He took the lovely rainbow shawl and draped it over the pilot’s chair, and Mercymorn daintily sat down upon it, belting herself in. The Body was gone. Little clusters of bone set over the cockpit window tinkled musically with the displaced air. The Emperor stood behind Mercy, one hand on the chair back, himself a light plex jangle of styluses whenever he moved, and he leant down to press down on the comm button. The prayer stopped as though everyone praying had lost the air from their lungs.

“Our enemies have once more raised their hands to those who would be at peace with them,” he said. “Again, we are a violated covenant, and again we are struck at with anger, and with fear, by those who cannot reason and those who cannot forgive what we are. You who have served on the Erebos—my soldiers and necromancers of the Nine Houses—if you find yourselves on the battlefield, remember that I will make even the dying echo of your heartbeat a sword. I will make the stilled sound on your tongue a roar. I will recall you when you are a ghost in the water, and by that recollection you will be divine. On your death, I will make the very blood in your body arrows and spears.

“Remember that I am the King Undying.”

He lifted his hand off the communicator button, cutting short the primal, triumphant howl that had echoed from the docking crew. You were painfully aware of the lamplights of thalergy signifying the Cohort officers in the dock—ten of them in a cluster a mere forty metres away: too close to be doing anything to aid the shuttle, but praying, maybe. There were more of them, farther away. An orderly line, flushed with blood, pattering with gut flora. They were perhaps working the mechanisms. There were muffled booming sounds as the shuttle clamps were loosed.

The engines behind the blood-daubed wall groaned to life in a huge, dull roar; those thalergy lights fell farther and farther away as you were lowered out the airlock on long struts of plex and steel. Mercy eased a lever upward, nose wrinkling in concentration, and then the thalergy rose away entirely. You dropped through space. The shuttle might as well have been empty for all that you could sense within, except for that single foetal bundle of thanergy lying still inside the coffin. As you looked through the plex window behind you, you saw the Erebos, and for the first time you got a sense of the enormity of the flagship: its scintillating, dark, and rainbow-hued steel, like an oil spill; the interlocking skeletons tessellated over the whole boxy structure, so that the vessel seemed an enormous moving ossuary. The iris of light from the fuel ignition hurt your eyes as it sped away.

Artificial gravity meant you were perfectly still and stable, but you still felt ill from the idea that you were drifting and tumbling through space like an abandoned piece of cargo.