Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  There was a slight accusatory note in Pent’s tone. Harrowhark did not feel great about it, but neither did she feel particularly bad; she just felt small and empty and hard, like the hail battering itself so fiercely on the window outside. The heater produced another helpless splurt of dust-smelling heat. “I had to be sure,” she said.

  “Of what?” said Magnus.

  This did not require an answer, so Harrowhark did not give one. She merely held her hot coffee between her hands and stared with what she knew to be a slightly smeared but still discomposing painted face, with all the white and black of Ninth House sacrament. It was not difficult to win a staring match against Magnus Quinn; he wilted in about five seconds, and stared out the window, and sighed very heavily.

  “We didn’t need him,” he said bracingly.

  Abigail said, “We need everyone.”

  “I never thought he was quite the thing.”

  “Tridentarius’s loss is the greater here,” said Harrowhark repressively, and she thought Abigail sounded somewhat distracted when she said, “Yes—yes, I do think so. I just hadn’t expected … If she’s gone, then perhaps that means … Reverend Daughter, will you do me a very great favour?”

  “That depends on what the favour is.”

  “I would like you to read this for me,” said Lady Pent.

  She set down an empty cup of coffee on the frigid windowsill, and she took a little flimsy bag from her pocket. She unzipped the plex tab on the top and removed, delicately, a piece of yellowing paper. The Fifth adept used the very edges of her fingernails to unfold it, carefully and tenderly. Harrow stood up at once, but the cavalier was somehow between her and the door. The sweat beaded behind her knees and prickled behind her ears as she glanced down at the paper.

  Harrow said, “I would like to bring my cavalier into this conversa—”

  “You need Ortus the Ninth to read a piece of paper with you?” said Magnus Quinn, with broad good humour, the type that was as resolute and inflexible and polite as a summons. She had been stitched up. She was a fool. She had lost her fear of the Fifth House, and now she had been boxed in as only the Fifth House might box you: smiling the whole time, and acting as though the whole thing might be a bit of a joke. Harrow made her face imperturbable, and swallowed slowly, so that her throat did not so obviously gulp.

  She stalled. “The text is small.”

  Pent said, “Do you think so?”

  The Fifth necromancer did not let go of the paper. Harrowhark looked down at its bloodred, panicked writing: a hasty, furious scrawl, written with such fury that the pen had bitten the paper.

  I WILL REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU KISSED ME—YOU APOLOGISED—YOU SAID, I AM SORRY, DESTROY ME AS I AM, BUT I WANT TO KISS YOU BEFORE I AM KILLED, AND I SAID TO YOU WHY, AND YOU SAID, BECAUSE I HAVE ONLY ONCE MET SOMEONE SO UTTERLY WILLING TO BURN FOR WHAT THEY BELIEVED IN, AND I LOVED HIM ON SIGHT, AND THE FIRST TIME I DIED I ASKED OF HIM WHAT I NOW ASK OF YOU

  I KISSED YOU AND LATER I WOULD KISS HIM TOO BEFORE I UNDERSTOOD WHAT YOU WERE, AND ALL THREE OF US LIVED TO REGRET IT—BUT WHEN I AM IN HEAVEN I WILL REMEMBER YOUR MOUTH, AND WHEN YOU ROAST DOWN IN HELL I THINK YOU WILL REMEMBER MINE

  Harrow read this screed in a flat and affectless monotone, her voice dying away on mine. The cavalier looked at the paper, and his necromancer looked at her.

  “Read it to me,” she said, knowing her voice was still flat and hard as the hail.

  Abigail turned the note back to herself, still with the care reserved for some priceless antique.

  “I still get an erotic charge from snakes, sorry to say,” she read.

  There was a brief silence. The hail slapped at the window’s glass as though wanting to hurl itself through. There was a growing rime of pale blue frost at the edges, and a cleared mist from where Abigail had sat. Deep in the fast-moving fog outside—unmoved by wind and unresolved by gouts of chilly hail—all three of them watched, a little detached, as tiny particles of ash joined the hail in the storm, as though the already overcrowded weather had been augmented by the eruption of some distant cinder cone.

