the First, and you were happy with a cold collation. Ingredients could be taken from the storeroom and eaten as they were, in the broad steel kitchens so antique in their style: chrome-brushed countertops, wide square ovens, and a ring where a gas-lit fire came out if you swivelled a dial. Often you could find the Emperor of the Nine Houses there, sitting at one of the plex counters and drinking from a chipped mug of hot coffee.
He was wholly Teacher now. His personal sitting room, a quietly appointed little space with a few chairs and a low table all comfortably faded with wear, had become a familiar sanctum. The rest of his private chambers remained a forbidden tomb. You’d traditionally been drawn to forbidden tombs, but this one repelled even your curiosity. The doors were always locked, and you nurtured no ambition to see them otherwise. He often summoned you for a theoretical lesson, or the cups of tea you still hated but would have rather seen your skin flagellated off than say so, or simply to sit in silence. He had a trick of asking you to come over and talk, and then never actually talking, but sitting with you watching the asteroids continue their graceful orbit around a thanergenic star.
Once you found him with a sheaf of flimsy spread out over the low table—months-old reports—and he was embarrassed; God was embarrassed. “I still think about it,” he confessed. “The eighteen thousand … the radiation missiles … Augustine says thinking about it before we endure Number Seven is folly, but the way I see it, if I fail with Number Seven nothing matters; if we win, then this is the thing that matters most.”
It was always I when God ideated failure, as though the rest of you were not accountable for anything. You sat in your lustrous white robe, trying to appreciate the taste of black tea with milk in it, trying to look as though you might at any moment take the hard biscuit and place it in the tea as he did—the God of the Unstilled Mandible always gave you a biscuit—and you said, “Who did it, Lord?”
“BOE, I’m assuming,” he said, a bit absently; then he paused at your confusion, and said, “That’s an acronym for a group of maniacs. A cult who came to our attention maybe five thousand years ago. We stumbled on them during one of our pushes into deep space. Stumbled … they’d been looking for us the whole time. They hate the Nine Houses.”
You said, “I have never heard of them.”
“You might have by another name—or simply as nameless insurgents. They prefer to present themselves as a kind of organic reaction, not a single coherent group. In fact, their existence depends on a secretive central organisation that sends its agents to people we encounter outside the Nine Houses, to populated planets we’re stewarding, and turns them against us from the shadows. But I know about them, and the Lyctors know about them. They upped their game about twenty-five years before you were born. They’d gotten a demagogue, a charismatic leader who wasn’t content to work behind the scenes. Hotspots flared up, but we took them down … cell by cell, bone by bone.”
You remained silent, fingering the biscuit thoughtfully, developing the fiction that you might eat it sometime in the next myriad. Teacher quirked his eyebrows close together and looked at you with those oil-on-carbon eyes, and said, “I think they were behind Cytherea’s coming to Canaan House. That’s a damned sight more terrifying to me even than old nukes they have in storage somewhere.”
You said, “Cytherea planned to lure you back to the Nine Houses. To attract a Resurrection Beast to kill you, I surmise?”
“Lure is a strong word. I still think it was a crime of passion. I’m not saying she didn’t have other reasons. It’s just that I think some of them were heartbreakingly simple. I could’ve gotten through to her, given time,” said God. “Time—it’s always time—she was overworked and underloved. Whenever something needed doing, she’d always say, Me, I will, and because she acted as though she had a leaven of selfishness to her it was easy to say Of course, not recognising how many times she’d said I will … not recognising how she worked herself into the grave.”
You said, “A Seventh House flaw. A fatal longing for the picturesque.”
“I understand the Houses have crystallised into … types,” he said, and he dipped his