She was a crumple of misery. “Tell me that you’re sorry you lied, you bastard!”

“I lied to you,” he said. “They’re dead because of me—I let them die because I thought that was easier … and I have regretted it for nearly ten thousand years. I love you so much, Mercy; I will love you three until the end of time, until there is nothing left of me but the remnant atoms of the God and man who loved you.”

“I forgive you everything, Lord,” she whispered.

And she slid her hands inside him.

The Emperor of the Nine Houses came apart, layer by layer. It was instantaneous, but so simultaneously slow—so unbelievably fucking slow—that it was like we saw every moment, you and I. He flew apart. The body of God separated from every divine part of itself. There was a brief flare of that sinus-panicking magic, which fizzled as Mercymorn somehow disconnected all his wires at once. It was as though he were suddenly nine million particles of magnet, repelling one another. That necromancer deity in the human frame—wasn’t it just, after all, a human frame?—exploded. He split into parts, and then the parts split, and the room drowned in red mist. The mist became powder, and the powder dwindled into nothingness, until Mercymorn was left standing alone, wet with sweat, and some other liquid, but clean.

Mercy turned around, to Augustine. She was not weeping now.

“It is finished,” she said.

Leaving me an orphan again, though your brain didn’t let me linger on that one.

52

THE SAINT OF PATIENCE stood up and crossed to her. She reached forward and took big, clawed fistfuls of his shirt.

“I wanted it to be me,” she said, in this weird, unearthly calm. “I didn’t want it to be you. I didn’t want it to be you, Augustine, after all … the sin needed to be mine.”

“There’s hours,” he said unsteadily. “If we drop through the River now—”

“We can watch our people die from close up,” she said. “The dead planets could have sunk out of orbit already … we just don’t know. We don’t know how long it takes to undo the Resurrection. Millions of people … all those millions of our people … No, I had to do it. I am not very nice, Augustine, and I was never very good.”

And for the first time, Ianthe’s voice, which was sunk in a whisper: “Eldest sister, what have you done?”