“
She pressed her forehead down onto the cold, clean tiles.
“Please undo what I’ve done, Lord,” she said. “I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav.”
“I can’t,” he said. He had a bittersweet, scratchy voice, and it was infinitely gentle. “I would very much like to. But that soul’s inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I’d take yours with it and destroy both in the process. What’s done is done. Now you have to live with it.”
She was empty. That was the terrible thing: there was nothing inside her but the sick and bubbling detestation of her House. Even the silence of her soul could not dilute the hatred that had fermented in her from the genesis of the Ninth House downward. Harrowhark picked herself up off the floor and looked her Emperor dead in his dark and shining eyes.
“How dare you ask me to live with it?”
The Emperor did not render her down to a pile of ash, as she partly wished he would. Instead, he rubbed at one temple, and he held her gaze, sombre and even.
“Because,” he said, “the Empire is dying.”
She said nothing.
“If there had been any less need you would be sitting back home in Drearburh, living a long and quiet life with nothing to worry or hurt you, and your cavalier would still be alive. But there are things out there that even death cannot keep down. I have been fighting them since the Resurrection. I can’t fight them by myself.”
Harrow said, “But you’re God.”
And God said, “And I am not enough.
”
”