The other voice paused. “No,” it said. But then it added, and there was a hint of stoic wretchedness: “Most Holy Saint of Joy—forgive me—I still ask you to please wait until the meeting is done.”

There was an explosive sigh. “It’s all right,” the voice said, quite normally. “It’s all right, Lieutenant, I understand. You’ve only met this baby and the other baby. You’ve never met a Lyctor. You’re not to know … even if you’re in his presence, it’s another thing altogether to understand…”

The voice trailed off, and the person standing behind your chair crossed over to the person in front of it. You were distantly interested in what happened next, if only because you were not used to being granted a front-row seat. You beheld one normal person before you—the other was a black hole, and now you knew why—and that person had two kidneys. A sudden one-two punch of thalergy emerged from nowhere, as far as your senses were concerned—no, not punches: a stiletto, an unutterably focused dart, a syringe—and each kidney was hosed with angiotensins. A perfect spike. Blood pressure plunged. A body joined the shoes and trouser bottoms in front of you as the officer fainted, and the chair was wheeled around the neat human pile.

The voice behind the chair was muttering:

“Horrid … just vile! Erebos placements never do have any horse sense … told him time and time again to rotate them each decade … just a nightmare. My presence ought to have the same effect as a fire alarm … I do not want to wait … I do not want a cup of tea. I am not asking for feudal submission; I am asking for understanding!”

This blast of volume might have made you jump, had your spine been connected. The chair paused in front of one of the elevator shafts; the dark doors whispered open to the rainbow inlay and the hangings of the lift chamber, and the chair was rolled inside. You were busy flexing the ragged end of your dorsal root—you had assumed it must have been severed, which would have been the simplest thing to do, but you realised all at once that it had been tied into a knot. It had been bowed out, twisted, and looped.

The keypad made low, electronic chirrups as somebody pressed down upon it. A mass of fabric whispered past you—you could not feel it on your body, but you felt the air upon your cheek—and then a person knelt in front of your chair. A shining, shimmering billow of pale fabric came into your field of vision, a rainbow-hued whiteness that ran through shades beneath the hot tungsten light, like the reflection of coloured glass on ice, the same stuff that now was draped around you. Then, awfully, your vision was lifted. Someone had pressed a finger lightly beneath your chin, and they were tilting it up so that you could see their face.

You looked at the Lyctor. The Lyctor looked at you.

The face beneath the icy parti-coloured hood was a prim, virginal oval; much in shape and feature like the shape of a saint’s face in a portrait, or a death mask. The nose and jaw and forehead were all carven and serene, and therefore had the same indifferent dullness of a well-formed statue. You noticed the colours first, beneath that harsh and unlovely light: that the hair was a dead flower or apricot colour, and that the skin and lips and brows were of a similar hue, so that beneath the nacreous cowl the saint looked like a painting with a very limited palette; and the eyes …

You had seen a Lyctor’s eyes only once before. Lyctors kept their own faces, but the eyes they stole from someone else. You had been lucky that your own transition was not as startling. This pair of eyes were a slumbrous, sand-tinted hazel with grey-madder clouds within them, like a red hurricane moving over a gaseous mantle, like a storm-ridden planet of red dust. The expression did not match these dreamy and quite beautiful eyes: the expression was paralytically repellent in ways that had nothing to do with your dorsal nerve. It saw right through you, marked what you had done, and let you know that there would be a reckoning. No signs of age touched the corners of those screwed-up, dust-storm eyes, but nonetheless it was a gaze as elderly as Crux’s. There was something in the look she gave you—after she read the whole of your features, as though searching—that puzzled you. Then fell the final indignity. She hooked her finger into the seam of your hood and tugged it down to your neck, so that she could look at your whole face without permission, bloodied skull and all.

You flushed until the tips of your ears were red hot. Fear and humiliation formed a bone hook at the back of your superior articular facet; acrimonious rage drove it forward, caught the loop, and withdrew it backward, as though unknitting your nerves. The scythe of pain that swept over the back of your scalp nearly made you sick again, and you would have been if you had not of late become the Saint of Emesis. You squeezed the nerve flat with the muscles around it and wedged the minute hook back into your spinal mass where it belonged. This resulted in a whole-body case of pins and needles so profound that all you could do was thrash like a fish on the end of a line. The finger was withdrawn. The stormy eyes widened, just fractionally. An emotion was playing out over her face that was—not unfamiliar to you—but nonsensical; you discarded it.

“You oughtn’t to have done that,” she said. “You might have blown out your dorsal nerve and asphyxiated.”

She looked at your face and saw what was so nakedly writ there: disbelief that she could perceive what you’d done. “No, I cannot sense you,” she said, in answer to your unspoken dismay. “But your body is not a mystery to me. I may know it better than you do, you—you Ninth baby.” You were fumbling with the hood with clumsy hands, hiding your face. “How old are you?” she asked abruptly. “How old in years?”

You held your flopping idiot’s head up, to look at her face again. For some reason—and you never needed a reason; you were very good at producing a reaction to no stimulus whatsoever—you became afraid. It was then that the Body emerged from behind the Lyctor’s shoulder, squatting somewhere close to the doors. Her sweet dead face floated a little behind the Lyctor’s. She looked at you with her heavy-lidded, yellow-gold eyes, and she said, quite clearly, with the voice of Aiglamene and your mother commingled:

“Lie, Harrow. Now.”

“Fifteen,” you said immediately, hoping your own meat would not betray you.

She pressed, “Counting from conception, or from birth?”

“Birth.”

That emotion played out over the face again, like the ripple of darkness across a briefly disturbed body of water. The whole body clenched and unclenched. It didn’t matter that she was a black hole to you, without thanergy or thalergy to speak of; it was just a matter of seeing her shoulders. It was relief. It was unalloyed, full-bore relief.

“Yuck,” she said.

The elevator came to a thudding halt. The doors behind the Lyctor opened; she stood, then looked down at you. The relief was gone; the distance remained.

“I have asked the Emperor multiple times why he has allowed himself to sit, exposed, for this long on the edge of the place he must not come back to,” she said. “And the reason turns out to be you. Some lost Ninth scrap who never had anything to do with anything … a nobody. But he acted so surprised … I said, Put an age requirement in the letter! I said, Everyone will be pubescent if you don’t! And now we reap what he sowed. Hiss.” (For a moment you thought you’d had an aural hallucination, that nobody who had lived ten thousand years—that nobody who had lived—would verbalise the word hiss.) “Well, you have three options: you can walk with me now to the shuttle, I can wheel you, or I can drag you. Which do you pick, you half-grown juvenile? I will tell you: the other one walked.”

You stood up. It cost you.

“Good,” she said, looking at you critically. “You look like a bat stuck in a birthday cake and you need at least two haircuts, but you are—you will be—you were—God’s breath, and God’s bones.”

The Lyctor rearranged your hood a little bit and smoothed out the shoulders of your robe—for this you vowed to one day take her dorsal nerve—then looked at the sword webbed into your arm, bent nearly double beneath its weight and your weariness. Her expression said quite clearly what she thought of it, but she had seen your naked face and perhaps seen something there. Perhaps your plans for her dorsal nerve.

“You’re not as pretty as Anastasia” was all she said.