“You didn’t say he was forty-eight hours away and knew my target!”

“If you were on schedule it wouldn’t have mattered. You failed to kill him the first time—you were a whole day behind with the delivery—oh, and now I know why,” Mercy cried out. “You broke with the plan, took things into your own hands…”

“—necromantic wizarding fuckup—”

“—so you did the worst thing you could possibly have done—”

“I did what I had to do!” bawled the figure in the chair. She sounded legitimately unhinged now. The mouth sounded gummy, as though fringed with flecks of spittle, but I was pretty sure corpses couldn’t do saliva, so. “I did what I had to do when the dummy ones died—even though you dried-up liches didn’t give me the first fucking clue what I was really doing! Checking for life signs? Retrieving a sample? If I’d known then what I know now, I would have just shelled the place!”

“Now it comes out,” said Mercy. “Now, I am afraid it all comes out. You would have, wouldn’t you? And when you swore that you’d help evacuate the Houses, you never meant that either, did you?”

“Stop,” said God quietly.

And everyone stopped.

There was a flash of—I don’t know what. If it was necromancy, it was of a kind I’d never felt before. It was too sudden: more taste than theorem. There was this citrus taste in your spit. Everyone shut the fuck up, which, as spells go, was probably pretty useful.

He said, “Wake?”

“Yes?” She sounded irascibly eager; breathless, to match her actual breathlessness. There were hard, fuck-you edges to her voice.

“Will you answer my question now? Why did you go to the Ninth House, nineteen years ago?”

“To break into the Tomb.”

There’s an emotion that isn’t fear, and I wish someone would come up with a word for it, Harrow, because right then I sure as hell didn’t have one—it was this sense that started in the balls of your feet and moved right up through your legs to your spine, and I felt it in your hands, I felt it on your tongue. I felt it go chattering up the back of your head. It made your scalp softly fuzz over with electricity.

Maybe there is a word: omen.

“But you can’t get into the Tomb.” God sounded genuinely interested, but in this deeply casual way, as though he were hearing the result of a competition. It was the interest of someone at a party hearing the end of an anecdote. “Not without me.”

The corpse was grim. “I came armed.”

“It doesn’t matter what you came armed with, Commander—”

“I had the baby,” said Wake. “The baby I’d had to incubate myself for nine long fucking months, when the foetal dummies these two gave me died.”