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You should have known the former, and the latter was all your own fault. The first slip was the matter of Cytherea’s tomb.
The Emperor had laid the corpse of Cytherea the First in a small chamber off the central residential atrium, a little too close for comfort. This atrium was a well of corridor shafts off to other rings of the station, and its floor was an exquisite mandala of hand bones under glass—each metacarpal dyed the colour of its House, dominated by ombres of white to crimson for the Second and white to navy for the Fourth. Around the mandala were tiles of raised brown stone that rapped sharply when one stepped on them. There were no windows to speak of, just strong electric lights from round holes in the ceiling, and in the middle hung a delicate chandelier of white crystals. The room was pillared with three massive steel-edged columns on either side, each a cacophony of exposed wire under smoked glass. These wires were thronged about with bone, with glistening strands of fat wrapped around some of the threads of copper, instead of plex; they reeked of naked thalergy, and their purpose was still not immediately apparent to you. Every so often a whole arm bone would peek out of this nest of soft yellow fat-wrapped wire. You assumed it was not another memorial.
There were nine decorative arches on the east-most side of the room. You had by now investigated each arch carefully. The brown floor tiles were inlaid halfway up the walls in these arches, and then became glass of every different colour, and in the centre of each polychromatic sweep was a sword-bracket. Some of the brackets were empty, and some held rapiers. One in particular always drew you back to it: a black rapier with a basket hilt formed of ebon wires. At the termination of each wire was a single canine tooth, and the end—pommel!—was a soft, worn knob of black-dyed bone.
The side room they put Cytherea in was not so decorated. The door was always open to reveal her laid out on a stretcher, with candles all around her that never seemed to go out or melt down, covered by those chubby blush rosebuds that also never seemed to open or rot. In these two miracles you detected the hand of the Emperor Divine. Every so often you saw him in there, having a quiet conversation with the body in the same way one would talk to a sleeping child; sometimes Augustine was there, and once Mercy. You never saw the other. You had ventured in there yourself often, even though it was gauche, even though you had done enough damage. Something about her troubled you, and you thought it was the paranoid madness, but you couldn’t be sure. Your brain told you that the arms so chastely crossed over that skewered chest had been moved a little. Your brain told you that the lips were a little too parted. When you had told Teacher of your worries—you little imbecile—he had grimaced, and worried his forehead with his thumb momentarily, and said:
“Nobody would touch her, Harrow. I haven’t.”
“I know, I just—”
“Augustine wouldn’t, out of love,” he said. “Mercy wouldn’t, out of superstition. And Ortus…” He looked at you carefully, as always when he mentioned the other; the name always came awkwardly to his lips. “Ortus wouldn’t out of respect, believe me. He wouldn’t even think of such a thing. Doesn’t sound Ianthe’s style either.”
“But I thought…”
“I think perhaps you should try to avoid that room,” he had suggested, sympathetically.
You had burned: you had been molten with shame and resentment: you had been reduced entirely to flame. Yet for all that you now walked devoutly past the doorway where lay the peaceful corpse of Cytherea the First, you entered that doorway in your waking nightmares: watched, lost in the hallucination of your mind’s eye, as those frozen fingers twitched into arcane formations, as each bare toe on each chilly foot shivered as though the corpse had been touched with an electrified wire.
Your mistake was the time you stopped just outside the room, arrested by muffled creaks at the edges of your hearing; tortured past any shame, you turned to Ianthe and said:
“Do you perceive any sound from within the mortuary chapel?”
She said, “Do you try to sound as portentous as possible, or does it just sort of happen naturally?”
“Answer the damn question, Tridentarius!”
You did not call her Tridentarius outside of a locked room; so she looked at you queerly, and said, “No,” and then, as though more enlightened by what she saw in your face, gently: “No, I don’t, crazycakes.”
And you did not ask her again.
There was so much more you might have written: Eyes have not reverted to lilac since the River. Arm is continued weak point. Still cries at night. Cannot actually be anaemic considering diet primarily red meat and apples. Regularly undersleeps. Begrudges my relationship with Teacher. Knows too much.
Your other sections were more substantial:
AUGUSTINE (WHILOM QUINQUE) THE FIRST, SAINT OF PATIENCE (WHY?)
The name had been easy to get. You had simply found him at his midafternoon cup of tea and cigarette—the Saint of Patience was as regular as a worm, and had no apparent fear of fire, or having to regrow his own taste buds—and asked him outright.
“Ah! Finally, my biographer,” he had said, rubbing his hands together in a show of deep satisfaction. “I’ve been waiting for this, Harrowhark. A, U, G, U, S, T, I, N, E, Augustine; height six feet; visage can be described as attractive but grave; eyes can be cinereous; and if you’re appreciative of poor little Cyth’s tradition—” She was always poor little Cyth, while he smiled, and looked directly at you.”It’s Augustine Alfred. Alfred was five foot ten—let’s get that down for posterity. He was my other half—get that down too, for the human-interest aspect.”
You were momentarily revolted by the apparent Fifth House tradition. “You and your cavalier were—wedded?”
He did not turn a hair at wedded, or, as Ianthe would, say back exactly what you had in a high-pitched voice, for which you would one day jerk her white and beating heart from her colourless ribcage and eat it dripping before her. You did not examine eat it dripping as you maybe should have done. He just laughed in the uproarious, slap-your-thigh way that the Saint of Patience always laughed. It was not a laugh that really ever seemed to find anything genuinely funny. When this peal of performative humour had died down, Augustine said, “Bless you, sis! He was my brother.”
Killed own sibling.
Augustine the First was the closest thing you had ever experienced to human plex. On the outside, he was perfectly painted, in a sort of antique Fifth House style: all manners and politesse and over-easy familiarity. Yet there was nothing inside him but an equally easy contempt. It was as though ten thousand years had built up a shell and left a space at the centre. Nothing seemed to touch Augustine. He was effervescent and charming in a way you found a little tedious and flip, especially on those teeth-grinding occasions when God called you all to eat a social meal together. But there was never any real emotion, or reaction, or opinion—his mouth said one thing, and his face could contort itself into any number of silly expressions, but those eyes were devoid of substance. Cinereous was at least correct: ash also looked solid upon first glance, but was insubstantial filth on contact.
Poor relationship with Mercymorn.
You had written this understatement of the myriad when you thought that highly strung Mercy was easily out of patience with the sillier and more frivolous Augustine, in those first few weeks. He cultivated a specific expression whenever Mercymorn was talking: an expression that was meant to say to all assembled, At least we suffer together, and that more than once you had seen Ianthe smother a laugh at, so comical was the mouth. But that was the painted-on expression. The plex had been shaped differently. Though you often saw them pass in the hallway as if the other did not exist, you once spied a different encounter while safely ensconced in an alcove. They’d stopped in front of each other, with Mercy trying to pass left—Augustine made himself intangibly too much left to pass—Mercy trying to pass right—Augustine made himself intangibly too much right to pass—and Mercy saying, tightly: “Get out of my way, you miserable ass.”
Augustine had said something you did not catch, but then something you did: “—back to the bad old tricks of decades past.”
“Oh, as if you’re my keeper, you chattering imbecile!”
“But does John know, my child?” said the Saint of Patience, smiling.
Mercy had bristled, the nacreous whites of her robe visibly shivering. “That,” she said, “is a foul implication.”
“I’m not implying anything. Does John—”
“—and it’s obscene the way you call him that when—”
