I’ve eaten human being, Harrow, and I didn’t really want an encore. Now tell me what you have done.”
Your body was unyielding, but your mouth had purchase. You said, “I reconfigured a clump of marrow stem cells into sesamoid bone. From the sesamoid bone, I made a construct.”
“Harrowhark,” he said, “you cannot have perceived foreign bone marrow within the body of a Lyctor. I’m not sure Mercy could perceive it with her arms draped around Ortus the whole time.”
“The cells weren’t foreign.”
“What?”
“I sectioned my tibia for the soup,” you said.
God’s eyes closed, very briefly. He pushed his bowl another fraction away. You stared down the table at him: at the blank, remote faces of your two nominal teachers—at the frozen ivory stillness of Ianthe, her hair now whitish pink—at space outside the window, where the asteroids themselves seemed to hang in tranquilized arrest. He said, “You must know that I won’t let either of you kill the other before my very eyes, Harrow.”
“He attacked me in my rooms. He drained my personal wards.”
“Coming from the Saint of Duty, that’s a compliment.”
You said, “Lord, I am hunted. I perish.”
“Harrow—”
“I don’t come to you as Harrowhark the First,” your mouth said. “I come to you as a supplicant. I can’t live like this. Lord, do I displease you, that you shield him and not me? I understand that I am a sharpened twig beside your keenest sword, but why do you suffer this twig to live? I can’t live this way. I cannot live this way. I have nowhere to go. I have nobody to turn to. I am a nonsense.”
You looked at each other down that long, bloody table.
God said, “Harrowhark, when was the last time you slept?”
It was with all the dignity of the Locked Tomb, the chill of the stone that had been rolled and of the bones that had been laid, and of the still salt water that shimmered before the whitened monument where your holy monster lay, that you said, “Six days ago.”
The Emperor of the Nine Houses stood.
The spell, whatever it had been, dropped like a white sun setting. Your body collapsed back into your chair. The construct gamely clambering out of the Saint of Duty dwindled to a powder of pink dust. The shard you had been driving up the cervical vertebrae to the base of the spine and the brain within its casing simply disappeared: destroyed or removed, you could not tell. The concatenation of Ortus the First’s insides, laced and crocheted over the dinner table, sizzled away to a soft mist. Everyone’s breath spewed from their lungs in one unholy gasp. Ortus’s hands flew to his middle.
The Emperor did not give anyone time to react further. He said evenly: “Dinner is over. Let us leave the table. Ianthe—take your sister to bed.”
Everyone began clattering out of their chairs in a wild scraping of wood and tile. Augustine said, “My lord—?” and God said, “Go. Just go.”
You felt strange and unreal as a white-lipped Ianthe hauled you up from your seat. The skin she touched was merely a thin and pervious netting keeping in your meat, which consisted of ten thousand spiders. She slung your arm across her shoulders, as though you were an invalid. Perhaps you were. Your legs did not feel correct. Your eldest sister, looking distinctly green around the gills and checking long strands of her overripe-rose hair for globs, had also risen—but the Emperor said, “You. Stay,” and she froze.
There was no thought in you of fighting Ianthe as she walked you away. You could have gone meekly to the slaughter without a muzzle or a leash. Behind you, the Kindly Prince was saying, in far more ominous tones than you had ever heard him use: “Six days. No sleep. She still manages a full skeleton commencement from diluted marrow. What else have you failed to see, Mercymorn—?”
You were already at the door when her peevish response came: “But this is insane! She’s only nine years old!”
* * *
The Saints of Duty and Patience were out in the corridor. If either had wanted to run you through, you could not have stopped them. You looked at them despite Ianthe urging you away: at Augustine, looking as though he had seen the ghost of someone he did not particularly like, and at Ortus.
Ianthe kept trying to turn you to face forward, but you kept watching even as she hustled you down the corridor. You saw Augustine fumble for a cigarette, light