Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  “It’s great, isn’t it?” she said to Harrow, by way of hello. She had a sweet, modulated voice, only a trifle breathy. “It’s a pulmonary drain. It goes all the way down to my lungs.”

  “I have never seen such a thing before,” admitted Harrow.

  “You wouldn’t have,” said the Seventh necromancer rapturously. “He came up with it, when he was fifteen.”

  It seemed too stupid for Harrowhark to believe, but there could be no ambiguity in that woman’s gesture. Her paper-skinned hand pointed to one of the faceless corpses, the one without a rapier. It oughtn’t to have surprised her anymore that the relationships between every other scion of the Nine Houses seemed intimate, or incestuous, or familiar, or antipathic. She did not feel left out. She merely felt dislocated as Abigail said, “Are you sure it’s him, Dulcie?”

  “Give me a minute,” said Dulcie, apparently, though who would have let themselves be called Dulcie unless faced with water torture was a question Harrow did not want the universe to answer. “I took a swab from the doorknob—I’ve got two prints, so if they correlate, that will tell us something…”

  The grossly named Dulcie sat back down in the chair, and her cavalier pushed her alongside one corpse, and then the other. Harrowhark watched her work. She gently grated a bit off the heel of each stiffening hand—she took a minute sliver off each thigh, unbuttoning both sets of trousers without a blush or grimace—she cleaned under the fingernails (“Just for bacterial thalergy, you know”), and, in the end, sighed.

  “The one on the left’s Cam, the one on the right’s Pal,” she said, proving her desire to saddle the world with diminutives. “Did the Sleeper get them?”

  “Only by assumption,” said Harrowhark, while Abigail’s dolt of a husband said, “I bloody hope so.”

  “Magnus,” Abigail said, a touch disapprovingly.

  “Well, if the Sleeper didn’t, that’s two maniacs with an ancient weapon and a love of blowing off faces, dear,” said Magnus.

  Maniac did not seem apt. The first death was maniac. Deuteros was riddled with far more holes than necessary. This had been a simple execution. The effects were grisly. It would be difficult ever to get a clear picture of what Sextus’s and Hect’s faces had looked like, as they were now sprayed indiscriminately across the back wall of the mortuary. From what Harrow had been able to reconstruct, and the relative time stamps of the deaths, it looked as if both representatives of the Sixth House had stood quietly with their backs to the wall, about an arm’s length apart from each other, and had their faces forcibly removed from very short range. First went one; the second had waited; then the other.

  Harrow said, “The projectile exited out the back of the skull, and we haven’t been able to dislodge it from the wall. Fragments suggest a similarity. There is reasonable doubt, and then there’s unnecessary caution. I say the Sixth were killed by the same entity that killed Deuteros.”

  “A thesis I agree with,” said Ortus heavily. “The Sleeper, who sleepeth not. Perhaps a better name would have been.… the Waker.” (She searched her cavalier thoroughly for any evidence of humour, but found none, as per usual.) “It lies in an impervious coffin. It kills with a legendary weapon. What can we do against such a supernatural assault?”

  The dreadfully named Dulcie was stroking a soft, wet lock of very dark hair between thumb and forefinger, quite close to the ruined ear of Camilla Hect. “The only thing you can ever do, when faced with an enemy too great for yourself,” she said. “Fight like a trapped animal in a sack.”

  “I agree,” said her bronze statue of a cavalier. “Better that we make the first move. What is impervious? What is coffin?” (Harrow was astounded to hear the older man beside her mutter, “An adjective and a noun.”) “I say we muster all able-bodied cavaliers for an initial assault.”

  “And die,” suggested Ortus ponderously.

  “Better not to die as Deuteros and Sextus and Camilla the Sixth have died,” said the man. “If you think of the enemy as unassailable, shadow-priest, then the battle is lost already.”

  Then this bronze statue cleared his throat, and added:

  “I held to the faith of my fallible flesh;

  Why should I think of the irradiating star?”

  Harrow’s cavalier swung his head to confront this act of spoken poetry. He looked like a man who had stood on the bailey, beheld the enemy at his gates, and found them manifold and terrible. He stared as though the Seventh cavalier had revealed himself to be the Sleeper, done awful and inadvisable acts with Ortus’s mother, and compared Matthias Nonius to two shits.

