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Cytherea Loveday was retrieved from her deep-space shuttle and asked if she would need the mercy of a rapier’s point and a body bag.
She was babbling incoherently in an unholy tongue when they freed her from her coffin of metal and plex, squalling like an infant that had intuitively decided that it wanted to inflict permanent ear damage on everybody within a ten kilometre radius—but she supposed that she must have answered in the firm negative, because the next time Cytherea woke up, she was safely ensconced in blankets and bound to her bed while a dark figure with a smattering of rust on his scalp and jaw presided over her indisposed form. She said, Hi Gid, how are you? That was a positively horrid idea, by the way, but I promise not to hold it against you, although he’d advised against really acting on the suggestion and the Emperor All-Giving had also interjected with a helpful, You should definitely not do this.
But it was still the early days, and Cytherea had said, I should definitely do this, and that had been the end of the argument because everybody knew that Cytherea always won the arguments in the end anyway, unless Cassy managed to construct a convincing rebuttal. She’d only ever lost an argument once, and had gotten very, very upset in the aftermath—she’d thrown a tantrum, in Cyrus’s words—and everybody feared a repetition of the episode.
In her warmly upholstered room on the Mithraeum, her brother Lyctor looked her in the eye and told her, “You could have died,” very flatly. And, “That was reckless.”
“Sure, okay,” she told him, thoroughly mortified by that display of implied emotion. She made a valiant attempt to pat his arm comfortingly, and failed, she discovered by raising her head off her pillows, because restraints bound her from head to toe. “Well, this is an embarrassing state to be found in. Can you help me out here, honey?”
Gideon intoned, almost apologetically, “John said it would be inadvisable. You’ve not been yourself.”
“It’s been days,” Cytherea pleaded, petitioning his sweeter sensibilities. “I’m fine now. I’m fine—I really am.” She tried to extract her hand from her constraints and blacked out briefly.
When she tumbled back into her body she was shivering profusely. “Oh, is it that bad, Gid?” she asked, licking the sweat on her lips.
He hesitated briefly before starting to answer, but by then she was already hurtling into the clonic stage at terminal velocity. Her body snapped up against the bands with bruising intensity, the heavy-duty nylon straps bringing her motion to a stop abruptly. A tidal wave of impulses fired rapidly in her temporal lobe. She started to tremble—shoulders, hands, knees, all the way down to her toes. Her hips lifted again before penduluming back down to the bed.
“Straps,” she gasped. Gideon rushed to undo them.
When the seizure had finally run its course through her, Cytherea languished in the moist sheets. She cried a little. “I should be grateful, shouldn’t I?” she said. “Instead of tumours eating me up, I only need to worry about the beasties out there now.”
Gideon said, “I need to get John and Mercy.”
Her head rolled to the side listlessly. “Don’t tie me up again,” she whispered. She was drifting on a dark sea, with no end in sight. “I’m right as rain. It’ll just hurt me more if I have another episode by the time you return. I don’t want to hurt, Gideon.”
He hesitated.
She drifted a little longer on that sea of lethargy in the aftermath, before becoming horribly, acutely aware of her wasting body. In a fit of defiance, she pushed herself to feet and tottered around the room a bit on unsteady legs. She poured herself some water in shaky hands. Out of the corner of her eye, Number Seven loomed in gross majesty, obscenely blue and framed in the centre of the plex window that had previously provided her a view to the underbelly of vacuum and stars that dwelled at the edge of the universe. A dark wave of chittering, chitinous bodies swept over the threshold of her room and scrambled toward her—they ached, they hungered, they wanted.
The glass slipped from her fingers and shattered.
She was pulled from her fugue eventually by the arrival of the company Gideon had promised and discovered that she was screaming. Before she fainted, she heard Mercymorn shrieking, “... irresponsible to leave her alone, she’s cut herself to shreds … You could have as well handed her the peeler and let her have a go at her arms with it—”
When the Emperor saw fit to finally visit her, worry had carved deep lines into his skin. His first words to her were, You had us scared for a second there.
She asked pensively, Would you have preferred if I’d chosen the body bag, Lord?
He appeared to be genuinely affrighted by the sincere query. Why would I wish to see you dead? he asked with no small degree of perplexion.
She said, I dreamed about Loveday, and that always put me in a state of mind. Then, I’m afraid I’m being a terrible nuisance.
