The blood was still wet beneath your toes, although thinning out somewhat; it trailed in a nearly black ribbon down past the filtration rooms, and you followed it out to the exhausts. It dripped down a short flight of metal stairs into a wide, deep room within the station, not so thickly built up with the accretion of computers and mechanisms from upstairs. You could understand the great scope of the Mithraeum in here. Tall oblong plex windows were set high in the walls, and wads of thermal foam nuzzled up against a little bunker, windowless and solid, with huge valves set in it travelling up through the walls and into chambers unknown. You did not yet know why the station had an incinerator: as far as you knew, it recycled rather than destroyed its waste. Mechanical arms dangled overhead, waiting to place things into the incinerator via a roof-hatch. Partway up the main wall, above the bunker, was a tiny plex-fronted control booth, which you could see no way of accessing; the door must have been somewhere back up the stairs.

The blood ended abruptly at the door of the incinerator. As though in a dream, you followed it to its terminus. Set in the door was an immensely thick plex panel, yellowed from old fire, and you peered through it.

Ortus the First lay propped against the wall at the back of the incineration chamber. His chest was a neat, bloody void where the spearhead had gone precisely through his heart. It would have meant instant death for a normal human being, even a skilled adept. He lay with his chin lolled down on his chest. There was nobody else in the incinerator with him.

The showdown between you and the Saint of Duty was already over. Your enemy had been killed without you laying a finger upon him. You felt, dimly, cheated.

The Saint of Joy and the Saint of Patience were—distracted—with another matter, that matter being God and a heretical three-way division of saliva. Ianthe had walked away from you, all split lips and gay loneliness; had she walked, less drunk with every step, toward the little room where Ortus bent over a dead woman? Was his ruined heart a gesture for your benefit? Would she leave so much blood; would she come here?

Ortus’s corpse heaved for breath inside the incinerator, and coughed, though you could not hear the sound.

You watched as, trembling, he slapped a hand to hide his nude and livid wound. All around him, the incinerator mechanism rumbled to life. You spun away and looked up. In the protected plex booth stood Cytherea, spotlit by the strong white light from the panels above her, leaning heavily upon some handle within; a dead woman staring at you through dark and filmy eyes, her face freckled with drying blood, petals in her limp ringlets.

The flesh was dead, but the hate in that face was alive and well and living. You looked at the walking corpse within the cramped control booth, that wraith of irradiated loathing, and as you were frozen by that gaze she shouldered forward—moving as though throwing her limbs; moving as though she wore her body weightily as lead, and each joint’s flexure meant heaving an enormous mass—and, keeping her eyes on yours, she flipped a switch.

The valves groaned and popped with heat. They sounded like the acceleration of some great engine. And Cytherea turned, and with each limb dangling out of time with its mate, she limped away.

Within the incinerator, Ortus looked at you. In the shadows of the incinerator, his eyes seemed very dark. There was no bloom of necromantic power, nor move to save himself: the third saint to serve the King Undying stared at you with something very like helplessness, lying there with his heart exploded, a man before the flame.

You thought that you might gather up his ashes in a box and keep them. You imagined what kind of construct might be made from the bricks and mortar of the bones of a sacred Hand, a man who in an act of sacred transgression had used another human soul to fire the ravenous battery of his heart. You thought about sleeping for six whole hours a night, in a bed alone. You thought about proving your sanity: to Ianthe, to Mercy, to God. You prepared to follow Cytherea—to run on bare feet back up those stairs, into the filtration rooms, and to head off that loping, shambling cadaver at the pass. You imagined the answer to that mystery.

And then you iced your hands over with thick wads of cartilage, slid them into the handle of the door, and pulled with all your might. It did not respond. Living bone burst from your fingertips in grossly exaggerated distal tips, and you snapped them off at their bleeding edge. The pain distracted you, and you screamed aloud, to focus. This bone you unfolded into a seething web of phalanges and nuggety clumps of palm bones, pressed into the door; then those distal tips you turned into fluid, and this fluid you turned into liquid ash a micrometre thick, a very—weeny—construct. You syruped this broth through the microscopic crack in the door’s seam. The incinerator’s mechanism ignited somewhere in the vents above you with a thump—the Saint of Duty followed the flow of a nozzle spraying transparent liquid before his feet—and you wrenched the door from its hinges; you tossed it down the breadth of the room, in a mad, idiot, beautiful rush, and you walked straight into the petals of a chemical fire. An alarm shrieked overhead as though it too were roasting to death.

