was sick, but I had no idea how bad it was until Loveday brought her in, looking as though she wanted every one of us beaten to death, and she could hardly walk … I went to kiss her hello, and she said: ‘Lord, I can’t kiss you back. My lipstick’s perfect and I refuse to smear it.’”
The strange Lyctor barked out a hollow laugh. They—he?—inclined his head, and you saw him in part-profile for the first time. He was very fair, but in a greyish, damp, slicked-back way that showed off the promontories of his skull. Fine, impatient lines were set around his drooping eyes, and quite deeply carved into his mouth. He looked older than your father had looked, when he died. These haughty features were set in a tall, aristocratic face, with an arched and supercilious nose, which nose he was currently staring down at the Emperor with an expression of supreme suffering.
“It wasn’t, though. She had it on her teeth.”
Mercymorn muttered, but not so quietly that it wasn’t audible: “Of course you’d notice that, Augustine.”
But Augustine was adding, in a light, cultivated voice: “I remember now … Lord! The time flies!… That was a damnable business. They sent her to us barely alive, and back then none of us could do anything for her, excepting you. Was she the first gen, or second?”
“Second,” said God. “Early second. We were still experimenting with getting the Sixth installation up and running. Some of the Houses were empty.”
Mercymorn spoke up: “No. We had it running by then. Because Valancy was with us, and Anastasia.”
The Emperor clicked his fingers, as though she had triggered some neuron flash. “Yes, you’re right. We were all there to meet her. All sixteen of us—and she acted as though she were at a wedding and was doing a receiving line of tedious cousins … I could hardly keep a straight face. When was the last time you saw her?”
This last question was asked a little abruptly. Both Lyctors fell silent for a moment, and then the one they called Augustine said: “Recently. Ten years ago. I told her she was getting to be a bit of a hermit, and she acted as though I was rather stupid … but she seemed in good spirits.”
Mercymorn said: “Cytherea was good at seeming,” to which Augustine just said, a little distantly: “You’d know, I’m sure.”
Before this could decompose further, the Emperor pressed: “And you, Mercy?”
You heard the molar-grinding again. Then the Saint of Joy said, colourlessly: “Nearly twenty years ago.” And: “She laughed too much.”
All three of them fell silent at the altar. The wasted body in front of them would no longer laugh too much, in any case. Augustine said, “Does anyone remember her name—her actual House name? Didn’t she have one?”
The Emperor suggested, “Heptane,” but Augustine said, “No, you’re thinking of Loveday. We’ve forgotten it! That’s unnatural. Who would have ever thought we could forget—a thing like that?”
Mercymorn stood. She tucked her hair behind her ears and away from her deceptively serene oval face, and she crossed primly to the back of the altar. She put her hands behind her back as though afraid to touch anything with them. She looked at Cytherea’s dead face with an intensity that was in its own way worse than tenderness. It was as though she were willing something from the corpse; like she could conjure something through sheer force of wanting. “Call her Cytherea Loveday,” she said. “That’s what she wanted to be called—and I found it unbearable and glutinous then, and I find it unbearable and glutinous now; but that is what she said … I never saw her cry except once,” she added in a pointless rush. “The day after. When we put together the research. When she became a Lyctor. I said, There was no alternative. She said…”
At this point, she broke off. Thankfully, she did not glance in your direction. Augustine was staring at the floor, hands crossed demurely in a posture of awkward respect, and the Emperor was looking up at Mercy, but all you could see was the back of his head where mother-of-pearl leaves and baby fingerbones adorned his hair. The candlelight flickered heartlessly over you all.
He asked, “What did she say?”
The other Lyctor said nothing, for a moment. She cleared her throat: “She said, We had the choice to stop.”
After a second, the Prince Undying sank his head into his hands. A stylus fell out of his pocket and rolled