  “And that is how you would have your master end,” said her black-swaddled swordsman, “with her cavalier filled with shot, before a box that does not open?”

  “Interesting hypocrisy, from a black cavalier of the Ninth sepulchre,” said his equally tedious opposite.

  “All right, gentlemen,” said Magnus Quinn, with a slightly forced cheer. “Protesilaus, if I’m not wrong? I’m not? Good— Respectfully, I don’t agree with either of you. Ninth, you’re too good a man to roll over and wait for another death. Seventh, the last time I attacked a box I couldn’t open, it was my birthday and my wife had tied the ribbon too tightly. Let’s get everyone on side, inasmuch as that’s possible. Duchess Septimus. The Reverend Daughter. Lieutenant Dyas. United we stand, divided we fall, or so the saying goes.”

  “I don’t know how much I can do,” confessed Dulcie, who was most likely Duchess Septimus, and who had wrinkled her nose when a fat drop of rain had fallen on it. The gleaming Protesilaus thrust the umbrella over her head. “I’ve … I didn’t really prove myself … there was nothing much to prove, on Rhodes. When I came here I thought it might be my chance to do something.”

  She finished this rather helpless little speech by playing with a fold on her virginal white skirts. Harrowhark said bluntly, “Listen to your first instinct. There’s a tube in your chest, and you can barely walk.”

  “I’ve felt heaps better since I got here,” Dulcie said defensively. “I’ve coughed a few times, but it’s mainly for show, isn’t it, Pro?”

  “Do not mistake the thaw for the spring.

  Our bud is not yet certain,”

  quoth her cavalier.

  Harrowhark deliberately did not watch for the hot flash of murder in her own cavalier’s eyes, though it at least leavened his thick, porridgy sadness. It must have been traumatic to see his only cultivated personality trait co-opted by someone who looked like the hero of his very own epics. It was more interesting to look at Abigail Pent—to look at those slender, workaday hands turning over the forearms and elbows of the body that was apparently Palamedes Sextus, examining. “No defence wounds,” Pent murmured. “Just like Judith … I wonder.”

  The wind had picked up. It suddenly screamed shrilly over the glass-covered, vine-choked roof, bringing bullet sprays of hard rain in its wake. For a moment, Abigail shuddered. Then she straightened up and clapped her hands together, as though she led a class of unruly small children. “We’re all in this together,” she said, which was a typically Fifth assumption. The Ninth didn’t think anyone was in anything together, or if they were, they all had to disperse as soon as humanly possible to avoid splash damage. “I am beginning to suspect I know where the danger lies. Or at least, I’ve got a perfectly baseless assumption, and every scholar knows that this is where you begin. Dulcie—Lady Dulcinea, do you mind if I ask you to get Silas Octakiseron with us? He’s neither to hold nor to bind to me, but he might listen to you.”

  “Fine,” said the woman in the chair, drying her nose carefully with her crochet necktie, so as not to disturb her shunt. “I don’t love you for asking, but I won’t say that the renowned Abigail Pent asked something of me and I didn’t do it. And you’ve been kind to Cam and Pal. I’ll go.”

  Abigail said, “Magnus, will you ask the lieutenant—” (“Anything for you, even that,” he said promptly.) “—and, Reverend Daughter, if you can, when you can, Coronabeth Tridentarius.
And her sister, of course,” she added, though Harrowhark thought that addition a bit belated. “With the cavalier. Again, if you can. I haven’t been able to check … I’ll get any leftovers. Ask everyone to leave the facility alone, to come together. And find out whose room doesn’t leak,” she added, struck by inspiration, “so we can put down mattresses, as—I tell you for free—we’re flooded.”

  It was left to the cavaliers to transfer the faceless body of Camilla Hect back into the frozen morgue—Abigail had removed all of the cavalier’s effects from her pockets, and was brooding over them like a crossword—and the intubated flesh necromancer wheeled herself over to the grisly remains of the skinny Sixth boy. He was a perfectly normal sight, except from the neck up.

  “Is this how it happens, Lady Pent?” she asked soberly.

