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“There’s a lot I don’t know about you,” said God. There was a brief flash of him moving through the robes—he had stood. I caught an elbow, and an arm holding a mug; he was leaning against some chair a little way out of sight. “There’s a lot I want to know. Why the Ninth House all those years ago, Wake? There’s nothing there.”
She was silent. The arm gestured with the mug, and he pressed: “It took Gideon”—still weird—“two whole years to track you down and kill you. Even making you his mission in life, you had plenty of time to do some damage. Why waste your shot on my smallest House? If you’d dropped in on the Third, you could’ve done some real damage. And it wasn’t by accident. You skipped the dummy target in the atmosphere—you found the exact coordinates for the House.” A longer silence. He suggested, “Do you want to talk about that?”
Silence.
“You’ve been a revenant for nearly twenty years, Wake. It’s extraordinary … You really are everything they said you were.”
Silence.
“You’re not a necromancer—”
“Necromancy is a disease you released,” she said. “Necromancy needs to be strategically and deliberately cleansed.”
“Don’t spout bigotry, Commander, I won’t kill you for it and it hurts your cause,” he said calmly. “I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something, and nobody likes toddlers juxtaposed with cleansed.”
“How many babies died in the bomb, Gaius?”
“All of them,” he said.
And after a moment, he resumed: “I’m not really interested in this particular game, Commander. Let’s speed this up. You tell me the thanergy link you rode to get here, because you certainly weren’t in Cytherea’s body back at Canaan House, and you tell me what you were doing at the Ninth House nineteen years ago, and I’ll put you back in the River where you belong— Who’s there?”
I thought we were rumbled until the outer door swung open wider, damn near squashing me and Ianthe behind it. There was movement past us, a swirl of white fabric, and the little clink of God putting his teacup down. Stuck in the coatrack behind the door, we were left with a view of two people in stained white robes, quietly facing where God must have been. It was the Lyctor who’d tried to kill you, and the Lyctor who’d been afraid of my face.
Everyone was silent. The whole room held its breath. It must’ve only been a second or two before the Emperor said urgently: “Number Seven—”
“Number Seven can eat us, for all I care,” said Mercymorn. Her voice was quiet: the untrembling calm of someone who had done all their trembling already. “It’s over, John. It’s all come out … it took ten thousand years, but it’s all come out.”
No response. Everyone in the room was still as a mock-up in a doll’s house.
Then he said, as though puzzled, “What’s all come out?”
“I suppose it would be disappointing if you made a clean breast of it now,” said the Lyctor called Augustine, after a brief moment. “But go on. Try. Confess, and be the man I want you to be, rather than the man you apparently are.”
“Look, I hate to be flip,” said God, “but—am I in trouble?”
The Saint of Joy sat down on the empty chair and burst into angry tears. She pressed her face into her hands and sobbed violently for something like four seconds—we’re talking brief—and then she stood up again, having apparently gotten it out of her system.
“Because this maybe isn’t the time,” he said, “given that we’ve got—company.”
Again, thought we were rumbled. But he was just gesturing to the person in the body of Cytherea, still tied to the other chair. Both the Lyctors stared at her as though they hadn’t even noticed her.
“Mercymorn the First, Augustine the First, meet Commander Wake Me Up Inside, sincerest apologies if I got that wrong,” said the Emperor. “Wake—Mercy—Augustine.”
“Oh, we’ve met,” said the corpse, with immense satisfaction.
Both Augustine and Mercy drew their rapiers with one long metal whisper. I couldn’t see their faces. Next to me, I couldn’t even hear Tridentarius breathe: being Lyctors, maybe neither of us had to. I wasn’t in a hurry to experiment.
The voice from the other end of the room said, “Sheathe those.”
They didn’t. Neither did they go for the shackled corpse—Wake. She had turned her head to look at them. There were petals in her hair. God said quietly, “You’ve met, Commander? Can you tell me more about that?”
“I met the woman. I never met the man. She was the spokesperson for both.”
Mercy said, “It can’t be. This can’t be happening. This cannot be happening,” and the other Lyctor said, “It evidently can.”
And God continued, “In what context?”
“They were working for me,” said the dead Commander.
Mercymorn demanded, “Are you flattering yourself, or being wrong on purpose?”
The other Lyctor interrupted, “Joy—” but she was saying, wildly: “Oh, let it happen! If this is happening, let it happen … We had a deal, Wake! Where the hell have you been hiding for nineteen years?”
“Where—you—fucking—left—me,” she ground out. “In my bones. Then a blade. In—that—fucking—hole.”
Augustine said, “Mercy, don’t waste your time. If this really is the lady in question—then Gideon has proved, yet again, that he is unfit for any job beyond making simple gruels and stews.”
The figure in the chair strained at her bonds with a sudden, animated violence that made each rapier in each Lyctoral hand flinch. The corpse said, “You double-crossing bastards, you sent him after me—”
“You knew he was coming for you, you’d spent two years dodging him—”
“You didn’t say he was forty-eight hours away and knew my target!”
“If you were on schedule it wouldn’t have mattered. You failed to kill him the first time—you were a whole day behind with the delivery—oh, and now I know why,” Mercy cried out. “You broke with the plan, took things into your own hands…”
“—necromantic wizarding fuckup—”
“—so you did the worst thing you could possibly have done—”
“I did what I had to do!” bawled the figure in the chair. She sounded legitimately unhinged now. The mouth sounded gummy, as though fringed with flecks of spittle, but I was pretty sure corpses couldn’t do saliva, so. “I did what I had to do when the dummy ones died—even though you dried-up liches didn’t give me the first fucking clue what I was really doing! Checking for life signs? Retrieving a sample? If I’d known then what I know now, I would have just shelled the place!”
“Now it comes out,” said Mercy. “Now, I am afraid it all comes out. You would have, wouldn’t you? And when you swore that you’d help evacuate the Houses, you never meant that either, did you?”
“Stop,” said God quietly.
And everyone stopped.
There was a flash of—I don’t know what. If it was necromancy, it was of a kind I’d never felt before. It was too sudden: more taste than theorem. There was this citrus taste in your spit. Everyone shut the fuck up, which, as spells go, was probably pretty useful.
He said, “Wake?”
“Yes?” She sounded irascibly eager; breathless, to match her actual breathlessness. There were hard, fuck-you edges to her voice.
“Will you answer my question now? Why did you go to the Ninth House, nineteen years ago?”
“To break into the Tomb.”
There’s an emotion that isn’t fear, and I wish someone would come up with a word for it, Harrow, because right then I sure as hell didn’t have one—it was this sense that started in the balls of your feet and moved right up through your legs to your spine, and I felt it in your hands, I felt it on your tongue. I felt it go chattering up the back of your head. It made your scalp softly fuzz over with electricity.
Maybe there is a word: omen.
“But you can’t get into the Tomb.” God sounded genuinely interested, but in this deeply casual way, as though he were hearing the result of a competition. It was the interest of someone at a party hearing the end of an anecdote. “Not without me.”
The corpse was grim. “I came armed.”
“It doesn’t matter what you came armed with, Commander—”
“I had the baby,” said Wake. “The baby I’d had to incubate myself for nine long fucking months, when the foetal dummies these two gave me died.”
“Oh, God, it was yours,” said Augustine, in horror. “I thought you’d used in vitro on one of Mercy’s—”
“I said they all died,” said Wake. “The dummies died. The ova died. Only the sample was still active, no idea how considering it was twelve weeks after the fact, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“So you used it on yourself,” said Augustine. “Anything for the revolution, eh, Wake?”
“Are you judging me?”
“Only your intense self-delusion.”
