She was silent. The arm gestured with the mug, and he pressed: “It took Gideon”—still weird—“two whole years to track you down and kill you. Even making you his mission in life, you had plenty of time to do some damage. Why waste your shot on my smallest House? If you’d dropped in on the Third, you could’ve done some real damage. And it wasn’t by accident. You skipped the dummy target in the atmosphere—you found the exact coordinates for the House.” A longer silence. He suggested, “Do you want to talk about that?”

Silence.

“You’ve been a revenant for nearly twenty years, Wake. It’s extraordinary … You really are everything they said you were.”

Silence.

“You’re not a necromancer—”

“Necromancy is a disease you released,” she said. “Necromancy needs to be strategically and deliberately cleansed.”

“Don’t spout bigotry, Commander, I won’t kill you for it and it hurts your cause,” he said calmly. “I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something, and nobody likes toddlers juxtaposed with cleansed.”

“How many babies died in the bomb, Gaius?”

“All of them,” he said.

And after a moment, he resumed: “I’m not really interested in this particular game, Commander. Let’s speed this up. You tell me the thanergy link you rode to get here, because you certainly weren’t in Cytherea’s body back at Canaan House, and you tell me what you were doing at the Ninth House nineteen years ago, and I’ll put you back in the River where you belong— Who’s there?”

I thought we were rumbled until the outer door swung open wider, damn near squashing me and Ianthe behind it. There was movement past us, a swirl of white fabric, and the little clink of God putting his teacup down. Stuck in the coatrack behind the door, we were left with a view of two people in stained white robes, quietly facing where God must have been. It was the Lyctor who’d tried to kill you, and the Lyctor who’d been afraid of my face.

Everyone was silent. The whole room held its breath. It must’ve only been a second or two before the Emperor said urgently: “Number Seven—”

“Number Seven can eat us, for all I care,” said Mercymorn. Her voice was quiet: the untrembling calm of someone who had done all their trembling already. “It’s over, John. It’s all come out … it took ten thousand years, but it’s all come out.”

No response. Everyone in the room was still as a mock-up in a doll’s house.

Then he said, as though puzzled, “What’s all come out?”