tangled dead hair was very still. He said: “You’ve been trying to commit suicide by cop ever since I found you, Wake. I know when someone’s trying to get me to do something, and you’re acting like a woman who very much wants me to end her life.”
“Telepathy,” she said. “Did the ten billion give you that too?”
“Wish they had,” said the Emperor. “Wake, you’re acting like your mission’s over, and you want me to take you out of the equation.” Silence. “What was the mission?” Silence. “How did it end? What were you trying to do?”
“I’m not going to talk to you.”
“We both know that’s not true.”
A tiny ceramic clink. The Emperor was probably having tea. Ianthe stared into the middle distance, packing herself as tightly into the corner as possible. We shared the corner with a white robe on a hook, and she actually wormed herself behind the robe, like we were playing hide-and-seek. So I did too, and had to watch whatever the fuck was going on through a thin veil of robe, next to Ianthe, so please feel some sympathy for me here.
He said, “Blood of Eden died with you, Wake. Any further action is just agonal breathing.”
“We both know that’s not true.”
“You never would have fired nukes into my fleet.”
“Yeah, you know a hell of a lot about me,” said the corpse. “Perhaps almost as much as I know about you.”
“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