The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret

[hellonspectacles]

Palamedes keeps up a careful, steady pace as he walks across the city from the boardwalk to his apartment building. It takes every ounce of his not-insignificant self-control for him to do so, every instinct telling him to run until he is out of breath, or to stop where he is in the middle of the road and put pen to paper to make sense of what Gideon has told him.

Gideon didn’t die. The revelation is so great that Palamedes hasn’t even begun to consider what strange Darrow mechanism had caused the memories to enter her mind. What she had told him, as they shivered over their chipped mugs of tea, had been more strange, more wild, more world-changing than solving Darrow’s mysteries ever could be.

And there had been other things, too—stranger and more wild, that hinted at thousand-year conspiracies and a fundamental rottenness at the heart of all he has ever known.

Palamedes doesn’t even notice if Cam is home when he flies into the apartment and makes a beeline for his room. Technically, the Master Warden is incapable of forgetting an idea once it has taken root; in practice, like all good scholars, he believes in writing everything down.

He closes the door and leans against it with his eyes tightly shut, only to see familiar words emblazoned across his eyelids. He lied to us.

When Pal had asked Gideon if she knew what these revelations meant, really meant, she had said she did, but Palamedes doesn’t think that’s quite true. It isn’t her fault; Pal hasn’t expounded much on those last few minutes of his life, telling himself it is because he doesn’t have enough evidence to support his theories, but knowing, deep down, that his avoidance has a lot more to do with his own fears.

Still, they all understand pieces of it: Cam knows nearly as well as he does how they had picked at the lyctorhood theorem, trying to make it less awful in its conclusions, trying to make it right; Harrow, in her wild effort to keep some piece of Gideon whole, had, as usual, found a solution by awful instinct; Gideon, poor Gideon, now knows more intimately than all of them the sort of indifference their God is capable of.

Now, Palamedes Sextus has to put it all together and present his awful, terrifying, wonderful conclusion.

He sits down at the desk in the corner of the room and begins to write.

He doesn’t stop until morning.

Comments

[go_loud]

It doesn't quite make her laugh, but the corner of her lips turn up at Palamedes' huff. The expression transforms into something a little more wistful at his bitterness, not because it makes her sad to see -- although it does -- but because she shares it. More, probably, than Palamedes could know. Camilla had always been more devoted in cavalierdom to Palamedes and, if pressed for something larger, the Sixth House and the cause of truth and knowledge, than she ever had been to serving either the Emperor or God. But He existed in the background, the arbiter of necromancy, the giver of the gifts she saw used every day. After Canaan House, and the trials, after eight months with Blood of Eden -- even after the torture they'd inflicted out of fear and bias -- she's beginning to feel things crack around the edges. A resentment, even, a simmering anger she rarely lets show for how much of her life has been spent not knowing. And yet none of it matters here in Darrow.

But maybe it gets to. Palamedes caring means -- well, at very least it means she has her closest confidante to talk to.

She winces a little at imagining that last conversation between him and -- Cytherea. Cytherea. She's hammered the name into her head over and over to stamp out everything of Dulcinea she'd attached to her, the words of her saved letters, all the resentment she'd held against her and Gideon for those early days in Canaan, stubbornly working at the Gordian knot of feelings for her dear friend and the woman she thought was her. It's impossible, but she's managed to at least dull her feelings for Dulcie behind the wall of rage she can't help but still feel for the Lyctor who killed the people she loved most and so many others she had grown to care for.

"Like she was accessory to it," she elaborates. She'd had so much time, in those weeks without speaking, to contemplate the wool taken off her eyes. The worth of a cavalier. All that they -- that Palamedes -- had refused to engage with -- but in the end, wasn't it the justification for that entire social structure? While at the same time grieving, berating herself for losing him: yes, she thinks she can imagine how the Lyctor felt. That roiling anger at Cytherea almost touches pity for a moment, understanding, with all that Palamedes is saying and all that she's seen and learned. There's something so terrible and unwanted and world-shifting in that momentary compassion; it's nauseating. "There was a moment," she says, distantly. "I would have had her if she'd been anything but a Lyctor, but she had -- an entropy field up, I guess, I couldn't get my knife through her skin." She skips neatly over the part where she'd been letting her hand flay to try and run down her thanergy. "She said, I had a nice girl as a cavalier once too. She died for me. What can you do?. At the time, I was angry, and fighting, and she was too near to killing us all. And maybe it was just a taunt. But I think she might have meant what more could I do to her after that."

Cam shakes her head, as if it'll rid her of the memory, of that and so much more. Her eyes go back into focus when Palamedes says the equation's a mess, and she searches his eyes for a moment. "I have," she says slowly. She's been focused on Gideon being the child of God, some of its implications, but now other details fit themselves together like a stack of blocks, all at once. She lifts her chin at the papers he's been scribbling on. "You think she was right. They were right, the ones -- trying to get into the Ninth. That there's more, some exchange, and it was kept secret."

