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In the hours following the Saint of Duty’s near-departure from this mortal plane with the aid of an incinerator in the house of the King Undying that dwelled amongst stars—the Kindly Prince, the Lord over the River! The Necrolord Prime!—the Saint of Patience found himself cracking open the best bottles on the Mithraeum while the Saint of Joy interjected with an incessant torrent of dreadful suggestions for the palate that was ignored fastidiously. I need a drink, the second Saint to serve their Glorious Resurrector had muttered when they had failed to unearth the corpse of Cytherea the First aboard the home of their Lord that dwelt amongst the farthest stars—and so they debauched the alcohol stores. They positively glutted themselves on it. In the aftermath, they sat together in shared misery.
“…an awful man,” Joy was still saying as Augustine equipped the fifth cigarette of the night, trying to drown out the taste of Joy’s lingering presence in his mouth in a carcinogenic haze. “I’m sick of this wretched place…” Her voice ebbed and flowed in periodic intervals, chased to the horizon momentarily through sheer force of will, but ever-present, an immutable constant—an undimming, immortal star like their very own distant Dominicus!—that hovered at the edge of his perception. Over the course of the evening, it had progressively slid into the shrill disposition that only anger brought out in her. Joy was perennially unenchanting and unfailingly impersonable—her features obnoxiously symmetrical, the mouth curled in a state of perpetual condescension, her brows positioned too high on her frontal bone. Worst of all, Cristabel’s eyes afflicted her with the cancerous intensity that only the cavalier of the second Saint to serve the King Undying could have inflicted on somebody.
But Joy’s temper had calcified into a malformed facsimile of the emotion, and the millennia had allowed it to evolve into a sorry misery that evoked embarrassment in Augustine at the most inopportune of times, and aggravated him at worst for being forcibly brought into confidence to her indecent display of intimacy. Her digit circled the rim of the glass of red. Joy had said nothing when he’d offered her the red instead of virginal white. He’d thought it then an apt colour after the eventful evening.
“Yes, you suffer so endlessly,” Patience murmured irritably now, composure annihilated by her constant drunken chatter. “You’re a model martyr, truly representative of the most faithful soldiers that our glorious empire has produced…”
The corners of her mouth tightened. “Gideon will know,” Joy said, finally betraying the reason she’d worn a nervous disposition like a cloak all evening. “John suspects already… We always overdo the foreplay. If he spills to John—”
“Gideon wouldn’t.” Augustine took a long drag from his cigarette. “He has no reason to suspect. Paranoia doesn’t become you, Joy.”
“It’s the little things, and he was always such a stickler for detail… I’ve always thought that he was happiest when he was on John’s shortest leash.”
“Gideon never gave a damn about what other people thought of him,” Augustine said, with a shrug. Their ghostly reflections in the plex revealed a pair leaning toward one another with the helpless, abhorrent attraction that conspiracy wrought between the conspirators in question. “I doubt the old dog would bat an eyelid if you went up and told him you planned to kill him… Nothing new, nothing new. Only tempers and ancient resentments.” He found his brows creasing in contemplative meditation. “But Cytherea would have remembered. If she hadn’t lacked focus—”
“Cytherea is dead,” Joy said with a cracked laugh. “John will be on guard now—you can thank her for that, by the way—and you know—you know—that all it will take is for Gideon to plant the seed of doubt in John’s mind. If we managed to play him once, who’s to say we didn’t stage it twenty years ago?”
“He’s too sentimental for suspicion—least of all of the first three Saints to serve him. D’you remember when he locked A.L. away? We thought he wouldn’t bounce back from that.”
“You can’t think he’s forgiven us for that,” Mercy said. “Even after all this time.”
He conceded that Joy had perhaps made, as they said, a point.
“No,” Augustine agreed painfully, inspiring more hot effluvium into his respiratory tract. His eyes caressed the bob of her throat—a habit that had always felt dirtier than the smoking—as she drained the rest of her glass and poured herself more wine. “He was always like you in that regard. It’s a pity that we whored ourselves out to the commander only for the gambit to fail.” He tapped his cigarette to shake the ash and sighed in defeat when that creeping, skin-turning sensation assaulted his senses once more at his witness of Mercy drunkenly pushing a loose strap girdling her bicep back over the naked skin of her shoulder. Her face had steadily buzzed closer to his over the course of the evening, smudged lips parted in naked vulnerability, eyes preternaturally bright in her fury and anxiety.