  “It differs mildly, then,” said Harrow, and Abigail admitted, “Somewhat, yes.”

  Magnus said, “But why—”

  “I am mad,” she interrupted. “I have always been mad, since I was a child. I hallucinate sounds. I see things that do not exist. Ortus has masked much of it, but as you have identified and exploited, my vulnerability only requires his removal. I did not tell you of Silas Octakiseron’s death because I was not sure I was an accurate reporter. I am insane.”

  Abigail Pent took off her glasses and popped them down into the top fold of her robe. She reached out to touch Harrow’s arm, and Harrow flinched away; she winced a little in sympathetic apology, and removed her hand.

  “You have kept that close to your chest,” she said. “I would like to hear more sometime, if you are ever inclined to tell me. But, Harrowhark, that squares perfectly with another theory I have, if all this time you only looked to your own frustrations—have you ever considered the fact that you might also be…”

  “Here it comes,” said her husband wearily. “The ghost agenda.”

  “Magnus! Haunted,” his wife finished, in triumph. “Harrowhark Nonagesimus—I really think you should consider the idea that you might also be haunted.”

  29

  AUGUSTINE WAS ALL SMILES now that Ianthe the First had passed her final hurdle. His open delight did a lot to ameliorate the reddened, swelling tension that had permeated the Mithraeum. You found his frank and open relief patronizing, but your sister Lyctor did not, or at least made a very good show of enjoying it. You went to watch a bout between them in the training rooms, sitting quietly and holding your rapier—it was full of unnecessary formality even to your Ninth House eyes, all antique niceties and duelling condescension that had been long forgotten back home. Ianthe was a saint of the Third House, and Augustine an antique of the Fifth; neither did anything without putting down a little carpet first, and introducing themselves to an audience of a thousand quiet-eyed memorial bones, and you.

  But after the ceremony came the sword. You remembered so little of Naberius Tern, either of his death or of his life, but from what you had gathered he would have been the last cavalier in the whole starless universe to think his sword-arm better off defleshed. Despite that, Ianthe was cured. It had been your faintest and most childlike hope that Ianthe would consider your bondage over; that your saving her life would be enough to release you from the collar of debt she had placed around your neck.

  “As if,” she’d said. “When I ask, you will know you have been asked, Nonagesimus.”

  The Saint of Patience had held to his promise to gild the arm, and now you often caught Ianthe marvelling at her metal-shod fingerbones, at the buttery shine of gold upon her triquetrum. Your eldest sister, whose discomfort and annoyance only grew with Augustine’s delight, confronted you about it in the corridors: “Did you really erect that ghastly edifice?”

  “Yes,” you said.

  “And it’s really self-synthesizing bone?”

  “Yes,” you said. “Though I wouldn’t call the process synthesis when the construct is merely perpetually growing to fill a pre-realised skeletal map. It’s yet more proof that topological resonance can be manipulated.”

  Mercymorn’s eyes narrowed to hurricane slits with short, thick lashes. Her prismatically white Canaanite robe was wrapped very tightly around her, as though she were cold, and she had bound back her peach-coloured hair as though it were a wimple. She said, “I see,” and then, “I see. I see. What’s two plus two?”

  “Four—”

  “Smallest bone in the body?”

  “The auditory ossicles, but—”

  “What’s the name of the Saint of Duty?”

  You said, “Ortus the First,” and you were too slow. She reached out and tapped you on the side of the head. What Mercymorn the First could do with a simple tap on the side of the head might have meant y
our end far more easily than the Saint of Duty, a run-up, and his spear—but she said out loud, “Ortus,” and then hurriedly again, all in one single Ortus—Ortus. The back of your skull ached, and you felt the chilly stab of pain in your sinuses that you sometimes felt in the dry atmosphere of the Mithraeum. You jerked away—your fingers flew to the bone studs in your ears—but she was not attacking you. You, so aware of your body, could sense no gland overworking, nor chemical coursing, nor vessel constricting.

  The only change was in Mercy. Her placid oval face had taken on much the same look as you had seen, through a thin veil of viscera, the day you had fed the Lyctors your own marrow. She looked at you, quiet, and perhaps even a little lost; and she said: “I can’t tell if you’re a once-in-a-lifetime genius, an insane imbecile, or both.”

