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The invitation had said ‘no retainers’ and Teacher had said ‘no external communications’, and so it was a surprise for the whole of Canaan House when a shuttle arrived on the dock just a few days into their stay.
They were gathered for breakfast, all of them minus the nervy, brilliant Reverend Daughter of the Ninth, who was presumably still sleeping off her recklessness in the labs. The Ninth cavalier was there – she’d stumbled in late, and the Eight had made a point of rising and finding new seats as far away as possible—and Lady Pent and her cavalier were chattering about a party they intended to throw later for dinner. The Fourth pair were nearby, trying very hard to act above it all, and even Captain Deuteros looked relaxed. At his side, Camilla was bright-eyed and alert, still doodling over her map and glancing at Palamedes’s half-empty bowl in a way that promised retribution if he didn’t finish it all.
And then the man walked in. He was of average height and strolled in measured strides, every line of his face and posture conveying a studied sort of laziness. He was an incongruous sight, a new face on a deserted planet that only held the room’s occupants and an assortment of skeleton servants. Palamedes blinked in surprise. Camilla stiffened; Naberius Tern jumped to his feet. At the far end of the table, Duchess Septimus stood up with enough of a clatter to break through the sudden tension.
“Ops,” she said.
She stood very straight and smiled charmingly at the man, who carried a rapier at his side and wore a shimmering, eye-catching robe around his shoulders. He held out a hand in a nonchalant way, and everything froze.
Well, not everything. Palamedes was still breathing, heart pumping, he could still swallow and blink and turn his gaze. But his muscles were paralysed, his bones as heavy as lead, and he couldn’t speak. The skeleton constructs had stilled too, and so had everyone in the room except for Dulcinea—and the man they called Teacher, who let out a loud long cry.
“Oh, my Lord,” he wailed as if someone had died. “You're not supposed to be here.”
“And I see you still are,” said Teacher’s Lord, who was, Palamedes realised, one of the Lyctors. And then the Lyctor turned to Dulcinea, who looked remarkably composed.
“Cyth, love. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“I want her dead,” Palamedes said, in the aftermath, surprising even himself. He meant it. He wanted her killed, he wanted her broken. He wanted to do the deed with his own bloody hands.
“Well, you'll have to take it up with God, apparently,” said Ianthe Tridentarius, who had mastered the incredible talent of always inserting herself where she wasn't wanted.
Lady Abigail’s soiree hadn't gone as planned after the Lyctor—Cytherea the First—had left. A Lyctor had killed the heir of the Seventh, and her cavalier, and they were apparently all supposed to go on as usual. Judith Deuteros had remarked that surely the Emperor would take action, but Palamedes had the suspicion that the Emperor’s action would not extend to what he’d personally considered sufficient retribution.
“You want the bitch dead, become a Lyctor yourself,” Ianthe said, raising her glass at him. “I certainly plan to. Cheers, Sextus.”
The Saint of Patience returned to Canaan House two days later. Having escorted Cytherea away he now returned, he claimed, to put things in order.
“Terribly sorry,” he told the assorted heirs. “That sure was a blunder. A delicate internal situation, as you can imagine…” A very diplomatic way to describe cold-blooded murder. “Nevertheless. You are to stay here, work on your research, and once you do understand—you may decide to go ahead with it, or you may not.”
He spoke as though constantly on the edge of delivering a toast, smooth and airy, polished to a shine. “No shame in backing out, and you will be sworn to secrecy on the nature of the final theorem, but you will leave the House of the First in full honours and glory, et cetera.” He clapped his hands. “Any questions?”
He clearly didn’t expect anyone to take him up on it. Palamedes raised his hand.
“Why now?” he asked. “Why after all these centuries… after millennia. Why us?”
“That is an excellent question,” said the Lyctor. “Full marks, well done. Unfortunately, you don’t get the whole answer yet. The short answer… there are few of us, and we are weary, and our Lord’s plans are, of course, ever ambitious.”
“Was Cytherea the First part of those ambitious plans?”
It slipped out, easy as anything. Everyone turned to stare; even Cam shifted her weight from one foot to the other, faintly uneasy, and Silas the Eight said, “This is heresy. Surely, Your Grace…”
“Quite,” said the Lyctor. “You’re one of Joy’s, aren’t you?” He looked the Master Templar up and down. “How she’d hate to know her house sent forth an adolescent. As for you, Warden. I will say it plainly: my sister acted of her own will. She has been lonely for a myriad. She has also been a Lyctor of the Resurrection for a myriad. Both are things you may want to consider before you attempt to ascend, but if you do, and you choose to challenge her, I would not stand in your way.”
