by Tamsyn Muir
This assemblage writhed closer. You were a holy Lyctor: Harrowhark the First, ninth necrosaint to the King Undying, heir to a hard-won power that burnt in you like fusion. It was not arrogance to name yourself one of the most powerful necromancers in the universe. You took one look at that relentless, freakish argument of limbs, and you fled.
You hurled yourself back inside your room and locked the door. You scrabbled inside your mouth—drew blood with your fingernails, bit your tongue—swabbed your reddened saliva on the door in the hasty whorls of a blood ward, and pushed a chair up and beneath the handle, mindlessly. You threw yourself to the ground, your heart rattling the bars of its ribcage prison.
There was nothing but silence. Your body was the greatest source of noise: your chattering breath, your noisily pumping blood, your mashing teeth. Everything else was profoundly dark and still.
And then, from the door, the warded door that should have burst its theorems outward upon even the touch of foreign magic—from the door there came the soft, scraping noise of someone dragging nails down steel. The handle eased downward in its latch, and hit the chair, and stopped.
Great, greasy silence. Then another desperate rattle. And then: nothing.
How long you lay on the cool glassy tiles, forehead pressed into a red welter against clear obsidian glass, one of your fists bunched in the rough knotted fretwork of the rug, you did not know. You could only mark the passing of time when the habitation settings kicked into action and the panels around the room diffused pre-waking light, intended to mimic a circadian sunrise. You were cold all over, shivering in your exoskeleton until the bone cuticles rattled into your skin. At some point you stood, mechanically, and you went and lay back down in bed. There was nothing else you could do.
* * *
It seemed unlikely that you slept. When you thought it was late enough in the notional morning you put on your mother-of-pearl robe and you rapped on Ianthe’s door. It was not late enough; she answered after a long, scuffling minute, with sleep in her eyes and her hair in dilute whey tangles over her neck and shoulders, wearing a bewildering short garment of violet chiffon.
You said instantly: “Septimus is walking.”
It took a moment for her to understand the name that had never been Cytherea’s. After long seconds, recognition flashed in those adulterated blue eyes; you saw understanding replace the grouchy morning crossness; you saw it fade before an overwhelming boredom, and you knew that Ianthe would not help you.
“Tell her I want my arm back,” she said, and slammed the door in your face.
ACT THREE
23
FOUR MONTHS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
YOU WERE AWARE, as a hand thrust into cold water might not notice until too late that the water had begun to boil, that an atmosphere of greater unease had settled over the Mithraeum.
It would have taken an absolute straight-up idiot not to notice though. When you were all called to the interminable dinners for which Augustine hinted you should “dress”—which you took to mean that you should wear your mother-of-pearl robe by way of ritual, and which Ianthe took to mean that she should wear things beneath hers that were not worth looking at, and pin her mass of pale hair on top of her head, and which meant that God never came in a shirt that didn’t badly want a new collar—it became brutally obvious. The Lyctors now ate all their dinners staring at tablets. Sometimes Mercymorn spread open a system map of local space, triangulating things that the elders frowned over and talked about in a way that did not include you or Ianthe. Quite often you two ate dinner in stony silence while, as Ianthe bitterly put it, the adults talked.
You began to find Augustine alone in the training room. He did nothing so pedestrian and comforting as training, but stared—paced—thought about reaching for his rapier, then abandoned the idea and left. Augustine had been in training for the past ten thousand years. You did not know what his idea of training looked like. More often you found Ianthe with him, going through motions with an unresponsive, fat-fingered ham-handedness that was not in keeping with her poise. She always wore an expression of exquisite, hardened surrender on her face, as though to say: You do realise I’m not going to do this?
You only ventured in there yourself far too late into sleeping hours for anyone else to be up. Then you would strip down to your shirt and exoskeleton, and your trousers and your bare feet—and you would hold the two-handed sword in front of you, and lift it up—and point it down—and do a long and unutterably dull series of minute movements, trying to feel normal, trying to understand. You tried hard, in a way that would have broken the heart of any actual swordswoman. If your arms responded more ably now, if you were able to lift, and slowly strike, then it would not save your life at the hands of a Herald, a thing that none of your teachers had yet managed to describe.
“Imagine,” said Augustine meditatively, when you asked, “imagine—the worst bee, but with a blood aspect, if you knew the whole time that it was a multitude of bloods. I’m talking at least three different types of blood, here.”
“The last time I fought one, I did it with my eyes closed,” said Mercymorn in her turn, and finished as though her punchline was a triumph: “When I opened them—they had bled anyway!!”
“Do you know, I have rarely seen the Heralds?” said God, when you finally came to question him. “Whenever they come I am bundled off to a sealed sanctum at the heart of the Mithraeum, so that their insanity can’t touch me. Despite all that soundproofing, I hear them … I always hear them.”
You said, “Lord—”
“Teacher—”
“The Saint of Joy will be active, when we are all in the River,” you said. “And the Saint of Duty, and the Saint of Patience. And Ianthe. Four Lyctors, fighting with their cavaliers’ perfect sword hands. Teacher, is it so sure a thing that I am going to die? I will be dormant, I know, but are they not enough to protect our bodies, as we destroy the brain?”
