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“It is the mouth to Hell,” said God.
He stood in the liminal space between dining room and kitchen, the biscuit tin clutched in his hands. There were crease marks on his clothes from too much wearing, and there was a faint smudge of blue where he had been writing with ink and touched his temple. He said, “A genuinely chaotic space—chaos in the meaning of the abyss as well as unfathomable … located at the bottom of the River. The Riverbed is studded with mouths that open at proximity of Resurrection Beasts, and no ghosts venture deeper than the bathyrhoic layer. Anyone who has entered a stoma has never returned. It is a portal to the place I cannot touch—somewhere I don’t fully comprehend, where my power and my authority are utterly meaningless. You’ll find very few ghosts sink as far as the barathron. If I believed in sin, I would say they died weighted down with sin, placing them nearer the trash space. That’s what we’ve been using it for, in any case. That’s where we put the Resurrection Beasts. The rubbish bin … with all the other dross.”
Then he said, “So who wants a bikkie?”
37
THE ATMOSPHERE ON THE Mithraeum crystallized into hot, waiting agony. You would walk down a hallway and find Augustine and Ortus fighting—their eyelids glued together in pink, smarting lines as they sparred blind, in tight corners, rapiers flashing like light over water—then stopping apparently at random, before the Saint of Patience would say something like, “Okay; again, but airless,” and you would hear a sudden pounding wheeze as both of them emptied the air from their lungs. Generally, you then took another corridor.
The Lyctors also did what they perhaps should have from the very start, and organised loosely planned, often contradictory sessions of instruction for Ianthe—and for you. You went en masse into the River, leaving your bodies behind to slump into C-curves—or at least, yours did, the rest of them stood—and crunched the silvery sand of the bank beneath your feet as the three saints led you both to assemble wards. No blood or flesh or bone here: the first two might be scavenged, the last swept away by the capricious tide. You collected bits of dried wood—dried wood?—and empty-coloured stones—stones?—from the banks of the River beyond death, and you collected armfuls of the sharply unkind osiers and tall, feathery plants, the ones with long fibrous stems as tall as you were and thin, tangled leaves. Filthy salt wind whipped your faces as you formed wards from the flotsam that grew, apparently, on the bank. And no ghosts passed you to wade down to the water—no ghosts heaved themselves out of the waters of the layer that Mercymorn had called the epirhoic—they had fled for different climes.
“The poor bastards are terrified,” said Augustine.
There was nothing to see in the River yet; no brain, no hint of Beast, no far-off haze that indicated anything amiss. When you came around, you found that you were the only one sitting in a circle of standing Lyctors, their faces like blank flimsy, their rapiers in their hands, their offhands at the ready. The Saint of Duty with his spear. The Saint of Patience with his smallsword. The Saint of Joy with her net. Ianthe, with her trifold knife. You stared numbly at these faces, wondering which one would betray God at the last.
At the beginning of that last week, you still believed you might live, despite the briefing’s assumption that you would not. In the middle of that last week the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, invited you to his rooms after supper, to talk; when you sat in that now-familiar armchair before that now-familiar coffee table—the great window now a flat darkness, the ship a belly you were all nestling within—he surprised you by only offering you water and a very plain cracker. You found yourself able to nibble its edges, and tasted only flour and salt.
“I know you said no, the last time,” said Teacher. “I respected it. I won’t offer again, except to say—if at any point, before the final shutters come down—if at any point before Mercymorn locks me in—you come to me and ask to get locked in with me, it will be done. You have ten thousand years before you, Harrowhark.”
You did not address this. Instead, you said: “Lord?”
“Teacher.”
You said, “You are the Prince Undying. You are the Necrolord Highest. Why do we lock you inside an airless room?”
He rested back in his chair and locked his fingers together over his belly. “You’ve hit upon a sore spot, Harrowhark,” he said affably, brown brows crinkling together. “I am your salvation and your light. Who should I fear?”
“I never meant to,” you said, leaning forward. “I just want to understand. Please.”
“What happens to your body when you go under, Harrow? When you go into the River?”
You had long passed the point where you needed to think about it. “The body enters a senseless state. The Lyctor doesn’t perceive anything around them in any sense; even their necromancy fails. Instead, the secondary soul comes to the fore—the protection mechanism—that can wield a sword even if their mind is gone … without conscious thought or awareness of its own, but with a perfect sword-hand.” If they were functional.
The Emperor of the Nine Houses drummed his fingers over his belt. It still hurt you a little, to look into his terrible eyes: the irises like black shadows of the Canaanite white, that iridescent absence of colour, a shade rather than a tint; the purity of the white ring; then the matte black of the sclera. You had never become used to it.
“A myriad ago, I resurrected nine planets,” he said. “And I reignited the central star, and I called it Dominicus. As a reminder. Dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea, quem timebo? God is my light. Harrowhark, if I went under—I’d enter that senseless state, and I am God. What if, forty billion light-years away, my people looked up to see Dominicus falter and go out? What if the very House beneath their feet died all over again, as I turned my back upon it?”
You said, “So if you die, the Houses die with you. The star warming our system fails, and—becomes a gravitational well, as I understand it?”
“Yes. A black hole, like the one that took out Cyrus,” he said. “I can only hope you’d all be dead already. Oh, there’d still be Cohort ships … hold planets … a scattering of us … but we would be so few, and so many people hate us, and my work is not yet done. I cannot behold that apocalypse, Harrow. I think you are one of the only Lyctors who can really and truly understand apocalypse … It is not a death of fire. It’s not showy. You and I would almost prefer the end, if it came as a supernova. It is the inexorable setting of the sun, without another hope of morning.”
Both of you fell into silence.
“If I fought the Resurrection Beast I’d leave my Houses to die,” he said. “If I fought the Heralds, I might well go mad, which would be the same thing. So I’m shut in here—walled in, really—to prevent the Nine Houses becoming none House, with left grief.”
He looked very tired. He looked very rueful. He said, “Once again. You’re not the only one with limitations.”
“May I ask you a question, Teacher?”
“You’re not sick of them yet?”
You said, “Who was A.L.?”
His eyes flew open. God sat up straight in his chair, looked at you in open astonishment, and he said, “Are you sure you want to go with—that one? Let’s go through all the other, less awkward ones first. How is a baby made? I can do that, easy. I mean, I don’t want to, but I’m ready. I have this little book about babies, bodies, friends, and family. Are you and Ianthe being safe?”
It was your turn to sit up straight in your chair and intone, constructing each syllable with the same rigid emphasis you might give to a skeleton: “We—are not—intimate.”
“Sorry—I mean, you’re about the same age, I don’t really know how this goes anymore, we’ve all been alive for too long…”
“Neither are we romantic—neither are we, frankly, platonic—”
“Sorry! Sorry. Sorry,” he added, “I should not assume these things.”
If your paint could have baked upon your face and crumbled off like clay, it would have. If you could have willed the Saint of Duty to burst through the door, skewer you through, and parade your gored body around the room, you would have. You began to get up. “If I have overstepped, Teacher, forgive me. I withdraw the question.”
“No,” he said. “Let’s talk about her. Let’s talk about my bodyguard.”
Carefully, you sat back down.
God said, “You’ve been listening to Augustine and Mercymorn.”
“Yes.”