Whatever mysterious dictates kept the Emperor and his Hands away from the Houses had been relaxed, or else did not seem to apply to the Saint of Patience’s short sojourns. Over the next few months, he’d sometimes appear and make himself at home for a few days at a time, wandering about the magnificent decay of Canaan House and filling up the halls with cigarette stench—a filthy habit, but one that certainly would kill them before it killed him. He claimed he was checking on their progress, as God had once done for his Lyctors. As God currently resided in deep space, he said, a supervising Lyctor was the best they would get.
It took Palamedes less than two weeks to get a hint of the obvious, terrible conclusion to the Lyctoral theorem. He discarded it immediately and set about working on a second, less inhuman option that kept eluding them, collaborating most often with the Ninth and less frequently with all other Houses in turns. In the process, he accidentally stumbled on a third path that enlightened him on the true nature of the being they’d called Teacher and was, in a different way, just as repellent as the original theorem. It was messy work. It was complex and masterful, and the applications were nothing short of horrifying.
In hindsight, it all made a terrible sort of sense. Palamedes was no Eight House Templar or a spirit magician, but he understood on a fundamental level that such unbridled power must come at a cost that very few would pay.
The Saint of Patience never offered to enlighten them in their studies and was actively sardonic in a way that discouraged questions, but Palamedes was nothing if not persistent. He cornered him in the library, took walks outside on the docks where the Saint of Patience liked to sit and look at the blue sky, and enlisted Lady Abigail’s assistance to help track him down in the kitchen.
“I’m not helping you doves cheat,” he said, the first time Palamedes approached him. “I’m just checking you’re all still alive.”
“Your Grace,” Palamedes said formally, firmly. “I am the best necromancer of my generation. I don’t need to cheat.”
“That’s what you all seem to think. The Third House chick, the one with the—sister…” and there he smiled a wry smile. “Haven’t talked to that Ninth chit, but she glows like a beacon. Oh well, maybe our Lord got lucky when he called forth House heirs from such a momentous generation.” He waved it off. “Anyway. What do you want?”
“I had a question,” Palamedes said. “Well. A few.”
He had made a list. He couldn’t have done otherwise: the man in front of him was living history, a walking record of an entire myriad of the Houses. It was a momentous occasion and Palamedes took full advantage of it. Slowly, over months, he asked it all. The beginnings of the empire and the House installations, the dawn of necromancy in the wake of the Resurrection, the centuries of exploration and the war. He asked about languages and food through the millennia, about cultural practices fallen out of use—surprisingly few, under the steadying influence of the Emperor Undying—longer-term plans for the development of necromantic studies.
“Would you say recent scholarship is a bit sterile?”
It was their sixth or seventh conversation. The Lyctor—Augustine, he’d said his name was, a detail not recorded anywhere except perhaps the personal journals of the Saint of Vision, so jealously preserved that not even the Master Warden had opportunity to consult them without jumping through so many hoops that Palamedes hadn’t bothered—Augustine the First laughed. He held himself like an actor declaiming on stage, affected irony with all the flair of a Third House poet, and held very little of his sainted Patience, and his laugh was a charming performance of mirth. “You really are one of Cassy’s.”
Cassy, he learned, had been Cassiopeia the First, Saint of Vision. Palamedes wanted to take offence—the gene pool on the Sixth was shallow but not so shallow that he should in any way resemble a woman who had been born a myriad ago—but he understood that the Lyctor had meant it as a compliment.
“What are you, Warden? A psychometrist, and what? Flesh magic? Geneticist?”
“Pathologist,” Palamedes admitted. “Out of personal interest. And I’m a spirit magician by training.”
“Are you,” said the Saint of Patience, who had codified the principles of spirit magic at around the time he’d founded the Fifth House. “I’m sure your work is splendid.”
He said it warmly, in a tone that betrayed nothing but confidence, but something about the set of his mouth made it sound as though he were paying a compliment to a precocious seven-year-old.
“I think so, too,” Palamedes said. Modesty wasn’t an advantage in the Sixth House. “I’ve been working on a way to tether a revenant soul to the bank of the River—the edge of the liminal space—through a biologically compatible anchor.”