There was a prolonged pause. Then the Kindly Prince said, You undertook a dangerous quest on our behalf. It would reflect poorly on us if we didn’t care for you in the aftermath.
She said, then, Do you dream about A.L. too, Lord?
The Kindly Prince was still as a carved slab of marble.
She said, nonetheless, All the same, I do wish you’d arrived a decade late and paid a visit to what lovely bower the Seventh would have wrought for my grave, instead. It would’ve made a pretty picture—your eulogy the flowers on my grave, my bones hallowed by your presence, and perhaps accompanied by a pretty declaimation of poetry—you always saved the loveliest scraps for darling Annabel although she could never appreciate it. Why, sometimes I feel I could knock on her door and think A.L. might emerge and say, Fair morn, Cytherea, and I might say, Did you sleep well, sweetheart? But she’s gone now… gone like Loveday. And I regret that we left our Cavaliers to dust and decomposition on the First when they deserved to live forever.
I thought it would be poetic, he said. We were born there. He looked like he deeply regretted saying it, but added anyway, as if helplessly, It was an honour to allow them to be laid to rest there.
Cytherea nodded. But I’m too weak to bear it, Lord. I wake every day and think, this has been a long and dreadful dream and if I just open my eyes it will all be gone, and I’m proved wrong, and the disappointment never ends. I fear I cannot tolerate it much longer.
You can, the Emperor said. For her, you must bear it.
I can’t let it be in vain, Cytherea agreed sadly. She asked, What happened earlier today, Lord?
You peeled off most of your epidermis, he said. You were deep in the throes of a hallucination, attempting to slough off layers of imaginary beetles on your skin. It took Mercy two hours to ascertain that your arteries were healing right and shards of glass weren’t wedged in your tissues and muscles.
She said, I thought that was the case.
The Emperor came to see her often. His visits always followed a permutation of events that was set in stone—consciousness would hook a line into her and drag her to the surface, and then John would ask her how she was feeling—Cytherea always babbled whatever occurred to her. She would suffer from a seizure or two occasionally, tire from the damage her body was taking, and get tugged back down into the abyss of sweet ignorance. Sometimes she yelled things in a language nobody understood—things that hurt her sibling Lyctors to perceive because even in delirium it became abundantly clear to her that they preferred to not keep her company if they could help it.
One day she told him, She brought me roses everyday.
She said, Loveday remarked, “I like the thought of bringing you roses everyday, for the rest of eternity.”
The Kindly Prince nodded slowly. I can never remember a day when there weren’t flowers by your bed.
She said, When I die, I want my corpse to be laid to rest in a bed of roses. I want roses to sprout from my orifices and colonise my ribcage. I want to be positively smothered by them.
The Kindly Prince said, Cytherea, you’re in pain, but I refuse to let you die on my watch. I hesitate to help you because the thalergetic shock could wreck your limbic system.
And Cytherea said, But Lord, I’ve already been dying for millennia. I'm no stranger to it. And clarified impetuously, From heartbreak, mostly.
The Kindly Prince said nothing.
She burst into laughter. Lord, I jest. I can’t die now—not yet. It wouldn’t be fair, after all.
She sighed. God, I’m so hungry I could eat Number Seven for breakfast. Then, passionately, I apologise for profaning the name of our Holy Resurrector. And, How did it happen this time?
The Kindly Prince waved his hand and said, Don’t worry about that. And, You impaled yourself on Loveday’s sword. He seemed to deliberate the matter a moment before adding, I’m not certain it’s a good idea to leave you unsupervised. I know you hate the bindings, but—
I don’t want to be helpless without Loveday around, was all she said.
Before the Necrolord Prime graced the House of the Seventh with his presence, Cytherea had become very good at dying and nobody would have held it against her if she’d rebuffed his offer and elected to remain on the Seventh instead. The cancer had already been introduced to the gene pool and tradition had kept the practice alive for several generations. But Loveday had wanted her to live, and only God could bestow undeath on the so-chosen; so when he’d asked her to join his company, she had risen to the occasion and accepted his offer.
She woke with tears brimming in her eyes a few weeks after it had all begun and said, Do you understand, Lord? I liked Alecto. She was just a baby. It had gotten into her that she needed a confession from him, but Cytherea was still uncertain about the nature of the confession that she was trying to wring from him. And it delighted her senses to be privy to such private secrets. The Emperor was lonely in his way, and his Guardian had not been as beloved as the Cavaliers of his fists and fingers.