He drew away. “As illuminating as this conversation has been, we’ve had a long and tiresome night and I intend to retire. Do refrain from antagonising your protegee. If you applied yourself to the task, you could make more out of her than herald fodder.” He couldn’t help a chuckle. “I suppose John assigned the ninth scamp—that pitiful pious nun—to you because her cavalier killed herself.” It was a punchline to a joke in poor taste.
“Number seven will make quick work of her,” Joy said, remarkably blase about the whole affair, as she shook out her hair. He supposed she’d already considered and simply chosen to ignore John’s motivations. “The disgusting little infant is a lost cause.” Her hair tumbled down her naked nape and concealed the dents of her delicate vertebrae and exposed scapulae beneath a curtain of rosy peach. “I refuse to invest in pity cases. John should have let the River have her—it would’ve been the kind thing to do. The merciful thing.”
“Qualities that our Lord Resurrector doesn’t possess in abundance,” Augustine said. “Or we wouldn’t be here to start with.” He studied the workings of her face. A sudden, amusing thought occurred to him. “Does the Ninth nun scare you, Joy?” Augustine asked. “You forgive less, and forget never. I thought you would take on the nun despite your nature… you were always so attracted to pity cases. But I suppose it was always selfishness masquerading as love.” Her nostrils flared as he leaned in closer. “I think you enjoy tormenting her, in your twisted little way. I think you enjoy tugging the fledgling by her leash like one might enjoy a bitch bought at the store. Oh don’t give me that look, Joy…” Her withering stare could have reduced whole planets to ash. “Your anger thrills me, and my delight has always pained you so dearly!”
“Shame! For shame! I don’t understand why John tolerates you so.”
He felt burning hatred blossom in his insipid body with an intensity that transcended desire, something so hateful that his immortal flesh felt almost tender with it. He could have been on fire, his skin burned so. While Joy’s blazing, too-bright gaze held his, he bridged the distance between them, strangely secure in the knowledge that she might very well set his marrow on fire and kill him where he sat. “We’ve had this companionship thrust on us so long that I think we’re beyond outright lies.” He traced the contours of her face before he crushed her rosy curls in a brutish grasp and brought her face close to his, holding up his mouth-wet cigarette to her mouth. “Ciggy? I daresay you’d really enjoy the filthy habit if you let yourself commit. You’ve always been rotten to the core anyway.”
She took a long drag, staining the thing with her still pink-smudged lips. “Don’t be greedy.” He snatched it from her lips, took a puff, rolling his tongue over the pink paint before offering it to her searching mouth again. He let it hang trapped between her lips, brought the freed hand to the base of her throat and wrapped it around, enjoying the caution and warning that crept into her aspect. Her pulse fluttered in her throat. It was such a fragile thing.
“You were always a downright bastard,” she said, taking the cigarette out of her mouth with careful, exaggerated slowness. A single tear rolled down her placid face—Augustine, forgetting himself, turned his gaze from her mouth to watch its path, transfixed in equal parts by revulsion and fascination.
Joy took the opportunity, of course. She slapped him hard enough to elicit a definitive crack, forcing him to loosen the death grip on her head. White and red sprayed on the floor, accompanied by the tinkling sound of teeth bouncing on pristine white tiles, shaken loose by the apocalyptic force of her blow. His jaw dislodged and shattered under the perfectly calculated necromantic force, setting off a bright supernova in his pain centres. Augustine reared back from her, clutching his bleeding mouth.
“Oh, Joy, Joy, Joy,” he said, massaging his aching mandible as his body endeavoured to repair it. It was always less than ideal to nag her so, when they were both so drunk and loose with their tongues, and fresh off the resentment boiling in the air after engaging in sexual relations with their Holy Resurrector. “Joy, Joy, Joy. How I despise you.” He worked the crink in his neck as his tendons rearranged themselves. “You’ve gone and gotten blood on my good dress shirt now. But I’ll let you have your fill.” His blood dripped from his maw in a continuous torrent; it seemed like a moment as erotically charged as one disrobing in front of a lover. “Work out your anger. Don’t be shy… I couldn’t abide tenderness from you.”