  Then she said: “Children as fists! Infants as gestures! Yuck! Pfaugh! I live in the worst of all possible worlds.”

  And without saying another word, Mercymorn stalked off down the corridor in the opposite direction, the lights making rainbows of her tightly shrouded robes.

  When you reported this conversation to Ianthe, she was not particularly interested. This was, you thought, your sister-saint’s downfall: she had pre-defined a set of things that merited her attention and consideration, and everything else she put aside. (“You brood over everything,” she had said once, to this accusation. “You read unholy omens in the way people say good morning.”)

  “She’s a crank,” said Ianthe. “Augustine says she went funny years ago, and that much like a stopped clock, she’s ‘right twice a day, by coincidence.’ Avoid, avoid.”

  How you loathed any sentence beginning with Augustine says. “But she touched my head,” you said. “She was changing something, or looking for something—and I have no idea what.”

  “Your brain,” suggested Ianthe.

  Later you lay together in her lavish bed, far apart enough that if you reached out your hand, you might just brush her with your fingertips. It was, you had admitted, the only place you now felt safe to sleep, what with your wards so eminently destroyable. The mockery you endured for needing her proximity was exquisitely painful, but humiliation was steadily becoming your existence whole and entire.

  But sleeping side by side was—awkward. It had been her idea. You would have slept on the carpet, if you hadn’t thought it would leave you more vulnerable to the Saint of Duty—it would have been too easy to see you from the window in the case of a spaceside assault. Trauma prevented you from simply taking a pillow and sleeping in the bathtub. You lay flat on your back in borrowed blankets, wearing third-hand clothes. Ianthe had given you a daffodil-coloured nightgown, rummaged from some ancient drawer of artefacts belonging to a long-dead Lyctor’s cavalier. It made you look like a liver inflammation. You stared glumly at a painting opposite the bed of an exquisite woman with lots of ruddy golden hair, a dreamy smile, and no clothes—though she was holding a rapier and, for no reason you could see, a melon.

  That first night in her bed, you’d placed your bone-dressed sword between you, and felt better; she had, unsurprisingly, ragged you for it. “Relax,” she had said. “I haven’t invited you to an orgy, Harrow.”

  From this lying-down angle, the painting of the nude and obstreperously beautiful woman was in full sightline. You had murmured, “I believe you … albeit many wouldn’t.”

  “This is why I cultivate you, Harrowhark,” she had remarked, “the suspicion that you might possess a sense of humour.”

  You had said, “I’m not so gullible to think that your only reason.”

  “Of course I want something from you. But it’s not personal,” Ianthe had said. “Understand me, Harry. I always take the smartest option first … burn any bridges that need to be burned … try to get in before anyone else can. It was the first thing I ever admired about you, back at—well, I promised not to talk about that … I’m very good at seeing the big picture. And your being alive is, right now, part of my big picture.”

  Both of you had stared, in the bedtime silence of blankets and darkness, at the big picture in front of you.

  “They’re all self-portraits, you know,” she had said gloomily. “Cyrus the First and his cavalier constantly painted portraits of themselves and each other in the nude, hung them up everywhere, and gave them out to people for their birthdays. Augustine said Cyrus had them all brought over from Canaan House.”

  “Why do you keep them around?”

  “It is the type of energy I wish to take into my future,” Ianthe had said.

  You both lay now in the low blue habitation light of the sleeping hours, not so close that you could semantically be said to be lying together. You were very aware of her nonetheless: of her skimmed-milk hair and discontented mouth, and of the amber satin she wore that made her arm so gold and her veins so green.

  “The Saint of Duty is killable,” she said. “You’ve shown that you’re capable of killing him, even if you’re not a genuine Lyctor. So if it were up to me, he’d be dead already.” (You did not remotely believe this.) “The real problem is Teacher. I’m not sure you can kill Ortus quickly enough to avoid Teacher bursting through the wall with a merry, ‘Not on my watch!’ and bringing him back from a deathblow.”

  You said, “Then what do you propose? Distracting God?”

