“‘I pardon him, as God shall pardon me,’” said the Emperor. “Come, swear your loyalty, my son—my brother—beloved—Lyctor—saint.”

Augustine lifted his eyes to the Lord. They were the same grey as they had been in the stopping of time. He looked at the blood on his front; he looked over the assembled group across the room: me jerking in your frozen skin. Ianthe. Gideon. At Cytherea’s body in the chair. The collapsed body on the floor, Mercymorn’s hair tumbling close to his feet in rosy, bloodied tangles. He looked at the God of the Nine Houses.

“No, John,” he said.

And Augustine raised his hand.

A nauseating plunge. Like being thrown through the air, Harrow—the sickening weightlessness at the apex of a rising fall; the jolt before getting on that rickety old elevator down to the monument, to the millionth power. A lamentation of ripping metal. There was a huge, bubbling WHUNK—we all tipped over to one side as the station listed. The chairs tumbled over—Cytherea’s corpse tumbled too, no longer bound by the wrists to anything—and I could move your meat again, though it probably wasn’t the greatest moment to move. The outside shutter ripped off the window, and I saw it. I saw the water.

God had stumbled; he was pressed against the wall. Light flooded the room—weird, unearthly, poppling light. Alarmed bubbles and rills of air flattened themselves against the plex window as the whole Mithraeum was driven into increasingly dark, brownish, bloody water.

The plex buckled, shivered, then gave. The River burst through the window in a high-pressure torrent. The Emperor was sucked out into the water, and Augustine dove after him, and Ianthe waded after him. Harrow, the only reason we weren’t pulled out too was because I was yanked back into the muscular, lean-beef arms of the saint who shared my name. He was wrestling me out of the gush as the station listed upward, you under one of his arms, him clambering into the foyer that was quickly angling upward as I held on to my sword.

“Fuck off,” I bawled, affrighted—

He said, “Can you do necromancy?”

“No, I can’t do necromancy—”

“Then come with me,” he said.

The water surged and roared behind us. The Saint of Duty wrested open the door to the Emperor’s private rooms—slammed it shut behind us as we crawled out into a topsy-turvy corridor, where a wash of water was already sliding down the halls from some trickle point. Another far-off moan of metal, a cracking, crushing noise; we scrabbled upward—ricocheted down the corridor—I followed him up a narrow passage, and then I stumbled and fell into him as the station listed another way, falling on a memorial that was now the wrong way up.

“Outer ring. More stable,” he said.

“But—”

“Move. We’re sitting ducks.”

I moved. The station kept rocking back and forth as it was swept through the water, pressure nudging it back and forth from the sidelines. An alarm was wailing somewhere. I panted, “The hell happened—”