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The sun was setting over the vast oceans of the First when Augustine Quinque set the shuttle down on the landing pad of Canaan House. It was truly breathtaking, though of course Alfred—who had been asleep almost since the moment they’d left the Fifth—was missing it.
Augustine glanced over at his brother, who was slouched in the passenger seat with his limbs going every which way and his mouth open. There was a line of drool running down his chin which was disgusting but also endearingly Alfred-like. Since there was no one around to see, Augustine allowed himself a small indulgent smile before he leaned over and shoved Alfred’s shoulder.
“We’re here,” he said.
Alfred shifted and rubbed at his face, wiping away the drool. “Already?” he asked. “But we only just took off.”
“You’re only saying that because you’ve been asleep the whole time,” Augustine said. “I imagine that does pass the time rather quickly.” He would have liked to have been able to sleep and get through the hours in space quickly since space travel was torturous to necromancers. However, he had never been able to relax enough to sleep while in space, so there was really no point in being jealous of Alfred.
“Maybe you can let me fly next time,” Alfred said.
“After you passed out in the first two minutes?” Augustine snorted. “I think not.” Alfred had recently gotten it into his head that as Augustine’s cavalier he should handle things like flying the shuttle. Augustine thought he might have been talking to Cristabel again, because that seemed like the sort of madness she’d dream up. Maybe he should say something to Mercymorn about stepping in with her own cavalier; the idea of Alfred flying a shuttle was enough to give Augustine hives.
“Come on,” he said, rising and tapping his brother lightly on the shoulder. “We’ve been away from home long enough.”
“That’s ironic coming from you,” Alfred teased, but rose and stretched before following Augustine out of the shuttle.
They descended the ramp onto Canaan House’s landing pad. The pad wasn’t empty. John, Gideon and Pyrrha were waiting to great them, and Alecto was lurking near John as she always did. John’s face broke into a huge grin when he saw Augustine. His unabashed joy made Augustine smile as well.
“Augustine! Welcome back!” John strode forwards and enveloped Augustine in a tight hug.
Augustine returned the hug. He never forgot that John was God, but sometimes it was hard to believe that he was allowed to touch God this casually. “It’s good to be back.”
“Were you waiting long, my Lord?” Alfred asked.
“Not long. Plus Gideon’s been keeping me company,” John said. “And Pyrrha’s been keeping him company.”
“You act like I’m going to complain about getting a welcome party,” Augustine said.
“Of course, why would you complain about that?” Alfred teased and Augustine gave him a good natured shove.
“I am very glad to see you,” John said, but he suddenly sounded distracted, perhaps a bit worried. This immediately lowered Augustine’s mood because anything that upset John upset him too—John was literally God, the reason that everyone and everything Augustine knew existed—why wouldn’t this be the case?
“What?” he asked.
John reached up and touched the side of Augustine’s head. Oh, that was what was going on. Augustine reached up and took his God’s hand. “My Lord, don’t worry about it.”
“You’re going gray,” John said. He sounded devasted.
“Don’t worry about it,” Augustine told him. “I’m not worried about it.”
Augustine could feel Alfred practically vibrating with the effort of maintaining some measure of decorum around God and returning to the teasing he’d been subjecting Augustine to about this exact thing ever since he’d noticed. He was glad for that because he’d long since lost his patience for Alfred’s idea of humor regarding this, and he didn’t want to upset John any more than he already was.
John made a face. “You shouldn’t spend so much time on the Fifth,” he said. “That’s beyond the scope of my powers.”
Being near John was like a necromantic stasis field. John looked exactly the same as he had the day that he had Resurrected Augustine and as long as his disciples stayed near him, they would not age either. However, Augustine had been spending a lot of time on the Fifth in recent years. There was just so much to do there. Building up the political and administrative system of an empire from scratch was not easy work and required a lot of personal involvement. So what if the years he was spending putting out or avoiding starting fires on the Fifth were also years that he had aged naturally? Alfred had been aging naturally too for all that it wasn’t showing on him yet.
“It’s alright, John,” Augustine said, using John’s name to demonstrate how serious he was.
“It just bothers me,” John said. “I can keep this from happening, but only if you stay close.”
“I shouldn’t have to leave again soon,” Augustine said. “I think I’ve got things on the Fifth running smoothly enough not to need me for now.” He didn’t mention that Alfred was the one who had finally convinced him to leave, arguing that things had gotten to a point that being able to go to Augustine every time they had problems was actually holding the people of the Fifth back and that they needed space to figure out how to solve the little problems by themselves. He was right, but it kind of galled Augustine whenever his little brother was right about something, so he was determined to make sure no one at Canaan House ever found out about it.
