There was a rustle next to us. Tridentarius emerged from her hidey-hole in the robes and stood next to me. Her expression was blank, no emotion at all. Tridentarius was still holding those cards tight to her chest.

Mercymorn said, “John, if you’d lied to me about anything else, about how the planet died, about the extinction of our species … or if you’d just admitted everything and said your hand was forced, or that it was for the common good, and said nice-sounding nonsense—I would have forgiven you.”

“You might have said you forgave me,” said the Emperor. He was staring at his hands now. “But I think it would have rankled … I know it would have rankled. There is no such thing as forgiveness, Mercy. There’s only bloody truth, and blessed ignorance.”

She said, “Alfred, Pyrrha, Titania, Valancy, Nigella, Samael, Loveday, Cristabel.”

“They were my friends,” he said, simply. “I loved them too.”

Augustine said, “I’ve got to know. Call it morbid curiosity … Anastasia didn’t misapprehend the process, did she? She nearly cracked it—the right way of doing it. I knew she was working closely with Cassiopeia … It didn’t make sense that I became a Lyctor under scrambling pressure and did it right, and that Anastasia screwed it up in laboratory conditions.”

God stared at him.

“Yes,” he said, though it sounded far-off and confused, like he was hungover. “I was the only one she allowed to watch her attempt. She’d learned the trick was to do the Eightfold slower—more methodically—and it was still more of an accident than design. But it’s not as simple as her getting it right, and me stopping her. She panicked midway through. She hadn’t got his soul inside her all the way—if she had, Samael dying would have killed her too … They were both in danger. I killed him for her benefit, and she knew that at the time.”

“Is that the truth, or the truth you tell yourself?” asked Augustine.

“What is the difference?” said God.

And then he said, with that same far-off, graveyard chill: “How am I meant to attain absolution? What’s left for me to do?”

And Augustine said: “Stop your mission, John. Give up on the thing I know you’ve been looking for since the very beginning. Stop expanding. Stop assembling this bewildering cartography, this invasion force. I’ve puzzled over it for five thousand years, and I don’t believe I truly understand it now. But let it go. Let them go. Nobody has to be punished anymore for what happened to humanity.”

The Emperor of the Nine Houses turned to look at him.

“Augustine,” he said, “if the man you were—the man you were before you died, before the Resurrection—could hear what you just said to me, he’d tear your throat out.”

Augustine said, “Thanks for confirming that.” And he was silent.