by Tamsyn Muir
“I’m—” I said.
The world revolved.
“I’m not fucking dead,” I said, which wasn’t even true, and I was choking up; everything I’d ever done, everything I’d ever been through, and I was choking up.
And the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, stood from his chair to look at you—at me; looked at my face, looked at your face, looked at my eyes in your face. It took, maybe, a million myriads. The static in your ears resolved into wordless screaming. His expression was just—gently quizzical; mildly awed.
“Hi, Not Fucking Dead,” he said. “I’m Dad.”
51
WHEN I WAS, LIKE, six years old, I used to play a game trying to pick out my mum’s skeleton from the crowd—I’d choose a skeleton that I thought was her and hang out in the snow-leek fields, watching them endlessly breaking rocks into gravel, watching them winnow through the mulch. I used to pretend that whatever construct I’d picked knew I was watching, and would send me subtle messages. Hoe thrust into the ground three times in a row with a pause after, that was hello, because that wouldn’t happen so often that it would beggar belief. When I was seven the captain broke it to me that my mother wasn’t even in rotation yet. She only got boiled and sent out when I was eight.
Do you remember the time when we were little and I told you to stop fucking picking on me, because what if my other mum or dad was, like, important? I remember. You said, what’s the evidence, and I said what’s the … not evidence, and you said why would it matter anyway, and I said why would it not matter anyway, and you said I was an idiot, and we whaled on each other for a while. Then I said, what if someone came looking for me and said, “It’s me, the most important guy in the world, here’s the long-lost baby I was looking for, everyone will stop treating her like shit henceforth, also I am going to murder everyone in here for what they have done and Crux goes first,” and you told me that if anyone came looking for me you would get your parents to lock me in a closet and say that I had died of “brain malfunction,” which I now know isn’t a real disease, so I bet you feel stupid now?
You were furious. You said, It doesn’t matter who they are—they’re not important, and they’re not coming for you.
I used to sit by my mother’s niche and catch her up on everything. Things like: Aiglamene says I’ve fixed my hand placement when I block and pivot from the lower left. Things like: Harrowhark was a giant bitch today. (Told her that on the reg.) Things like: I can do ninety-six sit-ups in two minutes now. Absolute fourteen-year-old bullshit. Serious A-grade drivel.
It was worse when I was a kid. I remember the time you caught me telling her, I love you, and I can’t even remember what you said, but I remember that I had you on your back—I put you straight on the fucking ground. I was always so much bigger and so much stronger. I got on top of you and choked you till your eyes bugged out. I told you that my mother had probably loved me a lot more than yours loved you. You clawed my face so bad that my blood ran down your hands; my face was under your fucking fingernails. When I let you go you couldn’t even stand, you just crawled away and threw up. Were you ten, Harrow? Was I eleven?
Was that the day you decided you wanted to die?
You remember how the fuck-off great-aunts always used to say, Suffer and learn?
If they were right, Nonagesimus, how much more can we take until you and me achieve omniscience?
* * *
“And now we come to the heart of the matter,” said the Lyctor you called Mercymorn.
She had stood up next to us—and God looked at me, and at her, and at me, and held my gaze. It was this that pinned us in place. When those white rings hovered on someone else, the blood rushed back to your brain; when they flickered back to me, I went white and blank again, mute and stupid, a floating outline.
He looked at us, and he rubbed one of his temples as though he had a headache. And he said, with an enormous sigh: “Ah. The eyes.”
“Yes, the eyes,” she said. “Your child … Alecto’s eyes.”
A ripple of ice over the face. A hardening of the mouth. He said quietly, “Don’t call her—”
“Alecto! Alecto! Alecto!” repeated Mercy shrilly. The other Lyctors flinched each time she said it, as though it were an aural stab. “John, you are trying to start a fight with me to get out of the fight I am trying to have with you, which is a painfully domestic tactic. Those are A.L.’s eyes, Lord … right there in your genetic code.”
“There could be any number of explanations,” said God calmly.
