Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  Your narrow foyer was a necromancer’s dream: easy to ward, and to ward thoroughly. You had washed the whole little vestibule with a gossamer-thin layer of regrowing ash, and pressed bone of each type into whorls in the walls. On breach, anyone passing through would have their arms ripped from their sockets and their legs whirlpooled down into deep bogs of boiling-hot bone that crept up their bodies like incendiary gel. To follow up, they would be run through with 4,987 sharpened, flexible needles of your own temporal bone: unbreakable, reactive, instant.

  Only an idiot would have stopped there. Your quarters had windows. If you had wanted to invade anyone’s space, you would have put on a haz—you knew a real Lyctor didn’t even need that—crawled over the outside of the habitation ring, and found the inevitable gap in the room’s armour. There were no such gaps in your quarters. You had studied the floor plan and spent hours perched atop a ladder of skeletons, sliding hot gobbets of your blood and spit into the crawlspaces above the wall panels. You had stood at the docking bay and opened the airlock on a sack of bones, and walked back inside with them pattering parallel over the outside hull as you guided them to your windows and warded the plex with them. You had sent them down the plugholes in your pump sink and in the shining white edifice of the tub. You got the beginnings of a tension headache merely from the wards’ reaction to Ianthe Tridentarius visiting your bedroom. If she had noticed the fine bone dust you’d blown all over her clothes—a glitter of thanergy on all her robes—she had not said a word, which made you suspect that she knew and was doing worse to you in secret. You’d found none of her traps, and it made you jittery.

  Naturally, none of your spaces could be considered safe. You slept with your sword in your arms. You often woke yourself up suddenly, to practise how quickly you could throw yourself into action. Without a properly ingested cavalier, you had only yourself to rely on; you had to work nine times harder. But you thought you at least knew your vulnerabilities.

  You were eighteen years old now and a Lyctor of the First House, but in some secret chamber of your heart you clung grimly to the ways of the Ninth. Despite dead Harrow’s insistence that you become a generalist, you were on first instinct a bone magician. Your wards were bone wards; to some extent, blood wards. It was not that you did not account for spirit magicians—you had reasonably warded for everything, for every scenario both certain and uncertain: but your magic was at its heart still the magic of a Ninth House necromancer. This was your downfall.

  You were in the bath when it happened. The Mithraeum’s quaint bathrooms had no sonic appliances. You could only bathe in water, which you had grown to accept. Ianthe openly enjoyed it, and kept saying you weren’t running it hot enough; but you did not quite believe that hot water wasn’t injurious. You bathed in a few centimetres of water somewhat below blood temperature, wrapped in your exoskeleton and behind your multiplicity of bone wards, and for some benighted reason you considered yourself safe.

  The central ward in your bathroom was near the light fixture, where the protruding light made the ceiling tiles fragile and noncontiguous. You did not notice anything amiss until you saw fine grey grains in your bathwater, until you cupped this water in your palm, thinking it was soap, or that you were unusually dirty. Even when you saw the soft trickle of dying, pulverized bone drifting down from your ceiling ward, you still did not fully comprehend.

  The milled bone lay in your hands, unresponsive and inert. Only when you tried to join it together did you realise it was dead, in the way only the oldest bones in the most historical part of the monument of Drearburh were dead: the bones whose remnant thanergy had trickled out of them over nearly ten thousand years, like water from a pinhole in a bucket, leaving behind calcium dust too far gone to answer a necromancer. If the bones interred in the Mithraeum had been subject to time’s full ravages, not stalled by the gentle touch of the Prince Undying, only their most ancient stratum would have resembled the specks in your hands.

  It took perhaps five seconds from speck, to trickle, to realisation: your wards had been destroyed. And then you heard a crash from the foyer—and then your bathroom door exploded open.

  Your immediate reaction was to cocoon yourself in a thick shell of tendon-fused bone. This would have been a good trick if it had worked. Nothing responded. Your exoskeleton slid off your body as though embarrassed by you. The bone studs in your ears were numb. The bone chips you kept tucked in niches throughout the bathroom did not twitch as you pulled on them. Every bone in reach was dormant and immobile. You were far more naked than if you had simply taken off all your clothes, which you had in fact also done. And the Saint of Duty stood in the doorway with his spear, and his sword, and his tender green eyes in his hard concrete face, as though your wards were nothing.

