In these digestions of time the Body would come. She would put her cool, dead hands on your forehead and close your pumping eyelids with her fingertips, so that you could not see the sword nor the people.

This was great honour. This was great mercy. She always came to you now with such easy forbearance, and you were so grateful for it, you were so relieved. The Body’s hands were grey with death and they were so soft and familiar on your skin, so much so that you were absolutely sure you could really feel them; that this time around, the dead caress was tangible. And when the Body turned so that you could see her face you were amazed, as ever, by that beauty unblemished by breath.

Then she would draw you back to your bed and direct you to sleep. For the Body you tried to be obedient, for once in your benighted life; it seemed beneath you not to. When the Body appeared time could be relied upon to work as it ought, rather than melting away like chips of ice only to reappear in unexpected places. But at these times your brain kept nagging itself to stay conscious. The fact that the Body had come to you now seemed tremendously important, if only you could stay awake long enough to figure out why.

And your face itched from the dried blood, and all around you the people whispered, Thousand kilos of osseo—old—keep that, that’s the first thing we run out of— No, Sergeant, ditch it; we’re behind schedule already.

* * *

Your world was a white and sterile box. This box was the hospital quarter on board the Erebos. The Erebos was the Behemoth-class flagship of the Emperor Undying. These facts you held on to like an asphyxiating man to a last lungful of air. You lived in a cool, colour less room of dismantled beds and cartons, and you had for your own a bed and a chair and a sword. They had tried to remove your sword, once—they had tried to take it away on some pretext you could not exactly remember—and you were perturbed in some distant way by that memory, which was red, and wet, and ill defined.

They no longer touched your two-hander. It appeared and reappeared around the room wherever you had dropped it, usually accompanied by the mysterious smell of upchuck. You now slept beside it, like it was your large steel infant. Truth be told you would have been happy hurling the thing straight into the hot heart of Dominicus, as it was loathsome to you and you were convinced it wanted to do you harm; but it was very important that it should not be placed in anyone else’s hand.

This didn’t stop you from dulling the blade, nicking the polish, and altogether fucking up the edge, as you vaguely knew you were. You knew so little about swords—you had never bothered to ask; you could barely differentiate between them. Some were narrow. Some were broad. Some were big, some were small. This two-handed soldier’s sword was huge and aberrant and frankly malicious, and utterly your responsibility—even if you could not touch it without power-heaving.

Sometimes you knelt by your bed and tried to pray. With the Body there, you had nobody to thank and no intercession to request. Your greatest peace you found in that half-asleep, druglike state on the bed, holding your heartbeat low before the cold white stars, sick with a fury you kept forgetting existed and were corrupted by possessing. Around you, people would go back and forth, giving you the widest berth possible, ignoring you so entirely that at one point you were convinced you were dead. With that conviction, you had felt only intense relief.

2

GOD STOOD IN YOUR DOORWAY and said, “You’ve thrown up again, Harrowhark.”

You always tried to thrust yourself back into full consciousness for the Emperor of the Nine Houses, who regularly had the grace to knock on the door and wait for entry to be granted, proving by itself his divinity. He stood now at the threshold with his ever-present flimsy and ever-present tablet; a cluster of uniformed people tailed him, but his monstrous eyes, oil on carbon, were only for you. “You’re losing all your muscle,” he said, “and you didn’t have much to start with.”

Your mouth said, with gratifying clarity: “Why does a Lyctor need a sword? Lord, what use can we have of one? I can control bone. I can shape flesh and evoke spirit. I no longer need outside thanergy. Why anything so crude as a sword?”

“Nice to hear you’re feeling better,” he said. “I’m not going to talk philosophy with you, not when you’ve spent the last three hours venting your gut.” (Had you?) “I’m not a monster. Go rinse your teeth. I don’t care that you can fill your own cavities, not looking after those things seems wasteful.”

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.”