In the second that you saw the ruddy white surge of flame, you did not know it was hot enough to melt steel. You only saw the steps of what you had to do. One of the arms with the liquid-ash fingertips had resolved into two skeletons behind you, their outside layers wet with regenerating ash. You rocketed them forward to drag Ortus by the legs. You exploded their spines into a solid wall of regrowing bone, into a rushing avalanche of reeking, liquid, perpetual marrow, plunging it into that fire as a thousand-layered barrier, the fire versus the bone, unfolding and unfolding and unfolding as the flames burned and burned and burned. You stripped the fucking enamel from your own teeth and added that to the squelching, scorching layer. It was the first time, as a Lyctor, exploding such tonnage of bone into an incinerator’s flame, that you looked upon the limit of your power: and that limit still stretched so far out into the goddamn distance that it was out of your sight.

The incinerator buckled. The alarm screamed. You grabbed Ortus and pulled him down the side of the room as a mass of hot melted bone sludged from the door. You dragged him away from that singeing, choking, killing mass, and you laid him against the bulkhead.

He was almost totally incapacitated. His eyes were closed. You moved his hands away and looked more closely at that shattered heart; the wounds were closing, but slowly, far more slowly than you would have expected. His cyanosed lips bespoke terrible effort as his heart knit back together. He was a myriad-old Lyctor. You did not understand.

The Saint of Duty said, with a kind of hoarse solemnity: “Fresh blood wards. Every night.”

You said, too surprised not to sound like a moron: “What?”

He said, “Can’t bleed thalergy … not fresh thalergy. Thanergy, easy. Mixed with thalergy … much harder. No bone wards. Blood wards. Understand? Fresh blood wards. Each night. Can’t break those.”

This was all said in staccato, at the apex of each wheezing breath. The incinerator continued to spew out a white-hot lahar of semi-liquid bone, and it smelled ferocious. The Saint of Duty did not open his eyes. He just concluded doggedly: “You’ll be safe from us.”

There were smarter questions to be asked in response. The one that came to you first—and in your defence it was not a bad one—was: “Why?”

He did not answer. He buckled as he turned his head and coughed, more wetly. Then he reached out, and he put his bloody hand to your head, nearly covering your face, the tips of his fingers to your temples and your cheeks, like a smothering, or a benediction.

“I know you’re there,” he rasped. “Kill me all you like. I would know you in the blindness of my eyes … in the deafness of my ears … as a shadow smudged against the wall, annihilated by light … stop. Not here. Not now. Let it go, love. I just want the truth … after all this time.”

Ortus dropped his hand and said, with intent: “Just tell me—back then—why you brought along the ba—”

A voice down at the other end of the room bellowed: “Harrow!”

It was God, at the stairs. Mercymorn, dishevelled, was beside him. A few steps behind was Augustine, even more dishevelled, with lipstick on his collar. Ortus did not continue. You stood, the air sizzling the ends of your hair, slapping your face. The Emperor stood on the bloodied steps opposite you, amid the wail of the alarm. The incinerator wheezed dolefully—someone was moving in the little plex office—and then clanked off. With a sudden white shock to the sinuses the bone gunge melted to fine powder, and then, as you looked, dwindled to invisible soft dust.

You said insistently, “Why I brought along what? What do you mean?” but Ortus had opened his eyes now, with all their bizarre green sweetness, and he was staring up through you and up through the ceiling as though he could see through the very hull of the Mithraeum; and he looked up, and beyond you, and he said no more.

* * *

How much God believed your side of events—how much you believed, in relating the story, hot with adrenaline and regret and the helpless self-doubting rage of the psychotic who knew what she saw and was still able to dismiss it—was not clear. He was very weary. The buttons of his shirt had been done up with the wrong buttons in the wrong holes. You were acutely aware of his displeasure, but did not entirely understand it.