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?”