There was a terrific crash from out in the corridor, followed by a hideous creaking as, close by, a girder came down. The noise was awesome. It was as though the world were screaming and bending all about them. The Fifth House spirit-caller lost her reserve, and took Harrow’s hands in her own, and said: “I’m so sorry, Harrow. I wish it were different. I am so tremendously sorry.”

The ceiling above them buckled and shuddered, but held. Harrow looked at the stricken faces before her: at the now-sombre lines of the cavalier of the Fifth, his jolly face achieving a certain supernatural dignity; his historian wife, a woman whom she now knew could never be properly avenged. The tragedy of the genius and the useless death. The irreparable loss to the universe.

As though the universe could withstand more holes; as though the fabric of the universe had not become a series of lacework cut-outs linked by the thin, snappable joins of those who remained. Could the pattern sustain itself, with such absences? Could she, who had once thought herself well-versed in absence, endure alone? The answer was so obviously no; she was not even ready to have the question put to her.

And yet—and yet—

Harrowhark said, “You’ve got to go before the roof comes down on you.”

Abigail gave a weary, rueful half smile. A very Fifth House embarrassment. “Not until you tell me what you’re doing. In loco parentis, you see. I’m afraid I feel responsible for you, and need you to promise me you’ll live.”

“Gideon decided that for me,” said Harrow. She was not really afraid; it was only that her hands were, and were shaking independent of her feelings.

The first falling chunk of ceiling landed with heavy, balletic stillness, causing them all to stumble from the shockwave. Abigail, Dulcie, and Harrow momentarily cowered beneath the automatic and totally useless arm Magnus had thrown over them, a sort of optimistic human umbrella. Harrowhark said briskly, “Pent; Quinn; Septimus. I’m poor with thanks and worse at goodbyes. Therefore, I won’t bother with them.”

Magnus said, “Have you—”

“Someday I’ll die and get buried in the ground and you can take it up with me then,” said Harrow, and found, after all, that she was not really speaking to them. “Until then—I am afraid that I have to live.”

“Then this is not goodbye,” said Abigail, and she reached forward to brush a stray lock of hair behind Harrowhark’s ear, which was an instinct Harrow could not find it within herself to feel humiliated by. “I believe that we will see each other again.”

Magnus said quickly: “Jeanne said to tell Gideon hi. If you see her before we do—”

“Though try not to with any great hurry,” said the Fifth spirit-caller.

And then that same blue shimmer, and they were gone, without fanfare, leaving her alone—with Dulcinea Septimus.

The soft ripples within the bubble had not claimed the Seventh. She stood there amid the falling dust and the noises of shrieking steel, her skin like thin awful gossamer and her short sugar-brown curls stuck to her scalp with the ghost of sweat and blood. Harrowhark, bewildered and stricken, drew closer to her as the world fell all around them.

“Oops! It’s me again, never doing what I’m told,” said Dulcie. “One more moment, please.”

Harrow said, curt with bemusement, “Hurry up and go. If I ever stand before Palamedes Sextus again, I have no desire to explain to him why I put Dulcinea Septimus back in danger.”

“I’m going to risk staying here for a moment and getting squashed into nothingness instead, actually,” she said. “The Seventh says nothingness is the only truly beautiful thing anyway, so nyah.”

“Septimus, if this is about ensuring I get back into my body safely, you can trust me not to change my mind.”

Dulcinea, with that strange face that was at once the twin to Cytherea’s and yet nothing like it, smiled an extraordinarily rueful little smile that never would have fit the Lyctor’s face. She reached up and clasped one of Harrow’s hands between her own as one of the corridors to their left came down completely.

“Actually, I’ve got something to tell you,” she said.

50

THIRTY MINUTES BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER

THE WHOLE TIME IANTHE was leading me down those creepy, rainbow-swagged corridors, Harrow, I was wondering what the fuck had happened to you. I’d been pretty convinced that at any moment I’d find myself floating back down in the water, and there you’d be, ready to save my ass from shaking hands with the Emperor of the Nine Houses. I’d never wanted to meet God. Nobody ever met the Emperor in any of the comic books. God only ever appeared as a letter to somebody getting written out of the story, because they had to go serve the Prince Undying. I was irrationally convinced that the act of seeing God—that was the end of the story. Space was being cleared for a new character.

We stopped before a totally nondescript door, halfway open—and I mean nondescript, the doors to the rooms of the Emperor could’ve been mistaken for broom cupboards—and Ianthe stopped dead.

I cottoned on; that door wasn’t meant to be open. Ianthe pressed a finger to her lips and noiselessly pushed that door further open; we crept into a dimly lit and equally boring little foyer, with another half-open door on our left into a weirdly familiar sitting room. It nagged at the back of my brain: I knew you’d been there, but it was strange how some memories were like my own and some memories were whispers through a hole in the wall. Tridentarius pressed herself up against the wall next to the sitting room, so she could see through the gap, and I did the same because yes, okay, pretty curious.

In the room was Cytherea. Cytherea’s body, her back to us. She had been neatly tied to a chair with a band of angry-looking tendon. I couldn’t see whoever was talking to her.

“—not a difficult question,” someone said, without any particular concern. “It’s not as though you have anything to hide. I just want to know—how? Seriously, I’m more impressed than angry.”

The voice was still gravel. “I charge you with acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the human race—”

“Commander.”

“—for which the only sentence is death; repeated mass killings, the utter disintegration of institutions political and social, languages, cultures, religions, all niceties and personal liberties of the nations, by use of—”

“Commander Wake,” he said. It sounded like he scrubbed a hand over his face; there was a muffled exhalation. “I’ve heard this all before.”

“Call me by my full name, or don’t name me at all. I’ll be damned if I pass up the chance to hear you speak the words.”

The Emperor of the Nine Houses sighed.

“Commander Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead,” he said.

“All of it.”

“I can’t believe you feel like you’re in position to demand things of me.”

“All of it, Gaius!”

There was the preparatory sound of indrawn breath.

“Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity,” he recited, all in one breath. “Correct?”

“They’re dead words—a human chain reaching back ten thousand years,” said the corpse. “How did they feel?”

“Genuinely sad, bordering on very funny,” said God. “Can we talk?”

There was silence in that room. The tangled dead hair was very still. He said: “You’ve been trying to commit suicide by cop ever since I found you, Wake. I know when someone’s trying to get me to do something, and you’re acting like a woman who very much wants me to end her life.”

“Telepathy,” she said. “Did the ten billion give you that too?”

“Wish they had,” said the Emperor. “Wake, you’re acting like your mission’s over, and you want me to take you out of the equation.” Silence. “What was the mission?” Silence. “How did it end? What were you trying to do?”

“I’m not going to talk to you.”

“We both know that’s not true.”

A tiny ceramic clink. The Emperor was probably having tea. Ianthe stared into the middle distance, packing herself as tightly into the corner as possible. We shared the corner with a white robe on a hook, and she actually wormed herself behind the robe, like we were playing hide-and-seek. So I did too, and had to watch whatever the fuck was going on through a thin veil of robe, next to Ianthe, so please feel some sympathy for me here.

He said, “Blood of Eden died with you, Wake. Any further action is just agonal breathing.”

“We both know that’s not true.”

“You never would have fired nukes into my fleet.”

“Yeah, you know a hell of a lot about me,” said the corpse. “Perhaps almost as much as I know about you.”