“The lack of self-insight is pitying.” Joy brought her hands to his face, with no regard for the pain and disfigurement she had inflicted. He tried to bat her hands away in disgust of his own writhing, worming desire, but Joy had the advantage of not being preoccupied with trying to repair her body. She planted her palms on his face firmly, pulling back the muscles with sheer force to contort his expressions. Mercy drew his lips back from his teeth, exposed his bulbar conjunctiva, stuffed her thumb into his mouth and jabbed it into his palate, probing around in his oral cavity. “Turn the mirror towards yourself, Patience. Your brother loved the rotten thing you call Cristabel, was even nearly as rotten as you, and you ate him right up. You stuffed him all the way down. You glutted on your own damn brother.” She brought her lips to ear, closed the gap between them, so that he was forced to rest his chin on the nape of her neck, to endure the wetness of her tongue as she licked him. “How do you live with yourself, you disgusting little rag?” She took a final puff off of the cigarette and ground it into the space between his neck and shoulder.
A low, keening sound, escaped him. He clung to her with all the fierce strength that adrenaline pumping through his vessels imparted. The cigarette seemed to burn and burn. He rocked forward, spasming in her embrace. “Joy,” he said, writhing like a living flame. He thought he might die. “Joy… I’ll kill you.”
“I’ll let you say sorry,” Mercy said.
He laughed feebly. “I’d say it all over again. I’d say worse. I’ll tell you what I really think. Deep down, I think you hate Cristabel, too. I bet you lay awake some nights wishing you could sieve out her bits from your soul just to tell her how much you hate her. I think you hate her more than I ever have. I couldn’t abide Alfred’s betrayal, but it pains me that you won’t admit the same.”
He’d gone too far. He knew it the moment Mercy’s eyes narrowed into thin slits, in the fraction of a second where she slid a hand up to the nape of his neck. It was the only warning Augustine had before he realised what she had done, when his dumb limbs failed to respond to his command. His muscles relaxed reflexively, flexing his body in forwards pitch. Joy’s other hand looped below his arm and braced him before his knees could hit the floor, his clawed hands gripping her shoulders as his world rocked.
With a single touch, Joy had not only sliced through the nerves forging his motor pathways but had manipulated his nerves so that the slightest stimulus—touch, pain, pleasure—induced torment. The slide of expensive fabric on his fragile epidermis was torture. The slither of her curls over his neck left his body racked with convulsions. The press of her lips—and later her teeth—over his Jugular vein was pure agony.
As his blood spilled out of him, she burrowed into his nerve pathways and manipulated them with breathtaking expertise, holding his utterly helpless, immobile self clutched tightly to her body like a poor imitation of a marionette. He was helpless as an infant. His head rolled back in her arms and came to rest on her hip, pressing into the soft, crumpled silk of her slip, eyes settling on their thanergetic star through the plexiglass. The dazzling light seared his retinas.
He was burning bright as the heart of a star. He was pure starlight. He felt immortality thrumming in his veins. It was a second Ascension.
An inkling of her necromantic power touched the edge of his senses. Memories buried in his amygdala, aided by his hippocampus, burst forth under her not-so subtle manipulation. Joy was playing dirty today—he’d tipped her over the edge.
“Enough,” he croaked when he glimpsed the shadow at the edge of his dreams.
The grey-eyed twin shadow who wandered in his dreams approached his prone body, climbing out of Dominicus’s core. “We made a promise,” it said. It engulfed him in an embrace. “Immortality together, as no mortal life would permit.”
“Mercy…” he rasped.
Joy did not heed his call. Alfred rested his cheek against Augustine’s. “I let you have me… so that we might never be separated.”
“Enough, Mercy!” If she might have killed him, he could have never lifted a finger to stop it but Augustine found the strength to overpower her and fix the severed nerves. Awareness of his motors flooded back into his nervous centres. He pushed her away from his neck and threw himself to the floor in his haste to get away from her. “You go too far,” he roared. He stumbled and crawled, trying to stem the blood still sputtering from his ravaged Jugular and Carotid. “You have always presumed too much.”
