by Tamsyn Muir
She was a crumple of misery. “Tell me that you’re sorry you lied, you bastard!”
“I lied to you,” he said. “They’re dead because of me—I let them die because I thought that was easier … and I have regretted it for nearly ten thousand years. I love you so much, Mercy; I will love you three until the end of time, until there is nothing left of me but the remnant atoms of the God and man who loved you.”
“I forgive you everything, Lord,” she whispered.
And she slid her hands inside him.
The Emperor of the Nine Houses came apart, layer by layer. It was instantaneous, but so simultaneously slow—so unbelievably fucking slow—that it was like we saw every moment, you and I. He flew apart. The body of God separated from every divine part of itself. There was a brief flare of that sinus-panicking magic, which fizzled as Mercymorn somehow disconnected all his wires at once. It was as though he were suddenly nine million particles of magnet, repelling one another. That necromancer deity in the human frame—wasn’t it just, after all, a human frame?—exploded. He split into parts, and then the parts split, and the room drowned in red mist. The mist became powder, and the powder dwindled into nothingness, until Mercymorn was left standing alone, wet with sweat, and some other liquid, but clean.
Mercy turned around, to Augustine. She was not weeping now.
“It is finished,” she said.
Leaving me an orphan again, though your brain didn’t let me linger on that one.
52
THE SAINT OF PATIENCE stood up and crossed to her. She reached forward and took big, clawed fistfuls of his shirt.
“I wanted it to be me,” she said, in this weird, unearthly calm. “I didn’t want it to be you. I didn’t want it to be you, Augustine, after all … the sin needed to be mine.”
“There’s hours,” he said unsteadily. “If we drop through the River now—”
“We can watch our people die from close up,” she said. “The dead planets could have sunk out of orbit already … we just don’t know. We don’t know how long it takes to undo the Resurrection. Millions of people … all those millions of our people … No, I had to do it. I am not very nice, Augustine, and I was never very good.”
And for the first time, Ianthe’s voice, which was sunk in a whisper: “Eldest sister, what have you done?”
“I killed Dominicus,” said Mercymorn. “Killed the Second, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth, the Seventh, the Eighth, the Ninth … and the First, though who cares about that? He is dead. He is gone. What he held together must now come apart. The sun must have died immediately, and those grey librarians will be the first to know about it—then the Seventh, and Rhodes … but every system that John ever put into place will cease. Every House may hear the dying cries of their life support … even as I speak.”
Somehow I managed to say: “We have to go get everyone out. Now.”
“There is no way,” said Mercy, cool as death.
It was Ianthe of all people who said, “How can you say that? Will you not even try?”
“Dominicus will collapse in a few minutes, chick,” said the other Lyctor. He too had the calm of a dying man. I only met that calm once, and it wasn’t on a living human being: it was the calm on a dead girl’s face, speared and mangled in a bed I’d told her to lie down in. “It’s going to form a black hole that nobody in that system will escape. The Nine Houses are over.”
“The Nine Houses are gone,” echoed Mercy. “It is over … it is done. We always planned for a mass evacuation … but I had my moment … and I took it. I took it, Augustine. And now I will die, and face the River.”
“No,” said Augustine.
“Augustine, you promised me that after we did it we would go somewhere and drop into the nearest sun—”
“That was when this was a fantasy,” he said. There might as well have been no one else in the room. The Saint of Duty held burning embers in his palm, more statue than man; Ianthe was staring into space, looking like a child, for all her height. Little. Bemused. I don’t even want to know what I looked like. Augustine said, “That was when the plan happened under perfect conditions. Conditions we never could have fulfilled, honestly. You took your shot, and you had to take it, and now the Houses are dead. The Resurrection Beasts are still out there.”
“You cannot make me do this.”
“You have a job, Joy,” he said. “If you kill yourself now, you’ll leave everything remarkably untidy, and that’s not like you, is it?”
She said numbly, “That was not the agreement.”
