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.
He said a little irrelevantly, “Did you two just pretend to hate each other?”
“No,” they said, in dreary chorus. And Augustine said, “But we have never loathed each other so intensely that we couldn’t work together. It kept us honest. I never wanted to believe anything Joy was saying … I never wanted to believe it when she said, What if he didn’t really put down A.L.? And then—What if he couldn’t put down A.L.?”
The eyes opened. They opened up on you and me. Those white rings, like a migraine; those black, iridescent insides, like tar or a butterfly or obsidian glass.
And he said, “Summarise, please. You both do tend to go overboard on the foreplay.”
Augustine said, “You didn’t kill Alecto. And she wasn’t just your bodyguard.”
Mercymorn said, “Alecto was your cavalier.”
The Emperor didn’t move.
Augustine said, “The eyes have it, John. Those damn golden eyes she always had, like a cat’s. When I saw young Harrowhark over there—” He jerked his thumb in our direction, which still somehow had the ability to startle me, I guess because I thought he’d forgotten we were even in the room. “—sporting those exact same lights, I freely admit my first thought was Fuck me backward, she woke up.
“But it didn’t make sense, of course,” he continued, “because if A.L. turned up on the Mithraeum, she would have been as … distinctive as ever. So why else would Harrowhark’s eyes change? For the same reason our eyes changed. The completion of the Eightfold Word. She had attained actual Lyctorhood.”
“Which meant,” said Mercy, taking up the thread, “that the infant’s cavalier had somehow ended up with the eyes of your Annabel Lee. There was no possible way Alecto’s genetic code—to the extent she even had one, which by the way I am not convinced she ever did—could have ended up in a baby in the Ninth House … but there very