That light took colour from the room—everyone was a slow-motion cavalcade of greys, of eyes caught widening, of mouths parting in stone-shaded articulations of shock. I’d tried to turn us around like there was a grenade to fall on—and then, in that thousand-shaded grey, I saw—the red.

Powdery particles were resolving in the air—they were emerging from my mouth, shaking free from Ianthe’s hair. First a softly tinted pale colour like a sunrise pink, then deepening to cherry colour, then to deep scarlet. They floated in midair, hesitatingly, and then inexorably travelled to one point, like dust motes beneath a ray of sunshine. A great stripping wind blew through the room like a scourge, whipping those motes up in a crimson vortex. The powder became a grit; the grit became an aggregate; and then that hot red matter resolved into bone.

It happened in an instant. It happened over a myriad. A wet red construct knitted itself back together, and then burbling out of its centre, a hot gush of pale pink meat and nerve—a lumpen squirting of organ, deep soft violets, fat-stippled cerises, coils of intestine and gentle buff-shaded curves of bowel—white pops in each eye socket, bumps of sandy pearl stuff filling in behind—the twitch of a wet red tongue in a mandible spurting teeth. The percussive, throbbing urgency of a heart, quickly hidden with a puff of bronchiae sliding into big soft lung shapes—abruptly muscled over, then dressed with belated modesty in skin—the skin shading over with a fine coating of hair at the arms, at the chest—dark hair undulating over the eyebrows, making wrinkles and ruffles over the skull. The hot white jelly of the eyes was dyed black as though oily drops had been squeezed into it—purling over in black, shining wavelets, staining it true nitid ebony—the white rings bobbing up to the surface as though they’d been ducked into the water, each matte black pupil resting in the central point.

The Emperor of the Nine Houses—the King Undying—the Prince of Death—the Necrolord Prime—stood behind Mercymorn. He reached out with his naked hand. Her chest blew outward in a hot shower of ribs, meat, and diaphragm. Her body stumbled forward—he tapped the back of her head, something went crack—and the Saint of Joy fell facedown before Augustine, whose chest was decorated with the desecrated remnants of her heart.

The Emperor dropped to his haunches and eased the white robe off Mercy’s dead shoulders. He shrugged his naked body into it—coyly pulling it closed—and he stretched his jaw in his mouth, and wriggled the tip of his newly grown nose.

“Right,” he said, and closed his eyes briefly. Then he said, “The sun has stabilized. Hope the Sixth House didn’t get cooked in the flare.”