only option. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not a monster. Septimus was dead before the shuttle landed at Canaan … she hardly suffered.”
There was a very long pause. Palamedes’s voice betrayed nothing when he said: “Well, that’s something, at least. I suppose we’re all to follow now?”
“Yes, but this wasn’t really about any of you,” said the woman in the room with him. “Not personally. I knew that if I ruined his Lyctor plans—killed the heirs and cavaliers to all the other eight Houses—I’d draw him back to the system, but I had to do it in a subtle enough way that he wouldn’t bring the remaining Hands with him. If I had arrived in full force, he’d have turned up on a war footing, and sent the Lyctors to do all the dirty work like always. This way he’s lulled into a false sense of … semisecurity, I suppose. And he won’t even bother coming within Dominicus’s demesne. He’ll sit out there beyond the system—trying to find out what’s happening—right where I need him to be. I’ll give the King Undying, the Necrolord Prime, the Resurrector, my lord and master front-row seats as I shatter his Houses, one by one, and find out how many of them it takes before he breaks and crosses over, before he sees what will come when I call … and then I won’t have to do anything. It will be too late.”
A pause.
“Why would one of the Emperor’s Lyctors hate him?”
“Hate him?” The voice of the girl whom Gideon had known as Dulcinea rose, high and intent. “Hate him? I have loved that man for ten thousand years. We all loved him, every one of us. We worshipped him like a king. Like a god! Like a brother.”
Her voice dropped, and she sounded very normal and very old: “I don’t know why I’m telling you this … you who have been alive for less than a heartbeat, when I have lived past the time when life loses meaning. Thank your lucky stars that none of you became Lyctor, Palamedes Sextus. It is neither life nor death—it’s something in between, and nobody should ever ask you to embrace it. Not even him. Especially not him.”
“I wouldn’t have done that to Camilla.”
“So you know how it happens. Clever boy! I knew you’d all work it out … eventually. I didn’t want to do it either … I didn’t want to do it at all … but I was dying. Loveday—she was my cavalier—she and I thought it could make me live. Instead I’ve just kept dying, all this time. No, you wouldn’t have done it, and you’re smart not to. You can’t do that to somebody’s soul. Teacher was nearly demented. Did you know what we did to him? I say we, but he wasn’t my project … he was a holy terror. Blame your own House for that! I can’t be grateful enough to those Second ninnies for killing him and calling for help. He was the only one here who scared me. He couldn’t have stopped me, but he might have made things stupid.”
“Why did Teacher not recognise you?”
“Perhaps he did,” said the woman. It sounded like she was smiling. “Who knows what that soul melange was ever thinking?”
There was another pause. She said, “You’ve taken this much more sensibly than I thought you would. When you’re young, you do everything the moment you think about it. For example, I’ve been thinking about doing this for the last three hundred years … but I assumed you would try something silly when you realized she was dead.”
“I wouldn’t ever try to do something silly,” Palamedes said lightly. “I made the decision to kill you the moment I knew there was no more chance to save her. That’s all.”
She laughed, as clear and as bright as ice. It was arrested midway through by a cough—a deep, sick-sounding cough—but she laughed through it anyway, as though she didn’t care.
“Oh, don’t … don’t.”
“I just had to buy enough time,” he said, “to do it slowly enough that you wouldn’t notice—to keep you talking.”
There was another laugh, but this one was punctuated by a big wet cough too. No laughter followed. She said, “Young Warden of the Sixth House, what have you done?”
“Tied the noose,” said Palamedes Sextus. “You gave me the rope. You have severe blood cancer … just as Dulcinea did. Advanced, as hers was when she died. Static, because the Lyctor process begins