[hellonspectacles]

“If she had known anything about you at all, she would have never called you a nice girl,” Palamedes observes, and though he smiles, it isn’t a very nice smile. It’s a smile that could remind someone that being the greatest necromancer of one’s generation means one is capable of terrible things, even if one is as careful and kind a person as the Warden of the Library always strives to be.

He’s turning his glasses around in his fingers in silence when he hears the all-too-familiar crack of a tiny screw losing its structural integrity thanks to Palamedes’ slow, constant assault. The sound breaks the tension in his expression, and he holds them up with an apologetic wince. “…I’ll take care of that later,” he says, setting them aside.

His eyes brighten when Cam reveals that she has spoken to Gideon—it’s a lot of take in, of course, and Cam’s mind must be roiling in the aftermath as much as his own, but that does make it much easier to catch her up. “I think—no, I know—there’s another sort of lyctorhood, where no one needs to die. The theorem isn’t meant to create a perpetual furnace; it’s meant to create a perpetual wheel, no destruction necessary—“ he gestures at his papers— “well, sort of, it’s an awful metaphor, but I’m still stuck at the ‘awful metaphor’ stage of figuring it out.”

He scrubs his hands through his hair. “I’ve suspected as much for a while now, as it points to a different source to fuel the theorem, one that doesn’t lead to horror and bloodshed. But we didn’t have any proof, and no way to test it, not until Gideon woke up one day and realized that she didn’t actually die.” Pal flashes a smile that’s just a little manic with competing emotions: excitement, and weariness, and horror, and awe. “Harrow became a Lyctor, and despite that, Gideon Nav kept existing. And of course God knew it was it possible. He invented the fucking thing.”

[go_loud]

It's a chilling smile, but not one that surprises Camilla. She, after all, has always been capable of relatively terrible things; it's just that most people don't understand how capable until she's dislocating their arm behind their back.

"If I'd gotten over her fawning all over Gideon on the landing pad, we'd have probably spotted that earlier," she grouses. If there's anyone she feels like she failed as much as Palamedes at Canaan House -- and it's not that she wouldn't have loved to save the Fourth or the Fifth, or anyone really, but it doesn't feel like a personal failure -- it's Dulcie. It was genius, and beautifully brave too, not to mention them and what they were to her, and it meant she trusted they would know something was wrong. And instead Cam had wasted so much time baffled and betrayed and seething, believing their dearest friend for years was capable of the cruelty of ignoring Pal and flirting with Gideon in front of them.

For all the self-flagellation she's capable of inside her head, though, the actual comment is light, just a little wry. The Warden's on something big here. He doesn't need her regrets.

Him breaking his spectacles makes her smile a little bit, anyway. Every time. She leans from the bed to snag them by the arm, gesturing for him to continue and leaning back to dig in the thinner nightstand drawer, one of many places she's hidden the little plastic tubes of glasses repair kits that they sell at pharmacies here. As he talks, she sets down her tea and finds the tiny screw and miniature screwdriver, better able to listen for something to do with her hands anyway.

She nods, slowly, taking it in. A perpetual wheel. It's less horrifying, for one thing, but for some reason, she'd just accepted the idea that cavaliers had been created to die. One flesh, one end is a beautiful idea, and she's extraordinarily lucky to have someone like Palamedes sworn to her, someone entirely uninterested in her ever even getting injured, but there's idealism and there's practical reality, and somehow -- as nauseating as it was, the more they'd found, the more she'd realized it made sense.

The idea that perhaps power just doesn't work like that, that it should never have been used that way and that there is an alternative, is -- well, Cytherea was absolutely right, as much as she resents that. It's actually more horrifying.

"She wasn't the only of the original Lyctors to figure that out," she says suddenly, which is apropos of nothing, except that it absolutely is connected in her head, and she leans forward, eyes bright. "Well. I don't know if it was that lie that did it, but it seems like a good candidate. There's -- those eight months in Blood of Eden custody weren't for nothing. It's --" She takes a breath, trying to explain rationally. "They're terrorists, yes; they do terrible things. To them, necromancers are -- most of them probably don't think you're human beings. But they're people who've been forcibly displaced and had their homeworlds destroyed for thanergy and a war no one knows the rationale for. They've been roped generationally into some sort of life contract to the Emperor -- the Second knows all about this, I guess -- and they never knowing he was immortal. I got in with their commander so I could find out more, try to filter it all out. And here's the thing. Lyctors are helping them. Currently. Judith is still alive because of one."

"Pal, they have -- they still have -- a broadcast signal into the Houses, a sort of news channel, and it's somewhere on the Sixth. On the Sixth! They knew things about us, too, things no one who hadn't been to the Sixth would know, but it was like sitting in history class. Some of what they were describing hasn't existed on the Sixth for thousands of years. As if they'd learned it from Cassiopeia herself.

I think -- whatever the Emperor has done, whatever reason he had for deciding cavaliers were expendable, that that was better, the repercussion has been coming for millennia."

