I have heard critique of cultural depictions of necromancers as romanticising an essentially military bondage; it is hard not to see these critiques as ignoring the poignancy, the humanity, and the quintessentially Nine Houses qualities of the concept. Have we, as a civilisation, had a love affair with the idea? Yes! Has it been the keystone of all interstellar exploration and success in military conflict? Yes! Was Be My Cavalier VII six too many sequels for that worthy first novel? Yes; but be it ever so saccharinely depicted in poetry and prose, our concern with the relationship between a necromancer and their cavalier remains at its heart our pure ideal: that though as a people we are divided between those who are attuned to, and afflicted by, the aptitude, and those who are withdrawn from, and spared from, the aptitude, we two groups share a symbiotic relationship. Those who hold the sword must hold it for the necromancer. Those who were born with thanergetic nervous systems ply their art only by the grace of the sword. The necromancer is weak, and the sword is strong. The sword is weak, and the necromancer is strong. Our pleasure at the bond unbroken between necromancer and cavalier is a Nine Houses acknowledgement of the equality granted to us by God.
This is not to say that the relationship entered our consciousness fully formed, nor that we have not watched it change through the eras. Its application in military circumstances has changed just as much as its application in society and in fiction. Necromancer-cavalier pairs are never sent out without the backup of modern Cohort regiments: those soldiers who make up the frontline Cavalier units would be the first to differentiate their work from the work of the classic cavalier. The social cavaliers—attached to the premier necromancers of their house—are under fire from traditionalists for contributing to the “worrying trend” of granting the title of cavalier to people who go unranked in swordplay: the use of “cavalier” as a metaphor. But this argument is at least five thousand years old: we have reams of editorials criticising cavaliers primary who have failed to travel and gain fame and “at least captaincy.” Society would consider this an unnecessarily harsh requirement of a cavalier primary nowadays: even Second House cavaliers primary most often begin their higher services as a lowly lieutenant.
What has not changed is the essential equation. A necromancer who must leave her House and fight requires a swordswoman. A swordswoman leaving her House to fight requires, amid the bullet-fuelled barbarism of other planets, a necromancer. Of course, it is the swordswoman who makes the necromancer’s art possible: thalergy planets reject the necromancer, and require fresher death than we do in the Nine Houses to perform. But without the care and craft of the adept, would the first assault not be merely a suicide strike? Perhaps the swordswoman may survive alone where the necromancer would find it difficult or impossible: but this is the mathematics we come back to. The one binds to the other. More warriors, and the necromancer would be hard-pressed to perform the feats that come with intimate knowledge of another’s thanergy; more necromancers, and the swordswoman’s burden to supply thanergy would multiply with each adept, to say nothing of the difficulty of protecting more than one person. Both halves serve as sword and shield. The long-standing relationship is required for the heat of battle; unfamiliarity with the other’s methods will lead to death.
Our concern with what the relationship should be is a long-standing one. The love between them should be centred on duty. No matter the House, the vow is short—
One flesh, one end.
The Emperor confirmed long ago that this oath was taken from the Lyctors themselves, in the early years of discipleship after the Resurrection. With this as our understanding, how beautiful an oath it is!
“One flesh” is the underpinning of our whole Empire. We are born necromancers, or we are not; yet we are one. The non-necromancer will still have necromantic children. The necromancer will have parents who lacked the aptitude. The possibility is within us. We live under the thanergenic light of Dominicus, are born, grow, and die in his thanergetic Houses; the Resurrection made us so. We are fundamentally different to those born on thalergy planets outside the Empire. Our anxiety drives the expectant parent to arrange to give birth back home, or concern themselves with the baby’s proximity to grave dirt sourced from home. Our necromantic characteristics make us more like the Emperor. As he was once man, and became God, and was God and became man, so were we dead and became alive; so were we alive and became dead. The necromancer and the cavalier are no different. They are one flesh. And yet that is only one understanding of the mystery that characterises us as a society.
“One end” is necessarily martial. We may take “end” as in the sense of goal or desire; the necromancer and cavalier work toward the same thing, no matter their differences in personality or method. Both members of the pair must work together to secure whatever path has been marked for them by House or empire. One end is one Empire. Love between a necromancer and cavalier is vital to differentiate them from a soldier’s love of the Emperor: they are carrying out a personal devotion that beautifies both types of adoration. If the cavalier and the necromancer do not take “one flesh, one end” as a maxim for their passion for each other, their bond is nonexistent. They must each take the other as their ideal. The necromancer must be a pure expression of their art to the cavalier. The cavalier must strive for perfection in theirs, to gain the necromancer’s admiration and trust. They do not have to enjoy each other’s society; they must simply take their togetherness as assumed. The cavalier who will not sleep in the same room as their necromancer must question themselves as to why. Their love is the love that fears only for the other: the love of service on both sides. Some have tried to characterise this relationship as the cavalier’s obedience to the necromancer, but the necromancer must be in turn obedient to the needs of the cavalier without being asked or prompted: theirs is arguably the heavier burden.
As we are concerned with what the relationship is, so are we concerned with what it is not. The love of the cavalier for the necromancer, and the necromancer for the cavalier, is not the love of a spouse. It cannot be libidinous. “Sword-marriages” wherein a necromancer and their cavalier married to one outside party as dual spouses were almost certainly the invention of the fiction writer, or more likely, the pornographer who cannot see anything beautiful without wanting to make it lewd. This is proved in the fact that, after a myriad of thought about the matter, marrying your cavalier remains taboo at best. There have been those who have argued eloquently that it is traitorous to the ideals of the Necrolord Prime. There is still a precedent in the Fifth for spouses to become a cavalier at particular times, but this is regarded as a stubborn holdover that is characteristically Fifth to not remove from their practise. Neither can the love be familial love, which is why the necromancer and cavalier cannot be parent and child; sibling rules have relaxed, but only in times of unusual paucity. Many Houses still cleave to the idea that the best cavaliers are those who from the cradle know both what they are and at whose side they are destined to stand; the Second House has notably argued against this, stating that this results in a sibling relationship. History gives us successful and unsuccessful examples of both methods: of the cavaliers and necromancers trothed nearly at birth, or of the necromancer and the cavalier who join as strangers to each other.
It has gone out of fashion to have “pattern” marriages as a hard rule; for one reason that adhering to “pattern” marriages often led to blurring of traditional cavalier families and administrative families, leading to the need for new branches of both. Atrial marriages, of necromancer to necromancer, and of their cavalier to cavalier, worked only inside House lines; ventricular marriages, of necromancer to the other necromancer’s cavalier, and vice versa, worked best with outsiders. “Swap” or “bruise” marriages are still common in this way—non-adepts sent in to marry necromancers on both sides—but are hardly done to “pattern.” In this era of mixed Cohort regiments and long placements out in space, mixed-House marriages can occur by sheer accident, or—in the case of the Sixth—by hopeful design. The only “pattern” left is the Sixth’s rigid adherence to set childbearing pairs, albeit this is acknowledged within the Library to often have little to do with love and everything to do with genetic scarcity. This fluctuation of style and whim has not touched the central tenet of cavalier and necromancer, nor what they represent to both each other and the children of the Resurrection.
As we approach the celebration of a myriad of years serving the Necromancer Divine, our King of the Nine Renewals, first and last among us, we may see the cavalier-necromancer bond as a gift to us in long standing. Like him, it has not changed; like him, although we may build altars and light candles, the fundamental substance beneath does not wear or tarnish with long years of worship. The necromancer stands with her cavalier. The cavalier stands with her necromancer. They are one flesh, and one end, and they are all of us.