Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  Ianthe struck again and again. The wound kept healing over—the skin sewed itself back up even as she pulled the blade away. Blood coalesced around the seam in a serried row of teeth, of needles, and these she used to try to lever herself apart, but her elbow wobbled beneath her and she collapsed on the sodden carpet. She dropped the knife from nerveless fingers. She slapped that almost-imperceptible seam, then again. Then she gave a low and broken moan, and fell over onto her side, curled foetally inward.

  Your mind was clear. Your thoughts were warm and tidy, as though they had been put through the sonic cleaner. It was with very little trepidation that you dropped to your knees beside her. You rolled her onto her back—and she looked at you with terrified eyes, half-blue, part-brown, with fragments of lavender. Her mouth was an ugly twist, contemptuous of herself. You had seen that expression a million times in your mirror, but never on her.

  “Harrow,” she said unsteadily. She was trembling.

  “You’re a fool,” you said.

  “How I crave your honeyed words,” said Ianthe. Her mouth was almost purple from the pain. “How I love your tender compassion.”

  This was rank hypocrisy, but you were too focused to care. You said, “It needs to come off all at once.”

  “What—”

  “Get something to bite down on.”

  She looked at you, her eyes a wild confusion of colours; she lay spread before you in her hideous buttercup nightgown, which was now a parti-coloured mix of gold and pink and red like a liver. After a moment, she nodded: she ripped a bloodied swatch of yellow lace from her skirt, and she compressed it into a tight cylinder and pressed it between her teeth. Her teeth were very white, and her tongue was wet and red.

  You raised yourself up on your knees, swaying a little, and you pictured her for what she really was: an exquisite conglomeration of bone beneath skin and meat, pocketed in the middle with soft treasures of parenchyma and muscle. When you placed your hands upon her ribs you were able to see her skeleton as though she had shyly undressed herself for you, as though in the orange hues of the daytime light she’d sloughed capillaries and glands off the budding rose of her scapula. You saw the curve of her clavicle, bowed softly as the line of some drooping bellflower.

  It was so easy. Now that you had slept, everything was easy. It was as though you had been walking in a lead casing, and now you were free. As before any difficult work, you prayed out loud: prayed for the rock to go unrolled and for the closed eye and the stilled brain; prayed for a woman you loved to assist you in disrobing a woman you did not, but whose bones you would sacramentally adore. You kneeled on her thighs and unsheathed a great shank of bone from your knuckles—Ianthe bucked, just the once—and you sharpened the edge to a translucent, liquid thinness.

  With one cut you took the arm: you scythed through the knob of ligament and scapula and removed the humerus. Ianthe screamed through her mouthful of lace. The blood came like a spring tide over your front, and you felt it soak through your clothes and trickle down your navel. You cauterized the meat all at once, pinching the vessels closed, reaching down to press your fingers against where the humeral head had been. Then you covered over the gap with spongiform bone—to give you a platform to work on—and you spun her shoulder beneath your fingers, and it squirmed at your touch. Ianthe’s screams had subsided to ravenous whimpers.

  Her arm had to be her own. That was no difficulty. You coaxed fine webby strands of red marrow from the wing of bone that girdled her shoulder, and from that—from minute osteoblastic grit—from the mazelike netting of the bone that swaddled the sponge and the marrow—you remade her. The humerus was child’s play, and you took genuine pleasure in socketing it into the lovely cup of the radius, the forked embrace of the ulna. Her trochlea you sculpted while holding your breath, easing it into its wet white housing.

  The hand was almost an indulgence. The skeleton recalled itself. You did not need to know so intimately the lover’s knot of carpal bones—the long tooth of her lunate, the jutting promontory of her trapezium—nor did you need to know the arch of the distal phalange, the shaft, the base. The new bone sprang avidly to meet your fingers, as though you were lovers joining hands after a long time apart. Your role with the bones was more guide than artist. The artistry would come at this point, and you warned her: “This will hurt.”

  Ianthe rocked upward.

