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“Mercymorn!” said Augustine lightly. “I won’t fall for any of your worn-out tricks, my girl. Now, look: do I have to kill you before you get us both in trouble, or not?”
From your vantage point, you could see that the Saint of Joy’s face was a stiff white oval. Those hurricane eyes roiled within a face that was trembling and fixed. You could not see Augustine’s.
She said, “Don’t threaten me.”
“Or what? You’ll tell Daddy?” His tone of voice hadn’t changed. “Good grief … You wouldn’t get close enough to touch me, Mercymorn. No, I am not afraid of you. You are not very nice, but you are also not very clever, when it comes down to it. I’m going to give you three recommendations. One is to be in my airspace less. Two is to stop messing around with Cyth’s body. Three is to stop playing the rather dangerous game you’re playing—the one you said you’d stop.”
“I won’t do a thing you say.” She sounded tearful now.
“Don’t pull that face. I know you like I know my own soul … you’re thinking, If I move now, can I touch his neck before he can stop me? And heigh ho, there goes my trachea! It wouldn’t matter even if you were quick enough on the draw, you know.”
“As though you could ever—”
“If you killed me, I don’t think he’d forgive you, you see,” said Augustine. The easy, confidential tone of voice had gone. It was now flat and immovable and bored. “But if I killed you—if I stubbed you out beneath my foot, which would still be more than you deserve—then I am convinced that it would take me a mere hundred years to get John to say, I know why you did it, old chap, and I’m sorry, and for everything to come up Augustine. You have shot your bolt too many times.”
“How dare—”
“You have rendered yourself unlovable, Mercy,” said Augustine. “You’re the second saint. He’s sentimental over you. But don’t forget that he’s spent the last ten thousand years on a perpetual search-and-destroy mission out of, as far as I can tell, purely symbolic retribution. John is never as sentimental as you think. Do you need me to write this down for you, so you can read it to yourself each night? You—are—unnecessary—to—him. Worse still, you’ve become an embarrassment. I wouldn’t set myself up as his replacement A.L. He doesn’t need another bodyguard, and even she was significantly more lucid than you are.”
You’d expected a response. None came. You looked at the Saint of Joy—and at her expression withdrew into your alcove, flattening yourself, lest she pick you as a target to vent her frustrations on. There was silence from the corridor. Then Augustine broke it: “Stay away from me, Joy. I find myself so profoundly tired of looking at your face,” and his clickety-clackety bootsteps sounded down the corridor.
Mercymorn’s voice floated back, somewhat strangled: “But I haven’t even touched Cytherea!”
Afterward you stopped seeing them in the same room, except when the Necrolord Prime called you together for dinner, and then they sat as far apart as possible.
Favours Ianthe.
A source of continuing annoyance to you. You’d never been anybody’s favourite anything and did not intend to start. But the idea that the Princess of Ida had managed to capture another’s affection was bilious. Yet from the very start, Augustine had inclined toward her, and she had deployed her whole menagerie of coquettish smiles in return, each looking as though it had spent a month prowling the desert before being captured and put to this circus use.
She was often seen at his side, fully absorbed in whatever pearls of wisdom were dropping from the Saint of Patience’s lips; drinking calamitous amounts of hot tea with much the same expression, one you thought ill-suited to her shadowed eyes and white mouth; and, though less calmly, taking instruction in the long training hall with its polished wooden floorboards, the wood so new you were hesitant to step on it. It was only then that they seemed at odds, as the so-called Saint of Patience ran out of it every time Ianthe put hand to rapier.
He smoked his fierce cigarettes as he put her through her paces. She was always so tremendously bored by sword exercises: “I thought the point was to outsource this, elder brother,” you had heard her remark more than once. He would get cross quickly. From what little you could tell, her form was perfect. Her lines were exquisite. She never dropped the sword or fumbled with it, which proved again how inadequate a standard what little you could tell was. But there was something he did not like about how that right arm clutched that sword.
“Let go,” you heard him tell her once.
“I’m assuming you mean metaphorically.”
“Younger sister,” he said cordially, “some nice boy spent his life learning that sword for you, now you are trying to add your opinions to his, and they are simply not worth half a toot in this hot and terrible universe. Stop holding it like it smells—or like a banana you’re trying to burst—Emperor almighty, Ianthe! I’ve seen you do this perfectly, so why must you persist in doing it poorly?”
At that she had said a rude word, flung the sword down, and fled. Augustine finished his cigarette in a ruminative manner, and you stared at the rapier you had been given. The Emperor asked you to handle it, so you scheduled some time for handling it, with absolutely jack shit arising from the exercise.
“She can do it, you know,” he remarked to the air. “She simply needs to quit steeping in self-pity.”
You said, “Humiliating her is perhaps not the best curative.”
“Harrowhark,” he said, smiling, tapping his cigarette out on the skull of some long-dead Cohort hero, “if Ianthe’s opinion isn’t worth a fart in a hurricane, try to imagine how much less I value yours.”
So far away from Drearburh; so far from your congregation, and the elders and laypeople who had blushed to kiss your knucklebone prayer beads. You felt you actually had valuable information in this instance, but Ianthe’s secrets were not held in common, for you to spill so thoughtlessly. “Then that is your downfall,” you said.
“You are Anastasia come again.”
In a perfect world, Augustine’s cool would have warmed Mercymorn toward you. She did cultivate a distaste for Ianthe, but did not become any less shrill, acid, or contemptuous in your direction. Naturally a large portion of your education fell to her—with Augustine busy, there was nobody left for you—but she more than once expressed her view that Augustine had nabbed the “working baby” on purpose, and left her the dregs to spite her.
Once when you were tired you had said to Ianthe, “Doesn’t it chafe, carrying on after him the way you do? Picking up his things? Smiling with your teeth showing?”
“My teeth are extremely white and I brush assiduously, so I see no problem showing them off,” said Ianthe.
“Lighting his cigarettes and cooing, ‘That is so fascinating, elder brother.’”
“I intend to take on the habit myself,” said Ianthe. “Cigarettes! On a space station! What a power play.”
“Do you ever wake up and think to yourself, When did the Princess of Ida become this grovelling slime?”
She smiled at you, with those teeth so brushed and white. The eyes that had once been chill lavender were now blue, pattered with brown flecks, and as mocking as ever. “Most days,” she said. “Oh, for crying out loud, Harrowhark, smiling and listening to some quite interesting stories about his ten thousand years is no hardship. Especially not when it may make him think twice about leaving me to be eaten by a Resurrection Beast. Carrying off Corona’s con for over twenty years taught me that shame is a privilege. We’re puppies, you and I: I with my lame paw, and you with three legs missing insisting you can make it on your own. And God help us both, because we are surrounded by wolves.”
Ianthe ended this startling speech by chucking you under the chin. You were too outraged and befuddled to dodge her. She said, “Show your endearing side, Harry. It may save your life.”
Spirit magician.
Another terrible understatement. Augustine was a spirit magician like the Mithraeum was a box with some bones. You did not begrudge him this expertise. Spirit magic had never been your forte. He had a Lyctor’s power, and a myriad’s refinement: he taught to a curriculum you had barely known existed. The dead Harrowhark of your letters had told you to take instruction: and so did God, shepherding you and Ianthe both to take lessons from the Mithraeum’s resident expert in Resurrection Beasts.
“It’s not my primary wheelhouse,” Augustine explained. “But since our last expert vanished into a large intestine, unravelled by a troop of ghosts, I’m the last spirit adept standing.”
“He’s being modest,” said God. “The barriers between us and the River are Augustine’s. He could plunge half a city into it, if he wanted.”