“Yes,” said Augustine. He tapped his cigarette out into the emptied cup of tea. “There could be. You’ve offered us explanations for everything over the years. But—some of them didn’t hold up on examination … It was the power I could never get my head around, you know? I follow power back to its source, John. It’s the skill you asked me to perfect. And the longer I looked at yours, the less things added up.”
“This has been troubling you for a very long time, then,” God said finally. “A.L. always did bother you two the most … If I’m such a liar, why didn’t I lie to you about her? I told you the truth about Annabel’s resurrection, and in the end you killed her for it.”
“My lord,” said Augustine formally, “you told us the truth about Annabel—about Alecto—because she knew the truth about it too, and you never could control her. Even after two centuries, I’m not sure she ever managed to lie. That was what stayed my hand for such a long time. How would you have asked Alecto the First to lie—how would you have persuaded that mad monster into even an unsophisticated con?”
God said, “Don’t call her that.”
“A monster, John!” Augustine barked. “She was a bloody monster in a human suit! She was a monster the moment you resurrected her, and you went and made her worse!”
There was silence in that room. The air had cooled, somewhat, but it was still hot and sticky and it smelled like everyone’s sweat. It smelled like hot perfume, and cigarettes, and fear.
After a moment in that silence, the Saint of Patience said: “Raised my voice. Apologies.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said God quietly.
Mercymorn was grinding her back molars, making a sound like ball bearings fed into an industrial mincer. She stopped, and said pensively: “But you see, we all thought you were just sentimental over that horrible thing—even though she was bad in every single way, we all hated her—”
“I didn’t,” said Gideon Zero.
“Oh, do shut up, Gideon—Lord, you and she went through all the early days together; it made sense that you didn’t want to kill her. We came to you, back then, we came to you and begged you to get rid of her. We said she was too dangerous … We knew the Beasts were coming, and we knew they were partly coming for her. She was going to get us all eaten alive.” Mercy’s eyes had gone almost distant, as though she was living the argument over again. “So eventually you gave way. You killed her, for us. But we never knew how you did it.”
“Annabel Lee … was not the dying kind,” said the Emperor. “It might be more accurate to say that I switched her off.”
“You came to us and we asked, Is she dead?” said Mercy. “And you said, As dead as I can make her … I remember, Lord, that you wept.”
“Well, I was very sad,” said God reasonably.
“Yes! You were!” cried Mercy, like this was welcome confirmation. “You were very sad … but you didn’t blame us. You said you understood. You said you’d do what was right by your Lyctors. But you wanted to honour her, so you made her a tomb, and set Anastasia to guard it … It all made such perfect sense, for us. What didn’t make sense was you.”
God propped his chin in his hands again. “What about me?” he said.
Mercy and Augustine both barked out hollow little sounds that were not in the same universe as laughs.
“You don’t get your power from Dominicus,” said Augustine. “It gets its power from you. There’s no exchange involved, no symbiosis. You d
raw nothing from the system. It relies on you entirely, as we all know. You’re God, John. But—as the Edenites are fond of pointing out—you were once a man. So whither that transition? Where does your power come from? Even if the Resurrection had been the greatest thanergy bloom ever triggered, it would drain away over time. And then Mercy said to me—in a moment of true Mercy vileness—she said, What is God afraid of?”
Those white-ringed eyes closed, and your heart almost relaxed in your chest.
He said a little irrelevantly, “Did you two just pretend to hate each other?”
“No,” they said, in dreary chorus. And Augustine said, “But we have never loathed each other so intensely that we couldn’t work together. It kept us honest. I never wanted to believe anything Joy was saying … I never wanted to believe it when she said, What if he didn’t really put down A.L.? And then—What if he couldn’t put down A.L.?”
The eyes opened. They opened up on you and me. Those white rings, like a migraine; those black, iridescent insides, like tar or a butterfly or obsidian glass.
And he said, “Summarise, please. You both do tend to go overboard on the foreplay.”
