The pain did not matter. The shuttle had shivered, somehow, around you: synaptogenesis had erupted in your braincase, and your eyes were opening. You were lying in a sea of bodies. They had bumped up against you before you had realised it, before you could flinch away from their nearness: perhaps the blood conjured them into being, so suddenly were they there. You stood up without thinking, and more bumped gently into your elbows, your arms. They carpeted the bottom of the shuttle. They bobbed in an unseen current low to the ground, lacking the air to drift to the top. Through a thin curtain of your blood you could see the dizzying array of slippery corpses, their faces painted in black and alabaster greys. Dead girls in their teens, their half-exposed bones still caught in the act of fusing at the caps; dead boys still shedding their milk teeth; ungendered infants, mostly skull, their nails like tiny chips of stone. A rubber-bodied toddler with a painted face and very red hair lay dead beside your knee and for some reason it was this that destroyed you, it was this that kindled within you something you had no hope of defending against. You howled in a purity of fright.

The Emperor was wading toward you through this bobbing array of dead. He was saying something you paid no particular attention to: “Harrow, it’s not real. Only you can see what you’re seeing, and everything inside the shuttle is illusion. It’s the River. The River is a predator—the dead are in your brain. It’s trying harder with you because you’re fundamentally deeper in it than Ianthe. I didn’t think you’d be able to go this deep, first time in, but you have. Walk back toward me.”

“Two minutes remaining,” said Mercy. And: “They are coming for the source of the noise. I stood on the bank and watched Cassiopeia die, Teacher—”

“—do not rev that engine, Mercymorn—”

“She led them away from the brain; I was there in projection, and I saw when they seized her legs and arms … I was laying stakes for the Beast, and I was there, and I thought to myself, Lord, But what will we do with your ceramics collection? There is so much of it.”

You pressed your hands to your face and were startled all over again that you could not close your eyes. When you pressed the lids down, the light changed, and—you recalled this, as though you had done it before—you lost visual complexity. The shuttle was gone, but the water was not, and the bodies were everywhere. You were lost in a deep aperture. Hot bloody blisters bubbled up from your skin, and you were aware of yourself, not as a structure, but as a sickly radiance: one sickly radiance among other sickly radiances, one, two, three, four, five, all around you, one beneath. The distant scream coalesced. You realised it was coming from you.

Your eyes opened. You looked at the blanketing bodies of the dead children of the Ninth House, were aware of yourself as an ova cluster of two hundred pinpricks of light. You were a sigil: you were an intermingled fire. The fluid was sucked from your sinus cavities, and with it your brain, soon disassembled. You were made small. You were a throat, you were an oven. The water was boiling hot and your skin was sloughing off you in reddened, shrinking frills; those pinpricks boiled within you, and the bodies boiled without—you were a hunger without a stomach. You felt the thanergetic pit inside the coffin, the curve of a childlike jaw, the pallid bow of a dead mouth. You did not understand yourself as standing, nor understood yourself as walking, but you were doing both. You were dying in that hot water; whatever wanted your meat suit could have it.

“Harrowhark,” said God. “Over here—over here, kid. I daren’t touch you. Come toward me. Toward me—Mercy, as you love me, do not push that button.”

“Thirty seconds,” said Mercymorn, and quietly: “Lord, you doom your Houses.”

You could see everything. The shuttle was a tawdry nest of fuselage and metal sheeting, wiped over with plex and antifriction gels; breakable, startlingly so. You could see in a multiplicity of directions. You could see the dead blood ward churning beneath the water, the metal where it had etched itself curling and seizing beneath superheated steam. You could see your live blood, rising up in bright red plumes before you, leaving streaks of red on your robe.

Mercy said, “Twenty-five. The shuttle is becoming porous. I’m starting to feel drag.”

“Hold it.”

Something hit the shuttle like a closed fist: it spun from side to side, going nearly all the way around like a top, and you fell off and away from that needle. You fell to your knees on a soft dead pile of children and stared over your shoulder where Ianthe lay propped up on the floor, shrieking shamelessly in fright.

Mercy did not pay attention. “Twenty seconds.”

“I’ll grab Harrow. Gun it.”