“Bad luck,” said Augustine. “It’s done—as you chose to stain your hands so mine could be clean, you’re going to have to put up with the fact that you picked the wrong man to enter into a suicide pact with. I hate ’em. Cristabel might have undone all my good work with Alfred, but here comes the reckoning. We’re going to go round up the ships—everyone who’s left—sue for peace as best we can—get the Edenites on side. And then we’ll find a place to fulfil the old promise … Somewhere out there exists a home not paid for with blood; it won’t be for us, but it will be for those who have been spared. Babies always get born. Houses always get built. And flowers will die on necromancy’s grave.”
Her throat was working. “Augustine—”
The Lyctor took her silently in his arms: they held each other like children who’d had a nightmare and had woken in a fright. Just as silently, they detached.
She said in a low voice, “He was right. There can be no forgiveness.”
“Then let us not seek out forgiveness, but forgetfulness,” he said. “Bury me next to you in that unmarked grave, Joy. We knew that was the only hope we ever had—that we would live to see it through … and pray for our own cessation. Oh, we’ll still hate each other, my dear, we have hated each other too long and too passionately to stop … but my bones will rest easy next to your bones.”
Augustine raised his head, for the first time, to look out at his frozen audience, of which probably the most animated member was Cytherea’s body, which my mum had completely abandoned.
“No retribution, Gideon?” he remarked. His face was deathly livid. His features were still, but his hands were not. “I thought you might want to burn on his pyre.”
I opened my mouth to speak; I was startled when the raw-looking man wearing my sunglasses said, “No.”
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t surprised,” Augustine said, “but also lying if I said I wasn’t pleased. Here we three are at the end … Alpha, beta, and gamma.”
Gideon stared at the dead cigarette in his hand, and then he said, “Well. Augustine, there’s something you should know—”
White light.
It bleached the insides of your nose and the back of your throat. It hurt coming out your ears. It bled out your eyeballs. It wasn’t a flash of light, more … a suddenness; when it was gone—as though it hadn’t even existed, but had been a luminous hallucination—time stopped.
That light took colour from the room—everyone was a slow-motion cavalcade of greys, of eyes caught widening, of mouths parting in stone-shaded articulations of shock. I’d tried to turn us around like there was a grenade to fall on—and then, in that thousand-shaded grey, I saw—the red.
Powdery particles were resolving in the air—they were emerging from my mouth, shaking free from Ianthe’s hair. First a softly tinted pale colour like a sunrise pink, then deepening to cherry colour, then to deep scarlet. They floated in midair, hesitatingly, and then inexorably travelled to one point, like dust motes beneath a ray of sunshine. A great stripping wind blew through the room like a scourge, whipping those motes up in a crimson vortex. The powder became a grit; the grit became an aggregate; and then that hot red matter resolved into bone.
It happened in an instant. It happened over a myriad. A wet red construct knitted itself back together, and then burbling out of its centre, a hot gush of pale pink meat and nerve—a lumpen squirting of organ, deep soft violets, fat-stippled cerise
s, coils of intestine and gentle buff-shaded curves of bowel—white pops in each eye socket, bumps of sandy pearl stuff filling in behind—the twitch of a wet red tongue in a mandible spurting teeth. The percussive, throbbing urgency of a heart, quickly hidden with a puff of bronchiae sliding into big soft lung shapes—abruptly muscled over, then dressed with belated modesty in skin—the skin shading over with a fine coating of hair at the arms, at the chest—dark hair undulating over the eyebrows, making wrinkles and ruffles over the skull. The hot white jelly of the eyes was dyed black as though oily drops had been squeezed into it—purling over in black, shining wavelets, staining it true nitid ebony—the white rings bobbing up to the surface as though they’d been ducked into the water, each matte black pupil resting in the central point.
The Emperor of the Nine Houses—the King Undying—the Prince of Death—the Necrolord Prime—stood behind Mercymorn. He reached out with his naked hand. Her chest blew outward in a hot shower of ribs, meat, and diaphragm. Her body stumbled forward—he tapped the back of her head, something went crack—and the Saint of Joy fell facedown before Augustine, whose chest was decorated with the desecrated remnants of her heart.
