The inside was as cramped as you’d suspected, and sordidly simple. What arrested you immediately was the source of Ianthe’s fascination and open admiration. Before the back wall of the shuttle, a necromancer of the Cohort squatted; necromantic miasma shone upon her as brightly to you as a torch. There was no fuel here for her to use to commit necromancy. She was in deep space, and she was not a Lyctor. What she could do was put the final touches on an exquisite nullification ward—wet and red with her own blood, which was being pumped out from a long syringe. It would have been difficult and arduous work even had she access to her aptitude. The arms of her robes were rolled all the way up to her shoulders so that the cloth would not touch and blur the pattern as she worked; you noted rucked-up House ribbons of pale seafoam green.

Ianthe saw you, and she startled. Before you could be relieved that there existed one Lyctor who might still startle for you, she made room for you on the upturned crate on which she was perched. You did not like to, but you sat primly on the corner proffered, trying to press your knees together to stop your bodies from touching. Today—and how much time had passed?—her eyes were that washed-out blue, with amethyst lights in them.

“You’ve met our respected elder sister, I see,” Ianthe said. “She accused me of being twelve, called me one of those animaphiliacs, then told me I wasn’t as good looking as someone called Cyrus. It was like being back with Mummy,” she added, with a touch of fond nostalgia.

Your palm remembered the knife, and you resisted the chumminess. You said, “Where is the Emperor?”

“I don’t know, and nobody will tell me anything,” she said, more peevishly. “Everyone has been acting frankly mulish … which I suppose I can’t blame them for, as I might act the same if I were peremptorily dropped from the Emperor’s personal attaché and shipped off to the front … but what is the good of being Ianthe the First, if I can’t even leverage it?”

You hazarded a quick glance to the Cohort necromancer; but the Seventh adept paid you no attention. You noticed that her ward—an expert’s work, and an artist’s, that of genius married to style—was a very familiar one: it was a ghost ward. You tried to wrench your brain back to the words Ianthe had said, and the order she had put them in. This was difficult, as what you knew about the Cohort and the front could fit into a teaspoon. Even that much knowledge had always annoyed you, but something she’d said had rattled your comatose hypothalamus.

You said, “That makes no sense. The Imperial Guard doesn’t see action.”