Joy joined him on the floor, crawling in mockery, grabbing him by the chin when he attempted to shake her. “Day and night you provoke me,” she shrieked, wiping her bloody mouth. “And I bear it all. I tolerate you when you punish me a hundred times over for a sin John convinced you to commit. Cristabel didn’t kill Alfred.”
“She killed him. The nun was rotten, rotten like you, I knew it at first sight. I was afraid, I stayed for love of John.”
“You stayed for love of Alfred,” Joy cried. Augustine shoved her face away from his. “And Alfred stayed for love of you. We knew it. We all knew it. The second gen lyctors knew it. Cristabel knew it.”
“You abetted his murder,” Augustine bellowed. “I won’t let you tarnish his memory too.” He launched himself at Mercy with the full force he could muster—Augustine wrapped his fingers around her bare neck, slamming her head down against the floor.
She was laughing when he dragged her to the wall and pressed her up against it. The blue corridors drowned out the warmth in Mercy’s face. She resembled a snarled, vengeful Saint carved from marble. “You feared death so much that you were glad to eat your brother so that you might share in immortality with him,” she said. “But you killed him all the same. And you’re left with yourself now. How sorry it must be, being the Saint of Patience.”
He laughed darkly. “And you ate your pious pig of a lover, vile creature that you are,” Augustine said. “Stop sermonising us before I get bored, Joy. Take your contorted fantasies to the schizophrenic nun if they amuse you so much.”
With a wail, she surged forward and kissed him. And damn him—Augustine answered in like, letting her taste invade his senses again. Mercy kissed him with the savage yet utterly contradictory precision only she could’ve managed, dragged her sharp teeth across his lips, clamping them hard and fast on his lingual muscles—and then she bit his tongue off.
“Fuck.” The profanity produced a wet syllable that sounded nothing like what he’d wanted to say. “Fuck—”
“Alfred wanted it,” she said with a red laugh. He stumbled back from her, tripped, and they both crashed to the floor in a bloody heap. “Cristabel barely had to say anything. He wanted it! He wanted it, he wanted it, he wanted it! You wanted it, so desperately too—”
A long struggle ensued; they stumbled down the hallways, littering them with bits of one another as they went. Joy clawed his much abused face to shreds and managed to emancipate several more teeth from his jaw as they crashed down the corridor. He wrenched her shoulder out of its socket, and shattered her kneecap. When her hand punched into his chest Augustine stumbled and they tumbled to the floor. Their limbs looped around each other to produce a thoroughly snarled mass of flesh that only thinly—and later did not even attempt to—persevere to separate into individual beings.
He groaned when she began pushing her hand in with exquisite control, crying out wordlessly at the pain-pleasure sensation of their mingling flesh when her hand penetrated the layers of skin and fascia over his heart. She parted his pectorals like mist, his flesh unfurling like a very red flower in response to her touch while his body valiantly attempted to staunch the hole she was carving into his body, frantically sealing itself around her fingers. When she soldiered past his ribcage and reached his naked cardiac mass his hips lifted from the floor, and he grabbed her body for dear life. “Will you kill me, Mercy?” he asked. He pried apart her rosy gown, placing a hand on her scapula, another on her pelvis. “Will you kill me, Joy?”
She fell into him with a surprised gasp—something that in another light might have almost resembled near-rapturous delight—when her flesh melted beneath his touch. His anatomy was not as precise as Joy’s, but he made do. Augustine found the graceful curve of her iliac crest; it shattered under the force of his power. She forced his face to the floor so that he was prone, and had to work by touch. Flesh had never been his expertise—he had to resort to brute force.
Augustine wrapped his hands around her already denuded intestines and stripped them from her body. Mercy pushed his head hard into the floor, manipulating his bones until he heard a definite crack from the general location of his skull plates. Cerebrospinal fluid leaked from his nose in a steady steam.
“Not yet,” Joy said, as she shattered another bone. He wrapped a hand around her spine. “Not yet.”
He did not know how long they lay there, mangling one another, mingling, until they could no longer recognise pain or pleasure. At the time, it seemed to last an eternity.
