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God said, a little bewildered, “That’s not quite what I mean. But to concentrate so much thanergy into so precise a task—like using a nuclear detonation to power a sewing machine … The ovum ought to have been obliterated at a subatomic level. Do you understand what they did?”
“Intimately,” you said. “They explained it to me when I was very young. I could draw the theorem mathematics, if you gave me some flimsy.”
“No, I don’t mean mechanically. Conceptually. To all intents and purposes, your mother and father committed a type of resurrection,” he said. “They did something nigh-on impossible. I know, because I have committed the same act, and I know the price I had to pay. Thalergetic modification of an embryo is difficult enough, but to achieve the same thing with thanergy…”
You gave a helpless half shrug. “My parents were not flesh magicians,” you said. “But they were the greatest necromancers the Ninth House had yet produced.”
“No doubt,” said the Emperor. “But, Harrowhark—even as the product of two obvious geniuses—you are a walking miracle. A unique theorem. A natural wonder.”
You looked at him, and you said: “I have just told you that I am the product of my parents’ genocide.”
The Emperor set down his tea and finished off his biscuit, and did that terrible thing that he did, on occasion: he reached over to touch your shoulder in that brief, tentative way, the lightest and swiftest of gestures, as though afraid that he might burn you. Your mother had guided your hands over bloating corpses. Your father had held down the corners of great tomes, and his sleeve had brushed your six-year-old-fingers as he showed you how best to turn their pages. Both of them had pressed a rough rope made of coated fibre into your hands—you recalled the pressure from their palms, their attempts to be gentle. When the Emperor touched you, your body recalled, unbidden, each rare and terrible touch committed by your mother and father.
God said, “I will shepherd your dead two hundred. I will take on their burden to mourn and cherish in more ways than you’ll understand right now. And I’ll remember your parents, who did such a godawful thing to my people and theirs. I will remember it until the universe contracts in on itself and wipes clean what they did, and makes blank such an indelible stain. I acknowledge to you and to infinity that I am the Emperor of the Nine Houses—the Necrolord Prime—and that their stain must be regarded as my stain. Consider it my crime, Harrowhark. I pledge myself to making it right.”
A red heat had begun at your exoskeleton’s necklet—travelled up your throat—darkened your face beneath your paint until you felt as though you had been held too close to a stove. You said, “Lord, you can’t.”
“Teacher.”
“Teacher, have mercy on me. Please don’t tell anyone.”
A child’s plea. Nobody has to know. To God! For a moment, he changed. He grew angry, and you thought it was at the rank foolishness, the irresponsibility of what you’d said. Those monstrous, unnatural eyes narrowed, and his mouth became hard as the stones and rocks that had made up the planetoid you’d later slaughter. For a moment you perceived a hint of his great immortal age—of an enormous distance between you, of an ignition too bright for you to conceive. You were an insect standing before a forest fire. You were a cell beholding a heart.
“Harrowhark, nobody has the right to know,” he said fiercely. “Nobody has the right to blame you. Nobody can judge. What has happened, has happened, and there’s no putting it back in the box. They wouldn’t understand. They don’t have to. I officially relieve you from living in fear. Nobody has to know.”
That night in your bed, you did not weep. Your body tried, and failed, to produce tears. Afterward, God was more careful with you than ever, and he had been careful before; sometimes you caught him glancing at you as if he was trying to see something in the confines of your face, but whatever he was looking for it was not what your parents had done. At the time you swore that you would tell him about the Tomb: you would find it within yourself to admit that also. You had never told anyone about the Tomb, but you would tell him—you would tell him if he asked—no, that was equivocation. You would tell him of your own free will, and be glad of any punishment he saw fit to give you.
Before you’d left him then, when your tea had cooled sufficiently that you were no longer required to drink it, you’d asked: “What does BOE stand for?”
“Blood of Eden,” he’d said, slowly.
“Who is Eden?”
“Someone they left to die,” said God wearily. “How sharper than the serpent’s tooth, et cetera … Harrow, if you bother to remember anything from my ramblings, please remember this: once you turn your back on something, you have no more right to act as though you own it.”
At the time, that had made perfect sense to you.
15
ONE OTHER CONSOLATION WAS THE BODY. She kept close by in the months that followed; she walked around in an old bloodstained copy of the scintillating First House robes, and you startled whenever you saw her. But you took enormous comfort in watching her pace your sterile, empty quarters, and in watching her kneel before the mummified assembly that lived within the corridors and apses of the Mithraeum. The greatest gift she gave you was that when you laid yourself down on your bed to sleep fully clothed, you would dream of her with an uncanny, profound regularity. You could not in fact dream of anything else.
In dreaming you would return to your old bed back in the sanctuary of Drearburh—your childhood bed, getting a little bit short in the toes for you now. You prayed at its foot, no longer bracketed by either gruesome great-aunt. Instead, opposite your cot would be the Body, her hands neatly folded on the ancient shawl that your mother had always laid on the bed—the electric light in the sconce shining down on the firm musculature of her forearms, the calluses upon those dead palms. Her eyes she kept closed, each wet and frozen lash brushing cheeks blanched by expiration.
“I’m afraid,” you’d say.
She would say softly, in the voice that prickled each hair on your scalp with a sweet, deep electricity: “What of, Harrowhark?”
“Tonight I am afraid to die.”
“That is the same fear as failure,” she said once. “You don’t fear dying. You can tolerate pain. You are afraid that your life has incurred a debt that your death will not pay. You see death as a mistake.”
You said, a little bitterly: “What else is it?”
The dead corse of the Locked Tomb—the death of the Emperor—the maiden with the sword and the chains, the girl in the ice, the woman of the cold rock, the being behind the stone that could never be rolled away—said, in half-confused tones she had never taken with you: “I don’t know. I died, once … no, twice,” but then she had said no more.
Another time you said, “I’m afraid of myself. I am afraid of going mad.”
Another time, “I am still afraid of Cytherea the First.”
And, “I am afraid of God.”
And again: “Do I have Ortus’s eyes? Are these ones mine? I never really looked at them— Beloved, what were my eyes like?”
Unfortunately, that time she answered. Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she talked to you, quietly, about discursive subjects, and sometimes she didn’t say a thing. But now, that which was buried insensate said quite calmly, “She asked me not to tell you.”
You awoke, flat on the floor in front of the water-pump sink, screaming until your throat was broken. When you stared at your bloodshot eyes in the mirror and tried to remember Ortus Nigenad’s, you couldn’t recall a difference: they were both that deep and fathomless black, the colour Ianthe called black roses, because Ianthe was overfamiliar and frankly a pervert. You tried to imagine Ortus’s sad, heavy weariness staring at you from your own mirror. It did not work. You were both terribly relieved and terribly frightened.
16
IN THE FIRST FEW weeks you had created a new cipher, based off the original with a few mathematical changes just in case Ianthe had gleaned too much data from the envelopes. In this you started to collate your thoughts and findings on the Lyctors around you: a pitiful memorandum of opinion and perceived fact, mostly useless, gathered in the hope that by examining your findings in aggregate you might somehow receive wisdom. You had always liked to write notes. You grieved the loss of your diary from Canaan House, but your things had been filtered through Ianthe back to you, which meant that all you got was a small supply of sacramental paint and your old clothes. When you inquired about the diary, you received the blunt response that it had been burned on your own orders.
Your section on Ianthe was very short:
IANTHE (WHILOM TRIDENTARIUS) THE FIRST
Unworthy of trust. Suspects me mad.