Augustine said, “You didn’t kill Alecto. And she wasn’t just your bodyguard.”
Mercymorn said, “Alecto was your cavalier.”
The Emperor didn’t move.
Augustine said, “The eyes have it, John. Those damn golden eyes she always had, like a cat’s. When I saw young Harrowhark over there—” He jerked his thumb in our direction, which still somehow had the ability to startle me, I guess because I thought he’d forgotten we were even in the room. “—sporting those exact same lights, I freely admit my first thought was Fuck me backward, she woke up.
“But it didn’t make sense, of course,” he continued, “because if A.L. turned up on the Mithraeum, she would have been as … distinctive as ever. So why else would Harrowhark’s eyes change? For the same reason our eyes changed. The completion of the Eightfold Word. She had attained actual Lyctorhood.”
“Which meant,” said Mercy, taking up the thread, “that the infant’s cavalier had somehow ended up with the eyes of your Annabel Lee. There was no possible way Alecto’s genetic code—to the extent she even had one, which by the way I am not convinced she ever did—could have ended up in a baby in the Ninth House … but there very much was a way that your genetic code could have, because Augustine and I worked extremely hard to put it there.”
“All that effort to break open the Locked Tomb,” said Augustine, “only to have the answer we wanted wander up in the form of one dead teenager flaunting your genes. They were never Alecto’s eyes at all. They were yours, John. Alecto had your eyes from the moment any of us first saw her. And those extraordinary black eyes you’ve always worn … they were always hers.”
Harrow, I was not following all of this, because necromantic theory is a lot of hot bullshit even when I’m not busy having Complex Emotions, but that last bit pinged even me as weird. I’d seen Ianthe wearing Tern’s eyes, like a funeral in her face. I’d looked in the mirror and seen your face with my much more attractive and cooler eyes, and that was—weird. I’d figured out that the eye-change is what happens when two people become one. It’s not what happens when two people swap places. No one was ever going to see that ass Naberius strutting around with a pair of bad purple eyes that got left out in the rain, because the Lyctoral eye swap relied on him taking a rapier backward to the heart. There was no way a cavalier could end up with a necromancer’s eyes.
Unless the cavalier failed to die.
Mercy reached out for Augustine’s cigarette. He mutely handed it to her; watched as she sucked furiously on its end, as the thin wrapper flared orange around the tip, as she tapped it—distracted and frantic—into the empty tea mug. Then she handed it back to him without a word.
“You lied to us, John,” she said.
And, with a sob in her voice: “There is a perfect Lyctorhood … a perfect Lyctor process that preserves the cavalier, and you let us think there wasn’t. You let us think we’d cracked it … You let us think it had to be a one-way energy transfer … but nobody had to die. Alfred, Pyrrha, Titania, Valancy, Nigella, Samael, Loveday, Cristabel … You watched us kill our cavaliers in cold blood, and none of them had to die. You had already done it yourself. But you had done it perfectly!!”
The Saint of Duty was very still. Augustine stubbed out the end of his cigarette; Mercymorn held her own fingers clutched tightly in her palms. And God sat in his chair, and looked at his hands.
There was a rustle next to us. Tridentarius emerged from her hidey-hole in the robes and stood next to me. Her expression was blank, no emotion at all. Tridentarius was still holding those cards tight to her chest.
Mercymorn said, “John, if you’d lied to me about anything else, about how the planet died, about the extinction of our species … or if you’d just admitted everything and said your hand was forced, or that it was for the common good, and said nice-sounding nonsense—I would have forgiven you.”
“You might have said you forgave me,” said the Emperor. He was staring at his hands now. “But I think it would have rankled … I know it would have rankled. There is no such thing as forgiveness, Mercy. There’s only bloody truth, and blessed ignorance.”
She said, “Alfred, Pyrrha, Titania, Valancy, Nigella, Samael, Loveday, Cristabel.”
“They were my friends,” he said, simply. “I loved them too.”
