Swaying on your feet, you rose from the bed like a ghost from the tomb and went over to the nearby sink, where you parted your shitty veil and resentfully rinsed your teeth with antiplaque. There was an urgent murmuring from the asteroid belt of aggravated Cohort officers, with the Emperor saying, “Yes,” then, “No,” and “Don’t bother with new plating. They’ll be using the Erebos for transport.”
Another officer said, “My gracious lord, the loyal Saint of Joy…”
“Has not yet learned to wait,” said God. “Hold the comms. I answered three of them just this morning.”
“But her order countermands—”
“A Lyctor’s order is the order of God and should be carried out with the same grace you would have honoured me with,” he said. “Except for right now. Station the last person to graduate Trentham on the stele and tell them to make static noises if she keeps it up.”
“Lord?”
“Air blown through the teeth, tongue high, hand flaps up and down over the mouth. Sounds suspect, I know, but she’s never caught on when I’ve done it.”
You spat into the sink. In the mirror, you perceived the Body, waiting quietly beside you; she wore a turquoise hospital shift exactly the same as your own, her hair shimmered over with frost, her exquisite mouth a hard and ready line. There was a sword strapped to the Body’s back—you met God’s gaze in the mirror, and for a moment you were convinced he could see her too, that he beheld you both—but it was a trick of the eye.
“Harrowhark,” he said, “I would like you to come with me.”
The grave and unslept faces of the officers surrounding him gave a sort of communal wince. One said, very low and very quiet: “Forgive me, Kindly Prince, but let me bring to your awareness that the Admiral of the Dead Sea and the Admiral of the Ceaseless Fleet began their meeting … ten minutes ago.”
The Emperor said: “No meeting will raise eighteen thousand dead. I need time with Harrowhark the First. Please attend to me in the Old Chamber ten minutes hence.”
The attachés drifted apart as though they had suddenly lost fixity, all moving down the corridor at barely less than a run. You were afraid someone might take your sword away from you if you left it; rather than lifting it, you lay down next to where it glowered at you blackly from the bed. You rolled over onto its flat steel breadth and bound crisscross straps of dense bone across your back, around the blade, around the hilt. Straining beneath its weight, with nothing but a ripped-up sheet to mask you, pathetic in your turquoise nudity, you found yourself accompanying the Emperor down long black corridors, trying to fix yourself in time and space.
You were basically naked. The sword weighed you down so much that you were affecting a hump. Your Inglorious Mask was a patchwork of flaking osteology. You looked like an imbecile.
God was murmuring to himself: “Please … as though any Admiralty meeting ever ended after twenty minutes.”
You said, with difficulty: “What is happening to me?”
“You’ve had a shock,” said the Emperor, which was not an answer, actually.
“Does this happen to all new Lyctors?”
“Some of them,” he said vaguely, which did not fill you with relief. His tablet started to softly peep, and after a cursory glance he shoved it in his pocket. “How are you feeling right now?”
You had no room for personal feeling right then. You were assaulted by the sensory data from seven hundred and eight pulmonary muscles. Every body on board felt like the awareness of a meal cooking, a good smell, a pillar of something hot and rich. Their thanergy and thalergy rippled in and around each other like a bloom, or like light playing over metal. And there were more: you could hear on the edge of your senses a deeper, sleeping seethe of life and death, a huge body count, but muffled. You felt the dead in some onboard morgue—ten bundles of discrete dead, of thanergy with the rot of thalergy arrested, snap-frozen. The stillness of this thanergy was profound: not even a body in ice was so still.
You realised that the Body had stopped moving, and that the Emperor was waiting quietly for you.
You said, “I’m very tired of this convalescence, Lord.”
“If I had it my way it would take months, not weeks,” he said. “I would let you come back, bit by bit, until you felt entirely ready to wake up. I can’t. I mastered Death, Harrowhark; I wish I’d done the smarter thing and mastered Time. I have to ask you to get ready soon, and so I am going to show you something I hope might … trigger your readiness.”
You were deeply and gravely relieved by his understanding, by his tact. It kept you awake and alive all throughout your trip down the elevator, even though the elevator took full minutes to sail through the enormity of the Erebos. You had never seen anything so fresh and new. You focused on the lovely silver-and-black chasing on the metal boards, the inlaid panels of rainbow colour, the skull above the door that some artistic adept had fashioned into the skull of the First; someone’s bones beautifully moulded into that central sign with the eight answering Houses around it. The skull of your House looked plain and silent next to the others. Soft dark hangings obscured the plex and the metal and the antiquated LED gleam of electronics.
Then the doors whispered open to a cavernous, echoing space where an overhead speaker was announcing, “Our God the Emperor sees fit to grace the second cargo hold,” and you perceived many people moving away—stray Cohort officers in their white jackets making themselves scarce, bowing quickly, stopping their work to leave their lord in privacy. Their scuttling footsteps sounded like fleeing animals.
You were on a steel-frame balcony overlooking a field of hundreds and hundreds of oblong boxes. Each was a body long and half a body tall, and all were constructed of bone—their lines and ranks so dizzyingly even that it took you a while to comprehend them, as your eyes kept wavering and crossing. The chill breeze of the recyc air ruffled your smock and goose-pimpled your thighs, but the cold kept you conscious, and you wanted to be conscious. The bone of the boxes gleamed less purely white than the amalgam metal and plasticised panels that made up the sides of the hold, and the bone was topped with a soft transparent skin so taut and fine you could see through it, and through it was—
“My promised gift. Your renewed House,” said the Emperor.
When he looked at your face, he cautioned you gently: “It’s a little under five hundred, and only a third will display necromantic aptitude, and the same for their next generation. They’re all between the ages of fifteen and forty, which I thought was easiest.”
“Oh my God,” you said, forgetting that the deity in question was right there. “The ancient dead. You’ve committed resurrection.”
He said, “No. I haven’t truly resurrected anyone in ten thousand years. But at that time … I set many aside, for safety … and I’ve often felt bad about just keeping them as insurance. They’ve been asleep all this myriad, Harrow, and it’s frankly a relief to my mind to wake them up. I’ll begin the process of bringing them to the surface before they’re shipped off to the Ninth.”
You unpinned your cloth mask so that you could look with your whole face, only a little ashamed to show it so nakedly to the Emperor. He, after all, had seen it before. A sick hope rose in you like nitrogen bubbles in a diver, and you forgot yourself: “Let me go with them,” you said. “Not long. Just enough to introduce them to my House—my seneschal—enough time to tell them—”