“Where are Cristabel and Mercymorn?” Alfred changed the subject, looking around. Augustine had been wondering too, but he would never have asked—he had a reputation to maintain.
John smiled. “They’re in their lab. Mercy is not going to be pleased with how long we’ve dallied up here. I was given strict instructions that I was supposed to bring you directly downstairs as soon as you landed.”
Augustine raised his eyebrows. “Did she say why?”
“She’s been working like a mad woman on something,” John said. “Though she’s been stingy on details, even to me. I get the impression that she might have been waiting for you to get back.”
“Well then,” Augustine said, trying to conceal how much the idea of Mercymorn saving some kind of news specifically for his return pleased him. “If she wanted to talk to me she could have called,” he said.
John gave him a look that said he was not fooling anyone. “I get the impression that this is the sort of thing that should not be discussed over the comms,” he said, then gestured towards inside. “Shall we?”
“If you insist,” Augustine said. He was excited to see Mercymorn, but God forbid he let her know that. She would never let him live it down.
~~~~
Mercy had been waiting for Augustine for eternities.
Of course she would throw herself on Cristabel’s rapier before she’d admit it, but that didn’t change the fact that she had been waiting. It figured that the time when she most needed Augustine on the House of the First to aid her would be when he was thoroughly distracted by solving the Fifth’s pointless problems for them. It wasn’t that Mercy thought the Houses were unimportant and didn’t need their attention. She cared greatly for the Eighth and would take time off from her research to travel there if necessary, but the key word was necessary. She had never been convinced that the things Augustine did when he and Alfred were away on the Fifth were necessary. He coddled the Fifth and let them get used to being able to call on him as a way to avoid solving their problems themselves. This was a discussion that she had had with Augustine before and she had decided the time had come to have it again. They couldn’t keep letting the research get further behind just because the Fifth was a bunch of needy children.
She’d just been contemplating breaking down and sending him a message even though that would likely leave her looking like a needy child when Cristabel had gotten a message from Alfred saying that he and Augustine were coming home. Privately, Mercy thought that Cristabel had asked Alfred to convince Augustine to come home, if her cavalier’s grinning was anything to go by, but at long as she didn’t do anything to confirm that she could weather the whole situation with minimal damage to her dignity. That was what really mattered when dealing with Augustine, she couldn’t allow him to think that he’d somehow gotten the upper hand.
She was just debating whether it was possible to go great Augustine and Alfred on the platform without seeming desperate when she heard footsteps coming towards the lab accompanied by John’s voice and Augustine’s low laughter. She practically vibrated with excitement and shuffled through her papers to make sure they were in the correct order. Her hands were not steady which was weird because she was not the sort of person whose hands shook when they were excited. She frowned and tried to steady them. Augustine would never let her live this down. Neither would Cristabel for that matter. She glanced at her cavalier, but Cristabel was too distracted by hurrying across the lab and swinging the door open just as John and Augustine reached the other side.
“Welcome back!” she cried out, bowing in reverence to John before bypassing Augustine to give Alfred a bone-crushing hug.
“What am I, part of the door?” Augustine asked her in a mock-offended voice—very mock because Mercy knew that there was no love lost between him and Cristabel.
“Don’t act so surprised that someone has finally realized that you’re not that great,” Mercymorn said, because what other welcome would Augustine really expect from her?
“You know that’s not true, Mercy,” Augustine said, equally teasing because he knew this song and dance as well as she did. “Just because—” his attention shifted away from their cavaliers and towards her and when his eyes landed on her his words trailed off. One minute he was still in the doorway and then the next he was across the lab and cupping the sides of her face, his fingers running through the crusty hairs framing her face. “Is this blood sweat?”
It was blood sweat. Mercy had been too distracted by her experiments to wash it off properly. Now that she thought about it, that was probably why her hands were shaking too. She didn’t need to see Cristabel to be able to imagine the way she was rolling her eyes. “Yes, but don’t act like that,” Mercy grabbed his wrists and moved his hands away from her face. It would do both of their reputations no good for it to become widely known that they might actually care for each other. “It’s good that you’ve finally deigned to come home,” she said. “I’ve made a breakthrough and I want you to help me test it.”
