Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  A file opened in your mind. Your hands scrabbled within your robes—the exoskeleton gave up one of the twenty-two letters, with a reminder long memorised:

  If met, to give to Camilla Hect.

  This had not troubled you. Many of the letters required impossible contingencies. Now one impossible contingency was standing before you. You gave the envelope to your hulking skeleton, and it crossed the clearing, admirably navigating the lumpen forest floor, to deliver the letter to the previously dead Hect.

  She took it, broke open the envelope, read the contents, and blinked; all while you siphoned blood out of your ears. She looked at the letter; she looked at you; she looked at the letter. Then she balled it up between her fists and ripped it to shreds.

  “Okay,” she said finally. And: “It’s coming out your nose.”

  You wiped your face, quashed your growing annoyance, and said, “Am I required to know the contents?”

  Hect cleared her throat—you flinched—and recited perfectly: “For service previously rendered by your House: invoke the rock that remains ever unrolled, and understand that I will both consider your life as inviolate, and aid you if I can. Thanks.”

  You said, appalled, “I did not.”

  “It was there in black and white, Reverend Daughter.”

  Reverend Daughter was still a little sweet to your bloodied ears; but you said, and knew you sounded irascible: “Then I have been seriously promiscuous with my past favours.”

  “I suppose you thought you owed us,” said Camilla.

  It had been a long time since you had been around those who were not Lyctors. You grasped for her, thoughtlessly, with your construct; you were astonished by the speed with which Hect drew those big, balanced knives from each shoulder, and hurled herself at your skeleton like a stone from a sling. Her first sweep with the butt of a knife shattered the ribcage—it coalesced back; you now disdained skeletons not made of permanent ash. She swept in with a foot, aimed at the fragile place beneath the knee, and sent your construct stumbling forward. You said, “Cease,” but she levered one knife into the base of the spine, severed it, pulled the spine back toward her with a twang—and you heard your voice rise to say: “I need to know you are real!”

  She kicked the skeleton away from her; it was in two surprised parts, wriggling to fuse back together, slow to understand the damage. Camilla Hect sheathed her knives with as much speed and fury as she had unsheathed them, and she said: “No sudden moves.”

  “I am Harrowhark Nonagesimus,” you said. “I am the ninth saint to serve the King Undying. I am his fingerbone; I am his fists and gestures … I am a Lyctor, Hect. What hope would you have against me?”

  “None,” said Camilla.

  And then she added calmly: “Yet.”

  You were silent. Your head throbbed. The birds were very loud and shrill, and a multitude of smells drifted from the forest—of damp air, of damp earth, of all the things that crept upon it, with their insensible quantities of legs and little frondy parts. You sat down on your bone-plated log, and you wiped your face, and you said: “I watched your body be laid out. I examined it myself. And now you are here, forty billion lightyears from the Nine Houses, and you tell me that you are real.”

  “If you’re going to sit around feeling sorry for yourself, you’ve changed,” she said. And then: “I’m going to come closer. All right?”

  You watched with cold apprehension as this resurrection approached. She was not puppeted as your mother and father had been; nor was she a Seventh-style simulacrum. Her thalergy lit up with the pure combustive light of a strong, healthy human being, and the minute deaths throughout her body—bacterial, apoptotic, autophagic—produced a thanergetic embroidery you could see as easily as her breath heaving within her chest. You startled badly when she dropped to her haunches before you and looked you over coolly; looked into your left ear, then your right, peered into your eyes, glanced up your nose.

  “Nice intercranial haemorrhage,” she said. “Kills most of us non-Lyctors.”

  You said, “Why are you here? Why are you here now? How are you here? This planet orbits the sanctuary of the Emperor, Hect, reachable only by necromantic means, and you are dead.”

  “I’m really not,” she said. And, after a pause, in her dry abrupt voice: “I came to find you, Reverend Daughter.”

  “You have found me. Tell me for what purpose.”

  Camilla took the bag from around her neck. She held it between her hands, and you could see her hesitate; she did not appear to be the hesitating type. Her thumb gently stroked the leather thong closing the drawstring neck—rested there lightly—and then she offered it to you. She silently proffered this shabby little bag, about as big as your two hands cupped together, as if it were a casket filled with jewels. You knew before you touched it what was within. What you did not understand was why.

  You opened the bag and removed its contents before her dark and stony gaze. It was not particularly full. You cupped the thing between your palms, and marvelled.

  It was a cracked piece of human skull—a ridge of supraorbital bone and a cut-off curve of parietal, a bulge of zygomatic cheekbone, a shard leading down to the maxilla. That was all. As a skull, it was not particularly interesting—male, early twenties, maybe eight months dead—but as a reconstruction, it was incredible. The piece had been assembled from fragments, manually, and not by a bone magician. The smallest would have been no bigger than the moon of your cuticle. It had been painstakingly—passionately—laboriously reassembled, from the skull of someone who, soon after death or symptomatically during, had exploded. There were miniature cracks where it had been glued. You turned it over and over in your hands.

  “Eyes,” said Camilla.

  A thin stream of blood was emerging from your right lacrimal duct. You wiped it away. Your headache was quite bad now.

  You said, “Your necromancer.”

  She said, after a moment’s pause, “Yes.”

  This was also impossible, as the last time you had seen the skull of Palamedes Sextus, it had been speckled with firearm propellant from the bullet that had shattered his face—inward. You wiped your left tear duct before the stone-faced cavalier could say a word.

