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I pushed out of the robes. Ianthe tried to reach for me; I slapped her hand away. It was seven steps out of that little foyer to the centre of the room where the Emperor sat. I stood, breathing hard, my battered two-hander clutched in your hands, not knowing what to do with your arms, and not knowing what to do with your face. There was this huge, insane roaring in your ears, like close-up electrical static, and it was like I was watching us move from outside—as though we were both out of the driver’s seat, Nonagesimus, and someone else was in there.
But nobody else had their hands on the controls. It was just me.
Everyone turned to look at us. Nobody said a word. I stood behind the chair with the dead body in it, a dark hole at the back of its neck. The cigarettes made thin grey ghosts curl up toward the light.
“I’m—” I said.
The world revolved.
“I’m not fucking dead,” I said, which wasn’t even true, and I was choking up; everything I’d ever done, everything I’d ever been through, and I was choking up.
And the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, stood from his chair to look at you—at me; looked at my face, looked at your face, looked at my eyes in your face. It took, maybe, a million myriads. The static in your ears resolved into wordless screaming. His expression was just—gently quizzical; mildly awed.
“Hi, Not Fucking Dead,” he said. “I’m Dad.”
51
WHEN I WAS, LIKE, six years old, I used to play a game trying to pick out my mum’s skeleton from the crowd—I’d choose a skeleton that I thought was her and hang out in the snow-leek fields, watching them endlessly breaking rocks into gravel, watching them winnow through the mulch. I used to pretend that whatever construct I’d picked knew I was watching, and would send me subtle messages. Hoe thrust into the ground three times in a row with a pause after, that was hello, because that wouldn’t happen so often that it would beggar belief. When I was seven the captain broke it to me that my mother wasn’t even in rotation yet. She only got boiled and sent out when I was eight.
Do you remember the time when we were little and I told you to stop fucking picking on me, because what if my other mum or dad was, like, important? I remember. You said, what’s the evidence, and I said what’s the … not evidence, and you said why would it matter anyway, and I said why would it not matter anyway, and you said I was an idiot, and we whaled on each other for a while. Then I said, what if someone came looking for me and said, “It’s me, the most important guy in the world, here’s the long-lost baby I was looking for, everyone will stop treating her like shit henceforth, also I am going to murder everyone in here for what they have done and Crux goes first,” and you told me that if anyone came looking for me you would get your parents to lock me in a closet and say that I had died of “brain malfunction,” which I now know isn’t a real disease, so I bet you feel stupid now?
You were furious. You said, It doesn’t matter who they are—they’re not important, and they’re not coming for you.
I used to sit by my mother’s niche and catch her up on everything. Things like: Aiglamene says I’ve fixed my hand placement when I block and pivot from the lower left. Things like: Harrowhark was a giant bitch today. (Told her that on the reg.) Things like: I can do ninety-six sit-ups in two minutes now. Absolute fourteen-year-old bullshit. Serious A-grade drivel.
It was worse when I was a kid. I remember the time you caught me telling her, I love you, and I can’t even remember what you said, but I remember that I had you on your back—I put you straight on the fucking ground. I was always so much bigger and so much stronger. I got on top of you and choked you till your eyes bugged out. I told you that my mother had probably loved me a lot more than yours loved you. You clawed my face so bad that my blood ran down your hands; my face was under your fucking fingernails. When I let you go you couldn’t even stand, you just crawled away and threw up. Were you ten, Harrow? Was I eleven?
Was that the day you decided you wanted to die?
You remember how the fuck-off great-aunts always used to say, Suffer and learn?
If they were right, Nonagesimus, how much more can we take until you and me achieve omniscience?
* * *
“And now we come to the heart of the matter,” said the Lyctor you called Mercymorn.
She had stood up next to us—and God looked at me, and at her, and at me, and held my gaze. It was this that pinned us in place. When those white rings hovered on someone else, the blood rushed back to your brain; when they flickered back to me, I went white and blank again, mute and stupid, a floating outline.
