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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 cerises, 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 back 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.
