“You’re a projection. They can’t hurt you,” said the King Undying. “And you won’t even see them. No ghost will approach a Beast submerged.”

He sat back in his chair. God had a quiet, ambling posture, an upright if slightly stoop-shouldered gait; he was mobile and alive. He was always somehow more alive than everyone else around him, and yet dislocated from what you considered living. A man-shaped eclipse. “And there we fight it,” he said simply. “Much like fighting anything else.”

Augustine said, “You ward against it. You hack up whatever it points in your direction. You wither its false flesh. It has form as we have form in the River, and it’s vulnerable the same way we are. You get a good tight grip on its soul and you pull the damn thing to pieces. In the end, if you wear it down, you exorcise it altogether. It is a revenant … a revenant of a specific hell.”

The Emperor said, “Once defeated, it can be forced down into the abyss, and from there it will not return.”

“We hope,” said Augustine. “Oh, Lord, do we ever hope.”

17

MERCYMORN (WHILOM???) THE FIRST, SAINT OF JOY (IRONY?)

Not forthcoming.

When you had asked Mercymorn outright for her House name, she had simply stared at you with disgusted astonishment, as though you were a turd who had learned to dance, and then said, “Go away!”

Unfortunately, Augustine had been no more forthcoming than Mercymorn. He did not recall Mercy’s House name, would not remember if he could, and had most likely forgotten the information immediately to make room for something more worthwhile, i.e., anything else.

Poor relationship with Augustine.

“She might not have even had one,” he said, shaking out an ancient sheet of flimsy newsprint. “Do keep in mind that our holy resurrections were staggered, and it took generations for our merry band to assemble. Alfred and I were there early enough to found the Koniortos Court on the Fifth, but Lyctors like Cyth wouldn’t be born for years and years, and she spent her whole life suffering Seventh House woo-woo theories regarding the value of hereditary cancer … whereas Mercy is the oldest lag except for me, and she was out hammering at the Eighth House before the paint was even dry on the Resurrection.”

Contentious cavalier.

When you asked God why she was the Saint of Joy, he simply said: “I really intended those titles to describe the cavalier, Harrowhark, not the Lyctor. Alfred for patience; Pyrrha for duty; Cristabel for joy. Mercy would be the first to tell you that Cristabel Oct was a delight.” He paused and said, “Maybe don’t mention her name to Augustine though.”