“There were nine. We called them by number. Over ten thousand years, we have managed to take out a grand total of five. Number Two fell soon after the Resurrection. Number Eight cost a man’s immortal soul, and—I still see that day in my dreams. Number Six died because one of my Hands—Cyrus—drew it into a ultramassive black hole, and Number Six had better be dead, because Cyrus won’t be coming back.”

Before you could do anything—exclaim, or question his mathematics, which did not hold up even on first acquaintance—he did something dreadful. The Emperor of the Nine Houses pushed himself away from the plain coffin with the rose and he stood before you at the Third’s, with his monstrous eyes and his ordinary face, and he took both of your hands in his. He patted them gently, as though you were a child whose pet had been squashed in a tragic accident. It would have been preferable for him to rip your ribs from their costal cartilage and waggle them around. It would have been preferable for him to take your throat beneath his hands and snap your neck. There were bright lights in your vision. You were deeply distressed.

“The choice I offered you was always a false one,” he said. “I’m sorry. The Resurrection Beasts always know where I am, and wherever I am they turn themselves to me and start moving … slowly … but never stopping. And they don’t turn to me alone, though they focus on me most strongly. They hunt whoever has committed the—indelible sin.”

You stared at him. He dropped his hands.

You said, “Which indelible sin?”

“The one you committed when you became a Lyctor,” said the Emperor.

You heard, dimly, the doors of Drearburh close. You perceived the grind of their mechanism and their indelible clang, the echo of their shutting ringing throughout the bottom atrium and upward into the tunnel shaft. Then your memories of it muddied and disappeared, back with the rest of your unsorted collection.

“They will be coming for me,” you said, and you said the words only because you thought you ought to make them come true. “If I returned to my House they would follow me there.”

He said, “No Lyctor has ever returned home, once we understood the repercussions … no Lyctor except one, who knew I would come to intercept her for that very reason.”

You looked at her plain coffin again. It was not particularly large; the body it held was not tall or broad, nor imposing, nor grand. You found yourself saying distantly: “And so the intention is to teach me how to fight these things?”

“Not before I teach you how to run,” said the Emperor. “It’s a rough lesson to learn. It’s never complete. But I’ve been running for ten thousand years … so I will be your teacher.”