Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  This made very little impact on you. It had the dim and nonsensical ring of a fairy story. You said, “The Lyctors have died … fighting these things?”

  “Fighting them?” said God. “Harrow, I’ve lost half my Lyctors distracting them. They’re hideously complex to destroy. The ones we’ve killed, we killed through luck—they were young, and we were at full power—and then … once our numbers thinned out … by sheer accident, or by suicide mission.”

  “How many revenants are there?”

  You prepared for an astronomical number. The Body raised its eyebrows when the Emperor Undying said, “Three.

  “There were nine. We called them by number. Over ten thousand years, we have managed to take out a grand total of five. Number Two fell soon after the Resurrection. Number Eight cost a man’s immortal soul, and—I still see that day in my dreams. Number Six died because one of my Hands—Cyrus—drew it into a ultramassive black hole, and Number Six had better be dead, because Cyrus won’t be coming back.”

  Before you could do anything—exclaim, or question his mathematics, which did not hold up even on first acquaintance—he did something dreadful. The Emperor of the Nine Houses pushed himself away from the plain coffin with the rose and he stood before you at the Third’s, with his monstrous eyes and his ordinary face, and he took both of your hands in his. He patted them gently, as though you were a child whose pet had been squashed in a tragic accident. It would have been preferable for him to rip your ribs from their costal cartilage and waggle them around. It would have been preferable for him to take your throat beneath his hands and snap your neck. There were bright lights in your vision. You were deeply distressed.

  “The choice I offered you was always a false one,” he said. “I’m sorry. The Resurrection Beasts always know where I am, and wherever I am they turn themselves to me and start moving … slowly … but never stopping. And they don’t turn to me alone, though they focus on me most strongly. They hunt whoever has committed the—indelible sin.”

  You stared at him. He dropped his hands.

  You said, “Which indelible sin?”

  “The one you committed when you became a Lyctor,” said the Emperor.

  You heard, dimly, the doors of Drearburh close. You perceived the grind of their mechanism and their indelible clang, the echo of their shutting ringing throughout the bottom atrium and upward into the tunnel shaft. Then your memories of it muddied and disappeared, back with the rest of your unsorted collection.

  “They will be coming for me,” you said, and you said the words only because you thought you ought to make them come true. “If I returned to my House they would follow me there.”

  He said, “No Lyctor has ever returned home, once we understood the repercussions … no Lyctor except one, who knew I would come to intercept her for that very reason.”

  You looked at her plain coffin again. It was not particularly large; the body it held was not tall or broad, nor imposing, nor grand. You found yourself saying distantly: “And so the intention is to teach me how to fight these things?”

  “Not before I teach you how to run,” said the Emperor. “It’s a rough lesson to learn. It’s never complete. But I’ve been running for ten thousand years … so I will be your teacher.”

  After a moment he laid his hands on your shoulders, and you found yourself looking up into his weird and ordinary face.

  “What he is saying,” said the Body distinctly, “is that you have to learn that sword.”

  You looked at her, over his shoulder. The Emperor instinctively followed your gaze, but he could never have seen what you saw: the weals where the chains had passed around the other girl’s wrists, neck, ankles. He would not perceive that long hair hanging wetly over her shoulders, that resinous colour that in death might have been brown or might have been gold or might have been anything. He could not have heard the voice—low, husky, musical—or its dry and uncanny echo of other voices you had known: your mother’s, Crux’s.

  He would not know that in truth the Body of the Locked Tomb had not spoken to you since the night you massaged the purple, swollen clots of blood out of the necks of your dead parents, so that their strangulation might not be so obvious. He would not know that you had only walked with her one tranquil year, and trysted with her afterward only in your dreams. He could not possibly know that in your youth her eyes had often been black, like yours were, but that ever since you had writhed in Lyctoral agony her eyes had turned a yellow that made you dizzy to behold: a bronzed, hot, animal yellow, as amber as the inside of an egg.

  When you were ten years old, the Body was quiet and rigorous, practical and merciful. At fourteen the Body was tender and serene, and sometimes smiled. When you were sixteen the Body was resolute and impassioned. In all these incarnations, she had preserved her vow of silence. Now the sound of her voice meant the madness had returned to you in full.

  “I can’t,” you said, as carefully as possible. “I can’t, beloved. It’s gone.”

  The Emperor said, “Harrow?” but you’d mostly forgotten he was there.

  “You are walking down a long passage,” said the Body. “You need to turn around.”

  “I am standing in the dark,” you told her. Each of the Body’s eyelashes was wet with frost. “I lost it. It’s gone. There’s nothing there. I must have misapprehended the process. I am half a Lyctor. I am nothing, I am pointless, I am unmanned.”

  Hands fell heavy on your shoulders. You looked from the face you loved to the face of the Resurrecting King.

  “Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing,” he said.

  As he spoke, his mouth looked strange. A hot whistle of pain ran down your temporal bone. Your body was numb to grief; perhaps you had felt it once, but you did not feel it anymore. “Ortus Nigenad died thinking it was the only gift he was capable of giving,” you said, “and I have wasted it—like—air.”