“And this breakthrough has you going around careless of the fact that you’re covered in blood sweat?” Augustine asked. There was still no teasing in his voice which was uncomfortable because that was not the way that her dynamic with Augustine was supposed to go. Yes, she knew he genuinely cared about her just as she genuinely cared about him, but that caring was supposed to be buried under layers of banter and rivalry.
“Read my notes and then we’ll discuss that,” Mercy said, snatching up her admittedly haphazard pile of notes and forcing them into his hands.
Augustine shot a look at John who shrugged. “You should be honored, she hasn’t let anyone see those notes.”
So Augustine sat down at one of the stools around Mercy’s worktable and started reading. Mercy went and tried to do a better job at washing her face, which was only partially helpful, because she admittedly needed a shower, but better than nothing. When she got back Augustine’s skepticism had dissolved into shock. Mercy sat down at the stool across from him and John sat on the stool at the end of the table. Cristabel and Alfred retreated to sit cross-legged on Cristabel’s bed like children. They were chatting quietly and it was impossible to tell whether Cristabel was filling Alfred in about the experiments or if they were just catching up. Alecto skulked along the edges of the room in her usual way and Mercy tried to ignore her.
After what felt like an age, Augustine reached the end of the pile of papers and paged back through, rereading a few passages before looking back up at her with an expression that was probably the closest thing to awe anyone other than John could expect to receive from him. “Mercy, am I understanding this correctly. You were able to successfully…” he faltered, grappling for the right word, “siphon, I suppose, Cristabel’s life force and use it to power your necromancy?”
“Yes,” Mercy said, almost tripping over herself in her excitement. She had waited so long to share this with someone and she was so glad she had waited to share it with Augustine. “Yes, that’s exactly what I did.”
At the end of the table, John went very still.
“That is…” Augustine paused and paged through the notes again. “Mercymorn, this is incredible. It’s a huge breakthrough for the project.”
“I’m not sure about huge,” Mercy said because she and Augustine were not often unqualifiedly complementary about each other’s skills and she didn’t know how to respond to it. “Lyctorhood would require a much more sustained source of power than I’ve been able to get siphoning from Cristabel.”
“It’s still undeniably a step in the right direction,” Augustine said. “Has anyone else tried this yet?”
“I hadn’t realized that your research had gone in this direction,” John said in a very strange tone of voice. A bit like someone staring down into a very deep and slippery well that they were about to fall into.
“Yes,” Mercy said. “But someone else still needs to try it with their cavalier to see if Cristabel and my results are repeatable. If Augustine wanted we could try it right—” then she trailed off as the strange, cornered expressions on John’s face sunk in. “Unless there’s something to be considered that I’ve missed, my Lord?”
John’s mouth opened and closed a few times. He was obviously fighting with himself over whether to say something, but Mercymorn had absolutely no idea what. Given what they were doing this research on, she didn’t understand why he would suddenly get cold feet. She and Cristabel had performed the experiment multiple times now; she knew that as long as they were careful nothing bad would happen, so there really was no cause for concern.
“No,” John finally settled on. “There’s nothing you’ve missed.”
Mercy and Augustine exchanged a look. They both knew their god well enough to recognize when something had unsettled him. “You’re sure, John?” Augustine ventured.
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure,” John drew himself up, committing now. “Just a bit rattled by how dangerous this is. I can’t believe you and Cristabel tried this without anyone else present, Mercymorn.” Mercy wasn’t sure how he knew what the experiment entailed when only Augustine had read her notes, but she supposed John wasn’t literally God for no reason.
Alecto muttered something incomprehensible but undeniably angry from the corner of the room. Mercy and Augustine both jumped nearly out of their skins but John just gave his bodyguard a wary look, like he thought she was going to spill a secret or something.
After a moment Mercymorn dragged her gaze back to John. “Cristabel and I had it under control,” she said. Actually it had been pretty hairy the first time, but John and Augustine didn’t need to know about that. It had all turned out fine. It had been briefly terrifying, but it had worked out in the end. Mercy had even been able to use necromancy to repair the damage she’d done to Cristabel’s ribs performing CPR. And now she knew to add that kind of emergency medicine to the list of things she needed to learn to do solely with necromancy, which was also good. And after that first time they’d known to be more careful. There was no need for concern. Not anymore.
She turned to Augustine. “So,” she said. “Do you want to give it a shot?”
He gave John one more worried look then turned his attention to her. He grinned. “You know that I do.”