The Emperor dropped to his haunches and eased the white robe off Mercy’s dead shoulders. He shrugged his naked body into it—coyly pulling it closed—and he stretched his jaw in his mouth, and wriggled the tip of his newly grown nose.
“Right,” he said, and closed his eyes briefly. Then he said, “The sun has stabilized. Hope the Sixth House didn’t get cooked in the flare.”
He rotated his shoulders like a prize fighter, and he said, conversationally: “I never like cleaning house all at once, but it seems as though I have to, don’t I? Let’s make this very simple and very clear. I am going to ask each of you a question. If you give me the correct answer, you live. If not”—he nudged Mercy’s leg with his bare foot—“you know what happens. I shouldn’t have to do this, should I? This is seriously awkward and embarrassing, isn’t it?”
Augustine pressed his lips together; that was it. God said, “It was a lovely bit of work on Mercymorn’s part. She must have been training for thousands of years, to bring that off. But I didn’t get to where I am by being able to die, you know?”
The Lyctor said, “The Resurrection Beasts—”
“Can’t kill me.”
“You acted afraid—”
“Acted is operative. But this is not an FAQ. Let’s get a move on. Gideon,” he said. Then he looked at us, gave a little crooked half smile, and said, “Gideon Episode One, I mean. Gideon the First—third saint to serve me—my fingers and gestures. Mate, I’m not mad about Wake. I’m not even mad that you failed to either fix or put down Harrow. I just want your loyalty. Do I have it, or not?”
“You have my loyalty,” said Gideon.
“Good. You stand on that side of the room—yes—just there.” The Saint of Duty crossed to stand on the other side of the chair, away from Augustine, away from the two dead bodies, never even giving them a backward look. Then God said, “Okay—Ianthe the First—eighth saint to serve me—my fi—”
“You have my loyalty,” Ianthe interrupted.
“Choice,” he said, as she crossed the room. “Obvious enthusiasm. Great stuff. This is what I like about you, Ianthe, you don’t hedge your bets. Now—can’t ask Wake even if I know what she’d say. It’s a real pity you killed her, Gideon, I’d been planning on keeping her around … She had a lot to tell me, and why be an ass to the mother of your child? Speaking of…”
And he looked at us.
I said, “You told that bastard to beat up Harrow?” That was my job, after all.
God said, “I was trying to save her.”
Also my job. “Go to hell, Pops.”
“This isn’t a question for you,” he said patiently. “You’re my kid; yikes. I’m not going to give you an ultimatum on our first day together. Let’s talk about me and you later. I can’t make up for all the years where I wasn’t around to buy you hot chips and go to your school gala, but killing you to escape a messy relationship is a bit beneath me. Besides, that’s not your body. I’d rather not punish Harrow for you acting out.”
We were tossed across the room, not hard. Your bones and meat came to a gentle rest next to Ianthe before I could even tighten your hands on the sword.
Then the Emperor turned to Augustine.
They faced each other without aggression. The Emperor looked like a man waiting in his bathrobe on the front step, greeting someone slinking home long hours past their curfew. Hot red heart’s-blood was splattered down the Lyctor’s chest, running in rivulets into his robe, and some of it was speckled lightly over his face.
“Do I get the opportunity?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the Emperor. “You do. I didn’t offer it to Mercy because Mercy really pissed me off, I’m sorry to say.”
“Understandably,” agreed Augustine.
“Augustine the First,” said the man who was God, and the God who was man. “My first saint. My first hand, and fist, and gesture. Will you swear your loyalty to me again, clean slate, fresh start? Or not?”
He murmured, “You said there was no forgiveness.”
“‘I pardon him, as God shall pardon me,’” said the Emperor. “Come, swear your loyalty, my son—my brother—beloved—Lyctor—saint.”
Augustine lifted his eyes to the Lord. They were the same grey as they had been in the stopping of time. He looked at the blood on his front; he looked over the assembled group across the room: me jerking in your frozen skin. Ianthe. Gideon. At Cytherea’s body in the chair. The collapsed body on the floor, Mercymorn’s hair tumbling close to his feet in rosy, bloodied tangles. He looked at the God of the Nine Houses.
