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.”