  You knew your limits. You had understood what to do with her body innately, and it was not what she wanted, but you thought it would suffice. You blistered the bone in tendons only where you thought it was necessary for range of motion. You bubbled nerves into that shining periosteum where nerves had never been before. Not a full complement, but just enough. Bone would call to bone, and nerve would call to brain. When you trailed your fingers up that new trunk of electrified humerus, she almost spat out the chunk of lace—when you pressed your palm into her shoulder and plugged her in, she sobbed, rhythmically, beneath you.

  What was left at the end was not an arm. It was a construct: a sectioned skeleton, defleshed. When you sat down beside her you were chilly with sweat and pleasantly tired, as though you had run a good distance. You watched as Ianthe took the saliva-sodden wad of nightgown from her teeth, and as, shaking, she raised her new arm up to the light: the warm electric lamplight made her naked arm bones an iridescent gold.

  The old arm lay on the carpet, abandoned and dead, looking a little sorry for itself. You said, “I didn’t bother about the meat.”

  Ianthe said wonderingly, “But I’ve got some feeling in it.”

  “Most of the nervous glands are in your elbow.”

  “Why even—”

  “You have worked out that the Lyctoral healing process is dependent on your nerve fibres?”

  “But you don’t—”

  “I lack entirely what you all have,” you said, “and have had to work out a replacement. I watched, and compared. In the beginning I thought maybe I could implant the process in myself … but it’s not just a matter of nerves, even if those signal the reconstruction. I thought if I experienced enough pain, something might kick in to save me. It didn’t.”

  She spread her rightmost finger bones wide, then back, experimentally making a fist. You said, “You will still need a mat of tissue or cartilage on the palmar bones, to hold the sword. Think of it as a glove.”

  Ianthe rolled away from you, damp with drying blood. You watched as she stood before the amethyst-studded rapier she had left in its scabbard, and you watched her slide it out, slowly, with a soft metallic sound that set your teeth on edge. You watched her web her skeleton hand with a neon pad of fat—not your preference, but she had her own proclivities—and raise the sword behind her, gauging the new weight in an arm substantially lighter than the one on the floor, and close her eyes.

  Lunge. The arm answered. The movement was reactive, liquid, smooth. She cut a sweep before her, then flicked her naked wrist; each action was clean. The sword was as light in her hand as the bones in her arm. Her body was not her body—it was strange to you how you could see no trace of idle Ianthe in the parry and the thrust. Instead you saw a cavalier who had known from the cradle what life intended for him, and had a rapier placed in his hands not long after.

  You might have changed your clothes, or washed the blood from your body. All your sister Lyctor did was throw her nacreous white robe over her shoulders, where it settled like snow under an aurora—all she did was belt her rapier to her waist, and slide the trident knife into the special scabbard across the hip, and point at you, and say: “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. Do not leave the room.”

  You were still weary and frightened, and Ianthe leaving reminded you how vulnerable you really were. But Ianthe did not heed your protests. Nor did she take fifteen minutes. You sat yourself back on the bed and pulled the covers up around your shoulders, and very slowly and surely your heart rate returned to normal.

  It was fully twenty-five minutes before the door opened again. You coiled for flight,
but it was, after all, just Ianthe—an Ianthe who had changed. She was a sorry sight. You had an artist’s fondness for the right arm, but recognised the shocking juxtaposition of it, of the bloodless flesh and then the bloodless bone, that unexpected and violent nudity. Her yellow lace nightgown had dried to a crust of brown, and her hair had dried in patches of much the same colour: a sort of carroty stain at the temples and the ends.

  But the expression on her face was that of undressed release. It was the expression of an awed child watching their raised skeleton totter forward for the first time without falling. She was incandescent, softly luminous in a way that gave her bleached skin a creamy colour, and which made the death-mask lines of her blank face animated and alive. Her eyes were blue again, with those mountainous flecks of sea-parted brown, and for the first time you thought how much she resembled her twin.

  She was still grasping her lovely Third rapier in her skeleton hand, the blade naked to you, and she said, not bothering to hide her excitement: “It’s shit. It’s going to break.”