  He drew back his arm and hurled his spear at your heart. You flung yourself so violently to the right that the entire tub swayed and tipped onto its side, with an enormous porcelain crack and a rush of tepid water that sluiced across the tiles to lap against the toes of his boots. The sword you had balanced across the bath, its bone scabbard flaking away in chunks like the candied coating from a sweet, clattered onto the floor. You grabbed for it but he stepped forward and kicked it away.

  You were grovelling in half a centimetre of soapy water and gritty skeletal residue at the feet of your assassin. The spear he had thrown, and the sword you could barely use, were out of your reach. Your layers of traps and contingency plans had been rendered abruptly useless. You were soaking wet, and you were naked.

  It was probably desperation that saved your life. You had trained your whole necromantic career to move for space: to fight from a distance. The Lyctor must have anticipated that. He had seen you do it before. He did not anticipate you throwing yourself at him with the only biddable bone you had left, which was your own. Great spurs burst through the heels of your hands from your carpal bones, and you slashed, wildly, at his chest, at his face, at the arm holding the crimson-ribboned rapier. You had extended your curved, bloodied talons of trapezoid and capitate into him, through the fabric of his shabby shirt, into the meat of his pectoral muscles, before he bounced your head back against the doorjamb. The back of your skull smashed into the steel casing, but he was falling back, and he was taking you with him. As Ortus staggered over the threshold into the bedroom you had a split second’s perception of your broken wards lying in heaps and desiccated clumps by the door, your regenerating ash all dried up on the threshold like so many ancient clags.

  He dropped his sword to wrench your claws out of his chest, and you understood what he had done. He took your bloody spurs between his fingers, and the blood fell away into powder as he stripped away the thanergy. He did not absorb it or try to turn it back on you; he simply undid it, with the dismissive ease of upending a jug of water over a drain. The spikes of living bone, freshly grown from your own body, faded in seconds into brittle twigs. They snapped off in his hands and he tossed them aside.

  You were dazed. You were horrified. The sword was in his hand again, vaulted neatly back into his grip by the blood streaming down his arm. He was too close to bring the blade to bear, so he simply swung the butt hard into the side of your face. Your cheek staved in; you felt your jaw splinter, and a couple of teeth tumbled loose in your mouth like ragged little dice. You staggered away with the force of the blow—he stepped clear and sliced inward and down, opening you somewhere under the ribs—and you spat in his face. The blood sprayed feebly from your lips and spattered to the floor.

  The teeth, on the other hand, hung in the air for a moment, blossoming into perfect four-pronged flowers of sharp enamel, each one angled toward a verdant eye. You shot those teeth forward like bullets. They flew as you fell sideways, your balance lost. You could feel the depression fracture at the back of your skull; you could feel your brachial arteries spraying, panicked.

  Your collapse against the wall meant you did not see what happened next. Neither, however, did he. There was an unpleasant, wet sound as tooth met e
ye.

  Ortus did not cry out in pain. You might have respected that, once. He merely turned away—his sword in his hand and the spear dragging behind him—and exploded back out through your ravished front door, your untidy, ward-strewn foyer. You were left slick with bathwater, wet with blood, half-dead and dismayed on the floor outside your bathroom.

  The injuries could be seen to. Arteries could be stanched, then snapped back together. Meat could be sewn up and skin made whole. Dentine was easily reconstructed, and so was enamel, though you might have to re-form your jaw a few times before your bite was correct. Nothing cracked in your skull had driven itself into your brain, and the bleeding could be corrected. But your peace was gone, forever.

  The Saint of Duty could bypass your wards at any time. The Saint of Duty was a thanergy void. The Saint of Duty was the ultimate nemesis of a bone adept. You would never be able to sleep again.

  It was at this point that someone, obviously drawn by the noise from down the corridor, tiptoed over the mess at your front door and peered inside. You did not have to feel her presence to know it was her: you knew the sound of her shoes.