“Ianthe is far from a perfect sword hand.”
You did not know why you defended her: “She will perform on the day, Teacher. It’s a pose.”
“We cannot afford to pose,” he said, but there was a faint smile at his weary mouth. “Ianthe the First is a continual surprise to me. If I was going to pass out a fourth epithet, I’d call her the Saint of Awe.”
You thought that had not quite suited Naberius, though it was hard to remember the Prince of Ida, these days. He was a face and a set of eyes and very little else. It was as though your brain had formed a scab over everything that had happened to you. But you pressed: “Lord, it’s not certain that I’m going to die.”
He did not correct your Lord, then. In those oil-slick, inconceivable eyes, you saw a flicker of something you did not understand. God said, “Harrowhark, to that, to everything, all I can say is that I live in hope. And that you need to keep handling your rapier.”
So you kept handling your rapier. It was on one of these late nights, coming back to your room with a heavy heart and bare feet, running with sweat, arms screaming in the wrong places, your fingers red and raw beneath their coats of cartilage, that you came to the flesh-pillar atrium before the habitation ring, and noticed that the autodoor to Cytherea’s tomb was shut. It was never shut. Its wounded openness, the thin smell of perpetual roses that always seemed to drift from that terrible monument, was a constant. Now it was closed.
You stood before that door, hearing the quiet injunction of your Emperor to maybe … not. In a very real way, he was correct. You did not understand your fears enough to confront them. You did not even understand if they were real. Back when you were a child and hung up on something you thought you had seen or heard, Crux would say: You saw what you saw, Lady, and the only thing you control now is your reaction thereto. You had seen the corpse walking. Now you would react. The steel of the door was very close to your face, and misted up with your breath.
With one swift movement, you pushed it open.
What confronted you was Ortus the
First, his back bare to you, in a pair of soft flannel sleeping trousers and nothing else, so that you could see the protruding, tumorous knobbles of his spine and the wads of muscle atop his shoulders. Cytherea’s limp corpse was propped upright, her fingers dangling over his forearm, the dead-dove whiteness of her face, half-covered by his own, rosebuds crushed to deep yellow shadows at his feet. His palm supported the exhausted lily stem of her neck; the press of his fingers on that faded skin was so gentle that it left no mark. You, who had been so familiar with his hands in all their violent attitudes, had not thought them capable of that kind of gentleness. It made them seem alien from the rest of the man. And he was …
Crimson heat scoured your neck all the way up to your ears. The Lyctor who so often tried to kill you did not turn around, though you had in a split second already thickened your exoskeleton to double density and slapped big layers of enamel over your heart.
Ortus stiffened to the point that his shoulder blades showed real danger of bursting through his back. He had become one enormous hunch. You were frozen in a welter of adrenaline confusion, ready only for his inevitable murderous blow: you were not ready for the un-Ortuslike tenor of his voice when he said, calmly, back so vulnerably offered to you: “Close the door, and go away.”
You closed the door. You went away.
“I caught the Saint of Duty in the throes of grave lust,” you told Ianthe, about a minute later: she was not asleep either, but sitting up in bed with the lamp on, making complicated notes in a little journal.
“Oh my God,” said the Princess of Ida. She looked enchanted. In the lamplight, the bags beneath her eyes were very pronounced. Two apple cores sat in a perpetual state of perfumed rot by her bedside: her attempts to halt decay had progressed admirably. “The classical vice. Oldest sin in the book.”
“All flesh magicians,” you said coolly, “should be drowned in boiling blood.”
“Don’t tell me the Ninth never—”
“We do not.”
“Ah, but my beautiful naïf—”
“No.”
“Never mind that. Was he actually…?” (Here she made an evil gesture with her hands, which you took a moment to comprehend.) “You know. Waxing necrolagnic? Committing the love that cannot speak its name?”
You told her what you had seen, and she was immediately dismissive and mildly crestfallen.
“Oh, but who hasn’t done that,” said Ianthe. She reopened her small journal; you noted that whatever she was doing involved some quite substantial mathematics. “Dull. You obviously walked in too early. At least now you know who’s been moving her—so to speak.”
She did contentious things with her eyebrows, and then, apparently no longer interested, turned back to her mathematics. “Good night, Harrowhark.”
You were not to be so lightly disregarded. You stood with your sweat cooling inside your shirt and your flesh adhering to the exoskeleton, and said: “The depredations of a bad man do not cause Cytherea to walk.”
Ianthe closed her notepad and rested her pale head briefly against the headboard. “Bad man,” she murmured to herself, and then: “I’d walk out on a date with the Saint of Duty. Nonagesimus, this is no time to interrupt grown Lyctors committing acts that probably seem perfectly normal after ten thousand years with such limited romantic options—though you should hear some of the things Augustine has told me, my God!—nor is it a good time to advertise that you are not merely a failure, but a mad failure.”
“You should not advertise your utter lack of imagination,” you said. “Tridentarius, my position is not so precarious that I am going to ignore things that happen in front of my face.”
