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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.”