Augustine said, “I’ve got to know. Call it morbid curiosity … Anastasia didn’t misapprehend the process, did she? She nearly cracked it—the right way of doing it. I knew she was working closely with Cassiopeia … It didn’t make sense that I became a Lyctor under scrambling pressure and did it right, and that Anastasia screwed it up in laboratory conditions.”
God stared at him.
“Yes,” he said, though it sounded far-off and confused, like he was hungover. “I was the only one she allowed to watch her attempt. She’d learned the trick was to do the Eightfold slower—more methodically—and it was still more of an accident than design. But it’s not as simple as her getting it right, and me stopping her. She panicked midway through. She hadn’t got his soul inside her all the way—if she had, Samael dying would have killed her too … They were both in danger. I killed him for her benefit, and she knew that at the time.”
“Is that the truth, or the truth you tell yourself?” asked Augustine.
“What is the difference?” said God.
And then he said, with that same far-off, graveyard chill: “How am I meant to attain absolution? What’s left for me to do?”
And Augustine said: “Stop your mission, John. Give up on the thing I know you’ve been looking for since the very beginning. Stop expanding. Stop assembling this bewildering cartography, this invasion force. I’ve puzzled over it for five thousand years, and I don’t believe I truly understand it now. But let it go. Let them go. Nobody has to be punished anymore for what happened to humanity.”
The Emperor of the Nine Houses turned to look at him.
“Augustine,” he said, “if the man you were—the man you were before you died, before the Resurrection—could hear what you just said to me, he’d tear your throat out.”
Augustine said, “Thanks for confirming that.” And he was silent.
It was Mercy who said, “John,” in a tremulous prayer—all the metal gone from her voice, replaced with a shameless tenderness. “John, you’re wrong.”
“Don’t I know it,” said the Emperor, but those scalding white-ringed eyes raised to Mercy’s face.
“I will forgive you,” she said bravely, and she swallowed three times in quick succession. Augustine looked at her with an expression of growing bewilderment. “There’s one thing left—one last chance. If you can do this for me … if you make me believe you … I’ll forgive everything. Rinse my memory, if you want to. That idiot infant Harrowhark did it. I’ll work out how you can do it to me. I’ll let you rip out my brain if
you want to. But I will forgive you, if you do just—one—thing.”
Augustine said blankly, “Mercy, don’t do this.”
“You never loved him as much as I did,” she said, without taking her eyes from John. “This is the moment. This is the chance for unlovable Mercymorn—critical Mercymorn—to show she is the most capable of her name … Every time you’ve said that I did not understand the human heart, that I was unfeeling, that I only knew worship without adoration … Watch me, Augustine. I am the second saint to serve the King Undying. I will teach you a lesson in forgiveness.”
“You don’t even know the meaning of the word,” said Augustine.
God watched this exchange. Then he rose to his feet, and he worried one temple with his thumb, his gaze on Mercymorn: her eyes were like soft bloody dust, some brownish, greyish, reddish substance, all stirred together.
“Mercy,” he said raggedly, “tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I’ll do anything. I would go to the ends of the universe, if you told me that I could suffer enough—withstand enough—learn enough—to be truly forgiven. Tell me.”
Thick tears pooled in those bloody, stormy eyes. Augustine looked at her, and then he quite abruptly pressed his back to the wall and slid down until he was sitting; a posture of absolute defeat.
“Look at me and tell me you loved Cristabel,” she said raggedly. “Look at me—look right in my eyes—tell me that you never wanted any harm to come to her.”
God took her hands in his own.
“I loved Cristabel,” he said.
“Tell me you never wanted any harm to come to her,” she said.
“I loved Cristabel,” he said. “I never wanted any harm to come to Cristabel. I’m so sorry. Mercy—I’m so sorry.” She was in an absolute storm of tears now; she pressed her face into his chest and gave way, as though struck with a rock from behind. He held her close and said, “I’m so sorry. I loved you all—I adored you all—I thought I was doing the right thing.”