Your vision swam. It became apparent immediately that you could not move. Your clinical brain rose to the fore as your meat brain shied and ran around and barked like the badly behaved animal it was. Your clinical brain took stock and realised that you were seated in some kind of chair being wheeled down an Erebos corridor, and that someone had pinched a high cervical nerve right into your spinal cord—not deforming the bone at all, but manipulating the flesh only—in such a way that you were locked out of your body from the neck down. You could not raise your head. You could blink, and breathe sufficiently, and swallow poorly. Otherwise you were as marble. It was an astonishing act of necromancy. You were righteously indignant, but amazed at the act.

You were still in your beautiful mother-of-pearl robe, head deep in your hood, hearing the thick and papery rustle of twenty-two letters secreted within your clothes. The sword was laid across your lap; a thick, fatty webbing joined the hilt to your forearm, a webbing that you had no memory of creating but was nonetheless your lacework. Perhaps you had woken up at an earlier point to stash the letters down your shift and fix the blade to your arm; you did not recall, but that was not unusual. Sometimes your conscious days were dreamlike ordinances of movement, functions, sounds. Rather than muscle mass within the web, there was a honeycomb of bone stretching out from your forearm through the webbing to the hilt. Nobody was going to get it away from you in a hurry. It was as though you had been picked up bodily, plopped in the chair, and disabled from the neck down. You hoped distantly that your bladder hadn’t evacuated.

The chair stopped. There were voices. You concentrated hard on whatever had been done to the back of your neck—visualized your known friend, the odontoid peg that protruded from your other known friend, the cervical vertebra—the bracelets that surrounded the vertebral arteries, the tangle of physeal joints. If it had simply been bonework, you would have been able to identify the mischief immediately, and unfuck accordingly. The voices coalesced—

“—can clear this instantaneously, Saint of Saints, once the Holy Prince has finished giving audience to—”

This came from in front of you.

“The meeting! The meeting!!” It was difficult to articulate extra exclamation marks, yet the new voice did so. “Do you think I have time for—for—for the extra hour in which three generals and your Resurrector, the God of Dead Kings, try to schedule another meeting after the first one has done? Do you think I came here to wait for three personal assistants, six calendars, and God himself changing his mind nineteen times??”

This came from behind you, and above. This voice, in all probability, belonged to the person who was pushing your chair.