He looked at us, and he rubbed one of his temples as though he had a headache. And he said, with an enormous sigh: “Ah. The eyes.”
“Yes, the eyes,” she said. “Your child … Alecto’s eyes.”
A ripple of ice over the face. A hardening of the mouth. He said quietly, “Don’t call her—”
“Alecto! Alecto! Alecto!” repeated Mercy shrilly. The other Lyctors flinched each time she said it, as though it were an aural stab. “John, you are trying to start a fight with me to get out of the fight I am trying to have with you, which is a painfully domestic tactic. Those are A.L.’s eyes, Lord … right there in your genetic code.”
“There could be any number of explanations,” said God calmly.
“Yes,” said Augustine. He tapped his cigarette out into the emptied cup of tea. “There could be. You’ve offered us explanations for everything over the years. But—some of them didn’t hold up on examination … It was the power I could never get my head around, you know? I follow power back to its source, John. It’s the skill you asked me to perfect. And the longer I looked at yours, the less things added up.”
“This has been troubling you for a very long time, then,” God said finally. “A.L. always did bother you two the most … If I’m such a liar, why didn’t I lie to you about her? I told you the truth about Annabel’s resurrection, and in the end you killed her for it.”
“My lord,” said Augustine formally, “you told us the truth about Annabel—about Alecto—because she knew the truth about it too, and you never could control her. Even after two centuries, I’m not sure she ever managed to lie. That was what stayed my hand for such a long time. How would you have asked Alecto the First to lie—how would you have persuaded that mad monster into even an unsophisticated con?”
God said, “Don’t call her that.”
“A monster, John!” Augustine barked. “She was a bloody monster in a human suit! She was a monster the moment you resurrected her, and you went and made her worse!”
There was silence in that room. The air had cooled, somewhat, but it was still hot and sticky and it smelled like everyone’s sweat. It smelled like hot perfume, and cigarettes, and fear.
After a moment in that silence, the Saint of Patience said: “Raised my voice. Apologies.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said God quietly.
Mercymorn was grinding her back molars, making a sound like ball bearings fed into an industrial mincer. She stopped, and said pensively: “But you see, we all thought you were just sentimental over that horrible thing—even though she was bad in every single way, we all hated her—”
“I didn’t,” said Gideon Zero.
“Oh, do shut up, Gideon—Lord, you and she went through all the early days together; it made sense that you didn’t want to kill her. We came to you, back then, we came to you and begged you to get rid of her. We said she was too dangerous … We knew the Beasts were coming, and we knew they were partly coming for her. She was going to get us all eaten alive.” Mercy’s eyes had gone almost distant, as though she was living the argument over again. “So eventually you gave way. You killed her, for us. But we never knew how you did it.”
“Annabel Lee … was not the dying kind,” said the Emperor. “It might be more accurate to say that I switched her off.”
“You came to us and we asked, Is she dead?” said Mercy. “And you said, As dead as I can make her … I remember, Lord, that you wept.”
“Well, I was very sad,” said God reasonably.
“Yes! You were!” cried Mercy, like this was welcome confirmation. “You were very sad … but you didn’t blame us. You said you understood. You said you’d do what was right by your Lyctors. But you wanted to honour her, so you made her a tomb, and set Anastasia to guard it … It all made such perfect sense, for us. What didn’t make sense was you.”
God propped his chin in his hands again. “What about me?” he said.
Mercy and Augustine both barked out hollow little sounds that were not in the same universe as laughs.
“You don’t get your power from Dominicus,” said Augustine. “It gets its power from you. There’s no exchange involved, no symbiosis. You draw nothing from the system. It relies on you entirely, as we all know. You’re God, John. But—as the Edenites are fond of pointing out—you were once a man. So whither that transition? Where does your power come from? Even if the Resurrection had been the greatest thanergy bloom ever triggered, it would drain away over time. And then Mercy said to me—in a moment of true Mercy vileness—she said, What is God afraid of?”
Those white-ringed eyes closed, and your heart almost relaxed in your chest.
