You had no room for personal feeling right then. You were assaulted by the sensory data from seven hundred and eight pulmonary muscles. Every body on board felt like the awareness of a meal cooking, a good smell, a pillar of something hot and rich. Their thanergy and thalergy rippled in and around each other like a bloom, or like light playing over metal. And there were more: you could hear on the edge of your senses a deeper, sleeping seethe of life and death, a huge body count, but muffled. You felt the dead in some onboard morgue—ten bundles of discrete dead, of thanergy with the rot of thalergy arrested, snap-frozen. The stillness of this thanergy was profound: not even a body in ice was so still.

You realised that the Body had stopped moving, and that the Emperor was waiting quietly for you.

You said, “I’m very tired of this convalescence, Lord.”

“If I had it my way it would take months, not weeks,” he said. “I would let you come back, bit by bit, until you felt entirely ready to wake up. I can’t. I mastered Death, Harrowhark; I wish I’d done the smarter thing and mastered Time. I have to ask you to get ready soon, and so I am going to show you something I hope might … trigger your readiness.”

You were deeply and gravely relieved by his understanding, by his tact. It kept you awake and alive all throughout your trip down the elevator, even though the elevator took full minutes to sail through the enormity of the Erebos. You had never seen anything so fresh and new. You focused on the lovely silver-and-black chasing on the metal boards, the inlaid panels of rainbow colour, the skull above the door that some artistic adept had fashioned into the skull of the First; someone’s bones beautifully moulded into that central sign with the eight answering Houses around it. The skull of your House looked plain and silent next to the others. Soft dark hangings obscured the plex and the metal and the antiquated LED gleam of electronics.

Then the doors whispered open to a cavernous, echoing space where an overhead speaker was announcing, “Our God the Emperor sees fit to grace the second cargo hold,” and you perceived many people moving away—stray Cohort officers in their white jackets making themselves scarce, bowing quickly, stopping their work to leave their lord in privacy. Their scuttling footsteps sounded like fleeing animals.