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