The Prince Undying turned his eyes of liquid tar to her. The iridescent rings of his pupils zeroed in on her with what she thought was undivided focus as such that she had never seen him patronise her with. A baby? She was immeasurably older than you could comprehend. There was the remorse once more.
Cytherea repeated, She was just a baby. Do you remember how happy it made her when I let her sniff the roses Loveday left everywhere? Cytherea closed her eyes. She was always second-happiest when she stuffed her mouth full of roses. Lord, the First would stuff them whole in her mouth, thorns and all.
Her kindly visitor remained silent for a long while. Then, I suppose you won’t remember any of this later anyway.
Then, I have no right to miss her—not the way the rest of you mourn your Cavaliers—but I do anyway.
He said, I’m sorry you had to come to be this way.
She laughed, mouth bubbling with salt and red. He retrieved a handkerchief from his pocket to wipe her mouth. She said, Sorry I stained your handkerchief. I have a bad habit of leaving behind bits of me everywhere. Before he could offer another apology, Cytherea continued, trying to recall the warmth of Dominicus's light, I woke one morning and I was the coldest I’d ever been in my whole life. The House of the First was at its perihelion, and I remember complaining incessantly that the air was hot and suffocating. The humidity and salt made the winds buffeting Canaan sticky and irritated my respiratory tract.
Cytherea said, Six Saints had already taken their place by your side. That morning, Loveday helped me into a wheelchair and rolled me out onto a rooftop.
She paused thoughtfully. She had the impression that God was listening to her more intently than he had ever before. I wasn’t dying, of course—I couldn’t as long as I stayed by your side. I’d had close shaves before, though, so Loveday was frightened, and she did so hate to see me suffer. I knew she’d been spooked because she was silent, and very stoic—she always thought maintaining her composure helped me stay brave too, but it always gave her away, and it scared me in turn.
She added dreamily, The garden was infested with the foetid smell of roses in full blossom. I thought she’d never looked handsomer than she did that day—she knew I especially liked it when she dressed up, so it must have been why she went to the painstaking effort to clean up so well. She kissed me. She said she wanted to help me, and bid me not to let everything go to a terrible waste.
Her throat felt moist and cottony. She choked a little when she said, Lord, I stole Loveday Heptane’s eyes in a garden overrun with sunlight with only the roses for witness to my treachery. I held her head in my lap and wept and wept. I tried to heal her, belatedly, faced with the nature of the crime she was asking me to commit—but her soul had decoupled. She’d made me promise not to let her death go to waste, so I stuffed her into my mouth hastily because she was already starting to get away from me. I might have failed the process entirely—I was so hasty, in my state of grief—if Cassy hadn’t found me, first.
Cytherea frowned. She always fancied she’d go down defending me valiantly against a worthy foe. If she had to die, she deserved to have gone that way.
The King Undying murmured, It happens to the best of us.
She said nothing for a long time. Then, she said, You’re right, Lord, I don’t want to remember this conversation later. And because he seemed deeply, viscerally uncomfortable, Cytherea asked, How did I hurt myself this time?
You smashed your head on the edge of the dining table, he said. An obscene chuckle escaped her throat. Multiple times, he added with uncharacteristic solemnity.
I dreamed I was in Loveday’s lap, she said. I wish I’d never woken up. And then, Where’s the morphine?
When the darkness finally broke, Cytherea washed landwards to the gentle shores of wakefulness and full lucidity. She opened her eyes to find that Loveday Heptane was sitting beside her bed in the seat John usually occupied.
She looked a little wrong—there was a film of milky white across those striking blue eyes that she’d always adored, and her clothes were a mess of red in the front—Loveday had never lost a bout while she’d lived, not even the very last when she’d faced off against the force of Cytherea’s will. Her hair stuck to her dark-veined forehead wetly; her skin was pale and stretched tight from rigor mortis. Cytherea wanted Loveday to stick her hands in her curls, wrap a hand around her waist, and kiss her silly and carry her to bed and kiss her more. But she just said, tearily, “You came back.”
“I never left,” Loveday said.
“You did,” Cytherea said angrily. “You left me—you left me with him. With them. I didn’t want immortality. I wanted you.”
She knew her answer before Loveday ever said the words. “And I wanted you to live.”
Cytherea looked away.
Eventually, Loveday asked, “What will you do now?”
“Darling,” Cytherea said, “I’m going to kill that motherfucker.”