“Yes, but are they actually?”
“Don’t presume you know what you’re talking about.”
“Your position is that precarious, my dear,” said Ianthe, and reached over with a long left arm to place her journal on the rightmost table. “Did you know that Teacher asked Mercymorn if they could store you in his chamber when we go after the Beast? Mercymorn said no, they decompress that chamber for a reason, unless he thought it would be nice to asphyxiate you personally?”
You said, “And did you know that Teacher himself thinks you far from a perfect sword hand?” At her expression, you added, “I personally loathe tattletales for the purpose of insult, but it seems to be your main weapon in our conversations.”
Ianthe’s mouth had thinned to a purple slit where, you noticed, the skin was torn. “Those were his exact words?”
“It’s no secret that I’m going to die,” you said. In no way were you resigned to that. You had never died before. “I am most likely lashing out. Nevertheless, those were his exact words.”
She stared off into the distance, her eyes fixed on the huge painting of the long-dead, clothing-optional Lyctor. “God is a dickhead,” she murmured.
You were astonished by the force of your immediate anger. You were amazed by its intensity. You drew your two-handed sword from your back: your wrists weren’t quite in the right position, but it was a good attempt. The sword’s matte, calcified surface sucked in the lamplight, casting strange shadows on her eiderdown. You said, “Do not blaspheme in front of me.”
“Don’t draw on me with that ridiculous thing. You don’t even know where you got it.”
“God gave it to me.”
“And you’ve never asked yourself why?”
At those mere six words, your brain revolted. You felt a hot, thick sensation in the back of your top sinuses that you had not felt in a very long time, never approaching your limits enough for it to occur: a nosebleed. “So tell me why,” you said evenly.
“Can’t,” she snapped. “You ensorcelled my jaw, you fucking psycho shadow vestal! Yes, I worked that one out! So unless I want to do homebrew mandible surgery, I can’t squeal to anyone. And I have thought about homebrew mandible surgery, but I have no idea how far back your curse extends, because I’m not a blackened, tedious little bone witch. Now sheathe your sword; you don’t want to go toe to toe with me.”
You said, “There you are fundamentally wrong.”
“I’d strangle you with your own visceral fat before you raised one shitty skeleton.”
“Try me,” you said. “Oh, try me, Ianthe.”
You stared at each other: you at the foot of her bed, sword as still as you could make it, its weight a comforting and familiar pain—her sitting up in the fallen bedclothes, eyes like ice and frozen ground. You knew how you would do it: she was still fool enough to keep two jewelled candlesticks by her bed, thick with topaz and delicate flecks of polished tarsal, and from these you would smash two ropes of petrous bone straight into either side of her skull. You might run your finger up the inside of your sword blade, curling bone matter from there as though it were butter, fed and strengthened with your own heart’s blood. You might scatter it and thrust squamous pegs of thick phalange through her palms, the fissures between her tibiae and fibulae. At that point you’d get on top of her, use everything you had ever learned from watching Mercymorn the First, and fuse her spine like a hangman’s rope.
Ianthe looked at you, and in the paleness of her skin and in the shadows of her lips was her death, and yours.
Then she rolled over and covered her head with her satin pillow.
“Go ahead. Kill me,” she said, muffled through a thick layer of down and pillowcase. “I have to train with Augustine in less than five hours anyway and I’ve stayed up too late. Death is preferable.”
There was no answer to that, naturally, except to sheath your sword, return to your bedroom, and put yourself to bed, defeated.
24
IT WAS NO SECRET TO YOU, or to anybody in the claustrophobic, smothering schoolroom that was the Mithraeum, that Ianthe’s sword-fighting training was at the end of the line. The Saint of Patience had none left for her. Her ineptitude would have been a negligible problem had it not continued when Ianthe was in the River—had her doubts not gummed up the mechanism of Naberius Tern’s mindless sw
ord-arm. You had watched the submerged Ianthe’s strong, upright, boyish posture flounder as the right arm dropped the sword. A psychological block, certainly, but one projected into the dead soul that stood to defend her body when the mind went voyaging.
There was more pressure on her than on you. The eyes that fell on you were now less critical, because in those eyes you were a woman already dead.
Your eighteenth birthday passed without anyone noticing, even you. One night before you went to sleep you thought to yourself, restlessly: another year. You recalled it as you always did: the memorial to the two hundred who had died seizing, kicking, and choking as their neurotransmitters were poisoned into overdrive. You silently begged them to stay their hands, as you always did. You never asked for forgiveness. Then you slept. Most people would have iced a cake, or something.
It was soon after your seventeenth year passed that you acknowledged a truth you had known for some time: Ortus the First had to die.
His Ninth House name no longer bothered you, now that you knew about Anastasia. It seemed reasonable that the foundress responsible for establishing many of your House’s naming conventions had chosen to honour her fellow Lyctors, in the days before their names were veiled in holy secrecy. It was just a banal and uncomfortable coincidence, as though he’d carried the name of a dead childhood pet.
The Saint of Duty’s death went from option to necessity the day you realised his true power.