You were not so apt with healing yourself, back then. You heard: “Is she dead?—Stay there, you idiot! Hands where I can see them! What were you thinking? Oh, he’s going to be furious! You egg!”
It seemed hateful to you that in death you should be treated like a prey animal some domestic predator had brought inside. You heard the Saint of Duty say in his flat, joyless voice: “I don’t answer to you.”
The spear was removed. You still remembered acutely what that felt like. In the midst of that sensation, quick, light fingertips tapped a symphony over your back, arresting the flow of blood, seizing your flesh, cutting off circulatory shock; it was only then that you really began to understand what Mercymorn could do. With another fingertip, she tapped above your eyebrow, and your pituitary gland spewed out a flood of neuropeptides that immediately replaced the adrenaline squirting through your system.
She was saying: “It’s not fair of you to try to bump them off when we’d get in trouble for it. They can die well enough on their own, you toad. This one’s all of twelve years old.”
This was not close to accurate, even given your lie, but fine. He murmured something. She said back, sharply: “Quick enough for anyone’s satisfaction. Look! Look!! She can’t even heal … told him her integration had retarded … said she couldn’t stanch … and I’m not cleaning up this place, you are. Yuck. There’s bone in the grouting.”
Ortus the First said, “The Heralds will be here in eight months.”
“I’m well aware of that, thanks,” said Mercy. “You go flip some planets to give us a firebreak.”
Ortus the First said, “Now you’re telling me my own job.”
“Oh, I hate you! I’ve always hated you, you dreary, repetitive leg,” said Mercymorn passionately, and then you felt her thumb press down on your lower back, and your gastrointestinal tract—so interrupted by spearpoint—flushed, deep and warm, and you felt some of that twisting pain within you. You could barely feel it anyway, you were so running with hormones. It was the best you’d felt since before you’d gone to Canaan House. Then she said, more reasonably: “I know what you’re doing, and it’s not like I don’t understand it, but if you’d wanted to smother the kittens you could do it more cleanly by knocking her out and dropping her out the airlock…”
She trailed off suggestively. The Saint of Duty said stonily, “I do things face-to-face.”
“I am not trying to be cruel,” she said cruelly, “but that is what got you into trouble nineteen years ago.”
There were heavy footsteps on the tiles. You were rolled onto your back, where the scabbard made you roll backward and forward, like a tortoise with a knobble on its shell. You were filled with a great sense of calm as the world rolled back into focus. It had been psychologically dreadful to see Mercymorn tapping your chest and your midsection, mouth screwed up as though she were cleaning your vomit, but you were wrapped in a beautiful fug of oxytocin and did not care about other Lyctors, your assassination attempt, or anything much. It meant you could look up fearlessly, and nervelessly, into the eyes of Ortus.
Ortus’s face, stretched too tightly over its frame and locked into a long, lugubrious expression, had no reasonable relationship with his luminous green eyes: a soft, buttery green, less startling or harsh than the green of a shoot or the green of a leaf, but instead liquid and fluvial.
The Lyctor leaning over you said warningly, “Don’t you do a thing. I’ll have to fight you, and I cannot begin to tell you how much I don’t want to do that. Oh, why did I stop?” she wailed. “I should have kept walking. I hate reasonable culpability.”
“I want that sword,” said Ortus the First.
“What?”
“Give me her damned sword,” said Ortus the First.
“You’ve already got a whole complement of oversized weapons, greedy.”
Even an overexcited pituitary gland could not mask the sharp shank of fear that sliced down the length of your heart. You tried to raise yourself up on your elbows before you wobbled weakly back down. You said hoarsely, “No. No. It’s mine.”
Mercymorn lost her patience on an almost professional basis. “Oh, just get out of it,” she said peevishly to Ortus. “Leave the baby alone.” Before you could feel indebted to her, she added: “Next time, try this at night! When I’m sleeping! If I see you hurt her I have to intervene,