  “Harrow?” Ianthe ventured, from somewhere near the door. Then she obviously stopped and saw you naked, bloodied, flayed in your own anguish, with soapsuds still on your feet. You hallucinated that you could smell her: sweat, musk, vetiver.

  You saw your probable future clearly. You had not until that point understood the danger.

  If Ianthe Tridentarius knelt beside you then, no matter with what sugary contempt or filigreed Third condescension, you would press your diminished bloody terror into her; you would creep naked into her lap, shamelessly, and weep. You would crawl like a worm to whatever clinging scrap of solace she would give you. All your slithering, degraded desperation for condolence you would give to your sister Lyctor with a brazen thirst that you would never come back from. She would be your end, as surely as the hammer to the oxygen-sealant machine of your childhood. You would have reached for her with the mindless desire of an infectious disease. You would have whored yourself to her as necrosis to a wound.

  So maybe it was for the best that after a pregnant pause the Princess of Ida said: “Wow! Not how I imagined this happening, at all,” and you heard her hasty footsteps retreat, away, back down the corridor whence she came. Then she was gone.

  You lay prone on the cool black tiles, staring up at the smears on the ceiling where your wards had been—dazed and despairing, nearly too dead to sew yourself back up. In the back of your head you heard the Secundarius Bell pealing, pealing, extents beyond any Ninth sacred composition, and never called by any Tomb ringer.

  Aloud, you said through swollen lips: “The Saint of Duty must die.”

  And on the bed, the Body said, “Yes.”

  25

  YOUR LETHAL OATH WAS not reflected in any more general solemnity in the Mithraeum. Despite the apocalypse you had suffered, not much seemed to change. Everyone was far too busy to care. The next time you sat down to talk to Teacher, your heart in your throat and your tea stubbornly undrunk, he did not even mention it. Surely he knew. Surely he must have known everything. You were too prideful to beg salvation, but too stupid not to blurt, as a diversion from your own panic: “Lord, I saw the Saint of Duty kissing the body of Cytherea the First.”

  Part of his biscuit dropped off in his tea. He looked at it with genuine consternation, then at you with equally genuine consternation, then back at the biscuit. “Harrow—Harrowhark, I hate to ask, but are you certain?”

  Even God distrusted you. “Teacher, I swear by the Locked Tomb.”

  “I wouldn’t swear by that in this instance,” he murmured, and took his dented teaspoon to fish out a quivering and deliquescent glob of ginger biscuit. Then he looked at you. There were sleep marks beneath his eyes, he was not wearing his halo of infant phalanxes and pearl-coloured leaves, and his hair looked only hastily brushed. He ran one hand through it, as though conscious of your critical gaze. “Well,” he said, eventually, “that’s unfortunate.”

  “Is it not a sin?” You knew you sounded like a quisling. You knew you sounded like a prattling gossipmonger. What you really wanted to say was: Lord, I was in my bathtub, and he drank my wards dry of thanergy, and I burst his eyeballs before he could destroy me. I have not slept in forty-eight hours. I asked Mercymorn how best to stimulate my own cortisol, to keep me awake. Lord, she did, and I fear I have done something to my hypothalamus. “Don’t you think it’s strange?”

  “Only in that the closest thing to interest Ortus ever showed in anybody was in Pyrrha, and in the criminals he hunted,” said the Emperor of the Nine Houses. “When he kicked that Edenite commander out an airlock, it was like seeing a man on his wedding day. Not exactly romance though … Harrow, over ten thousand years I’ve known that man, and he is legendarily unamorous. I have watched six other Lyctors carry out a myriad’s worth of inadvisable love affairs with one another, because it is a very long time to be alone, but never him. He was unassailable. I won’t believe he’s doing anything to Cytherea. Everyone liked her, he liked her, but there’s a huge leap between liking and—corpse compulsion.”

  You stared, feeling mildly drunk and unutterably pitiful, at your repeatedly uneaten biscuit.

  Teacher said quietly, “You must think us all a depraved set of immortal criminals.”