He counted five whole seconds before Augustine’s mouth moved. It was immensely satisfying.
“Realistically, it’ll have to be bone,” he went on before Augustine could say anything. “For the thanergy storage.”
A precocious seven-year-old could’ve guessed the last part. The Saint of Patience said, “No shit,” and lit up another cigarette.
“That is an intriguing idea,” he admitted. “You can do that—I mean, I can see how I’d do that, I can see how a non-Lyctor might try it. Maybe. If they were frightfully smart,” he said. “Or completely delusional.”
“I’ve been peer-reviewed.”
“There you go,” he said. “Want a smoke?”
Another time, he asked the Saint of Patience about medical advancements in the Houses. Yes, their population had always been barely above replacement level—the war did not help, but even Palamedes knew better to say that to a Lyctor—and necromancers had always been physically fragile, draining their own thalergy still in embryo.
Aptitude carried a whole host of health issues, an acceptable trade-off for some but deadly for others. Over the years, Palamedes had made notes on possible applications of necromancy to living thalergy, but hadn’t pursued them on a broader scale; his medical studies had always been so narrowly focused, a race against time. Now… well. He’d been thinking about repurposing his research, if possible. Surely the Lyctors, in their myriadic lifetime, must have researched something similar.
“One Lyctor,” said the Saint of Patience. “We haven’t spoken in nearly twenty years and my fondest hope is that we won’t speak for another two hundred. But if you do ascend, you’re welcome to ask her.”
And then later that same afternoon, he prompted, “You said you are a pathologist?”
“Yes,” Palamedes said. “Psychometric cytopathology. I studied—”
“Yes, I think I get the picture. The Duchess Seventh. Eptamerous cancer, was it?”
“Septimus,” he corrected. “Dulcinea Septimus.”
“Yes, yes. Her.”
He waved it off as he spoke, with the same studied dismissiveness he used for everything else. It set Palamedes off. The thought that Dulcinea’s murder was a mere speck of dirt on the shiny plex of Augustine’s carefree performance—and it had been murder, cold-blooded and unjustified, and it didn’t matter in the least that she’d come to Canaan House to die.
No tribunal in the universe could bring a Saint of the Resurrection to justice for killing a sickly woman, and Cytherea the First was going about her life even now, doing whatever she had been doing for the last myriad after receiving a slap on the wrist from the Emperor. Palamedes had accepted that. But the Saint of Patience could have at least affected some caring for Cytherea’s victim, just as he affected everything else about himself – he could’ve bothered to pretend human life mattered.
“Oh, impetuous,” the Lyctor said, and Palamedes realised he’d said that out loud. And then Augustine the First—Lyctor, Saint, first of God’s Holy Fingers—grabbed his shirt about the shoulders and crashed their mouths together.
Palamedes had been kissed precious few times in his life. He was briefly stunned, then flushed and warm all over—he didn’t know where to put his hands. The Saint of Patience, who had been alive a myriad and must have had several romances in his time, was an exquisite kisser. He kissed with the showmanship he employed in all things. The suction of his mouth on Palamedes’s lip, his eager demanding tongue, the brush of his breath as he chuckled warmly into their kiss. His mouth tasted like the wine he’d been drinking, and his hand cupping Palamedes’s jaw smelled of nicotine and ink, and the combination was overwhelming to the senses. It made him hungry. It made him stupidly, ridiculously aroused.
Augustine pulled back.
“There,” he said. “Let’s not argue, my boy. I’ll see you around.”
And he left, whistling. Whistling, because he knew he’d be heard. Palamedes had made Warden at thirteen, but he’d never felt so small as he did now. Confused, annoyed, embarrassingly bereft. He knew by now that Augustine always liked to have the last word, to leave with flair on a tasty soundbite, and he’d just kissed him to prove… what? That he could shut him up? That he’d enjoyed riling him up?
Palamedes thought of how he’d already made a fool of himself around an immortal once, only to fall for the same trick with another Saint who didn’t even playact at being a good person, or any sort of a person at all.
It made him feel disoriented, dizzy. Pushed about by forces grander than he could ever be.
Lady Pent was the first to leave Canaan House. With her went her her husband, naturally, and the Fourth House teens.
“Well, obviously the old way would never work for me,” said Abigail, with lively, terrible practicality, as if she were talking about a malfunctioning prototype and not killing her husband and cavalier.
