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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.”
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 fuck ing 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.
