much was a way that your genetic code could have, because Augustine and I worked extremely hard to put it there.”
“All that effort to break open the Locked Tomb,” said Augustine, “only to have the answer we wanted wander up in the form of one dead teenager flaunting your genes. They were never Alecto’s eyes at all. They were yours, John. Alecto had your eyes from the moment any of us first saw her. And those extraordinary black eyes you’ve always worn … they were always hers.”
Harrow, I was not following all of this, because necromantic theory is a lot of hot bullshit even when I’m not busy having Complex Emotions, but that last bit pinged even me as weird. I’d seen Ianthe wearing Tern’s eyes, like a funeral in her face. I’d looked in the mirror and seen your face with my much more attractive and cooler eyes, and that was—weird. I’d figured out that the eye-change is what happens when two people become one. It’s not what happens when two people swap places. No one was ever going to see that ass Naberius strutting around with a pair of bad purple eyes that got left out in the rain, because the Lyctoral eye swap relied on him taking a rapier backward to the heart. There was no way a cavalier could end up with a necromancer’s eyes.
Unless the cavalier failed to die.
Mercy reached out for Augustine’s cigarette. He mutely handed it to her; watched as she sucked furiously on its end, as the thin wrapper flared orange around the tip, as she tapped it—distracted and frantic—into the empty tea mug. Then she handed it back to him without a word.
“You lied to us, John,” she said.
And, with a sob in her voice: “There is a perfect Lyctorhood … a perfect Lyctor process that preserves the cavalier, and you let us think there wasn’t. You let us think we’d cracked it … You let us think it had to be a one-way energy transfer … but nobody had to die. Alfred, Pyrrha, Titania, Valancy, Nigella, Samael, Loveday, Cristabel … You watched us kill our cavaliers in cold blood, and none of them had to die. You had already done it yourself. But you had done it perfectly!!”
The Saint of Duty was very still. Augustine stubbed out the end of his cigarette; Mercymorn held her own fingers clutched tightly in her palms. And God sat in his chair, and looked at his hands.
There was a rustle next to us. Tridentarius emerged from her hidey-hole in the robes and stood next to me. Her expression was blank, no emotion at all. Tridentarius was still holding those cards tight to her chest.
Mercymorn said, “John, if you’d lied to me about anything else, about how the planet died, about the extinction of our species … or if you’d just admitted everything and said your hand was forced, or that it was for the common good, and said nice-sounding nonsense—I would have forgiven you.”
“You might have said you forgave me,” said the Emperor. He was staring at his hands now. “But I think it would have rankled … I know it would have rankled. There is no such thing as forgiveness, Mercy. There’s only bloody truth, and blessed ignorance.”
She said, “Alfred, Pyrrha, Titania, Valancy, Nigella, Samael, Loveday, Cristabel.”
“They were my friends,” he said, simply. “I loved them too.”
Augustine said, “I’ve got to know. Call it morbid curiosity … Anastasia didn’t misapprehend the process, did she? She nearly cracked it—the right way of doing it. I knew she was working closely with Cassiopeia … It didn’t make sense that I became a Lyctor under scrambling pressure and did it right, and that Anastasia screwed it up in laboratory conditions.”
God stared at him.
“Yes,” he said, though it sounded far-off and confused, like he was hungover. “I was the only one she allowed to watch her attempt. She’d learned the trick was to do the Eightfold slower—more methodically—and it was still more of an accident than design. But it’s not as simple as her getting it right, and me stopping her. She panicked midway through. She hadn’t got his soul inside her all the way—if she had, Samael dying would have killed her too … They were both in danger. I killed him for her benefit, and she knew that at the time.”
“Is that the truth, or the truth you tell yourself?” asked Augustine.
“What is the difference?” said God.
And then he said, with that same far-off, graveyard