“And we’d rather… I think, Warden, that I can be more useful to my House—to all the Houses, pursuing my research back in Koniortos instead of waiting here for you and the Ninth to come up with a new trick that even God’s Holy Fingers could not crack. No, no, I believe you can do it,” Abigail said. “You have it in you. But it’s not for me, and it’s certainly not for the Fourth. Even Master Octakiseron, I believe, is far too young… but don’t mind me. Give my best to the Saint of Patience when you see him next, will you?”
She had known of his interviews and approved heartily. She’d called it a ‘neat little project’, and had listened to Palamedes complaining about cigarette smoke, and wild detours into frivolous anecdotes, and how the Saint of Patience only answered a question every three and that only if he felt like it—Lady Abigail had paid attention to all of it and nodded sympathetically and now said, “But of course, you will allow the Fifth House to consult your records when you publish? It is our founder Saint you’ve chosen as the subject of your interviews.”
“You may, of course, petition for access,” said Palamedes in his Warden voice, and Lady Pent smiled before hugging both him and Cam.
He would miss her. He did not, however, give her best to the Saint of Patience the next time he visited, because he made sure he could not be found—mostly by sticking to Cam’s side, as Augustine, unsurprisingly, avoided cavaliers.
Then there was that whole business with the Third, and Palamedes found his unspoken answer to why Ianthe Tridentarius had waited this long before killing Naberius Tern—her twin sister. Afterwards, the Second House too made noises about departing, and Palamedes could not say he’d mind it. Judith Deuteros was an officer, not a scholar, ill-suited to their research, though she had not yet left, and Palamedes had heard from the Ninth that lieutenant Dyas had been considering allowing her necromancer to ascend the old way—the traditional way.
“That’s absolutely fucking fucked,” said Gideon Nav. “Sitting there and talking about the pros and cons of your necro killing and eating you? Couldn’t be me.” And then again, “That’s fucked.”
“It’s the Second House,” Camilla said, and Palamedes nodded out of habit—the Second were a popular topic among the Alexandrite gossip that made its way back to the library—but then he remembered what Augustine the First hinted at about the founders of the Cohort, necromancer and cavalier. That they chose it willingly and the Saint of Duty had ascended with the blood of his cavalier on his brow, a last kiss of devotion before the end.
“Warden?”
Cam’s voice snapped him out of it. Palamedes came back to himself to find that everyone was watching him, even Lady Harrowhark, who immediately affected extreme indifference under her pale facepaint.
“Sorry,” he said. “Just thinking.”
That same evening, in their shared room, he took Camilla’s hands in his own.
“Cam. Maybe we should just go home.”
“How long have you been thinking that?”
“A while,” he admitted. “I believe we might crack it eventually…” If there was something to crack. God’s best and brightest had thought so too, with a wealth of souls at their disposal—these days Palamedes could not look at the priests without wincing. “But if we did. Do you think it’d be worth it?”
Eternal life, of course. Immense power. Endless avenues of study opened up to them, the universe at their fingertips. The opportunity to shape the future of the Houses.
The downsides…
“Warden?” Camilla’s voice was gentle, quiet. He let her hands go. “Do you still want the death of Cytherea the First?”
“Of course,” he said, immediately. “But I’ve come to think…” Being in her place. That he too may become so callous after a myriad, so inured, so indifferent to the importance of a single human life. He’d hated the way Augustine the First had dismissed Cytherea’s crime, as a mere footnote in a history book. As if it were—a pity, of course, but a small one. Because a single dying woman, as brilliant and funny as she might have been, was only dust compared to a millennia-old companion. He didn’t know how to articulate what he felt. He was a man staring into the vastness of space, thinking that he might become a star, and leave only ashes in his wake.
He licked his lips. Camilla was still looking at him, alert and inquisitive, and so dear.
“I’ve come to think,” Palamedes said, “I wouldn’t want to become like that.”
The next time the Saint of Patience graced Canaan House with his polished presence, Palamedes went to him.
“I have a question.”
“How surprising, Warden,” his voice was smooth as silk and just as cool. “I thought you’d chickened out.”
That made him frown—of what?—but he pressed on. “It’s a personal question.”
“That’s fine,” said the Saint of Patience, spreading his arms wide. “Always loved being interviewed. Do tell.”
“I wanted to ask…” He searched for the right words. “I wanted to know. How much do you value humanity?”
For the first time since he’d known him, Augustine the First looked taken aback. “Humanity, as in…?”