  The Resurrecting King took on the expression of a man working out a very difficult and emotionally taxing anagram. He said, “Ortus,” again, but the bile was sputtering up into your throat, your mouth, before the Body passed her hand over your eyebrows and the bridge of your nose and you slipped from his imperial grip. You fell almost senseless to the floor.

  “Ortus Nigenad,” said the Emperor again, almost wondering; but then you knew nothing more, except that you hadn’t thrown up on God, which had to count as consolation.

  3

  THE REVEREND DAUGHTER Harrowhark Nonagesimus ought to have been the 311th Reverend Mother of her line. She was the eighty-seventh Nona of her House; she was the first Harrowhark. She was named for her father, who was named for his mother, who was named for some unsmiling extramural penitent sworn into the silent marriage bed of the Locked Tomb. This had been common. Drearburh had never practiced Resurrection purity. Their only aim was to keep the necromantic lineage of the tomb-keepers unbroken. Now all its remnant blood was Harrow; she was the last necromancer, and the last of her line left alive.

  Her birth had been expensive. Eighteen years ago, in order to wrench a final bud from this terminal axil, her mother and father had slaughtered all the children of their House in order to secure a necromantic heir. Harrow had been created in that hour of pallor mortis, while the souls of her peers were fumbling to escape their bodies, her genesis their ignition of thanergy as they died with a simultaneity her parents had agonised to calculate. None of this had been kept from her. It had been explained to Harrow, year after year, right from the time she knew both when to speak and when to not. This skill came early to Ninth House infants.

  As a child, she was allowed to pull down the coverlet and get into bed only after she had worked her way through forty-five minutes of evening prayers, bracketed by her wretched great-aunts Lachrimorta and Aisamorta. They had been strict with her infant catechism, and their presence was a strong motivation for Harrow to get her prayers exactly right and not start over, as they smelled like incense and tooth decay. She had enunciated clearly—no lisping—devotio
ns of their own devising: The Tomb I will serve till the end of my days, and then see me buried in two hundred graves … which they’d thought sweetly whimsical, just right for a little girl.

  Otherwise, Harrowhark was left completely to her own devices. She would rise well before First Bell and pray in the chapel before they turned on the heating, her fingers much too cold to count her prayer beads, and then she would ensconce herself in one of the libraries with a battery lantern and a blanket and her books. She embarked on her study of necromancy alone: the dead were her mentors and tutors. Harrow had no idea how difficult it was to understand the work of adult necromancers, which meant she did not fear trying to understand it. Her development suffered from neither ego nor apprehension. Her parents would sometimes have her recite her theorems of an evening, or make her conjure ulnar bones from a skeleton ground up to powder; or they would have their elderly marshal, Crux, heave some recent corpse over the top tier to squash right to the bottom, and have her fuse the bones back together blind, through the dermis and meat. Then they would open up the body to see how well or badly she had done, but either way their approval was mostly relief. In her genius, they had received the goods that they had so dearly paid for.

  Crux told her that her parents had been different, once. This must have been before they committed a little light child massacre. Harrow had been dimly interested in this factoid; she could never recall her parents being anything but exhausted, their joy all spent. Her mother rarely spoke, or if she did, addressed all her remarks to their hulking cavalier, a man who looked as though he would weep if he could only figure out how. Her most vivid memory of her mother was of her hands guiding Harrow’s over an inexpertly rendered portion of skull, her fingers encircling the fat baby bracelets of Harrow’s wrists, tightening this cuff to indicate correct technique.

  Her father had been the more voluble of the two. In the evenings he read to his little family, sometimes sermons and sometimes antique family letters. That was another rare memory: the electric light strung up behind her father’s chair, her sat on a three-legged stool next to her mother, her father’s voice a drone unceasing until a touch from his cavalier indicated that he might stop. Harrow would shrug herself inside her black-hooded church robe and practice moulding tiny motes of bone between her finger and thumb, pressing them into soft fingerprints, mentally chopping her body into two hundred relic pieces.

  Then everything changed, abruptly, forever. Harrowhark fell in love.

  * * *

  “Falling” was not the right term, precisely. It was a long process. She more correctly climbed down into love, picked its locks, opened its gates, and breached its inner chamber.

  Her life had been dedicated to the Locked Tomb, and what was interred within had commanded her whole attention since she understood what it was: the comatose corpse that lay in state amid the tatters of the Ninth House. She’d been taught to love the Emperor, who ten thousand years ago had given them all release from a death that none of them had deserved, and to view the Tomb as symbol of his victory and his demise. Her mother and father feared what lay consigned to that locked-up grave. Her tedious great-aunts worshipped it, but in desperation, as though their collective awe might flatter it into sparing God. They had never wanted to open the doors and look upon it. Those doors had opened for the body to be brought in, and they would only open again for the body to come out, in some doom yet to come.

  Harrow was forbidden entry in the same way she was forbidden from going up to the top tier of the drillshaft and taking a hammer to the oxygen-sealant machines. It would be the end.

