Your breath sounded an unlovely peal. Ianthe’s sounded like a bellows. You could not hear that of the Emperor of the Nine Houses—maybe you never had—nor that of the elder Lyctor. The shuttle’s habitation controls had either been turned off or set low even by Ninth House standards: beneath the thin robes and minty smock, your thighs were pimpled with cold. And nothing happened. No thanergetic flush, no thalergetic wane. You’d never been a spirit adept, and you did not feel now any subtleties of transition; it was very cold. That was all.

You were dead weight in that heavy chill, each breath a ponderous inflation of the lungs, in and out, in and out. You were aware of yourself, of each juncture of energy inside you; you were aware that your feet had blisters, that your throat was stripped by too much upchucking, and that you felt alone in your head. You were embarrassed by your distraction. The physical body had never occurred to you so much in previous meditation. The light from the ceiling above had dulled to a sooty orange glow like that from a lit furnace; you fell into a numb, half-alive, half-dead reverie, your anxiety stifled and calcified, until you heard Ianthe cry out.

You stared through the minute slit where your hood brushed your cheeks. You made no sound, because you were not sure you were seeing what Ianthe was seeing: for your part, you saw the water.

7

THE WATER CAME BUBBLING up through the bolted seams in the floor panels, a filthy, rusty red, with a bloom like sewage upon it. It had already boiled up to the front of the shuttle and was to the top of what you could see of the Emperor’s shoes. It seemed unsure of gravity, running this way and that; then it started coming in high-pressure spurts through the sides of the cockpit’s front window.

“Thirty seconds,” said Mercymorn, whose voice had gone so utterly from petulant to clinical that it seemed the voice of a different woman. “Five minutes thirty remaining.”

There was rustling from right next to you. The Emperor said, “Keep flat.”

Ianthe said urgently, “Lord, I can see them.”

Them? But the Emperor said, “Focus on them. Don’t be afraid. Take off your hood if you want to. But think about the details of the shuttle too … where you were, where I am, where Mercy is, where Harrowhark is … the details of the shuttle are a projected memory and they are not all real, but they will dissolve further as you leave your body behind, and I don’t want to lose you.”

To the empty reaches of space, or to Mercy? The Lyctor said, “Four minutes, thirty seconds remaining. Ward has an estimated half a minute left.”