  Abigail picked up a worn leather strap that must have belonged to a clockwork watch face, and said gently: “No. It’s not.”

  “Does it get—better than this? Do you know?”

  This did not seem to Harrow like a question that could ever be answered. She did not fully understand it. But the Seventh did love questions that were as beautiful as they were unanswerable. This oblique sally did not get a response from the other woman, who had taken off her glasses to examine a crisscrossed piece of wax and a fragment of darning thread. Harrowhark felt bounden to look at the things they had taken from the Master Warden’s pockets: a scrap of soft cloth that you might wipe your glasses with, a pen, a little fold-out examining lens, a crumpled-up piece of flimsy. When the cavaliers came to bear away the Warden (less heavy than his cavalier: only Magnus and the Seventh, Protesilaus, bore him, with Ortus hovering on the sidelines), the chair-bound girl gave a woeful little sigh.

  “Oh, goodbye!” she called out suddenly, to the corpse borne aloft. “Goodbye, Palamedes, my first strand—goodbye, Camilla, my second … One cord was overpowered, two cords could defend themselves, but three were not broken by the living or the dead.”

  Harrowhark suddenly felt something, in her core, though she did not know precisely what it was. Somehow in Canaan House her ability to feel had been blunted, leaving only a sense of dislocated longing, a bizarre yearning as though flipping through the pages of a book for a proverb she remembered but could not find. She focused on what was in her hands, instead of on a stranger’s farewell to strangers.

  The piece of flimsy was rolled up so tightly that it resembled a kind of fat pill. She took off her gloves, and with the edges of her fingernails—bitten to the quick, and never much help—she started to prise open one wrinkled corner. She was thoroughly surprised when a deep shadow fell over her: when her cavalier primary laid one black-gloved hand down on her naked ones.

  “My Lady Harrowhark,” whispered Ortus, “perhaps … maybe you shouldn’t … in case.”

  “You presume overmuch,” she snapped.

  He withdrew. “I have often thought so,” he said sadly.

  By the time she swept into the corridor, the rain driving through the holes in the roof and the walls and lashing in with gusty, bad-smelling sprays, Ortus three-quarters of a step behind her, she had nearly gotten the whole thing open. She opened it, hummocked and humped all over with little rills from being over-folded, and she read:

  HIM I’LL KILL QUICK BECAUSE SHE ASKED ME TO AND BECAUSE THAT MUCH HE HONESTLY DESERVES BUT YOU TWO MUMMIFIED WIZARD SHITS I WILL BURN AND BURN AND BURN AND BURN UNTIL THERE IS NO TRACE OF YOU LEFT IN THE SHADOW OF MY LONG-LOST NATAL SUN

  “It is a drawing of the letter S,” said the deep, solemn voice from over her shoulder, and she realized she had stopped midstride. “The letter in question is constructed from six short marks stacked vertically three by three. There are two triangles on the top and bottom, which, along with some diagonal strokes, form a calligraphic S.”

  “Nigenad,” said Harrow, without turning. “I did not ask you.”

  “Three people are dead, my Lady Harrowhark,” said her cavalier. “One ranked Cohort necromancer. Two scions of the enigmatic Sixth House, quick in learning and wisdom if not in martial prowess. Am I to act only on your command, when the Sleeper comes for me?”

  “Were you planning to do anything other than lie down and die?” she said, waiting for rage; dying for rage; hoping for the simulacrum of rage, if nothing else. “What do you think you can do, Ortus? Did you have a tactic, beyond stopping bullets with your body?”

  “It would be within the family character, I agree,” said Ortus, meditatively. “My father died, simply because your mother and father asked him to. He took his own life when your parents handed him the rope, though he had a wife at home and, if he acknowledged it, a son.”

  Harrow lowered the flimsy more out of instinct than intent. She found herself turning around to look Ortus full in the face, as best she could with the umbrella over his head, and the hood half-plastered to his scalp with rain despite the oilcloth’s best efforts, and his painted skull now a sad melange of alabaster grey and black. She looked at his underslept, roly-poly face, his deep black Drearburh eyes. They were not true black, as she had usually thought: in the shadow she could finally see a deep earthy undertone, like the ploughed-up additive ground in the planter fields. His grown-up features were suddenly ancient to her. She wanted to panic, to feel the icy knives of despair.

