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She was bookended by skeletons—skeletons too huge to have ever lived inside the greasy meat sock of anyone real.
“Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House,” she said hoarsely, “you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.”
“Now we kick her ass until candy comes out,” said Gideon. “Oh, damn, Nonagesimus, don’t cry, we can’t fight her if you’re crying.” Harrow said, with some difficulty: “I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it.” “Yes you can, it’s just less great and less hot,” said Gideon. “Fuck you, Nav—” “Harrowhark,” said Gideon the Ninth. “Someday you’ll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then. For now—I can’t say you’ll be fine. I can’t say we did the right thing. I can’t tell you shit. I’m basically a hallucination produced by your brain chemistry while coping with the
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Harrow could never tell precisely how she knew who he was, only that she did. She threw off the rustling thermal blanket—someone had dressed her in an unlovely turquoise hospital smock—and got out of bed, and she threw herself down shamelessly at the feet of the Necromancer Prime; the Resurrection; the God of the Nine Houses; the Emperor Undying. She pressed her forehead down onto the cold, clean tiles.
“Please undo what I’ve done, Lord,” she said. “I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav.” “I can’t,” he said. He had a bittersweet, scratchy voice, and it was infinitely gentle. “I would very much like to. But that soul’s inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I’d take yours with it and destroy both in the process. What’s done is done is done. Now you have to live with it.”
But there are things out there that even death cannot keep down. I have been fighting them since the Resurrection. I can’t fight them by myself.” Harrow said, “But you’re God.” And God said, “And I am not enough.”
The Emperor closed his eyes. “Cytherea was my fault,” he said. “She was the very best of all of us. The most loyal, the most humane, the most resilient. The one with the most capacity for kindness. I made her live ten thousand years in pain, because I was selfish and she let me. Don’t despise her, Harrow—I see it in your eyes. What she did was unforgivable. I can’t understand it. But who she was … she was wonderful.”
“Most of my Lyctors have been destroyed by a war I’ve thought best to fight slowly, through attrition. I have lost my Hands. Not just to death. The loneliness of deep space takes its toll on anyone, and the necrosaints have all put up with it for longer than anybody should ever be asked to bear anything. That’s why I wanted only those who had discovered the cost and were willing to pay it in the full knowledge of what it would entail.”
“All the Houses will have questions tonight,” he said. “I can hardly blame them. I’m sorry, Harrow, we couldn’t recover your cavalier either.” Her brain listed sharply. “Gideon’s gone?” “Everyone else is accounted for,” he said. “We have had to settle for partial remains of the Seventh House and the Warden of the Sixth. Only you two were confirmed alive. It doesn’t help matters that I can’t even go down there and search.” Harrow found herself saying, distantly, “Why can’t you go back? It seemed to be the whole of Cytherea’s plan.” The Emperor said, “I saved the world once—but not for me.”
if she saw herself in a mirror, she might find a trace of Gideon Nav, or worse—she might not find anything, she might find nothing at all.
Love between a necromancer and cavalier is vital to differentiate them from a soldier’s love of the Emperor: they are carrying out a personal devotion that beautifies both types of adoration. If the cavalier and the necromancer do not take “one flesh, one end” as a maxim for their passion for each other, their bond is nonexistent. They must each take the other as their ideal.
The love of the cavalier for the necromancer, and the necromancer for the cavalier, is not the love of a spouse. It cannot be libidinous. “Sword-marriages” wherein a necromancer and their cavalier married to one outside party as dual spouses were almost certainly the invention of the fiction writer, or more likely, the pornographer who cannot see anything beautiful without wanting to make it lewd.
valancy says one flesh one end sounds like instructions for a sex toy. can’t stop thinking about that so can someone stop cris and alfred before the sex toy phrase catches on, thanks
Coronabeth Tridentarius Cor-OWN-a-beth. “Corona” as in the halo. NOTE: In the original, Ianthe and Corona were “Cainabeth and Abella,” a feat of naming so unsubtle that I might as well have just gone with “Goodtwin” and “Badtwin.” And it’s not even accurate! It should be Badtwin, and Lessbadtwin.
“Isaac” in Christian theology foreshadows Jesus’ death by taking the wood for his own sacrifice up a mountain. Isaac here foreshadows Gideon’s death by doing the “bravest and stupidest” thing, i.e. getting his abdomen made into a huge Connect-4 board. I might as well have called Jeannemary and Isaac “Don’tgetattached” and “Deadsoon.”
“Sex” as in “you’d have to be weird to want this with Harrow.” NOTE: There was a very brief space of time where Palamedes was Diomedes, Athena’s favourite goodboy in the Iliad, but that would not have facilitated Gideon’s stupidest joke in the book.
NOTE: Protesilaus is the first hero to die at Troy. He is also the first man who dies as a result of the Lyctor trials. “Johnny Quickdeath” would’ve also been a good pick.
NOTE: I would be lying if I did not say that “Matthias,” the legendary sword-wielder of the Ninth, has a name that is a reference to Brian Jacques’ Redwall.
Lyctor LICK-tor. In order to facilitate “Lyctor? I hardly touched her,” stand-up routines in the Nine Houses. NOTE: Lyctor as in “lych,” but also as in Lictor, the Emperor’s guards.