  “Not in a hurry, Tridentarius. That’s regenerating ash.”

  “There wasn’t the same weight behind my thrust.”

  “He didn’t compensate?”

  She swung her sword in a slow, glittering arc, revolving her wrist. Ianthe said, not unhumourously: “Naberius always compensated.”

  You asked, “What did Augustine the First say?”

  “Nothing,” she said, and she started to laugh, peals of bell-like laughter. She dropped to sit on the bed, and exulted: “Nothing much. He dropped me into the River, went two rounds against my body—it worked, Nonagesimus. It worked. He says it’s hideous and he’ll gild it for me—” (“Tacky,” you said.) “—but I can fight the same way I fought after I became a Lyctor, before I lost the arm. I’m real, I work. Harry, I am a Lyctor.”

  Her jubilance was infectious. It did not hurt you. You were not a Lyctor.

  You said, “You may feel free to thank me anytime you so choose.”

  Ianthe was suddenly beside you on the bed. She had dropped her rapier among the bedclothes and for the very first time brushed the dry distal tip of her new pointer finger against your cheek. You were vulnerable, but you did not pull away. She tapped you on the cheekbone, and once on the tip of your nose, and then lastly pressed her naked finger to your bottom lip.

  “Thank you?” she said. “Harrow, you loved that.”

  The smooth claw of the finger joint felt cool against your mouth. Her head was quite close to yours. The lace nightgown gapped, somewhat, at the front. The Princess of Ida said, “I already know how I’m going to thank you,” and you were bemused. You absolute idiot baby, you were mystified. You were tired, and you were embarrassed, and you were riding high from the satisfaction of doing one half-perfect thing—of having committed a low miracle of your own devising—of, for a handful of minutes, being Harrowhark Nonagesimus again, the greatest necromancer produced by your dark and sacred Drearburh.

  Ianthe took her finger from your lips, looked at you, and smiled a phosphorescent and confidential smile.

  She said, “I’m going to help you kill the Saint of Duty.”

  28

  DAYS LATER, THE ENDLESS rain and lubricious fog turned suddenly to ice. Harrowhark woke up in the unfamiliar annex where she now slept, red and chapped with cold. The Second’s chambers had been deemed the least leaky of all their rooms on offer, helped by their placement quite low down Canaan House’s southmost side, and Lieutenant Dyas had invited them to move in with no enthusiasm whatsoever. They had arrayed makeshift beds and mattresses on the floor of her parlour, the broken furniture pushed into corners and stacked up at the sides, and there they all lay like victims after a massacre.

  They were a ragtag bunch: Abigail Pent and her husband, who shared the decomposing four-poster that the dead Judith Deuteros had slept in; Protesilaus the Seventh and his intubated adept, who slept like a healthy baby swaddled in carpet rugs, and robes, and all her spare clothes; Dyas, who seemed never to want to sleep again, but only to sharpen her rapier, to the point where it must have held around nineteen edges; and Ortus; and herself. Ortus had placed his mattress between all concerned and the door—“I will be that bulwark,” he’d said portentously, although Harrowhark had noticed that it was the driest and warmest spot. That was that, that was all of them. When she had asked after the remnant Fourth children, Pent had remarked a little cagily that she had already moved them on. Harrow read between the lines and found that she could not resent their being—squirrelled away—so that the rest of the group presented a larger and juicier target.

  Her breath sparkled in front of her mouth, and her fingers ached, even though she’d slept in gloves. The sun shone thinly through lacy patches of feathery, tessellated mist on the glass, glass on glass: ice! All at once Harrow was homesick for Drearburh. The fog outside was so thick that Canaan House seemed to have ascended into the heavens overnight—risen up into the atmosphere within a thick wet fleece of cloud and mist, a dirty ovine colour. Harrow could not see the sea or sky. She thought the rain was falling less heavily outside—but then she perceived that instead of the dreary, murmurous fall of precipitation, each drop had hardened into a pellet of ice. The wind whipped them up against the thick plex window, and they sounded like shot from the barrel of a gun.

