“He attacked me in my rooms. He drained my personal wards.”

“Coming from the Saint of Duty, that’s a compliment.”

You said, “Lord, I am hunted. I perish.”

“Harrow—”

“I don’t come to you as Harrowhark the First,” your mouth said. “I come to you as a supplicant. I can’t live like this. Lord, do I displease you, that you shield him and not me? I understand that I am a sharpened twig beside your keenest sword, but why do you suffer this twig to live? I can’t live this way. I cannot live this way. I have nowhere to go. I have nobody to turn to. I am a nonsense.”

You looked at each other down that long, bloody table.

God said, “Harrowhark, when was the last time you slept?”

It was with all the dignity of the Locked Tomb, the chill of the stone that had been rolled and of the bones that had been laid, and of the still salt water that shimmered before the whitened monument where your holy monster lay, that you said, “Six days ago.”

The Emperor of the Nine Houses stood.

The spell, whatever it had been, dropped like a white sun setting. Your body collapsed back into your chair. The construct gamely clambering out of the Saint of Duty dwindled to a powder of pink dust. The shard you had been driving up the cervical vertebrae to the base of the spine and the brain within its casing simply disappeared: destroyed or removed, you could not tell. The concatenation of Ortus the First’s insides, laced and crocheted over the dinner table, sizzled away to a soft mist. Everyone’s breath spewed from their lungs in one unholy gasp. Ortus’s hands flew to his middle.

The Emperor did not give anyone time to react further. He said evenly: “Dinner is over. Let us leave the table. Ianthe—take your sister to bed.”

Everyone began clattering out of their chairs in a wild scraping of wood and tile. Augustine said, “My lord—?” and God said, “Go. Just go.”

You felt strange and unreal as a white-lipped Ianthe hauled you up from your seat. The skin she touched was merely a thin and pervious netting keeping in your meat, which consisted of ten thousand spiders. She slung your arm across her shoulders, as though you were an invalid. Perhaps you were. Your legs did not feel correct. Your eldest sister, looking distinctly green around the gills and checking long strands of her overripe-rose hair for globs, had also risen—but the Emperor said, “You. Stay,” and she froze.