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

[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."