“People,” Palamedes prompted. “Our people, all people. Whatever that means to you. The individuals, not—”
“I get it. A question of ethics. You know, you really remind me of Cassy. She’d like you. And no,” he said. “I care for people a great deal and, of course, only in the abstract. Is this what you wanted to hear? That your Saints are merciless? You certainly didn’t need me to tell you that.”
“Was it the immortality that came first?” Palamedes asked. “Or the worship?”
He had always wondered. The Sixth House wasn’t much for religion in the doctrinal sense of House theology, but they did revere accomplishments and skills, and when it came to the Emperor and his Lyctors that amounted to pretty much the same thing. All the Saints had been scholars, first.
Augustine’s grey eyes were weighing him, taking appraisal.
“Why do you want to know?”
“I think you know.”
Augustine nodded. “Guess I do. Having doubts? Let me say, that my little sister Ianthe the First is settling in wonderfully.”
“I had no doubts,” Palamedes said. “She’ll fit right in.”
“She really does.” Then in a different voice, he said, “Yes. The answer you’re expecting to hear. What did you want me to say? It takes a specific sort of soul to crave eternal life. We always had it, you know,” he said. “From the first, the Lord made us immortal—well, the man made us immortal, and we made him a god. In the early days, it was more… fluid. You certainly don’t believe he set up his cathedrals himself? We built him up. He gave us life, after all.” Palamedes had never given thought to that, the beginning of Lyctorhood, besides the notes he’d found in the laboratories and the occasional discarded note, a folded-off picture, fragments of a life.
“He gave us life,” Augustine repeated. “We were his chosen from the start… it all happened rather organically. We grew into it and everything else grew around us, like vine. Do you have those on the sixth?” he asked, as if he truly were curious. “Ivy? Wisteria?”
“We don’t,” Palamedes said. “Not much use for climbers in the Library. We have genetic samples.”
“Of course.”
“And they grow wisteria in Rhodes.”
“Of course they do. Very romantic,” he said. “Did that satisfy your curiosity?”
“I have one more question.”
And there the Saint of Patience smiled in a way that was nearly genuine. The facade cracked; a corner of his mouth went up higher than the other, a little crooked. Disturbingly, he hadn’t noticed. Disturbingly, that Palamedes had.
“Yeah. Go for it.”
“In my place, what would you do?”
“Oh, Warden,” Augustine said. “But you can’t ask me that. You are chickening out, if you come to me to seek guidance. I’m not like you. I never was.”
Drily, Palamedes said, “Use your imagination.”
“I can’t answer that for you. You are asking me—do I wish I hadn’t done it? I do wish it, all the time, but regret is a luxury in my position. I like to tell myself that I wouldn’t ascend, if I had to do it again, but maybe that’s a lie,” he said. “I can’t fathom having died a myriad ago. The dust of my dust would be forgotten. Human lives are short.” He shook his head. “Your power is minuscule. No offence,” he said. “But I’ve held planets in the palm of my hand.”
He said, “We romanticise humanity, my sibling Lyctors and I. If someone offered me to take it back today, turn me back to human, I’d think it was dreamy. I’d swoon like Cyth—ops. Sorry.” He wasn’t. “And I’ll take up the offer and then I’d hate humanity within a day. Does that help?”
Not at all.
Instead, he said, “Why did you do that? The last time. Why’d you…”
“The kiss? No reason. Self-righteousness, intelligence, incredibly frustrating. I have a type. Oh, my boy,” he said. “You are blushing.”
Palamedes looked away. “Don’t,” he said. “I appreciate that you view us as dust, but I appreciate having my intelligence respected. Do not make fun of me just because I asked you questions you didn’t want to hear.”
“Right. I’ll speak plainly,” Augustine said. “You were yelling at me, I thought it was hot. Don’t read into it more than that. Any other questions?” he said, his tone implying that he wanted none. “I’d like to go outside. Always loved the waves in this place. One of the prettiest ocean planets I’ve ever seen.” There was, on his face, something nearly genuine. “I miss it. It was a good home, once.”
And then he said, “Do you want to come with?”
Palamedes thought about it. Then he nodded. He followed Augustine out of the tower, side by side, not touching but knowing they probably would soon.
He had one last question on the tip of his tongue. A stupid childish question, the kind he’d outgrown by age seven, and Juno would make fun of him for it, telling him to use his own brain. What would you want me to do?
He almost asked. Then he thought better of it, and stepped out into the light of the day.