After, their throbbing, squelching, debauched bodies separated of their own accord with excruciating slowness. They spent several hours on the cold tiles wrapped in one another like a two-headed beast. It began with their capillaries—they grew apart cell by cell. His powdered phalanges reformed and separated from her vertebral column. Mercy, still immobile, watched him extricate his hand from the kidney strangled in his palm, sighing when they separated. Her shattered tibia drew back from his quadriceps where she’d savagely planted the bone. Their mingled thighs and sex organs separated. The bleed in his right eye resolved itself, giving him clarity of vision devoid of the red film that had coloured the entire second half of the act. His body expelled the fingers Joy had jabbed into his bronchi and the soft meat of his lungs.
When they were fully separated, Joy took a deep, deep breath. She licked the blood on her lips.
“Let’s take this to the bedroom,” she said.
Hours later, with deliberate motions, Joy occupied a seat far from the foot of the bed where he was lounging, while he was still trying to shake the feeling that Mercy had left behind bits of her in his body. “You made an ugly mess of the place,” she said incisively. Her curls of rotten salmon hung limply down her shoulders. Gore and blood clung to them. “As if it isn’t bad enough that Gideon is periodically redecorating the wretched place with the infant’s innards…” She coughed a bit. “I hate you all,” she said passionately, staring dully at the charcoaled end of her cigarette being taken over by a crush of cool grey. She slowly raised her citrine eyes to watch Augustine massage his tormented Jugular with bored indifference. “Cigarette?” she asked.
“We’ve savaged each other before.” He accepted the proffered stick from her and took a long drag. “You’re almost tolerable when you’re honest, Joy.”
“I can’t say the same for you,” she said. “I have to endure you at all because of him. He has to pay for making us do it. He resurrected us, and promised the whole world to us, but it was a lie. Instead he took everything from us.” She laughed, misery afflicting the sound, and transforming her face. On Cristabel’s face, the eyes, the expression would’ve been a tragedy in loveliness, if he’d asked John. Augustine had always looked into them and only seen the apocalyptic force of ill-concealed misery.
He said meditatively, “Eventually.”
An ugly, ill expression contorted Joy’s face. He thought she might cry.
“Brother, lover—we all committed the sin the same,” she said. “John’s empire was built on filth. We loved him despite it. Perhaps because of it.” She looked away. “I understand why Cytherea did it. I’ve been dying for a myriad and I never noticed. But Cytherea knew… and she never forgave.” She frowned at her nubby cigarette and got up to stub it on his thigh. His nerves twinged. Augustine bit back a filthy curse. “Do you want to know a dirty little secret of mine? Eating Cristabel made me hungry,” Mercy said. “I’m always hungry. I’ve been hungry everyday for ten thousand years. I think I could have a Cristabel for breakfast everyday. I almost wish I could have a Cristabel for breakfast everyday.”
“On the contrary, I have scarcely ever enjoyed a meal since I ate Alfred.”
“I didn’t say I enjoyed the feeling.” She watched him intently with her bloodshot eyes. Mercymorn the First finished another cigarette while pacing before adding, “I’m getting hungry again, Augustine. I’ve been hungry all night.”
“We’ve hated each other for a myriad, Mercy, and I’d be disappointed if we weren’t forced to endure one another for a myriad more on account of your ceaseless appetite.” He spread his arms. “So come here, darling.” Beneath him, the sheets were a massacre of red. “We’ll feast on one another, and if we live to see the daylight, then we can call it even.”
Her eyes shone.
“It’ll hurt,” she said, as though she hadn’t torn him up and left him to bleed all over the bed and the corridors not so long ago. Her hurricane eyes were limned with a weatherworn weariness. “I’ll make you wish you’d let me kill you instead,” she added, with the fondness that only an anatomist anticipating the dissection of a cadaver could muster.
Augustine could have described the feeling she conveyed as something almost like love.
“As long as you don’t kill me,” he said, but they knew that when the time came, they’d both go out together. Augustine privately held the belief that whatever hell was in store for him and Mercy would resemble the perpetually endless, bone-laden, corridors of the Emperor’s wretched seat.
He exhaled deeply as Mercy crawled into bed. “I won’t,” she said, very solemnly, which was perhaps the most honest thing she’d said all night.
He caressed her lips a moment before drawing back the collar smudged with garish shades of pink lipstick. Augustine unbuttoned his shirt with Mercy watching, and fell back into the bed. “And please don’t be gentle, Joy. That would be intolerable.”