of magnet, repelling one another. That necromancer deity in the human frame—wasn’t it just, after all, a human frame?—exploded. He split into parts, and then the parts split, and the room drowned in red mist. The mist became powder, and the powder dwindled into nothingness, until Mercymorn was left standing alone, wet with sweat, and some other liquid, but clean.
Mercy turned around, to Augustine. She was not weeping now.
“It is finished,” she said.
Leaving me an orphan again, though your brain didn’t let me linger on that one.
52
THE SAINT OF PATIENCE stood up and crossed to her. She reached forward and took big, clawed fistfuls of his shirt.
“I wanted it to be me,” she said, in this weird, unearthly calm. “I didn’t want it to be you. I didn’t want it to be you, Augustine, after all … the sin needed to be mine.”
“There’s hours,” he said unsteadily. “If we drop through the River now—”
“We can watch our people die from close up,” she said. “The dead planets could have sunk out of orbit already … we just don’t know. We don’t know how long it takes to undo the Resurrection. Millions of people … all those millions of our people … No, I had to do it. I am not very nice, Augustine, and I was never very good.”
And for the first time, Ianthe’s voice, which was sunk in a whisper: “Eldest sister, what have you done?”
“I killed Dominicus,” said Mercymorn. “Killed the Second, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth, the Sixth, the Seventh, the Eighth, the Ninth … and the First, though who cares about that? He is dead. He is gone. What he held together must now come apart. The sun must have died immediately, and those grey librarians will be the first to know about it—then the Seventh, and Rhodes … but every system that John ever put into place will cease. Every House may hear the dying cries of their life support … even as I speak.”
Somehow I managed to say: “We have to go get everyone out. Now.”
“There is no way,” said Mercy, cool as death.
It was Ianthe of all people who said, “How can you say that? Will you not even try?”
“Dominicus will collapse in a few minutes, chick,” said the other Lyctor. He too had the calm of a dying man. I only met that calm once, and it wasn’t on a living human being: it was the calm on a dead girl’s face, speared and mangled in a bed I’d told her to lie down in. “It’s going to form a black hole that nobody in that system will escape. The Nine Houses are over.”
“The Nine Houses are gone,” echoed Mercy. “It is over … it is done. We always planned for a mass evacuation … but I had my moment … and I took it. I took it, Augustine. And now I will die, and face the River.”
“No,” said Augustine.
“Augustine, you promised me that after we did it we would go somewhere and drop into the nearest sun—”
“That was when this was a fantasy,” he said. There might as well have been no one else in the room. The Saint of Duty held burning embers in his palm, more statue than man; Ianthe was staring into space, looking like a child, for all her height. Little. Bemused. I don’t even want to know what I looked like. Augustine said, “That was when the plan happened under perfect conditions. Conditions we never could have fulfilled, honestly. You took your shot, and you had to take it, and now the Houses are dead. The Resurrection Beasts are still out there.”
“You cannot make me do this.”
“You have a job, Joy,” he said. “If you kill yourself now, you’ll leave everything remarkably untidy, and that’s not like you, is it?”
She said numbly, “That was not the agreement.”
“Bad luck,” said Augustine. “It’s done—as you chose to stain your hands so mine could be clean, you’re going to have to put up with the fact that you picked the wrong man to enter into a suicide pact with. I hate ’em. Cristabel might have undone all my good work with Alfred, but here comes the reckoning. We’re going to go round up the ships—everyone who’s left—sue for peace as best we can—get the Edenites on side. And then we’ll find a place to fulfil the old promise … Somewhere out there exists a home not paid for with blood; it won’t be for us, but it will