You began to find Augustine alone in the training room. He did nothing so pedestrian and comforting as training, but stared—paced—thought about reaching for his rapier, then abandoned the idea and left. Augustine had been in training for the past ten thousand years. You did not know what his idea of training looked like. More often you found Ianthe with him, going through motions with an unresponsive, fat-fingered ham-handedness that was not in keeping with her poise. She always wore an expression of exquisite, hardened surrender on her face, as though to say: You do realise I’m not going to do this?

You only ventured in there yourself far too late into sleeping hours for anyone else to be up. Then you would strip down to your shirt and exoskeleton, and your trousers and your bare feet—and you would hold the two-handed sword in front of you, and lift it up—and point it down—and do a long and unutterably dull series of minute movements, trying to feel normal, trying to understand. You tried hard, in a way that would have broken the heart of any actual swordswoman. If your arms responded more ably now, if you were able to lift, and slowly strike, then it would not save your life at the hands of a Herald, a thing that none of your teachers had yet managed to describe.

“Imagine,” said Augustine meditatively, when you asked, “imagine—the worst bee, but with a blood aspect, if you knew the whole time that it was a multitude of bloods. I’m talking at least three different types of blood, here.”

“The last time I fought one, I did it with my eyes closed,” said Mercymorn in her turn, and finished as though her punchline was a triumph: “When I opened them—they had bled anyway!!”

“Do you know, I have rarely seen the Heralds?” said God, when you finally came to question him. “Whenever they come I am bundled off to a sealed sanctum at the heart of the Mithraeum, so that their insanity can’t touch me. Despite all that soundproofing, I hear them … I always hear them.”

You said, “Lord—”

“Teacher—”

“The Saint of Joy will be active, when we are all in the River,” you said. “And the Saint of Duty, and the Saint of Patience. And Ianthe. Four Lyctors, fighting with their cavaliers’ perfect sword hands. Teacher, is it so sure a thing that I am going to die? I will be dormant, I know, but are they not enough to protect our bodies, as we destroy the brain?”

“Ianthe is far from a perfect sword hand.”

You did not know why you defended her: “She will perform on the day, Teacher. It’s a pose.”