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“I always see the job through.” Wake sounded bored. “You sent me out there to kill a baby and open those doors. Whose baby didn’t matter on my end. I carried that thing under my heart … threw up every morning that first trimester … felt it kick … had to induce labour and give birth in a shuttle, alone, knowing by then that Gideon was catching up … Do you know, I gave that thing a nickname, my whole pregnancy? I used to call it Bomb.”
Anything could have happened, then. One thousand futures stretched out in front of me.
“Okay. Let’s get this straight,” God was saying. “You brought a baby—a baby you’d made inside yourself, well done, that’s the classic—so you could, what, kill it and create a huge thanergy cascade at the door? I wish Harrowhark were here; it would do her good to know there are more people in the world with an imagination like her parents’. But you’re not a necromancer; you couldn’t have manipulated the thanergy burst. I mean, it’s appalling, but it would never have worked—”
While he was saying all this, someone else had stepped into the foyer. It was a man who looked like he had been stripped bloody by a wind machine and hadn’t healed up all the way; a wiry, knuckled-up tendon of a man, with the face of someone who had been starved once and burned recently. Joining the growing line of antiques on board this place, there was a gun holstered at his hip, and at the other hip a plain rapier with a basket hilt and a piece of fraying crimson ribbon tied to the pommel. His clothes were stained with green slime, and so was the scintillating white robe he wore, hood up over his head—he closed the door behind him and turned to look at Ianthe and me, with that weird scratched-up face and those dark eyes, and I knew that we were now well and truly rumbled.
He swept aside the robes. He looked at us, Harrow. Then he made this weird, half-grimacing, excuse me expression, and he reached forward. I was so far fucking gone that I didn’t even flinch as he slipped the sunglasses off your nose. He slid them over his face, and then he let the robes drop back over me and Ianthe, and he walked straight into the shitshow.
Augustine lifted his head, and he said hoarsely, “Gideon?”
The woman I was pretty sure was actually my mother—wearing the body of a woman I’d had a crush on, who in turn had been wearing the identity of a woman she’d murdered, until I fell on a spike so that my boss could kill her—craned her head around in her bonds.
Harrow, I will never forget the look on her face as long as I live, or as long as I die. For the first time, she smiled—a small, dusty, crooked smile that was totally alien to Cytherea’s mouth, which had smiled at me often but never like that. It was the smile for your old cellmate who’d just landed back in prison, the one that told them at least you were in it together—or more correctly, the smile of someone stepping out of jail after serving a very long sentence, having seen someone there waiting for her. Someone whose presence meant total reprieve, someone she hadn’t expected. It was a little bit mocking. It was deeply relieved. It was a smile that said: You came back for me?
The Lyctor who’d taken my shades pulled the gun out of his belt before anyone could stop him. He briskly closed the distance, pressed the barrel up to the base of Cytherea’s skull, and he pulled the trigger. There was a wet sound. The body jerked and its head lolled out of sight.
God exploded, “Gideon!”
“Wake,” said Gideon II—I?—as though that explained everything.
There was movement. Then God said sadly, “Damn it, Gideon, her ghost’s completely gone,” and Gideon said, “Good.”
Augustine said urgently, “Number Seven—”
“Got away.”
“What—what, it ran? You got it to run?” When this was not met with details, Augustine said, “But—you lived?”
Mercymorn said, “That’s not important right now! I don’t care about Number Seven! I want Gideon to hear this too. I want him to know what Pyrrha died for.”
Now, finally, the Emperor came into view. He calmly sat down on the chair that Mercy had vacated, in front of the head-shot corpse that was still tied up, opposite. He looked like anybody. His hair was cut short, dark brown, with no different highlights in it. His face was long and square and ordinary. And his eyes were just absolutely, insanely fucked up: deep black wells, this unreflective flat black. Even from where I was, I could see the white light that circled the irises: a cold, flickering perimeter. At the moment, he had his chin rested on his balled-together fists, his elbows set on his knees, and those whites had lighted on Mercy.
