read up on vegetables carefully, trying to overcome your aversion to their colours: you had not wanted anything that might dissolve entirely in the soup over the length of cooking called for. “Needs salt,” was Ianthe’s judgement.
“Too much water, but not a bad effort,” said Augustine with forced jollity. “Broth needs to thicken over time, Harrow.” (You had let it thicken for hours, then added a great deal of water, in a panic.) “Do not get me wrong, sis. Eating a new cook’s food after ten thousand years is frankly exciting. Let me give you a list of my favourite meals so that you can get them interestingly wrong.”
The Saint of Duty ate your soup at a stolid, uninterested, mechanical pace. You had noticed at previous dinners that he did not like some particular vegetables, so you had put them all in. Deprived of solid choices, he was mostly drinking stock. God had taken a spoonful, eaten it, then put down the spoon, then taken a discreet sip of water. He said nothing. The next sixty seconds were occupied with the wet, semiashamed sounds of people eating soup.
“If we’re going to do these awful shared meals, at least someone provide conversation,” said Mercy waspishly. She was removing thick pieces of root vegetable and eating them delicately off her fork. “I can’t bear to sit here and eat mediocre food in silence. I can do that by myself.”
You said, after a moment to peel up the edges of your words, “Is it mediocre, elder sister? I followed a recipe.”
“Cassiopeia’s? Now, there was a woman who could cook,” said Augustine, and his granite-coloured eyes grew soft and nostalgic in his long, hawk-featured face. “Not without injuring herself, mind. John, d’you remember that time she took half her finger off getting the meat out of that coconut? She didn’t tell anybody until after we’d eaten the meal. That’s a lesson for you, Harrowhark: confess, first thing, before we find a finger in the soup.” (You flinched, then tried to smile; perhaps that was called for. Ianthe looked at the expression on your face and shuddered visibly.) “What’s the meat in here flavouring the broth? If there’s chunks, it’s all rendered down.”
You closed your eyes and tried to think. It was so difficult. You so badly wanted to sleep. You were doing so many things at once—your sole remaining powers of concentration were given over to this moment. For a second or two you forgot the word that you were looking for—it was on the tip of your tongue—while you were building, minutely, stromal cell by stromal cell.
“Marrow,” you said.
The Saint of Duty exploded outward as your construct emerged from his abdomen. Your soup was watery and mediocre, as soup went, but as a delivery method for gelid explosives—marrow rendered through so much water as to not pass comment—it was perfect. Half a dozen arms shattered him in the soft electric light from the overhead panels. You let out your breath, and coalescing scythes destroyed intestines—lungs—heart. Then you fired upward, toward the brain.
And God said, “Stop.”
The world slowed down. Augustine and Mercymorn stopped, arrested in the act of half-rising from their seats. Ianthe stopped, left arm paused, outflung, to shield her face. You stopped, sitting upright in your chair: your bones somehow rigid and still, and your flesh chilly and rigid around those bones. The shrapnel spray from the Saint of Duty did not stop—it cascaded across the table like the crest of a pink waterfall, pitter-pattering down on bowls and the tablecloth and the polished dark surface of the wood. But what remained of him stopped too, half man, half rupture—his prurient details hot and white, naked insides clothed with the sinus-drying burst of the power of God.
The Emperor of the Nine Houses—the Resurrection—the First Reborn—sat at the end of the table, his plain face splattered with gore, and his eyes were the death of light.
The Necrolord Prime said, very calmly, “Ten thousand years since