across the sleek black-and-bone tiles. It was the first time that he had seemed at all mortal. Humanity touched him briefly, like a passing shadow.
Then Augustine said, quite irrelevantly: “I wouldn’t have called it glutinous. She was just lucky that Cythe-re-a Love-day trips off the tongue. Now, mine would alliterate in a way I couldn’t have abided. Abode?”
“I will say this,” said Mercy presently, acting as though Augustine had never said a word. “I never mourned for Loveday Heptane. She did one good thing with her life, and she knew it.”
“Eulogise her,” said the Emperor, through his hands. “For God’s sake, eulogise her anyway. Eulogise them both.”
Augustine reached over and squeezed the shoulder of the man who became God and the God who became man and yet still invoked himself, apparently; the Lyctor got up with a grunt as though it hurt him and went to stand at the foot of the altar. You saw now that he was tall, and not particularly imposing, but—there was something removed from real life in the lineaments of his face, as though he had once looked at something terrible and it had lodged in his cheeks and forehead. He twitched open his First House cloak and stuck his thumbs in the belt loops of his elegant trousers—his white robe floated around his shoulders like an overjacket, filmy and beautiful—and he cleared his throat.
“Cytherea was gorgeous,” he said simply. “Ten thousand years, and I never heard her say an unkind word except when it was very funny. She loved us unguardedly, all of us, which showed both her patience and her enormous capacity … She was a worthy Lyctor and a beloved Hand—and Loveday gave her to us, so I suppose God bless Loveday.”
Mercymorn pressed her hand down close to the small fat blush roses. She had to draw herself together quite tightly. Her voice was light and a trifle strange when she said, “She could be a dreadful little fool. But she was generally an endearing dreadful little fool, and her death was beneath her.”
She slowly turned those dreamy hurricane eyes on the pews, which meant she turned them on you and Ianthe, and she started. She said, “The infants are awake.”
The Kindly Prince craned his head over his shoulder and saw that you, the infants, were awake. He stood and, horror upon horrors, came down the aisle to you; he looked you both over, as though he were glad to see you, as though he were glad to see Ianthe, some nameless softening in his face and in those white-ringed, primordial eyes. He reached out for your hands. You could not refuse him, and in any case had no choice of doing so; your body reacted long before your mind did, and the meat of your meat and the flesh of your flesh belonged to God. And so, with your hand in his left and Ianthe’s in his right—Ianthe had arranged herself so that she had given him her left hand, rather than her less-favoured right—he said, “Welcome home. Come closer—we’re just saying goodbye … we’re used to saying goodbye.”
Both you and Ianthe were led like sacrifices to the bier, to kneel where the other Lyctors had on the black-and-cream tiles. Mercymorn did not deign to look at you, but the strange Lyctor they had both called Augustine did. He looked down his long nose at you both, and he remarked: “Well, which one of the kiddies did her in?”
The Emperor said sharply, “That doesn’t matter.”
“It’s not like I hold it against ’em—I couldn’t. Believe me, if she went she chose to go. Well, I’d hate to guess … Two of them! What a funny old world,” he added bracingly.
The Lyctor came away from Cytherea’s bud-covered feet and dropped to crouch in the transept before Ianthe. He said, “My name is Augustine the First, the Saint of Patience, Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, first finger on the hand that serves the King Undying—and your eldest brother, for my sins. Who are you, my doves?”
Ianthe said, lifelessly: “I am Ianthe Tridentarius, Princess of Ida,” and you said in the same automatic way, “I am Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the Reverend Daughter.”
Augustine laughed in a glassy and elegant way that had no relationship with mirth. He reached over and shook both your hands—you were befuddled; you had always considered a handshake the action of a misfit—and he said, “Not any more. Your obedient servant, Ianthe the First—you’re the one who ascended first, didn’t you? So you’re