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Nam in dando recipimus,
in ignoscendo ignoscimur,
et in moriendo ad vitam aeternam nascimur.
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
— Prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, 11th century
Gertrude Robinson, cavalier of the Seventh, finds her necromancer in the library.
“I know what it is you want,” she says, measured and calm.
Her necromancer looks up at her— even with her standing intentionally relaxed, at ease with her hand far from the hilt of her rapier, Elias is shorter than her. Delicate, fragile, easily broken. She imagines, as she has so many times before, the dearth of effort it would take to snap him over her knee: bones brittle as kindling, blood like fine wine.
“Do you,” he says, just as calm. There’s a note of amusement in his tone. “And how is that?”
“The Eighth,” Gertrude responds. “They figured it out first. Already done, I believe— I knew that cavalier was…devoted to her scion, but for such a quick transition there must have been no disagreement at all. Agnes the First. How fitting.”
She is watching Elias’s face as a sailor watches the ocean on the eve of a hurricane. It is perfectly still, perfectly controlled.
“Did you really expect me to acquiesce?”
“No,” says her necromancer, and stands. Carefully, with the precision Gertrude has come to expect from him in every circumstance, he marks his page, closes his book, and fits his fountain pen into the breast pocket of his neatly pressed suit. He crosses the library floor with an unhurried stride, even and cautious, avoiding the salt-rotted floorboards that plague Canaan House. He turns his back to her, at the window, and looks out at the sunset over the endless sea.
Gertrude steps forward soundlessly, delicately, to stand at his side. He does not acknowledge her presence. In the dying light, red as fresh blood, he looks almost unreal: a sculpture like the ones that populate this forsaken place, fragmented and ancient.
He is very beautiful, in the way that she imagines the Emperor must be beautiful.
“I’m surprised the Eighth shared it with anyone,” says Elias, after a time.
“They didn’t.” Gertrude steals another glance at him, silhouetted like a particularly gory murder. “They were working with the Sixth, pooling their resources. The Sixth necromancer told me. She refuses to do it, of course— cares about her cavalier too much.”
“Or not enough,” says Elias.
“How long have you known?” asks Gertrude, for once genuinely curious.
Elias pauses, just for a moment. “Long enough.”
“To plan a trap?” asks Gertrude, quietly, and then— “Ah. You told the Eighth.”
“Who told the Sixth, who told you. Rather like a game of dominoes, I imagine.”
“Of course,” Gertrude says, though in her stomach is an icy weight, the awful chilling gravity of the realization that she is right where he wants her. She should have known.
“I thought,” says her necromancer, “that you knew me well enough by now to expect this sort of thing.”
Gertrude doesn’t respond. Her hand rests at ease on the pommel of her rapier.
“Oh, come along, Gertrude,” says Elias. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. There’s a reason it’s the necromancer who devours the cavalier, and not the other way around.”
Gertrude stares into the dying light of Dominicus on the horizon, sinking slowly into the sea. “Do you know,” she says— measured, careful— “you never did tell me why you came here.”
“I don’t suppose you’d accept “the Emperor’s summons” as an answer.”
“I think you know me better than that.” Gertrude turns her gaze away from the sun, to the face of her necromancer. He is looking at her now, his face perfectly composed. His eyes are green, the beautiful luminous hyper-real green of the Seventh, and she has no name for the things she sees in them. “I think, if you’re going to…devour me, I have a right to know what it is I’m dying for.”
“Seven for beauty that blossoms and dies,” recites Elias. “Ironic, isn’t it? We live cheek by jowl with death, we necromancers, and it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life. Lyctorhood, did you know, is closer to death than to living. To become a Lyctor is to become a living well of thanergy: to burn your cavalier’s soul, atom by atom, for the rest of infinity. We of the Seventh, we spend our days trying our damnedest to peer in the space between death and life, as through a glass darkly— but to be a Lyctor…” He trails off, as if searching for the right words. “To be a Lyctor is to reside there for ever.”
“That,” says Gertrude, “doesn’t answer my question.”
“Is the lure of that knowledge not enough?”
“Not for you.” Gertrude considers the glint of the red light off his golden spectacles. “Not for me, either. The least you can do is tell me the truth, Elias Bouchard.”
