How long you lay on the cool glassy tiles, forehead pressed into a red welter against clear obsidian glass, one of your fists bunched in the rough knotted fretwork of the rug, you did not know. You could only mark the passing of time when the habitation settings kicked into action and the panels around the room diffused pre-waking light, intended to mimic a circadian sunrise. You were cold all over, shivering in your exoskeleton until the bone cuticles rattled into your skin. At some point you stood, mechanically, and you went and lay back down in bed. There was nothing else you could do.

It seemed unlikely that you slept. When you thought it was late enough in the notional morning you put on your mother-of-pearl robe and you rapped on Ianthe’s door. It was not late enough; she answered after a long, scuffling minute, with sleep in her eyes and her hair in dilute whey tangles over her neck and shoulders, wearing a bewildering short garment of violet chiffon.

You said instantly: “Septimus is walking.”

It took a moment for her to understand the name that had never been Cytherea’s. After long seconds, recognition flashed in those adulterated blue eyes; you saw understanding replace the grouchy morning crossness; you saw it fade before an overwhelming boredom, and you knew that Ianthe would not help you.

“Tell her I want my arm back,” she said, and slammed the door in your face.

ACT THREE

23

FOUR MONTHS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER

YOU WERE AWARE, as a hand thrust into cold water might not notice until too late that the water had begun to boil, that an atmosphere of greater unease had settled over the Mithraeum.

It would have taken an absolute straight-up idiot not to notice though. When you were all called to the interminable dinners for which Augustine hinted you should “dress”—which you took to mean that you should wear your mother-of-pearl robe by way of ritual, and which Ianthe took to mean that she should wear things beneath hers that were not worth looking at, and pin her mass of pale hair on top of her head, and which meant that God never came in a shirt that didn’t badly want a new collar—it became brutally obvious. The Lyctors now ate all their dinners staring at tablets. Sometimes Mercymorn spread open a system map of local space, triangulating things that the elders frowned over and talked about in a way that did not include you or Ianthe. Quite often you two ate dinner in stony silence while, as Ianthe bitterly put it, the adults talked.