“Oh, thank God, finally–what do you mean, grab—”

“I’m going to have to touch her. Hit the acceleration.”

“Wait, Lord, if she pulls you away—”

“The throttle, Mercy, in Cristabel’s name!” God roared.

She slammed a lever. Five points of light. Ianthe was staring and insubstantial, shuddering out of her lineation as though vibrating straight out of reality. Everything was borne away into this mad and boiling riptide, and when you followed Ianthe’s line of sight, the plex screen of the shuttle was a mass of dead hands, and trailing guts, and water, and blood. From your kneeling point, someone grabbed you from beneath your armpits and dragged you backward; there was a huge and overwhelming sound like some vast machine backfiring, and you kept thinking, Five? but then there was nothing left of you.

8

THE TEA WAS OVERWHELMING, and tasted too much. By choice Harrowhark had only ever drunk water. When she had been younger, or ill, the marshal had made her sugar-water with a drop of preserved lemon in it, as a treat; even then she’d had to take her time over each sip. Each bright citric burst had been half pleasure, half pain on her tongue; the sweetness so acute as to almost hurt her teeth. This new hot stuff tasted like a forest fire. It was with seriously burnt taste buds and no saliva in her mouth that she froze when the dire little man said, smiling: “And perhaps the Locked Tomb will favour us with their intercession?”

What seemed like a thousand eyes turned upon her. With a great internal fury, Harrowhark blanked. It was her cavalier who opened his mouth in the vast, corpsified atrium of Canaan House, and began: “I pray the tomb is shut forever. I pray the rock is never rolled away…”

She did not join him. If one did not begin a prayer in perfect unison, better not to pray belatedly. She listened as Ortus said words she suddenly doubted he even believed, full of a very weary resentment at herself and at people, everywhere. In that rotting hall there were people of all different sizes and postures; apart from the three priests they were all young, or young enough to eyes accustomed to her grey congregation, and they were dressed in a nightmare spectrum of colours and fripperies and materials. Classic constructs stood by dressed in white. She hated it when people dressed constructs; it smacked of whimsy, like making one’s hammer wear a hat. They had provided escort into the hall, dropping big handfuls of something green and white for people to gingerly crush beneath their feet as they walked under the cracked marble arches of the First House dock. She had realised with a thrill of frugal, exotic horror that it was plant matter. Some of those assembled had given fleeting, backward-shoulder glances to her, and to Ortus; and she was aware that she was not imposing—was acutely aware that she might be mistaken for younger, was aware of the optics of Ortus, whose bigness and sadness filled rooms she was already minute within—and their gazes held flickers her eyes were too sore to translate. Fine. That was manageable; that was their mistake to make, whole and entire.

O corse of the Locked Tomb, she prayed silently to herself, the cold death to anyone who looks at me in pity; the heat death to anyone who looks at me in amusement; the quick death to anyone who looks at me in fear.

As Ortus finished, the priests of the First smiled, just a little, and only with their mouths. It occurred to Harrow that the First and the Ninth were the only two Houses that understood how to wait for a thing that would never happen. Her cavalier rounded off the prayer, dolefully: “And so hail to the Lord of the Sharpest Edge, and the gossamer thinness of his blade, and the cleanness of his cut.”

“An ancient epithet!” said the ghastly old man that Harrow would come to curse as Teacher. He looked near death with excitement. He looked close to capering, which filled Harrowhark with a dry and powdery despair. “A classic, unuttered for years even in this House! How may I bless you for that, Ortus the Ninth?”

“Pray only that my bones be one day interred in the Anastasian monument, where even the ghost of the light does not go,” said Ortus, in front of everybody, like an absolute shit. Even in the shadow the heat slapped down on him, and beneath his veil some idiot had painted him with the Skull of the Anchorite Dying, that idiot probably being Ortus. As he wept from the sunshine the alabaster wounds of the Anchorite turned to big runnels of paint. No First priest’s blessing could get him inside the Anastasian, the tomb reserved for warriors: Ortus was only likely to die with a heretic’s blood still wet on his sword if he found a very slow heretic. “That is the only blessing I desire.”

The other priests murmured. “Incredible,” said Teacher. “I love it. I bless you that way, twice. Now, won’t somebody fetch me the box?”