  It was not much past dawn. She’d slept in her paint, and her teeth tasted like pigment. Harrow wrapped her veil around her mouth as a muffler, and rose silently from her bed. The others slept on, in silent hummocks like graves: Ortus before her, a black and faintly whuffling hill; on her right Protesilaus Ebdoma, who slept with his sword on his breast like some soldier’s monument, one where the sculptor had gone overboard on the muscles; on his right, his necromancer, her short buff-coloured curls falling on her childlike cheeks; and on her left, Dyas, who lay with her eyes open and her sword on her breast. Her gloves were very white against the steel hilt of her rapier, and very white against the bared sepia of her wrists.

  The door to Pent’s room opened on silent hinges to reveal her kind-eyed, curly-haired, and abominably silly cavalier. He had his slippers on, and two coats over his pyjamas: on seeing Harrowhark, he touched his lips and beckoned her through to his room. Within, Abigail Pent was curled up on an enormous windowsill, a decrepit love seat tattering itself to pieces beneath her, watching the hail come down in calm fascination. There was a roasting smell, like chocolate and dust. A little electric heater blarted out tepid air on the floor, its fans wheezing hotly. To Harrow’s numb fingers, it seemed to be warming approximately jack shit.

  “Pretty foul out there,” Pent said in low tones. “Coffee?” (That must have been the chocolate scent. Harrowhark accepted a cup, mainly to warm her hands.) “The pressure’s dropping freakishly … though of course, you aren’t victim to atmospheric conditions on Drearburh, are you? Are you getting any sleep?”

  Harrow said merely, “I don’t care about surrounds. It could easily be less advantageous.” Often her cell had been worse.

  “Hear, hear,” whispered Pent’s cavalier, holding the coffee pot, which was wildly belching steam. “That’s the stuff. We’ll make a Fifth of you yet, Reverend Daughter. Not that bad—can’t complain—it’ll be a damn sight worse in the River.”

  “Just so long as the Duchess Septimus is holding on,” said Abigail, unperturbed by a fresh smash of icy pellets next to her head. “I tried to make her take the bed—she was so upset that the Templar pair weren’t on board. I told her that I didn’t think we’d get Master Octakiseron first time round … She won’t tell me what he said to her, just that he ‘was horrid.’”

  “Cheeky little so-and-so,” said Magnus. “If he were my son, I’d give him something to think about. I’m not surprised he’s gone to ground.”

  “I would hope your son might be of different character,” said his wife, half-smiling.

  “Protesilaus should have biffed him.”

  “It’s strange,” said Abigail, ignoring her husband�
�s exhortations to biffing. “The Eighth are not generally the type to hide.”

  Harrow came to an internal decision to tell the truth. It was not particularly difficult. She had only been holding on to the knowledge because a woman whose tongue wagged did not love the silence of the Tomb. Also, she was frankly uncertain that what she had seen had been real: but now it was nearly a week later, and she was tired of what Magnus Quinn’s eyebrows did when he uttered the word biff.

  “Silas Octakiseron is not hiding,” she said. “He’s dead.”

  Both of them looked at her. The Fifth necromancer’s glasses were misting up with the cold, so that her tranquil brown gaze was seen as though through a filmy cataract. “Pardon?” she said.

  “So is Coronabeth Tridentarius,” Harrow added. “I cannot confirm the fates of the rest of the Third House.”

  “Both of them—” began Magnus, and his wife cut in quickly, “The Sleeper—”

  Harrowhark said, “No.”

  She told the Fifth House the story of what she had seen; though she left out the blood in the fog.

  Magnus and Abigail shared what seemed a very long glance. Magnus looked troubled, and his wife looked set, and strangely resigned. After the awkward length of what passed between them, the cavalier meekly slurped at his coffee cup.

  “We should have made him a greater priority,” said Lady Pent.

  Magnus said, “I’m not certain.”

  “And now he is gone,” she said, and added: “To say nothing of the Third … Reverend Daughter, you say this was nearly a week ago? A week, and you didn’t think to tell us?”