AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When you had asked Mercymorn outright for her House name, she had simply stared at you with disgusted astonishment, as though you were a turd who had learned to dance, and then said, “Go away!”
Unfortunately, Augustine had been no more forthcoming than Mercymorn. He did not recall Mercy’s House name, would not remember if he could, and had most likely forgotten the information immediately to make room for something more worthwhile, i.e., anything else.
Poor relationship with Augustine.
“She might not have even had one,” he said, shaking out an ancient sheet of flimsy newsprint. “Do keep in mind that our holy resurrections were staggered, and it took generations for our merry band to assemble. Alfred and I were there early enough to found the Koniortos Court on the Fifth, but Lyctors like Cyth wouldn’t be born for years and years, and she spent her whole life suffering Seventh House woo-woo theories regarding the value of hereditary cancer … whereas Mercy is the oldest lag except for me, and she was out hammering at the Eighth House before the paint was even dry on the Resurrection.”
Contentious cavalier.
When you asked God why she was the Saint of Joy, he simply said: “I really intended those titles to describe the cavalier, Harrowhark, not the Lyctor. Alfred for patience; Pyrrha for duty; Cristabel for joy. Mercy would be the first to tell you that Cristabel Oct was a delight.” He paused and said, “Maybe don’t mention her name to Augustine though.”
Mercy was not the first to tell you that Cristabel Oct was a delight. When you mentioned her cavalier’s name, she went rigid, as though stung. The Saint of Joy turned to you, scrunch-mouthed and nauseous with rage, and wheezed: “Don’t you ever—ever—use her name with me, you useless child, you impertinent cell,” which was a discovery in and of itself.
Yet it was Augustine who said fervently, “A total delight. Effervescent. Kind to animals and children. A master of the sword. Did not have the intellect you’d ordinarily find in a sandwich or an orange, and was a sickening twerp into the bargain. The Eighth House will never see her like again.”
Anatomist.
What else to call Mercy’s power? As a Lyctor, you could read a human body’s thanergy and thalergy like a book—but a picture book with helpful arrows pointing at places of interest, laying them naked and open to you. If you looked at Ianthe, however, you saw nothing. When you even looked at the nothing, it hurt the eye and wobbled the fat of the brain. Of course, she was no more immune to theorems than you were, but without the clarity of Lyctoral sight those theorems became much harder to use. You could press your hand to Ianthe’s chest, if you wanted—which you didn’t, naturally—and the blood-warm sternum beneath would gradually unfold for you. But it would take effort, and close contact, and you would need to know the sternum.
Mercymorn the First knew the sternum. Mercymorn the First knew the pericardial fat, the soft-tissue secrets of the mediastinum, the false-heart shape of the thymus. You might have to press your whole palm to Ianthe’s breastbone—doubtless—and take valuable seconds to search out the bone, and the things behind the bone, their characters, their locations. Mercymorn could pinpoint your pineal gland with the merest touch to the skull. This was not due to some Lyctoral power that she alone possessed, no honed necromantic theorem; as God had told you, she had simply memorised the body, by rote, over the course of ten thousand years. She had studied the measurements and their range of differences, and on the rare occasions when she needed to assume where something was or how it worked, her assumptions had the accuracy of ten thousand years’ experience. What Mercy didn’t know about the body wasn’t just not worth knowing, said the Emperor; if she didn’t know it, it hadn’t existed previously.
Over the dinner table you asked Augustine why, if it was simply a matter of memory, he hadn’t done the same thing. Ianthe choked discreetly on a forkful of boiled flour-paste shapes in red sauce.
“Lord! I can barely remember what I had for lunch last week,” he said. “Besides, anatomy has too narrow an application.”
Mercymorn opened her mouth, hurricane eyes promising a coastal lashing, and said, “Application!” but Augustine said, languidly—
“One would only really need it to kill Lyctors, Harrowhark, and the rest of us never evinced any interest in that.”
That broke up the dinner somewhat.
* * *
There was much you might have written about the last Lyctor of the trio. There was useful information aplenty—you held it all carefully in your head, repeated it to yourself day by day on the basis that it might yet save your life. In a way, you were more intimate with the Saint of Duty than you were with either Augustine or Mercymorn.
The thing was, life in the Mithraeum was very comfortable. You wanted for nothing. There was plentiful food and heat and water, none of which you could ever dismiss, having grown up in Drearburh—having pored so long over whether or not you had food and heat and water enough to support your dwindling population. You lived in the midst of a beautiful memorial to those who had offered the Nine Houses their bravery, and skill, and their lives, the very best of the best, whose deeds were proven now by the presence of their bones in the holiest temple in the holiest system in the holiest part of space. The House of God. The Temple of the Nine Resurrections. The Necrolord Prime.
Looked at objectively, there were really only two things wrong with your life. One was that you were not a normal Lyctor. The other was even less complicated.
ORTUS??? (WHILOM???) THE FIRST, SAINT OF DUTY
Wants me dead.
18
IT WAS ORTUS NIGENAD who took charge of the body, washing it and laying it out with the help of Magnus Quinn. Harrowhark was surprised that Ortus had the trick of it, let alone the will to do so. In the room off the kitchen, in the chilly little morgue that doubled as a pantry, their breath hung in diamond clouds midair. She found herself watching their process: dressing the eyeballs in spirits, supporting the jaw with a bandage tied neatly behind the dark head, doing up the shining copper buttons of the no-longer-white Cohort jacket. Harrow had questioned this, but Abigail said that once they had extracted the projectiles from the wounds, Captain Deuteros might be decently arranged. Harrow was astonished that decent arrangement could still be constructed: the body had been in poor condition.
There were eight bullets in all. On flimsy, Harrow had calculated the trajectories and forces needed to compromise the axial skeleton in such a way. Lady Pent had assisted. Her thick brown hair was pinned up high on her crown and supported her first pair of glasses, swapped out for another, apparently totally different pair of glasses while she leaved through an ancient gloss-pulp book, with gloves on to protect the fragile pages from her sweat. Harrow had sworn to avoid Pent at all costs, but the corpse in front of them had rendered that impossible.
Harrowhark said: “The first projectile caused enormous trauma to the heart, and would have been fatal. The second hit the clavicle. The third passed through the abdomen and lodged in the spine—and so on. The important note here is the first bullet. It accurately destroyed both atria.”
Abigail turned another page and said, openly baffled: “So why keep shooting?”
“Panic,” suggested her husband, straightening up from the corpse.
Ortus was still busy dabbing blood away from a popping bruise on the body’s temple, but said, “Anger, perhaps. I have often heard that anger may carry one beyond the initial act of murder.”
Abigail said, “Ah. Here’s the puppy. Reverend Daughter, look at this.”
Harrowhark stood and crowded in at the Fifth adept’s shoulder. She was being urged to look at a diagram of a bullet. Harrow reached over to take one of the less-crumpled projectiles between thumb and forefinger, to hold it close to the picture and compare, and she beheld the drawing opposite: a long stock, an immense barrel, a jumble of triggers and mechanics and protrusions that she did not understand. Carbine rifle, read the key. For a moment she pitied Judith Deuteros’s last seconds. To be killed with this ancient piece of grave goods! It would have been like being set upon by a ghost out of time.
A brief skim of the blueprint showed her the problem immediately. “This weapon can only fire six projectiles before needing to be replenished,” she said. (“Reloaded,” added Abigail helpfully.) “The assailant fired eight.”
“And must’ve known that poor Judith had no hope after the first hit. So reloading is odd, to say the least. Did anyone get anything pertinent out of the lieutenant?”