  Most of her life was spent in silence; there were many moments when she found living—difficult. Tedious. On the worst days, fatuous. Memory now recalled what had happened very bloodlessly, and the details were unimportant. One very bad day—when it seemed as though everyone hated her, and as though this were a completely correct way to feel—with bloodied fists and a bruised heart, she wrote a note explaining her suicide then went and unlocked the door. Unexpectedly, this did not kill her; and what did not kill her made her curious.

  She was much older before she could cross the threshold. It was trapped like all hell. But the traps were Ninth traps, made of bone and grinning skeleton, and she’d been using them herself since she was toddling. In the end, the experience was merely educational. She crossed the cave, which was trapped, and passed the central moat of black water—which was deep, and trapped—and then climbed the island (trapped) to the frozen mausoleum (ridiculously trapped), and when she got there—alive—she could look into the open-faced coffin where lay the reason for her existence.

  God’s victory and death was a girl. Maybe a woman. At the time Harrowhark had not known how to tell, and the gender was only a self-interested guess. The corpse lay packed in ice, wearing a white shift, her hands clasping a frost-rimed sword, and she was beautiful. The formation of her muscles was perfect. Each limb was a carved representation of a perfect limb, each bloodless foot the lifeless and high-arched simulacrum of the perfect foot. Each black and frosted lash lay against the cheeks with perfect still blackness, and her nose—it was the pinnacle of what a nose should be. None of this would have broken Harrow’s spirit except that the mouth alone was perfectly imperfect: a little crooked, with a divot in the lower lip as though someone had softly pressed a dent into the bow with the tip of their finger. Harrow, who had been born for the sole privilege of worshipping this corpse, loved it wildly from sight.

  So the death of God had been Harrow’s death too. She had been careless with her visits. Her parents had … found out … about what she had done, what manner of sin she had committed, and they reacted just as they might have if she had admitted to smashing up the oxygen-sealant machine with a hammer. Faced with apocalypse, they chose to die by their own hands before another death could claim them. They weren’t even angry. It was with a calm and earnest understanding that her mother and father and their cavalier tied five nooses—one for Mother, one for Father, two for Mortus, one for her. Then they hanged themselves with barely a gasp and barely a kick. It would have been better, really, if Harrow had hanged herself up beside them. It would have been best if she had crawled into the tomb beside the woman she loved and let the freezing temperatures take their course.

  But Harrowhark—Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years—Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.

  * * *

  Love had broken her life into two separate halves: the half before she had fallen, and the half afterward. Afterward, she hated to sit in the apse during chant and listen to a weird, thuddering beat disrupt the prayers of the faithful, a distant striking at the back of her head that she had taken for someone being out of time. She heard doors open and close in distant halls where no doors were opening or closing; her body would become very frightened, and her brain very frustrated. In her agonies she would have to sit right beside her ageing marshal Crux, usually while being spoon-fed; he was insistent that she had to eat. And all the while she would demand, Is that real? for half of what she heard. And he could say, Yes, my lady, or No, my lady, and she might be content.

  It killed all her peace. Even in the long dark days she spent wholly alone—in the libraries, or in her laboratory, fingers burnt from handling fatty ashes—she would hear voices just out of her hearing, or see things in her periphery that were not there. It seemed to her that sometimes her hands would grasp her own throat and press up against her windpipe until she saw spots in her vision. She would see dangling ropes; she would forget where she was and wipe out a whole morning’s scholarship with false memory.

  In that first year after her parents’ deaths she often saw the Body, when she was sleeping or when she was waking, and that was relief and frustration both. The Body brought her total peace, but in its presence she lost track of time; she would sit with her hand very close to the dry, dead hand of her obse
ssion, and when she looked up the hours would be eaten away. Or she would check the time and be astonished and discombobulated that it had been only a few minutes. When her pituitary gland kicked in, the Body stopped appearing when she was awake, but the other hallucinations kept on. Harrow was furious that she was doing something so—so pedestrian as to pubesce.

  But as puberty changed her yet again, with hormones or time or both, she was able to regain some semblance of control over her maggot-eaten mind. She prayed often. Her brain took refuge in rituals. Sometimes she fasted, or ate the same thing for every meal, arranged in a specific pattern on her plate, consumed in the same order, for months on end. She wore her paint far beyond the strictures of any nun, wore it in private, sometimes slept in it. She found the sight of her own unpainted face in the mirror impossibly wearisome, monstrous, and nonsensical, somehow faraway and yet heinously attached to herself. Harrow did not often weep, but at times she sat within the shroud of her cot and rocked back and forth with hard, fast motions, often for hours.

  The scholarship grew difficult once she realised belatedly that it was difficult; but that was cured by working harder. She spent sometimes half a month on the same theorem. She moved her mother and father through the House like chess pieces, trying every year to correct their stiff and unnatural gait, sitting them in chapel as her people asked them for guidance she had little idea how to give. But the penitents and devoted of the Locked Tomb were getting old, and she learned that they all wanted to be told the same thing. More often than not she would stand between her parents’ corpses at some death bed, watching one more of her penitents rattle their last as she repeated the words of their final service. They died happy. They loved it. She had a real talent. Harrowhark had attended so many deathbeds, and given so many solemn takes about death and duty, that in the end she started to believe them.