[hellonspectacles]

“Fuck.” Camilla has told Palamedes bits and pieces about her time with the Blood of Eden, her stories, unsettlingly, turning a theoretical threat into a society made up of real people. None of her stories have been pleasant, and none of them quite dislodge his long-time belief that the existence of BoE is a tragic and inevitable result of a myriad of Cohort expansion, and yet still a group that must be stopped.

But Cam always tells her stories carefully, leaping over narrative lacunas that frighten him. He doesn’t dare ask what those gaps might contain.

This time, the gaps are still there, but what’s outside the gaps is so enormous and world-turning that Palamedes barely notices them. Obviously the lyctors had colluded with BoE at some point—ergo, Gideon Nav—but he is startled to discover that the alliance had continued. More shocking still is the realization that it might go further back than he had imagined.

“A broadcast signal? Where—? How—?” Palamedes had a thousand questions, but they’re quickly drowned out by a deeper, more instinctual horror. After a lifetime of hearing truth over solace in lies, it feels like a betrayal, a violation, but by who? Who can he even be angry at? Strangely, maybe irrationally, given the source of the information, he finds it isn’t Blood of Eden. Maybe Blood of Eden is just the name for the people who have understood God’s betrayal the longest.

And none of it had to be like that. “You lied to us,” Palamedes recites with a small shudder. He remembers his horror at discovering what the avulsion chamber was meant to do, remembers Coronabeth keening over Naberius’ dead body, remembers Cytherea saying, we loved him like a brother, like a god. “He sure fucking did.”

He lifts his chin then, eyes bright and determined, even if his gaze remains slightly unfocused without his glasses. Only now does he notice, and only distantly, that she's fixing his broken frames. “Cam, we have to make this work.” He gestures at his notes. “We have to prove—“ What, that there’s another way? That necromancy can do something besides breed power and corruption? Pal swallows. “We just have to.”

[go_loud]

"I don't know," she says seriously, and almost laughs, because she's also been desperate to know how it's set up. Of course they both want to know where the receiver is on the Sixth. They've both been all over the Library, know it as well as anyone, and if someone's still maintaining something like that -- or maybe it's simply just very sturdy, basic technology and doesn't need much maintenance, but. "That's one thing I don't know," she shakes her head. "How it was set up, how it's been maintained, who knows and who doesn't..." She gestures uselessly. "The only thing I can think is that it's hidden among the various external structures, so only maintenance constructs ever see it." It's not the meat of the question and she knows it. Things are always double-stamped, triple-checked, peer-reviewed, everything in the name of transparency. There's a lot of jostling for importance and credit, but the idea of a conspiracy on the Sixth is unsettling.

But in some way that she can already hear Judith calling radicalization in her head, she isn't entirely sure that the conspiracy isn't most of how the Empire's been set up, and this gesture -- not even approval, per se, just one little act of rebalance -- a tiny light in the name of truth. Camilla, feeling a little adrift about all this, nods morosely at Palamedes' comment. Most people who aren't close with the Warden are taken a little aback when they first hear him swear, which tends to amuse her as he really does do it quite often; but it does betray that his anger is real.

Pal sits up straight then, though, rallied, his silvery eyes lit almost from within with a determination and passion. She's seen it before, of course she has, but it never fails to amaze Camilla, after all these years together, how he can take something as devastating, as world collapsing as all this and come back, bearing the flag of innovation and change. She can't help but love him for it, that insistent, contagious passion to work for more, for better. She couldn't do anything but march behind that banner.

Right now, she leans forward, smiling a little, and puts his repaired glasses back on his face. "Then we'll do it," she says, as though it's that simple. Maybe it is. Her believing there was no other option but to do something brought him back from the River. Why not change the Empire as they know it? "I'll help you with whatever you need."

She leans her head back, thinking, and recovers her tea. "In the name of making you prove your thesis, how do you know Gideon wasn't still alive because of Harrow's lobotomy? And you can't say because it was stupid."

[hellonspectacles]

Palamedes practically beams in response to the question. Naturally, the young scholar believes in the ethics of building a better world--believes it wildly and deeply--but he is still a product of an upbringing in which debating finer points of necromancy was more common than discussing the morality of what they did. Compared to all the earth-shattering issues swarming his mind, explaining his theory behind a seemingly impossible theorem feels like child's play.

"I never said it didn't," he answers cheerfully. "If I'm entirely honest, we may never know for sure if Gideon's soul remained intact thanks to that stupid," yes, he said it, "attempt at brain surgery, or some underlying tendency of the theorem. Gideon's story proves that the power of the lyctoral well may be available without a dead cavalier to fuel it, but, unfortunately, not how. And it's not like we can run a double-blind study." He makes a face, able to imagine a couple of scholars who would be happy to do just that, even if their proposals never made it through review.

"Though I hate to admit it, the lobotomy may have helped. Leave it to Harrow to discover the most ham-fisted way of doing something brilliant. But--" and now he picks up his notebook from his desk and brandishes it. The top is labeled GIDEON PRIME // PYRRHA DVE, followed by a page full of half written, quickly abandoned theorems. "Our Ninth House friends are not the only ones to have found themselves in such circumstances."