outsidebones | 006. soup

In this memory, you are on the Mithraeum, the space station that is the seat of your God and his saints. Due to increasingly persistent murder attempts by the Saint of Duty, you have spent days without sleeping, using necromancy to stimulate your own cortisol, and you fear you have become increasingly unhinged. But when you asked God whether he might ask the Saint of Duty to stop trying to murder you in your sleep, he suggested that instead you ought to get a hobby.

"Harrow," said God, when you pointed out the murders, "Do something normal. Learn how to make a meal. Read a book. Take the time to rest. Have you slept lately?"

So you realized that nobody cared, and no one would pay any attention to you on this ship full of thousand year immortal beings who thought of you as a useless child, a failed experiment, certain to die soon anyway. The worst indignity was that the Saint of Duty himself, when he wasn't stabbing you in surprise with knives or bypassing your wards in the night to attack you in the path and leave you in a pool of your own blood, went about his business perfectly normally, hardly acknowledging you, and completely healed of every injury you'd tried to put on him in return. Against a Lyctor, there was little you could do. Your necromancy could not reach inside his body; it was a void to you, and anything you attempted to pierce his skin he immediately countered.

So you decided to follow God's instructions, and you learned how to make soup. You had never cooked anything before, never watched anyone cook. You poured over technical manuals on the subject in the kitchen drawer. You practiced your soup during the day, keeping your hand at all times on the pommel of your rapier, and at night laid in bed, reading your manuals, waiting for an attack that didn't come. One hundred and twenty six hours without sleep, you no longer felt pain, though sometimes your jaw rattled to itself.

Perhaps impressed with your newfound understanding of soup or hungry for social cohesion, God asked you to make everyone dinner. That night you made soup more carefully than ever. The recipe said it had to cook for a long time. You paced up and down the kitchen, distracted and startled by lights as the air grew steamy and a little sweet-smelling. You transferred it to a big tureen, and when you all sat down around the table, the Emperor served everyone, like he always did. He was pleased with you. He smiled that rueful, dented smile, and he rested his hand on your shoulder, very lightly, when he filled your bowl.

"As I said, Harrowhark," he said. “Make a meal. Read a book. It’s the little things."

God and the Saints ate your meal. The Saint of Patience, ever cheerful and disappointed in you, criticized your technique, but pronounced it interestingly wrong. The Saint of Duty ate your soup at a stolid, uninterested, mechanical pace. You had noticed at previous dinners that he did not like some particular vegetables, so you had put them all in. Deprived of solid choices, he was mostly drinking stock. God had taken a spoonful, eaten it, then put down the spoon, then taken a discreet sip of water. He said nothing. The Saint of Joy, irritated at being called to supper at all, pronounced it mediocre.

"Is it mediocre, sister?" you asked. "I followed a recipe."

The Saints ignored you, eating their soup and beginning to reminisce about cooks they had known in the past, their long dead cavaliers and friends. Finally, the Saint of Patience thought to ask you about your technique.

"What’s the meat in here flavouring the broth? If there’s chunks, it’s all rendered down."

You closed your eyes, concentrating, trying to focus on so many things at once despite how badly you needed sleep. For the moment, you forgot the word you were looking for, though it was on the tip of your tongue, as you focused on building, cell by cell.

"Marrow," you said.

The Saint of Duty exploded outward as your construct emerged from his abdomen. Your soup was watery and mediocre, as soup went, but as a delivery method for bone rendered through so much water as to not pass comment it was perfect. Half a dozen arms shattered him. You let out your breath, and coalescing scythes destroyed his intestines, lungs, and heart. Then you fired upward, toward the brain.

And God said, "Stop."

You stopped. The shrapnel spray from the Saint of Duty did not stop — it cascaded across the table like the crest of a pink waterfall, pitter-pattering down on bowls and the tablecloth and the polished dark surface of the wood. But what remained of him stopped too, half man, half rupture.

The Emperor of the Nine Houses, his plain face splattered with gore, said, very calmly, “Ten thousand years since I’ve eaten human being, Harrow, and I didn’t really want an encore. You cannot have controlled foreign bone matter within the body of a Lyctor. Tell me what you've done.”

“The cells weren’t foreign.”

“What?”

“I sectioned a portion my tibia for the soup,” you said.

God’s eyes closed, very briefly. He pushed his bowl another fraction away. You stared down the table at him: at the blank, remote faces of your two nominal teachers — at the frozen ivory stillness of Ianthe, her hair now whitish pink — at space outside the window, where the asteroids themselves seemed to hang in tranquilized arrest.

He said, “You must know that I won’t let either of you kill the other before my very eyes, Harrow.”

"He attacked me in my rooms. He drained my personal wards."

"Coming from the Saint of Duty, that’s a compliment."

You said, “Lord, I am hunted. I perish.”

“Harrow—”

"I don’t come to you as Harrowhark the First,” your mouth said, slightly hysterical. "I come to you as a supplicant. I can’t live like this. Lord, do I displease you, that you shield him and not me? I understand that I am a sharpened twig beside your keenest sword, but why do you suffer this twig to live? I can’t live this way. I cannot live this way. I have nowhere to go. I have nobody to turn to."

You looked at each other down that long, bloody table.

God said, “Harrowhark, when was the last time you slept?”

You tried to muster some dignity as you admitted, “Six days ago.”

The Emperor of the Nine Houses stood, and the spell you were casting dissolved into nothing. Your skeletal construct disappeared. The shard you had been driving into the Saint of Duty's brain vanished. His insides, laced and crocheted over the dinner table, sizzled away to a mist, as he started to come back together.

The Emperor did not give anyone time to react further. He said evenly: “Dinner is over. Let us leave the table. Ianthe, take your sister to bed.”

You felt strange and unreal as a white-lipped Ianthe hauled you up from your seat. The skin she touched was merely a thin and pervious netting keeping in your meat, which consisted of ten thousand spiders. She slung your arm across her shoulders, as though you were an invalid. Perhaps you were. Your legs did not feel correct.

As you were carried off, you could hear the Kindly Prince, in harsh tones, saying to the Saint of Joy, who was wringing globs of blood out of her hair, "Six days. No sleep. She still manages a full skeleton commencement from diluted marrow. What else have you failed to see, Mercymorn?"

The Saints of Duty and Patience were in the corridor as Ianthe carried you past. The Saint of Patience stared at you as though he had seen a ghost, lit a cigarette, and passed it to his brother Lyctor. The Saint of Duty watched you, and then raised the cigarette and lifted it to you in an unmistakable salute.