“BOE, I’m assuming,” he said, a bit absently; then he paused at your confusion, and said, “That’s an acronym for a group of maniacs. A cult who came to our attention maybe five thousand years ago. We stumbled on them during one of our pushes into deep space. Stumbled … they’d been looking for us the whole time. They hate the Nine Houses.”

You said, “I have never heard of them.”

“You might have by another name—or simply as nameless insurgents. They prefer to present themselves as a kind of organic reaction, not a single coherent group. In fact, their existence depends on a secretive central organisation that sends its agents to people we encounter outside the Nine Houses, to populated planets we’re stewarding, and turns them against us from the shadows. But I know about them, and the Lyctors know about them. They upped their game about twenty-five years before you were born. They’d gotten a demagogue, a charismatic leader who wasn’t content to work behind the scenes. Hotspots flared up, but we took them down … cell by cell, bone by bone.”

You remained silent, fingering the biscuit thoughtfully, developing the fiction that you might eat it sometime in the next myriad. Teacher quirked his eyebrows close together and looked at you with those oil-on-carbon eyes, and said, “I think they were behind Cytherea’s coming to Canaan House. That’s a damned sight more terrifying to me even than old nukes they have in storage somewhere.”

You said, “Cytherea planned to lure you back to the Nine Houses. To attract a Resurrection Beast to kill you, I surmise?”

“Lure is a strong word. I still think it was a crime of passion. I’m not saying she didn’t have other reasons. It’s just that I think some of them were heartbreakingly simple. I could’ve gotten through to her, given time,” said God. “Time—it’s always time—she was overworked and underloved. Whenever something needed doing, she’d always say, Me, I will, and because she acted as though she had a leaven of selfishness to her it was easy to say Of course, not recognising how many times she’d said I will … not recognising how she worked herself into the grave.”

You said, “A Seventh House flaw. A fatal longing for the picturesque.”

“I understand the Houses have crystallised into … types,” he said, and he dipped his biscuit into his tea and ate it quickly, before the sodden part could lose coherency and fall into the mug. You did not understand why anyone ate these biscuits or drank this tea. “But they got to her, Harrow. I know they got her on side, though I’m damned if I know how they even got to be in the same room. BOE hates necromancers and necromancy. It’s their fundamental tenet. And Cytherea? She would’ve been their bogeyman. A Lyctor. My Hand.”