“Slow down, Harrowhark,” he said. “We must talk, you and I, before you ask me for that. I only wish I had more time to explain.”
You took the chilly metal stairs two at a time, feeling your heart ram against serous pericardium, feeling the slim covers of the steps chafing your bare feet. Sharpened by the pain, you wandered between the rows of your silent, sleeping people. You paused over their cradles and stared through the blurry films of skin, with their little radiating burses of veins and cells, at each face in turn. You tried to commit each one to memory, but their features blended together in one amalgam, one sea of strangers newly Ninth. You drifted a little, overawed and dizzy. The Body followed, exactly one half step behind, hand dead calm on the small of your back.
The Emperor kept a respectful distance between himself and his handiwork as you and the Body peered into each casket. Eventually the ranks of bone-and-skin boxes terminated in a clearing of their smaller, more colourful siblings. These were formed of white stone, not osseous matter, and were so freshly carved that the powder of their planing still clung to the sides. They were all of different shapes: some the six-sided funerary box of the deep burial, some the compact hexagon of the ossuary. All were draped in the spectrum of House colours, lacking only black—no empty coffins for your House tonight—except for one plain casket to the side. A little household rose sat atop it, shedding milky blush petals on the stone.
These were the corpses you were aware of before: each a crisp, silent slice of thanergy, without even a flicker of bacterial thalergy pattering over their skins. They were statuesque and incorruptible. The Emperor’s doing, maybe. But some of them were aberrant. You stared with calm vacuity at a six-sided container draped with the Second House’s scarlet and white, which had no human remains inside. The single casket covered in tissue the gorgeous gold of the Third had no one from the Third in residence. Nor could you locate bodies within either of the plain grey-sheeted hexagons intended for the Sixth, though there were pitiable scraps and remains in one: leavings only, much less than a corpse. Something flickered in your nervous system that was a bit like an emotion, but it struggled and died, much to your relief.
You were aware of the Body standing a little way behind you, quite close beside the Emperor. You said: “How will you explain the missing corpses?”
“Among the dubious privileges of the First House,” said God, “is that one is rarely forced to explain.”
“The cavaliers—”
“Have joined their Lyctors,” he said. “It’s not really a lie. It’s simply a flattening of an awesome … and sacramental … truth.”
You said nothing. He said, “We went over Canaan House with a fine-tooth comb when we picked you up. We found nobody alive and no more remains, and whatever end came to those we can’t account for—if an end has come to them—is a mystery I plan on solving. Until then, I have declared them dead. Call me premature, but I’d rather the Houses weep now, Harrowhark, with room for later rejoicing.”
It was the plain, uncovered coffin you stared at, the one with the waxy little rose; you suddenly understood which ancient cancerous corpse was frozen within. Your nervous system tried to process many emotions at once and then shut down entirely. The Body came and turned your face away, but she could not turn back the sudden access of patchwork memory.
The Emperor said gently, “She needs to go home, Harrow.”
You did not look. “And will the Seventh House accept her?”
“That was never home,” he said. “I am taking Cytherea back to sleep with her brothers and sisters.”
You ached. You burnt. The Body’s fingernails ran a smooth, cool rill down your hot cheek, and she made you look instead at the bone-and-skin boxes behind you, at the dead who were only sleeping now and had been privy to the oldest miracle you knew. Part of your promise had been fulfilled. You wanted to be relieved, but no longer recalled how that worked, glandularly speaking.
Now you and God stood facing each other. You could study him without shyness: the shining iridescence of his irises, the unyielding black of the cornea and pupil, the long, square, urbane face. God had very deep lines at his forehead and beneath his eyes. His brows were somewhat sorrowful, but the rest of his face was humourous and mobile, plain and normal. The cool white lights of the docking bay picked out all the parts on his shirt that were shiny with wear, and cast the warm browns of his hands and face into an everyday ochre. If you had seen him and not known you would have thought him utterly nondescript; but you could not look at him and not know. Terrible divinity clung to his skin.
“You could resurrect them,” you said, without bothering to filter much between thought and speech. “You alone are capable of it. But you won’t. Why?”
“For the same reason that I haven’t for ten thousand years,” he said. “For the same reason that I cannot come back to the Nine Houses. The cost is too great.”
You swayed a little. Maybe you fell. The metal grille was beneath your knees, making red sore marks in your flesh, the air through the grate reeking of antistatic pastes. You said into the panels, “Teach me, Lord, how to count that cost.”
God helped you up instead. He put his hands beneath your armpits in a perfectly normal way and raised you to stand, and clasped your arms clumsily—a quick, awkward squeeze, as though wanting to comfort and not knowing how—before he took his hands away. He said, “Harrow, you won’t kneel to me. I won’t let you, not until you know exactly what it means when you do it. It hurts me to see you perform obeisance when—if you knew the full story—you might strike me full in the face instead.”
You coloured at that, and protested, “My God—”
“And you shouldn’t call me God either,” he said. “You don’t comprehend the word, and I don’t want to be God to you yet. You’re an invalid, not a disciple. Listen to me. Can you do that? I hate to push you, Harrowhark, but we have so little time.”
This was not to be borne. “I still maintain some of my faculties, Lord.”
“Well, that’s all anyone can hope for,” he said.
You propped yourself up against the coffin that did not contain Coronabeth Tridentarius, as it was a heavy slab that couldn’t be hurt by your leaning on it. The sword was making your back ache. The Kindly Prince watched you try to stand, your shoulders bowing beneath the steel, and then he said: “Harrow, we’re still just outside the Dominicus system. Once you’re better, we will send the Erebos to the Ninth House, and it will deliver what I said to you it would deliver. Then it will go from House to House to give them back their dead—but I won’t be on it. You can choose to part ways with me. Or you can come with me as my Hand. In a real sense, it’s up to you.”
You tried to remember what you had said when you had first woken up aboard the Erebos; what you had said when first faced with your Resurrector. But you couldn’t. “I chose—”
“In ignorance,” he said. “It was no choice. Listen.”
He went to half-lean against the bulkhead closest to the plain coffin, put his tablet atop it, and let his hand rest upon the unadorned surface quite close to the little rose. The Emperor said, “Harrowhark, what happens when somebody dies?”