  “That is exactly what I propose,” said Ianthe. At the sound you made, she continued eagerly: “I mean it. Augustine says he’ll do it … I asked him as a favour to me, and he said yes.”

  “Augustine said yes? Augustine agreed to the murder of his brother Lyctor?”

  “There are very complex power dynamics on this station,” said your sister Lyctor, with whom you had a very complex power dynamic. “I told him the whole story—don’t make that face, Harry, it’ll stick that way—and he said Ortus was on too long a leash and what he thought he was doing Augustine didn’t know, but that gunning for you was stupid when you’re just going to be eaten by Heralds anyway … Sorry, direct quote.”

  You said flatly, “I appreciate the sentiment.”

  “In any case, he said they can get by with just three Lyctors to take down Number Seven, so if I can step into Ortus’s shoes now that I’m not ‘problematic’—you can see I took my lumps, Nonagesimus—he can buy you an hour, after dinner.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “How?”

  “Didn’t say—but it’s Augustine the First, my child. He’s the first and oldest Lyctor. These three are all the oldest—and the last—that’s why they’re Patience, Joy, and Duty … three virtues. If Augustine is going to distract God, that means he’s going to distract God. He’s very old, and I hate to admit it, but he’s enormously quick … and sophisticated … and devious. Anyway, I’ve taken care of him, and he’ll take care of Teacher, and you’ll take care of Duty.”

  “You’ve really—ensured this?”

  “Fight him and win, Harry. Call it payment for the arm … You sound surprised.”

  You found yourself murmuring, almost more surprised with yourself than with her: “Warrior proud of the Third House! Ride forth now as my sister.”

  There was a rustle from her side of the bed, and you saw that she had sat up a little, her exposed and metal-skinned humerus garishly propped on the covers.

  “Was that poetry?” she demanded.

  “Debatably,” you said, and she lay back down. Then you said: “I accept your help. I am forced to admit that I cannot do this alone.”

  “I live for your forced admissions,” said Ianthe. “It would have been a pain if you’d said no. I’ve already organised everything.”

  You both fell silent. The canopy of the four-poster bed obscured the fresco on the overdecorated ceiling, which was a relief to the eye. Her covers were softer than the covers in your room, though you thought the mattress too squashy for real comfort. One sank down into it like a bog. You were not used to so many pillows, nor were you used to the slippery chill of satin on your skin, nor were you u
sed to hearing someone else’s breath, insubstantial, beside you. For a moment you thought Ianthe had fallen asleep.

  Then she said, idly: “Coronabeth and I spent three nights apart in all our lives, and the second time she cried so hard that she threw up … I hope she’s sleeping easy now. When she doesn’t, she gets bags under her eyelids you could carry water in.”

  It seemed as though a response was expected, but you did not want to speak of dead twins. You simply said, “I have always slept alone.”

  “You don’t say.”

  You heard the primness in your voice when you said, “I am betrothed to the Locked Tomb, Tridentarius. I slept on a cot in my cell.”

  “I always forget you were an honest-to-God nun … and six years old to boot, if you listen to Mercymorn. How old are you, really, Harry?”

  “Eighteen, and my tolerance for Harry wears thin.”

  “Eighteen,” she said, in the tones of the jaded, fagged-out socialite. “I remember being eighteen.”

  “You are twenty-two.”

  “It’s a universe away from eighteen.”

  You lay in that bed like a marble sculpture, your body remote and faraway. Sleep and safety had blunted your panic, but not arrested it wholesale. If Ianthe reached out to touch your arm, you were afraid you might not understand whose arm she was touching. You were so afraid she might touch you. You were so afraid anyone might touch you. You had always been afraid of anyone touching you, and had not known your longing flinch was so obvious to those who tried it.

  But she did not touch you. Instead, sleepily, she asked: “Do you really keep all those letters on you?”

  Since you were living in exile from your room, they were now tucked into hollow capsules within your exoskeleton, the location of each of the twenty-two locked into your memory like so many theorems. You’d tried just tucking them into your robes, but you’d rustled. “Yes,” you said, and did not elaborate.

  Then she startled you by asking, “Any regrets, Harrowhark?”

  “About?”