Teacher capered madly down the hallway like a child—slapping at long, shivering droplet-shaped lumps of viscus, and whooping as he went. His hooting and hollering rang off the antique walls long after he disappeared.

Harrow felt the cold as an old friend inside the thick black canvas of her church robe. Her fingers burnt as though she had held them too close to a fire. Her cavalier and the historian did not warm her as they stood beside her: it was as though she were alone in the room. She was startled when the latter touched her: laid her hand on her shoulder as though she were no older than one of the vanished Fourth House duo, a gawky little girl in the face of death.

“Well, bugger Teacher,” said Abigail Pent crossly.

36

ONE WEEK BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER

IN THOSE LAST LONG, terrible days before the end—those strangled, claustrophobic, white-faced days that stalked the borders of your nights like predators waiting for your collapse—you began to pray again. This was not because you had anyone in particular to pray to. It just helped, in its own ineffable way, to read your knucklebone prayer beads, and to recite childhood meditations you had learned when you were yet too small to look out over the pew. You were filled with the baffling memory of Mortus the Ninth lifting you up to see your mother leading Mass; before you were allowed on the sanctuary, you were seated in front and held by your father’s cavalier, so that you might not stare at a softly powdered stone chair-back for the whole session. You remembered that you had far preferred the strong, sad hands of Mortus to being sat next to your great-aunts and given a stinging piece of peppermint candy to suck, as though you ever needed to be kept quiet. It had been the last assumption of immaturity you would ever enjoy. You had been three years old, maybe.

If you prayed for anything, you prayed for clarity. You prayed that you might look upon the face of each remaining Lyctor and that the Body would quietly point to the apostate. You prayed that it had been Cytherea, traitor even in death, and that her body had somehow been tossed out of the Mithraeum’s airlock. You prayed that the whole thing had been an illusion, and sometimes nearly convinced yourself that it was; that you had imagined the dead of Canaan House alive again, impossibly drifting through the jungles of your victim planet, far away from where their bodies had gone to rest. But then why had their coffins on the Erebos been empty? And why now was one of your letters missing, and another two freshly opened?

Whenever you thought about it, enervated lines of thick, hot blood drooled from each ear, so that your canals were perennially stained deep brown. You prayed to live just a few more weeks.