“To live,” responds Elias abruptly, and Gertrude is almost taken aback by the simplicity of it, the suddenness. “To live forever. What else is there?”
“Ah,” says Gertrude. “Rather more…pedestrian than I was expecting.”
“You don’t know me nearly as well as I thought you did.”
“Not as well as I thought either, apparently.”
They are quiet, for a time. Dominicus slips below the horizon as they watch, its last sliver of light almost an afterthought. Gertrude can hear her necromancer breathing, calm and measured, at her side.
“I don’t suppose you’ll make this easy for me,” says Elias, when the last red gleam of the summer sun is gone.
“No,” agrees Gertrude, and draws her rapier.
For a scrawny little magician, her necromancer is quick. In a flash he’s across the room, away from her with his back pressed to the rotting bookshelves. She advances, cautious, eyes locked on him. He’s managed to roll up the sleeve of his shirt and produce from somewhere a knife, jewel-hilted and ceremonial.
“Really, Gertrude,” says her necromancer as he extends an arm and slices the dagger easily across the crook of his elbow. Blood begins to stream freely, stray droplets staining his pressed white shirt. “It will be so much simpler for both of us if this is done willingly.”
“You know me better than that,” Gertrude responds, and darts in. Her first strike succeeds only in pinning the tail of his suit jacket to the wall, but her second finds a home in the hollow of his hip. He cries out in pain, and Gertrude— uncharacteristically, cruelly— levers the tip upwards, tearing through soft internal flesh until she’s got him nearly off his feet, pinned like a butterfly on the end of her blade.
“Gertrude,” gasps her necromancer, “please—”
She opens her mouth to respond, digging her blade in further, but before she can get the words out she’s body-slammed by what feels like a tidal wave. Her rapier is torn from her hand and she tumbles, head over heels, barely managing to tuck and roll into an upright defensive stance.
Her necromancer is still where she left him, slumped against the bookshelf with both hands pressed over the fast-growing dark stain at his hip. In front of him, though, is a roiling ocean of blood, viscous and opaque, formless and horrible. Gertrude stares at it, uncomprehending— she’s never seen, she realizes, Elias ply his trade at violence.
Rapier, thinks Gertrude numbly. Where’s my rapier? There, stuck in the rot-softened floor, thirty or so feet away. She begins to move towards it, carefully, eyes trained on her necromancer.
Elias doesn’t speak. His face is pale, and his breathing is heavy; he’s lost, ironically enough, a good deal of blood. As she watches, he lifts one trembling hand to his mouth, closes his eyes, and then— and then bites, tearing into the soft heel of his palm like a feral animal. There’s a horrible ripping sound as he gores out a chunk of it, and Gertrude sees a flash of exposed white bone as he twists what remains of his hand around it, crushing it in his grip.
“Elias,” murmurs Gertrude, hand on her rapier. “What are you—”
She only just manages to wrap her fingers around the hilt before a wave of force ripples out from Elias, and she’s thrown backwards like a ragdoll, hitting the far wall with a sickening crack and slumping to the floor. There’s an awful ringing in her ears, and as she staggers to her feet—
Oh, God.
Where her necromancer once was is a creature at least twice his height, and four times his width: a massive, heaping, vaguely humanoid form, as of concrete piled atop itself. Boils infest its surface, open sores weeping viscous white pus. Veins course beneath its waxy yellow skin, brilliant and clear red. It is composed entirely of flesh, and in the center of its forehead is one great green eye.
Gertrude has heard of flesh constructs before. She’s never seen one in person.
“Gertrude,” Elias calls out weakly from behind his creation. “You can still surrender. Trust me, it will be so much more pleasant that way.”
In lieu of a response, Gertrude grits her teeth, grips her rapier tighter, and charges.
She doesn’t know for how long she fights the thing. Long enough to open no small number of its horrible veins, to make the floor slick with its blood and lymph: not long enough that it begins to flag, not even close. It’s clumsy, and slow, but it is a titan, and it is good at what it was built for: protecting its master.
