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“It wouldn’t be Ortus. Poor Augustine. Poor Mercy. They still feel badly … they still carry their apportioned blame. I think, yes, that it’s time for you to know about A.L.”
He pronounced her name, as both his wayward saints had, as two clearly separate letters: you could hear the A and the L. He said, “It stood for a couple of things. A joke, mostly. I often called her Annabel Lee. Annie Laurie. When I first met her I just called her First, One. She had a real name, but I buried it with her, and nobody says it anymore.
“She has been dead for nearly ten thousand years, but she keeps her vigil with me, as a memory, if nothing else … Annabel Lee was my—what do I call her? Guide? Friend? I’d hoped so…”
You did not know how to respond to this. He did not seem to need a response. God said, “She was the first Resurrection. She was my Adam. As the dust settled and I beheld what was left and what was gone, I was entirely alone. The world had been ended, Harrowhark. One moment I was a man, and then the next moment I was the Necrolord Prime, the first necromancer, and more importantly, a landlord with no tenants.”
You said, “Teacher, what destroyed the House of the First?”
“Not much,” said the Emperor, and he tried to smile. It was awful. “Rising sea levels and a massive nuclear fission chain reaction … it all went downhill from there.”
This quiet admission provided the first details you had ever heard of the pre-Resurrection extinction. As mythologies went, it felt distant and unreal. He continued, “It wasn’t gorgeous dust to be left in, Harrow. I was dazed … I was bewildered … and she was my defender and my sole companion, and my colleague in the scholarship of learning how to live again. It was bloody difficult. I had never been God.”
He trailed off here. Then he said: “She lived to see what happened at Canaan House. Not that she took much interest. My first Resurrection was not a normal human being, Harrow, and she struggled to pretend. Anger was her besetting sin. We had that in common. And when the cost of Lyctorhood was paid, when the emotions were at their peak … we found out the price for our sin. The monstrous retribution. To be chased for our crime to the ends of the universe, to have our deed stain our very faces and follow after us like a foul smell. She died after that first terrible assault.”
You did not say, I am sorry; you did not offer empathy. As with many mysteries, this one had turned out to be sad and dull: the Emperor of the Nine Houses had someone, and then, like all his Lyctors, the Emperor of the Nine Houses had lost someone. It was your story. It was Ianthe’s story. It was the story of Augustine, and of Mercymorn, and of Ortus. It was Cytherea’s story, and that of all the Lyctors who had died over that long dark sheaf of years.
“I understand why cavaliers primary carry their House titles,” said God. “It makes sense. But it is a corruption of the original. D’you know why you’re really the First? Because in a very real way, you and the others are A.L.’s children … There would be none of you, if not for her.”
And then the Emperor of the Nine Houses set down his empty mug of tea with the residue of ginger biscuit crumbs within. You had no idea, in those seconds after the gentle clink upon the table’s surface as the universe held its breath, that he was about to say the worst thing that had ever been said to you. The fine, forbearing lines at his forehead and at his eyes crinkled earnestly, and he said: “I like to think that she would like you. You’d make a hell of a daughter, Harrowhark. I sometimes indulge in the wish that you’d been mine.”
There had been a moment in your life when you were convinced that you were about to spoil your substance at the foot of Ianthe Tridentarius’s altar. You had been granted reprieve. There was no such reprieve for you in that moment. You had not sold the marrow of your soul for stolen eyes and a half-hearted kindness. What dismantled you—you bereft idiot—was not even the God who made the Ninth House, the Emperor All-Giving, the Kindly Prince; your end appeared in the form of a grown adult telling you that they might have liked you for their own.
You hurled the glass to the table. It shattered into a flower of water, with a crackling multitude of shards for sepals. You stood upon that table. It creaked beneath your weight. God had half-stood to stop you when you sank to your knees on the glass; you kneeled into obeisance on the razor-sharp fragments, pressed your palms down into the shrapnel, and you folded yourself into wet and bleeding penitence before him.
He said, “Harrow, no.” He was distraught. He said, “Please—Harrowhark, I’m sorry, I have obviously said something immensely stupid—I do that, eh—I never wanted to hurt you.” He said, “Ten thousand years, and I am still such a fool.”
You might have told him of the traitor. Instead you said: “I broke into the Locked Tomb.”
After a moment God said, “You did not.”
“The wards to the stone were easily bypassed,” you said. “The line of Reverend Mothers and Reverend Fathers has been responsible for their upkeep for years. The barriers and gates beyond were more difficult. I was nine years old when I began, and ten by the time I could traverse the shaft. I spent a whole year working on nothing but those locks. When I came to the blood ward on the stone, the ward of the tomb-keeper, I did not know how to pass. It remains the most complex piece of magic I have ever seen. It was my first vision of the Necromancer Divine … but one day when I was ten years old I decided to end my own life, Lord, and sometimes I think it was that which let me cross the tomb-keeper’s gate. I opened it; I saw the saline water that laps the stony shore, and I walked into the sepulchre. I have seen the Tomb and I have looked upon your death. My parents killed themselves over my heresy. I saw what lies within, and I will love it beyond my own entombing. I— Did I sin, Lord? Did I kill two of my fathers that day?”
You were panting tiny, sharp puffs of breath from the back of your throat. You knelt on the broken glass on the flat table before him, damp with blood and water; you did not weep, but only because you no longer knew how.
The Emperor of the Nine Houses could only have been quiet for five seconds. To you, it felt like a hundred thousand years.
And then he said, very gently: “No, you didn’t.”
You pressed your face into the surface of the table, and you closed your eyes so violently that the pressure stung your brows and cheeks. No star hung so still as you did then, at the end of its hard hydrogen burn, breathlessly waiting to slough off its outer layer.
And he said, “Harrow, whatever you thought you did, you didn’t.”
“I opened the outer door.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I went up the passage.”
“I’ll accept it, though that thing’s a literal death trap,” he said.
“I broke the ward and I rolled away the rock—”
“There’s where you’re wrong,” he said.
You did not lift your head but said, “I was ten years old, but I was not a child. I set myself one task. I studied for one purpose. Don’t consider my limitations, God: I am not a person, I am a chimaera.”
“We won’t get into that, but don’t think I am discounting the genius of a single-minded, necromantically augmented ten-year-old,” he said. “I’m not saying that you didn’t do it because you weren’t good enough. Harrowhark, I’m saying that nobody is good enough. There isn’t a bypass. I built that tomb with Anastasia, designed every inch of it, and I did not include a way in. I never wanted that tomb opened, from either end. I made that ward, me alone, and it wouldn’t answer to the greatest of my Lyctors any better than the meanest infant necromancer in all the Nine Houses. Their might would be one and the same.”
The supernova of your heart went out; faded, as swiftly as it had shone; it became thick, and miniature, and dense. You lifted your head minutely, and an embedded fragment of glass fell from your temple, from a string of red blood.
“It can’t be broken,” he continued. “It can’t be contravened. It can’t even fade; its magic was my magic. The line of Reverend Tomb-keepers has laboured under a misapprehension if they think the rock could be rolled away, except by me. It’s a pure blood ward, Harrowhark. Whatever you thought you did—whatever false chamber has been built around that tomb that you mistakenly stumbled into—there is no possibility that you breached the real thing. I am so sorry. You were party to a tragedy based on a misunderstanding.”
