There were many uniformed people in that room, but they were used to these antics. Harrowhark the First, ninth saint to serve the Emperor Undying, might throw up as much as she cared to. You were a walking sacrament, even if your early contributions to Lyctorhood seemed to be finding new and different ways to puke. They only intervened if it looked like you might choke to death on your own vomit, a mercy that you always vaguely thought a shame.

The first time the man you called God had delivered you the sword—in what seemed to you his aspect of the Kindly Prince, intending only gentleness—you’d fallen into a deep stupor from which you had never really risen. Maybe the sword had reified your grief into six feet of steel. You had loathed that thrice-damned blade from sight, which might have been unfair before you knew it loathed you in return.

You kept trying to wield it, all the same. Each touch ended with the contents of your stomach splattered colourfully on the floor. Your days dissolved like ashes in front of a fan—scattered beyond any hope of retrieval—blown back into your face or fluttering upward beyond your grasp. Sometimes you would rise, and you’d take up the blade, as though in expectation of something. Nothing ever happened; you felt nothing except the sword’s enormous, empty hate of you, which you knew to be real, even then. You and the sword would seethe in your mutual bitterness and fury, and then you would end up with blistered hands and a floor’s worth of vomit.

Details sat at awkward angles to one another. You’d been in this bed some time, wearing clothes that weren’t yours. Occasionally ticklish rasps at your ears or forehead would frighten you numb before you realised it was your own hair. Away from Drearburh shears, it grew in a way that was almost debauched. You would cut it yourself and still find irregular little licks of it tucked behind your ears—or maybe you had not cut it at all. Sometimes, in reaching up to it, you would then recall that you had no robe or skeletal mask. Nobody had given you any paint and there wasn’t a stick of grease on board the whole ship, though even if there had been it would not have been blessed properly. The first time this happened, in your hot upset and shame, you ripped a sheet to shreds and covered your head with that. This still left most of your forehead nude, discounting the hair. Also, you were wearing a bedsheet. You took the poetic way out and used a black vestal’s last-choice gambit: you opened a vein and, trembling neither from pain nor blood loss, daubed blind upon your skin the sacramental skull of the Inglorious Mask.