“I think you’re skipping ahead in the story,” said God. “I think you’re glossing over a part … because you think it doesn’t matter? Are you embarrassed? Gideon, were you aware that, when you let Commander Wake get as far as she did—to the House of the Ninth, to one of our own Houses, our own people—that she was pregnant?”
A pause. “I was aware,” said Gideon Classic.
“Why the hell did you not tell me?”
“Because I thought it was—mine.”
There was a rising call of dismay from that whole room—a sort of strangled yeeeuuurgh from Mercymorn, an exhausted—was it a laugh?—from Augustine. He was laughing—in this eerie, humourless way, this huge, tired, exhausted laugh, until he had to press his face into his hand. Even then, he didn’t quite stop.
And Gideon Senior said, “Forgive me, John. I didn’t know anything about it,” which I would have thought was a weird thing to say if I hadn’t been too busy staring at Cytherea.
The Emperor said, “I’ve made mistakes too, Gideon … but you could’ve told me.”
And Gideon Prime said, “I didn’t know to.”
“How long had that been going on?”
“Nearly two years.” After a moment, he added, “It was complicated.”
“I’ll bet. So the plan was to kill a Lyctor’s baby,” said God, marvelling quietly. “A Lyctor’s infant child, barely born, to start a thanergy cascade. It was a hell of a plan. But both of you knew it never could have worked … surely you knew it couldn’t have worked. Augustine, for fuck’s sake have a cigarette, you’re getting hysterical.”
The noise Augustine was making was nearly laughter; it was nearly not laughter at all. The Saint of Patience snapped in pure agitation: “Stop kidding yourself, John!”
“Everyone’s being very opaque today,” said God.
“You know we know how the blood ward works,” said Mercymorn. She did not sound hysterical herself; she had swapped roles with Augustine unexpectedly, and now sounded measured and calm, nearly dreamy. “You never kept it secret from us. I always thought it was a little over the top, Teacher … you were always so fussy about never bleeding … but Cassiopeia told me a very interesting thing about blood wards, once. She always said that they should really be called cell wards, because they work off thalergetic enzymes … which can be spoofed with a substantial thanergy burst and the blood of a close relative. A parent. A child.”
The Emperor said, as though speaking to a kid: “And how would you ever—” and stopped.
And he said, “Mercy.” And he said, “Augustine.” And he said, “Mercy—” and then, “Augustine—”
“I wouldn’t think about the practicalities, if I were you,” said Augustine, extracting a cigarette. He tucked it into the side of his mouth. He was pretty good. His hands weren’t even really shaking. “It’s not worth it.”
“But it was only—”
“The once? Yes, one evening planned down to the ground for five hundred years,” said the Saint of Patience. He lit the end of the cigarette. “Dios apate, major. We needed your, ahem, genetic material, and it was the only way. It was the first time Joy and I had been in the same place for ten years. You were so damned careful, John. No vulnerabilities, no lapses. You’d have become paranoid if we’d—gone a second round. Good Lord, it all sounds so coarse. I imagine I might be hurting your feelings. God, I hope so. Right now, I find I hope so tremendously.”
“It’s impossible. I won’t believe this. How could you even—”
“Mercymorn,” said Augustine matter-of-factly.
“I didn’t even—”
“Mercymorn,” repeated Augustine. He took a drag from his cigarette and said, “Sorry, Gid, didn’t actually want you to know all the scummy details … Cig?”
“I’d kill for one,” said Gideon, original flavour.
There was more silence in that room as the Saint of Patience lit another cigarette and passed it to the Saint of Duty. Cytherea’s empty corpse lay still and silent in its chair. The Emperor was staring at the crown of her head, probably where the bullet had exited, which I could not see. The other Lyctor leaned against the wall, staring into a shuttered window.
“So what,” said the Emperor, “Gideon—you tossed Wake out the airlock—she and the baby died en route?”
“No,” said Mercymorn thinly. “It didn’t.”
