that had never been Cytherea’s. After long seconds, recognition flashed in those adulterated blue eyes; you saw understanding replace the grouchy morning crossness; you saw it fade before an overwhelming boredom, and you knew that Ianthe would not help you.
“Tell her I want my arm back,” she said, and slammed the door in your face.
ACT THREE
23
FOUR MONTHS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
YOU WERE AWARE, as a hand thrust into cold water might not notice until too late that the water had begun to boil, that an atmosphere of greater unease had settled over the Mithraeum.
It would have taken an absolute straight-up idiot not to notice though. When you were all called to the interminable dinners for which Augustine hinted you should “dress”—which you took to mean that you should wear your mother-of-pearl robe by way of ritual, and which Ianthe took to mean that she should wear things beneath hers that were not worth looking at, and pin her mass of pale hair on top of her head, and which meant that God never came in a shirt that didn’t badly want a new collar—it became brutally obvious. The Lyctors now ate all their dinners staring at tablets. Sometimes Mercymorn spread open a system map of local space, triangulating things that the elders frowned over and talked about in a way that did not include you or Ianthe. Quite often you two ate dinner in stony silence while, as Ianthe bitterly put it, the adults talked.
You began to find Augustine alone in the training room. He did nothing so pedestrian and comforting as training, but stared—paced—thought about reaching for his rapier, then abandoned the idea and left. Augustine had been in training for the past ten thousand years. You did not know what his idea of training looked like. More often you found Ianthe with him, going through motions with an unresponsive, fat-fingered ham-handedness that was not in keeping with her poise. She always wore an expression of exquisite, hardened surrender on her face, as though to say: You do realise I’m not going to do this?
You only ventured in there yourself far too late into sleeping hours for anyone else to be up. Then you would strip down to your shirt and exoskeleton, and your trousers and your bare feet—and you would hold the two-handed sword in front of you, and lift it up—and point it down—and do a long and unutterably dull series of minute movements, trying to feel normal, trying to understand. You tried hard, in a way that would have broken the heart of any actual swordswoman. If your arms responded more ably now, if you were able to lift, and slowly strike, then it would not save your life at the hands of a Herald, a thing that none of your teachers had yet managed to describe.
“Imagine,” said Augustine meditatively, when you asked, “imagine—the worst bee, but with a blood aspect, if you knew the whole time that it was a multitude of bloods. I’m talking at least three different types of blood, here.”
“The last time I fought one, I did it with my eyes closed,” said Mercymorn in her turn, and finished as though her punchline was a triumph: “When I opened them—they had bled anyway!!”
“Do you know, I have rarely seen the Heralds?” said God, when you finally came to question him. “Whenever they come I am bundled off to a sealed sanctum at the heart of the Mithraeum, so that their insanity can’t touch me. Despite all that soundproofing, I hear them … I always hear them.”
You said, “Lord—”
“Teacher—”
“The Saint of Joy will be active, when we are all in the River,” you said. “And the Saint of Duty, and the Saint of Patience. And Ianthe. Four Lyctors, fighting with their cavaliers’ perfect sword hands. Teacher, is it so sure a thing that I am going to die? I will be dormant, I know, but are they not enough to protect our bodies, as we destroy the brain?”
“Ianthe is far from a perfect sword hand.”
You did not know why you defended her: “She will perform on the day, Teacher. It’s a pose.”
“We cannot afford to pose,” he said, but there was a faint smile at his weary mouth. “Ianthe the First is a continual surprise to me. If I was going to pass out a fourth epithet, I’d call her the Saint of Awe.”
You thought that had not quite suited Naberius, though it was hard to remember the Prince of Ida, these days.