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After a moment, the Emperor spoke at the corpse, in the smiling cadence of a man giving a talk at a dinner party:
“When they first brought her to Canaan House, I thought there’d been some mistake. You know that I’d been to Rhodes, to see the miracle, but I asked not to see the woman—just so I could be a disinterested party—and of course once I saw that she was necromantic I said yes, she should come to me to be a disciple. She was just shy of thirty then, I recall. And I knew she was sick, but I had no idea how bad it was until Loveday brought her in, looking as though she wanted every one of us beaten to death, and she could hardly walk … I went to kiss her hello, and she said: ‘Lord, I can’t kiss you back. My lipstick’s perfect and I refuse to smear it.’”
The strange Lyctor barked out a hollow laugh. They—he?—inclined his head, and you saw him in part-profile for the first time. He was very fair, but in a greyish, damp, slicked-back way that showed off the promontories of his skull. Fine, impatient lines were set around his drooping eyes, and quite deeply carved into his mouth. He looked older than your father had looked, when he died. These haughty features were set in a tall, aristocratic face, with an arched and supercilious nose, which nose he was currently staring down at the Emperor with an expression of supreme suffering.
“It wasn’t, though. She had it on her teeth.”
Mercymorn muttered, but not so quietly that it wasn’t audible: “Of course you’d notice that, Augustine.”
But Augustine was adding, in a light, cultivated voice: “I remember now … Lord! The time flies!… That was a damnable business. They sent her to us barely alive, and back then none of us could do anything for her, excepting you. Was she the first gen, or second?”
“Second,” said God. “Early second. We were still experimenting with getting the Sixth installation up and running. Some of the Houses were empty.”
Mercymorn spoke up: “No. We had it running by then. Because Valancy was with us, and Anastasia.”
The Emperor clicked his fingers, as though she had triggered some neuron flash. “Yes, you’re right. We were all there to meet her. All sixteen of us—and she acted as though she were at a wedding and was doing a receiving line of tedious cousins … I could hardly keep a straight face. When was the last time you saw her?”
This last question was asked a little abruptly. Both Lyctors fell silent for a moment, and then the one they called Augustine said: “Recently. Ten years ago. I told her she was getting to be a bit of a hermit, and she acted as though I was rather stupid … but she seemed in good spirits.”
Mercymorn said: “Cytherea was good at seeming,” to which Augustine just said, a little distantly: “You’d know, I’m sure.”
Before this could decompose further, the Emperor pressed: “And you, Mercy?”
You heard the molar-grinding again. Then the Saint of Joy said, colourlessly: “Nearly twenty years ago.” And: “She laughed too much.”
All three of them fell silent at the altar. The wasted body in front of them would no longer laugh too much, in any case. Augustine said, “Does anyone remember her name—her actual House name? Didn’t she have one?”
The Emperor suggested, “Heptane,” but Augustine said, “No, you’re thinking of Loveday. We’ve forgotten it! That’s unnatural. Who would have ever thought we could forget—a thing like that?”
Mercymorn stood. She tucked her hair behind her ears and away from her deceptively serene oval face, and she crossed primly to the back of the altar. She put her hands behind her back as though afraid to touch anything with them. She looked at Cytherea’s dead face with an intensity that was in its own way worse than tenderness. It was as though she were willing something from the corpse; like she could conjure something through sheer force of wanting. “Call her Cytherea Loveday,” she said. “That’s what she wanted to be called—and I found it unbearable and glutinous then, and I find it unbearable and glutinous now; but that is what she said … I never saw her cry except once,” she added in a pointless rush. “The day after. When we put together the research. When she became a Lyctor. I said, There was no alternative. She said…”
At this point, she broke off. Thankfully, she did not glance in your direction. Augustine was staring at the floor, hands crossed demurely in a posture of awkward respect, and the Emperor was looking up at Mercy, but all you could see was the back of his head where mother-of-pearl leaves and baby fingerbones adorned his hair. The candlelight flickered heartlessly over you all.
He asked, “What did she say?”
The other Lyctor said nothing, for a moment. She cleared her throat: “She said, We had the choice to stop.”
After a second, the Prince Undying sank his head into his hands. A stylus fell out of his pocket and rolled across the sleek black-and-bone tiles. It was the first time that he had seemed at all mortal. Humanity touched him briefly, like a passing shadow.
Then Augustine said, quite irrelevantly: “I wouldn’t have called it glutinous. She was just lucky that Cythere-a Loveday trips off the tongue. Now, mine would alliterate in a way I couldn’t have abided. Abode?”
“I will say this,” said Mercy presently, acting as though Augustine had never said a word. “I never mourned for Loveday Heptane. She did one good thing with her life, and she knew it.”
“Eulogise her,” said the Emperor, through his hands. “For God’s sake, eulogise her anyway. Eulogise them both.”
Augustine reached over and squeezed the shoulder of the man who became God and the God who became man and yet still invoked himself, apparently; the Lyctor got up with a grunt as though it hurt him and went to stand at the foot of the altar. You saw now that he was tall, and not particularly imposing, but—there was something removed from real life in the lineaments of his face, as though he had once looked at something terrible and it had lodged in his cheeks and forehead. He twitched open his First House cloak and stuck his thumbs in the belt loops of his elegant trousers—his white robe floated around his shoulders like an overjacket, filmy and beautiful—and he cleared his throat.
“Cytherea was gorgeous,” he said simply. “Ten thousand years, and I never heard her say an unkind word except when it was very funny. She loved us unguardedly, all of us, which showed both her patience and her enormous capacity … She was a worthy Lyctor and a beloved Hand—and Loveday gave her to us, so I suppose God bless Loveday.”
Mercymorn pressed her hand down close to the small fat blush roses. She had to draw herself together quite tightly. Her voice was light and a trifle strange when she said, “She could be a dreadful little fool. But she was generally an endearing dreadful little fool, and her death was beneath her.”
She slowly turned those dreamy hurricane eyes on the pews, which meant she turned them on you and Ianthe, and she started. She said, “The infants are awake.”
The Kindly Prince craned his head over his shoulder and saw that you, the infants, were awake. He stood and, horror upon horrors, came down the aisle to you; he looked you both over, as though he were glad to see you, as though he were glad to see Ianthe, some nameless softening in his face and in those white-ringed, primordial eyes. He reached out for your hands. You could not refuse him, and in any case had no choice of doing so; your body reacted long before your mind did, and the meat of your meat and the flesh of your flesh belonged to God. And so, with your hand in his left and Ianthe’s in his right—Ianthe had arranged herself so that she had given him her left hand, rather than her less-favoured right—he said, “Welcome home. Come closer—we’re just saying goodbye … we’re used to saying goodbye.”
Both you and Ianthe were led like sacrifices to the bier, to kneel where the other Lyctors had on the black-and-cream tiles. Mercymorn did not deign to look at you, but the strange Lyctor they had both called Augustine did. He looked down his long nose at you both, and he remarked: “Well, which one of the kiddies did her in?”
The Emperor said sharply, “That doesn’t matter.”
“It’s not like I hold it against ’em—I couldn’t. Believe me, if she went she chose to go. Well, I’d hate to guess … Two of them! What a funny old world,” he added bracingly.
The Lyctor came away from Cytherea’s bud-covered feet and dropped to crouch in the transept before Ianthe. He said, “My name is Augustine the First, the Saint of Patience, Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, first finger on the hand that serves the King Undying—and your eldest brother, for my sins. Who are you, my doves?”