  You said nothing. He pressed, “Harrow, do something normal. Learn how to make a meal. Read a book. Go ahead and prepare—our lives revolve around us all preparing … but take the time to rest. Have you slept lately?”

  It was the first time you realized God could not understand you.

  And nobody cared, and nobody paid you the slightest bit of attention, including the Saint of Duty, who was as whole, and as normal, and as two-eyed as ever. You had not held out much hope that you had done anything permanent. The only surety that it had even happened was the lasting smell of damp on your carpets.

  So you went to Ianthe, and you asked her how to make soup.

  “Oh, it’s easy,” said the Princess of Ida breezily. Despite Augustine’s increasing critiques she showed no signs of temper, as might have been anticipated; in fact she seemed to get more carefree with every failure. “You cut up an onion, burn it at the bottom of the pot, put in a few vegetables, and then some meat. It won’t taste like anything, so put in a few teaspoons of salt, and then it’ll taste like a few teaspoons of salt.”

  In obedience to the Emperor, you made soup. You had never seen anybody cook before. You did not like it. There were technical manuals on the subject in a kitchen drawer, and you pored over those, rather than attempting Ianthe’s air on the theme of salt. By the evening of the third day after your interrupted bath, you had not slept for eighty-six hours, but you had read a book, and you had made soup three times. During sleeping hours you lay beneath your bed, in the dark, hardly breathing, staring up at the dustless ribs of the steel mattress slats—you prayed to the corpse of the Locked Tomb, or you said to yourself, “Oh, God! Oh, God! Oh, God!” until it slurred together on your tongue and joined the orchestra of whispers that thrummed between your ears, waiting for the assault that did not come.

  It was also on the third day post-Ortus that the tension in the Mithraeum gained weight and sharpness, like salt water forming crystals. This had nothing to do with you. It was the countdown that Augustine had issued to Ianthe.

  “Five more days,” he had said to her. You knew, because he had said it over breakfast, right in front of you and Mercy. “You’ve five days left, my chick. If you don’t start using that sword arm properly by then, I shan’t bother to teach you a damn thing more. I’m not interested in charity cases. If I were, I’d be teaching Harrow.”

  In another lifetime you might have been icily furious, or at the very least chagrined. In this one, you were simply looking at your knife, and your fork, and your spoon, and trying to remember which did what. The spoon, with its concave pit, was probably for transferring liquids. In its back you caught sig
ht of Ianthe, who had put her colourless chin in her hand and was leaning her head into it, as though listening without much interest to a bedtime story.

  “As you will it, brother.”

  Everyone was snappish and cross—except Ianthe, and except you. You drifted through the Mithraeum with your great sword on your back and your hand never far from the end—pommel—of your rapier. And you made soup.

  Two days after Augustine’s ultimatum, perhaps impressed with your newfound understanding of soup or hungry for social cohesion, a frazzled God asked you to make everyone dinner. You opened more of the recipe books—you spent some time cleaning out your weights and measures, and picking through the warehouse-sized supply rooms for the most appropriate ingredients—and, for a long time, you locked yourself in the bathroom, to do what you had to do. One hundred and twenty-six hours. You no longer felt pain. Sometimes your jaw rattled to itself, but it was almost musical.

  That night you made soup more carefully than ever. The recipe said it had to cook for a long time. You paced up and down the kitchen, distracted and startled by lights as the air grew steamy and a little sweet-smelling. When the alarm sounded to say it was done you nearly screamed. It took you a while to turn it off. You tested the result of your labour, after a moment’s hesitation: you still hated strong flavours, and it took you a while to understand tastes. The soup did not taste like anything very specific, but you did not add Ianthe’s teaspoons of salt.

  You transferred it to a big tureen, and when you all sat down around the table, the Emperor served everyone, like he always did: on those first few days in the Mithraeum you had been terrified by the idea of the God of the Nine Houses serving you food, but it was just his way. He was pleased with you. He smiled that rueful, dented smile, and he rested his hand on your shoulder, very lightly, when he filled your bowl. “As I said, Harrowhark,” he said. “Make a meal. Read a book. It’s the little things…”