“I imagine she didn’t have the grace to introduce herself, so I must: Mercymorn the First, the Saint of Joy, would you believe. She is a Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, the second finger on those two hands so outspread, that pray to the Kindly Prince. And she is all your sisters now—the one in front of you being, alas, completely dead—and I am the last of your brothers, excepting…”

He trailed off, as though expecting God to fill in, which God did not. He finished with, “Teacher, d’you think he knows about the missile strikes?”

“He’s never been particularly interested in the day-to-day,” said the Emperor.

“But he is interested in you-know-what, and I’m just thinking, if he’s heard, and maybe put two and two together…”

God said, “He had a mission. The Saint of Duty reflects his name.”

“Right, right,” said Augustine. “Unlike Joy and Patience. Quite right. Just—coming back here, and not seeing him—it gave me the heebie-jeebies, to be perfectly honest with you. I can’t quite shake the feeling that something’s wrong.”

“Can we get back to this blasted funeral,” said Mercy. “Sitting through six of these is worse than dying myself. I will let you know now that the plan for my funeral is in my top drawer, and I’ve got it down to a minute-by-minute framework, and it’s only twenty-four minutes, and it’s just lovely.”

“I can only imagine,” said her brother Lyctor fervently.

This excruciation was cut short when the doors at the back of the chapel banged open. Everyone alive swung around in a hurry, and in walked the next terrible part of your life.

It was a man. The missing Lyctor—as empty to you as all assembled, more still even than the frozen corpse of Cytherea the First. Unlike the other Lyctors, all of whom skewed hungry, soft men and women of the necromancer build, his frame carried nothing but muscle. He was sinew over bone. He was a walking tendon. He had a raw, stretched look to him like an idiot’s construct, bones that had been slippered in meaty fibrils to keep them moving. A metabolized, contracted striation, without fat, the only curve a hollow tautness from rib to stomach.

The Emperor’s face cleared. “Well timed,” he said with naked relief.