She gets glimpses of Elias, behind the construct: braced against the bookshelf, blood flowing steadily from both nostrils, controlling it with sheer bloody-minded force. He’s pulling on his own thanergy to keep it alive; each time her rapier opens the thing up, Elias knits it closed. He looks like death, pale and utterly drained, but he has that expression of absolute determination which she knows so well. It was the same expression he wore when he fought the Ninth, when he guided her against the bone construct, when he siphoned her in the avulsion room. He will die before he gives up. Gertrude will die long before that.
The construct’s one eye blinks at her as she catches her breath, a momentary pause in their gruesome dance, and Gertrude has an idea.
She turns, and she runs. The construct’s feet pound the rotten boards behind her, but she’s quick, she’s always been quick, and she just barely beats it to the spiral staircase up to the mezzanine. It’s too big to fit; she’s counting on it. As it begins to demolish the base of the structure, boards falling just behind Gertrude’s footsteps, she counts herself off— one, two, three, now— and leaps.
It’s a lucky thing. It doesn’t see her, or Elias doesn’t, or the information lag between creator and created is just barely long enough. Gertrude lands on the shoulders of the construct, balanced with exact precision, and drives her rapier into its beautiful, luminous green eye.
Across the room, Elias screams.
The construct crumples to the ground. Gertrude manages to jump clear of its titanic form; it falls through the salt-soft floorboards with a tremendous crash, plummeting into whatever lies below this place. She does not stay to watch it, dashing over to her necromancer, rapier still in hand.
He’s fallen to his knees, hands scrabbling at his face. For a moment she doesn’t see, doesn’t understand— and then she catches a glimpse, around his frantic fingers, of the single ruined eye in the center of his forehead.
“Elias,” she says, calm— not intentionally, as she usually is around him, but numbly. Part of her still cannot believe that this is happening, that the last minute was real. “Elias, look at me.”
He does, with his gorgeous green eyes, bright with tears of pain or fear or both. There are tiny crimson networks of burst blood vessels in the whites, and trails of blood from the edges. “Gertrude,” he gasps, his breath short and desperate.
She takes the knife from his grasp; he tries, weakly, to hold onto it, but the fingers of his ruined hand fall away like kindling. She is almost gentle. There is such profound panic in his eyes, fear like she has never seen in another human being.
“Is this what you’re afraid of?” she asks, softly. He has never appeared to her so out of control, so absolutely terrified. Nothing scares Elias Bouchard, Duke of Rhodes, Necromantic Scion of the Seventh House. Or, nothing did.
“Please,” he begs her, his voice little more than a hoarse whisper. “You’re my cavalier, Gertrude, you can’t— a dereliction of duty—”
“We’re well beyond that,” she assures him.
He gives a bitter laugh, and the panic seems to subside a bit, like the tide going out. The last vestiges of sunlight still remain; outside the window, she can see the stars beginning to blink into view. Strangely, they are just the same as they are on the Seventh.
“I thought,” he gasps, “I knew you better.”
“So did I.” She shifts, takes his upper body and positions herself so that she’s cradling him. Such an intimate position, his head in the crook of her arm, their eyes locked together. She can feel the tremble of his body, exhausted and worn down: he’s not dead yet, and he’s not dying, but he’s in no state to fight.
“I would say I’m sorry,” murmurs Gertrude, ghosting her fingers over Elias’s face. She lingers at the edge of his eyes, feeling the shape of them through the fragile skin. “But you told me the truth. I would be amiss not to return the favor.”
She is not violent, when she slides the knife between her necromancer’s fifth and sixth ribs. There is almost a gentleness to it, the precision with which she angles the blade so as to directly puncture the largest chamber of his heart. The blood spills out around the knife like silk, covering them both, and she watches intently as he gasps once, gasps twice, exhales, and then stills.
It is no easy task to carve out his eyes, those beautiful green gemstones set in the hollows of his skull. There is a certain delicacy required with the knife, and Gertrude is no surgeon. But she takes her time, and after long minutes of gory work she has them, twin emeralds. In some queer way he looks more right without them, in death.
They find her there, eventually. The Sixth necromancer comes looking for some theorem or other, the Ninth cavalier following her with a pot of tea which he drops at the gruesome sight in the library. They are silent at the image of her, her necromancer’s body growing ever colder in her arms, the colossal wreck of the flesh construct rotting already in the cool saltwater below.