“No, John,” he said.
And Augustine raised his hand.
A nauseating plunge. Like being thrown through the air, Harrow—the sickening weightlessness at the apex of a rising fall; the jolt before getting on that rickety old elevator down to the monument, to the millionth power. A lamentation of ripping metal. There was a huge, bubbling WHUNK—we all tipped over to one side as the station listed. The chairs tumbled over—Cytherea’s corpse tumbled too, no longer bound by the wrists to anything—and I could move your meat again, though it probably wasn’t the greatest moment to move. The outside shutter ripped off the window, and I saw it. I saw the water.
God had stumbled; he was pressed against the wall. Light flooded the room—weird, unearthly, poppling light. Alarmed bubbles and rills of air flattened themselves against the plex window as the whole Mithraeum was driven into increasingly dark, brownish, bloody water.
The plex buckled, shivered, then gave. The River burst through the window in a high-pressure torrent. The Emperor was sucked out into the water, and Augustine dove after him, and Ianthe waded after him. Harrow, the only reason we weren’t pulled out too was because I was yanked back into the muscular, lean-beef arms of the saint who shared my name. He was wrestling me out of the gush as the station listed upward, you under one of his arms, him clambering into the foyer that was quickly angling upward as I held on to my sword.
“Fuck off,” I bawled, affrighted—
He said, “Can you do necromancy?”
“No, I can’t do necromancy—”
“Then come with me,” he said.
The water surged and roared behind us. The Saint of Duty wrested open the door to the Emperor’s private rooms—slammed it shut behind us as we crawled out into a topsy-turvy corridor, where a wash of water was already sliding down the halls from some trickle point. Another far-off moan of metal, a cracking, crushing noise; we scrabbled upward—ricocheted down the corridor—I followed him up a narrow passage, and then I stumbled and fell into him as the station listed another way, falling on a memorial that was now the wrong way up.
“Outer ring. More stable,” he said.
“But—”
“Move. We’re sitting ducks.”
I moved. The station kept rocking bac
k and forth as it was swept through the water, pressure nudging it back and forth from the sidelines. An alarm was wailing somewhere. I panted, “The hell happened—”
“Augustine’s dropped the whole station in the River,” he said. “We’ve crossed over physically—body, soul, everything.” And, irrelevantly: “Wish he’d given me the packet.”
“What does that mean—”
“This,” he said.
We’d reached another ring. The plex here was solid—the shutters had peeled up with the force of the drop, but the plex hadn’t given, not yet—and we were tilting so far forward that we were nearly walking on the window. The River stretched out before us: some light source from the station lit the water’s gloom like a spotlight.
We were falling fast, and deeper, and deeper. Sad crunchy noises kept going off overhead, as though we were a suit of armour squeezed between enormous hands. The featureless River almost made it feel as though we were hanging still—the only thing that gave context to our movement were the little figures in free dive outside.
Augustine and the Emperor—God—the man who’d contributed half of me, unknowing—wrestled as they sank, sucked down by some invisible slipstream. The water churned around them. Maybe it was some titanic necromantic battle, but up here, falling sidelong, the River water boiling away from their bodies, it just looked like they were punching each other. I saw the slim, trailing white ghost that must’ve been Ianthe, diving down after.
I said: “What do we do? Abandon ship? Swim to the top?”
“No,” said Gideon. “Augustine’s dropped us deep. I think we’re already all the way down to the barathron. That’s a long way from the surface.”
“I can hold my breath.”
“Funny. Breath’s not the problem … You don’t need to breathe in the River.”
“So let’s goddamn swim for it, I hate this—”
“Listen to the station. Hear that creaking? There’s pressure down here. It’s not water pressure, it’s the weight of … whatever the River is, we never really knew. It’ll get a normal person in seconds. You and I won’t last much longer. And then there’s the ghosts. Number Seven’s gone, so they’ll be back soon.”