  “You knew,” she said. “You knew the whole time that Mortus the Ninth died at their command.”

  Now Ortus’s face changed. It slid a second time into paint-splattered, black-irised, hooded contempt. He looked at her as though she were tedious. He looked at her as though he did not know who she was. His contempt made the doors she heard in her ears slam in an orchestra of unfathomable sound. He looked at her as though she were a squalling infant; as though she had not spoken, but rather opened her mouth and vomited.

  “Harrow,” he said curtly, “you are not the only person who can add up two and two, and arrive at four.”

  Any reply she might have made was aborted by a sudden gust of rain through a broken window. A curtain of murky water splattered through the glass maw. The water carried with it a handful of flashing brown-and-steel objects, which fell in a tumbled heap on the rotten Canaan House corridor carpet. When they came to rest, she and Ortus stared down at a collection of large, rusted pipette needles, the hard plex type with measurement markings up the side.

  “Would you like to know if I can see them also?” Ortus asked humbly, after a long rain-swept pause.

  22

  THE NIGHT AFTER YOU killed your thirteenth planet, you were beset by a dream wherein you sat down to dinner opposite the Body. This was far better than the normal travails of dinner, with its partakers all wearing the filmy mother-of-pearl Canaanite robes that clung to Mercymorn like starlight, turned Augustine ethereal, gave Ianthe jaundice, and rendered you a sacrificial parsnip; that trial where, if you did not eat enough, the Emperor of the Nine Houses told you kindly, “Try just a few more spoonfuls, Harrowhark,” as Ianthe repressed not her smirks. But in the dream you wore your thick dark vestments of the Ninth House, and sat only opposite the monstrous dead of the Locked Tomb, who wore the shabby black shirt and trousers of some particularly slovenly penitent. Both of you wore the sacramental skull paint, and you talked comfortably of very little—yet it felt as though it meant very much. And nobody made you eat.

  Then the Body looked at you with those direct, incalculable eyes, and she said: “Harrowhark. Wake up.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Wake up. Now.”

  You opened your eyes to the ceiling the long-lost Anastasia had never seen, twisted in the bedclothes she had never slept in. The thickly insulated blackout hangings covering the plex windows projected the high ceilings into an eternity of shadows, and you could barely perceive your hands in front of your face. You pushed away the coverlet. You were cold beneath your nightgown, which had been short in the leg when you went away to Canaan House and was a sorry affair now, and your exoskeleton scraped quite loudly in that black silence as you took the b
one-sheathed sword from its loverlike position next to you on the bed. You held it with the swaddled blade flat on your shoulder, your hands cupping the bottom of the hilt—still the pommel—and you did not strap on the rapier that the Emperor had given you.

  It was lighter outside your rooms, in the corridor. The low yellow panel lights cast warped, skeletal shadows up and down the memorials of the Mithraeum. They had been turned down to faint blue-hued ambers to acknowledge the hours of sleep, and gave texture more than vision. To your Drearburh eyes, however, the passageway was flooded with light. That was why you saw her so clearly.

  She stood at the curve of the passage, perhaps fifteen metres from you. She struck weird shadows in that low halo of cold yellow, the softly gleaming whites of her shift glowing like a shaft of light through green water. There were still smudges of petal in her pale brown curls, and her eyes were too dark to see, but you recalled their nightmarish blueness. Cytherea looked at you, turned toward you, and began to walk.

  That walk! That shuffling, disconcerting, slithering walk! The body flung its arms before it for momentum, the legs stiff-thighed and lock-kneed, right-side arm moving in time with right-side leg, ridiculous, appalling. Those fixed dead fingers caught a skeletal arm wrapped in gold foil, amethysts studded like so many eyes between the knucklebones, and it clattered to the ground, and Cytherea tripped over it—without the head losing its tracking focus on you, those unblinking eyes adhered to yours—and the body splayed and juddered on the ground. Then the corpse began moving inchworm-fashion, pushed forward by the action of the legs, the forearms banging on the tiles, thrusting the blessed bones of some fallen faithful out the way as though unnoticed. It was as though a magnet were stuck in the meat, a magnet that craved some polar force within you.