You recalled that name from the shuttle, but had ignored it at the time. There was a ghastly moment now when you realised that he had looked at the Resurrecting Prince when he said John; that God had responded to so banal and cursory a word as John; and that he was looking at the rope-made man with something closer to despair than you had ever seen in him.

“We’ll fight,” he said. “We made the choice years ago to increase our numbers and fight these things. Five years, ten months … in the end, perhaps it is the same.”

“Stay?” said the stranger.

“Yes,” said God. “Stay, I do think.” And, lowly: “Thank you for making it home, Ortus the First.”

Something pooled inside your ears, culminating in a hot and intense dripping down your earlobes. You touched it and your fingers came away wet; it was blood. Ianthe was staring at you through a fine curtain of achromatic hair, the whitened curve of her lips a tight and careful line. You silently crumpled up in the transept and hit your head quite hard on the tiles before you were rendered senseless. Under the circumstances it took people quite a long time to notice.

10

“Then Nonius spake full wroth; thunder’d his voice as the black sea roars on the tomb-gate of Algol,

“Blazing his eyes with the fell light thrown from the Emperor’s corpse-fires; answer he gave, and he told them—”

“Stop,” said Harrowhark, from behind.

This did not go down well with the audience. The steel-panelled, split-floor library of Canaan House was perhaps one of the strangest rooms within it: it was the only room above the facility that evoked the same blunt sense of utilitarian workspace. It was like entering a modern chamber only to find an ancient artefact in the centre. The panelled floors were spread over haphazardly with old and hairy rugs, and the shelves were plain laminated metal. When Ortus declaimed, his voice rang through the place like the Secundarius Bell, except significantly more embarrassing.

“No, no, Reverend Daughter,” protested the curly-haired moron from the Fifth House, the one whose clothes could have provided the Ninth with material resources for a decade. “Please. Nonius is about to give the rebels what-for. I never got what-for in school. Fifth poetry is very much I come from climes of sulphur gas/I shine in plasma sheet/Er-hem-er-hem-er-hem, surpass/My spot a crimson feat, and by then I was always comatose. One little stanza of what-for, I beg of you.”