No servants here, in the bolthole of the Necrolord Prime. Not a construct in sight. You all cooked your own food—or at least, Mercymorn cooked, and Augustine cooked, and even God himself cooked—you did not know about the other. Augustine was deigning to teach Ianthe, or at least make the attempt, but you did not see cookery in your future. You so rarely ate for pleasure that it was beyond imagining that you would become a normal human being who learnt how to make a sandwich. You were born of the Ninth House even if you had risen to the First, and you were happy with a cold collation. Ingredients could be taken from the storeroom and eaten as they were, in the broad steel kitchens so antique in their style: chrome-brushed countertops, wide square ovens, and a ring where a gas-lit fire came out if you swivelled a dial. Often you could find the Emperor of the Nine Houses there, sitting at one of the plex counters and drinking from a chipped mug of hot coffee.

He was wholly Teacher now. His personal sitting room, a quietly appointed little space with a few chairs and a low table all comfortably faded with wear, had become a familiar sanctum. The rest of his private chambers remained a forbidden tomb. You’d traditionally been drawn to forbidden tombs, but this one repelled even your curiosity. The doors were always locked, and you nurtured no ambition to see them otherwise. He often summoned you for a theoretical lesson, or the cups of tea you still hated but would have rather seen your skin flagellated off than say so, or simply to sit in silence. He had a trick of asking you to come over and talk, and then never actually talking, but sitting with you watching the asteroids continue their graceful orbit around a thanergenic star.

Once you found him with a sheaf of flimsy spread out over the low table—months-old reports—and he was embarrassed; God was embarrassed. “I still think about it,” he confessed. “The eighteen thousand … the radiation missiles … Augustine says thinking about it before we endure Number Seven is folly, but the way I see it, if I fail with Number Seven nothing matters; if we win, then this is the thing that matters most.”

It was always I when God ideated failure, as though the rest of you were not accountable for anything. You sat in your lustrous white robe, trying to appreciate the taste of black tea with milk in it, trying to look as though you might at any moment take the hard biscuit and place it in the tea as he did—the God of the Unstilled Mandible always gave you a biscuit—and you said, “Who did it, Lord?”