The molar-clunching subsided gradually. You wove your fingers together in your deep pearly sleeves and bent your thumbs backward nearly to the point of dislocation. Ianthe looked at you, and when you looked at her in the candlelight—her eyes not betraying her; right now, they might have been blue—you were struck by her exhaustion. She had been dimmed, somehow. Something had been taken from her since you watched her scream on the floor of the shuttle. Her line of sight flicked to the gap at the front of your robe—you shouldered forward to close it—and she quirked her eyebrows in brief, enervated amusement.

You mouthed, Where are we? But she did not answer.

After a moment, the Emperor spoke at the corpse, in the smiling cadence of a man giving a talk at a dinner party:

“When they first brought her to Canaan House, I thought there’d been some mistake. You know that I’d been to Rhodes, to see the miracle, but I asked not to see the woman—just so I could be a disinterested party—and of course once I saw that she was necromantic I said yes, she should come to me to be a disciple. She was just shy of thirty then, I recall. And I knew she was sick, but I had no idea how bad it was until Loveday brought her in, looking as though she wanted every one of us beaten to death, and she could hardly walk … I went to kiss her hello, and she said: ‘Lord, I can’t kiss you back. My lipstick’s perfect and I refuse to smear it.’”

The strange Lyctor barked out a hollow laugh. They—he?—inclined his head, and you saw him in part-profile for the first time. He was very fair, but in a greyish, damp, slicked-back way that showed off the promontories of his skull. Fine, impatient lines were set around his drooping eyes, and quite deeply carved into his mouth. He looked older than your father had looked, when he died. These haughty features were set in a tall, aristocratic face, with an arched and supercilious nose, which nose he was currently staring down at the Emperor with an expression of supreme suffering.

“It wasn’t, though. She had it on her teeth.”

Mercymorn muttered, but not so quietly that it wasn’t audible: “Of course you’d notice that, Augustine.”

But Augustine was adding, in a light, cultivated voice: “I remember now … Lord! The time flies!… That was a damnable business. They sent her to us barely alive, and back then none of us could do anything for her, excepting you. Was she the first gen, or second?”

“Second,” said God. “Early second. We were still experimenting with getting the Sixth installation up and running. Some of the Houses were empty.”

Mercymorn spoke up: “No. We had it running by then. Because Valancy was with us, and Anastasia.”