010. god conversation

[outsidebones]

You were taking tea with God. He liked to insist on you drinking tea, and you did not wish to disappoint him. You were finding that if you held half a mouthful of tea in your mouth it cooled, and when it was cool it tasted more serene.

Unfortunately, while you were still figuring this trick out, the Emperor of the Nine Houses leaned
back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looked at you seriously, and said: “Harrowhark, how many in your family? Your mother and father are dead, that much I know.”

You swallowed in haste. How he knew that—the secret you had broken yourself attempting to keep hidden from the rest of the Houses, from the rest of your own House—you didn’t know. But you looked at his kindly, open countenance, and you said with the refreshing candour that came from talking to God: “One, since my parents ended their lives. I was the only child. My mother miscarried multiple times before I was born; I don’t know how many.”

His gaze didn’t leave yours. “How were you born?”

“I don’t understand.” You did understand.

“Harrowhark,” he said, “You are a Lyctor. You generate too much light, or too much darkness, for me to look at you and make out any strong detail. But there are details I have surmised: you were awake during your first time in the River, and you performed necromancy, and believe me when I tell you only one other person has ever done that their first time in. Keep in mind that she was an adult necromancer who went on to found the Sixth House. You have achieved incredible things. I understand your personality and your background, and I understand how they might turn natural talent into … you. But it doesn’t account for what I see in those moments when I can see you clearly. How did they get you?”

You put your cup of tea down, your biscuit still untouched, and you said as though pushed after long interrogation: “My parents gassed fifty-four infants, eighty-one children, and sixty-five teenagers, and harnessed that thanergy bloom to conceive me. My mother used the resultant power to modify her ovum on a chromosomal level, so thanergy ignition wouldn’t compromise the embryo. She did this so I would be a necromancer.”

The Emperor of the Nine Resurrections looked at you for a long time, and then he swore, very quietly, beneath his breath. You thought you understood, but then he said: “This was … all so different … before we discovered the scientific principles.”

“I am assured they had no previous research to go by. They came up with it themselves.”

God said, a little bewildered, “That’s not quite what I mean. But to concentrate so much thanergy into so precise a task —like using a nuclear detonation to power a sewing machine … The ovum ought to have been obliterated at a subatomic level. Do you understand what they did?”

“Intimately,” you said. “They explained it to me when I was very young. I could draw the theorem mathematics, if you gave me some flimsy.”

“No, I don’t mean mechanically. Conceptually. To all intents and purposes, your mother and father committed a type of resurrection,” he said. “They did something nigh-on impossible. I know, because I have committed the same act, and I know the price I had to pay. Thalergetic modification of an embryo is difficult enough, but to achieve the same thing with thanergy…”

You gave a helpless half shrug. “My parents were not flesh magicians,” you said. “But they were the greatest necromancers the Ninth House had yet produced.”

“No doubt,” said the Emperor. “But, Harrowhark - even as the product of two obvious geniuses - you are a walking miracle. A unique theorem. A natural wonder.”

You looked at him, and you said: “I have just told you that I am the product of my parents’ genocide.”

The Emperor set down his tea and finished off his biscuit, and did that terrible thing that he did, on occasion: he reached over to touch your shoulder in that brief, tentative way, the lightest and swiftest of gestures, as though afraid that he might burn you. Your mother had guided your hands over bloating corpses. Your father had held down the corners of great tomes, and his sleeve had brushed your six-year-old-fingers as he showed you how best to turn their pages. Both of them had pressed a rough rope made of coated fibre into your hands—you recalled the pressure from their palms, their attempts to be gentle. When the Emperor touched you, your body recalled, unbidden, each rare and terrible touch committed by your mother and father.

God said, “I will shepherd your dead two hundred. I will take on their burden to mourn and cherish in more ways than you’ll understand right now. And I’ll remember your parents, who did such a godawful thing to my people and theirs. I will remember it until the universe contracts in on itself and wipes clean what they did, and makes blank such an indelible stain. I acknowledge to you and to infinity that I am the Emperor of the Nine Houses — the Necrolord Prime — and that their stain must be regarded as my stain. Consider it my crime, Harrowhark. I pledge myself to making it right.”

A red heat had begun at your neck, travelled up your throat, darkened your face beneath your paint until you felt as though you had been held too close to a stove. You said, “Lord, you can’t.”

“Teacher.”

“Teacher, have mercy on me. Please don’t tell anyone.”

A child’s plea. Nobody has to know. To God! For a moment, he changed. He grew angry, and you thought it was at the rank foolishness, the irresponsibility of what you’d said. Those monstrous, unnatural eyes narrowed, and his mouth became hard as stones and rocks. For a moment you perceived a hint of his great immortal age — of an enormous distance between you, of an ignition too bright for you to conceive. You were an insect standing before a forest fire. You were a cell beholding a heart.

“Harrowhark, nobody has the right to know,” he said fiercely. “Nobody has the right to blame you. Nobody can judge. What has happened, has happened, and there’s no putting it back in the box. They wouldn’t understand. They don’t have to. I officially relieve you from living in fear. Nobody has to know.”

That night in your bed, you did not weep. Your body tried, and failed, to produce tears. Afterward, God was more careful with you than ever, and he had been careful before; sometimes you caught him glancing at you as if he was trying to see something in the confines of your face, but whatever he was looking for it was not what your parents had done. At the time you swore that you would tell him about the Tomb: you would find it within yourself to admit that also. You had never told anyone about the Tomb, but you would tell him — you would tell him if he asked — no, that was equivocation. You would tell him of your own free will, and be glad of any punishment he saw fit to give you.

Before you’d left him then, when your tea had cooled sufficiently that you were no longer required to drink it, you’d asked: “What does BOE stand for?”

“Blood of Eden,” he’d said, slowly.

“Who is Eden?”

“Someone they left to die,” said God wearily. “How sharper than the serpent’s tooth, et cetera … Harrow, if you bother to remember anything from my ramblings, please remember this: once you turn your back on something, you have no more right to act as though you own it.”