  You asked, “What do you want from me?”

  Camilla stood up.

  “The Warden’s still in there,” she said.

  You waited, with that work of astonishing labour between your hands. After a moment she said, “He’s attached. To the skull. I want you to confirm. That’s all.”

  That’s all. You beheld the skull again. The six-month-old bone was yet lively with thanergy. All scraps of flesh had been carefully removed; there were no hunks of hair on that pulverized skull, nor fragments of dried brain matter within the parietal bone. You tried to recall Palamedes Sextus, and your ears renewed their liquid assault. When you hastily scanned your brain for the source, you found nothing particularly wrong, and it made you bleed more. You shook blood out of your right ear, and said: “Elaborate.”

  “Thanks for not smiling. He’s in there,” she repeated, a little doggedly, but with that same dry calm. “He’s a revenant.”

  You had been too honestly astonished to do anything so coarse as smile, or laugh, or say, You have got to be kidding me, that is a good one. “No, he’s not,” you said. “A ghost attached to an immobile object—a ghost attached to an immobile object for this length of time—it would have lost coherency and drifted away long ago. He could not walk. He could not speak. He could not perceive. A ghost does not cling passionately for months to a few fragments of skull.”

  “He would,” she said.

  “I’m certain he had a—forceful personality, but—”

  “No, I mean he deliberately fixed his soul to his body, with spirit magic,” said the cavalier. “We planned for it. In the event of his death. I know he did it, because I got the message. I only want to make sure I snagged the right part of the skull. We didn’t account for—pieces. If he’s not in here I have to
go find the others.”

  You looked up into her face. Camilla Hect was a closed object, with locks and snaps; she had an expression like the rock before the Tomb, inexorable, giving nothing away. But her eyes—her eyes were dark as the grit mixed with the soil, neither grey nor brown but both. They were the eyes of a winter season without any promise of spring. In comparing the eyes to the face, you saw into a zipped-up agony.

  And she said, with that same dull, blank, diamond-hard pain: “The Cohort took the rest of him away. And I don’t know where they have put him.”

  It was not pity that moved your hand. It was open curiosity about the kind of man who would have sealed his soul to his fragmented corpse before he died. You tucked your knees up and you put the parietal bone lightly beneath the print of your index finger: you scoured every cell of that bone for some remnant soul.

  And you could find nothing.

  It was not the first time you regretted your unfamiliarity with spirit magic. You had flayed yourself in writing with the accusation: Your understanding of flesh and spirit magic is execrable. Now your regrets reached their pinnacle: you were not even sure that your inability to find a dead boy was due to the dead boy’s absence, or due to your lack of study.

  You said, “If his ghost in any way travelled to the River, it would have driven him mad. If he released his hold for even a moment, or if he was unable to bear the prison of his bones…” Camilla just looked at you. You relented: “One moment.”

  The ninety-six puzzle pieces this cavalier called a skull did not warrant what you were about to do. Your construct skeleton you compacted neatly back to a chip of bone, and your exoskeleton you made inert. If you left them, they would crumble to pieces, and it was better not to give her any indication of your vulnerability while you were under. You moved to sit on the grass. It crushed beneath you, and the smell made you anxious. You deliberately did not think about all the insect life squirming and seething beneath the seat of your robes. You planted your feet flat on the ground and made your spine a soft curve. The ghost wards were already painted on your belly and the back of your neck, though they were superstition only, placed for the unseen emergency where you were forced to physically move your body through the River. A mind without its meat would not attract a ravenous ghost. There would be a thronging populace here, all uninterested in you if you were not attached to your bright, delicious flesh, and anyway you only intended to take the briefest look. You took the weighty sword from your back and placed it beneath your feet, and then you took the partial skull from your lap, and you waded into the River.

  You had intended to use the skull to triangulate its owner. It would be otherwise impossible to pick out one ghost between the billions upon billions—innumerable spirits, a nearly infinite mass—making their way through the dark waters.

  Time and space works differently in the River no matter how you enter, my chicks, Augustine had warned. Anchor yourself as you’re leaving the old meat robes behind, and as you wade through the waters. Attach to worldly geography; be aware of your body; let it be your harbour, unless you’re dying to be pulled somewhere you don’t want to go.

  You used the skull as your geography instead. The water was very cold when it closed over your head. It felt thick and slippery as oil. Augustine had ducked you and Ianthe in the River, to train you for this—to get you used to a River teeming with the mad, the insane, and the ravenous—and you knew what to expect. You would be in filthy water, with the teeth, and the rotten flesh, and the bloody, unseeing eyes. You might, if you were lucky, look down upon the mad ghost of the skull. You could discharge your duty by confirming that he had long ago drifted away, and that Hect might drift away from the buttoned-up primal grief a ghost story had frozen in place. You prepared for the ice, and the initial panic of ghosts exploding outward from your body, that safe predatory entry of your brain—the cloudy water, foggy with old blood—

  —and you were standing in a room. Your wet robes were dripping onto a scrubbed wooden floor.

  The room was penitent-sized, big enough for a bed and a table. Less penitential, the bed was strewn with pillows and cushions and comforters; the table was similarly scattered with preparations, little paper packets, and a stained enamel bowl. An old chair was pushed close to the bed, its back re-stapled to its frame and some of the stuffing coming out in square, foaming chunks of yellow. Above the bed, a dirty little window that had resisted someone’s attempts to clean it looked down upon a dying courtyard where a thick array of salt-choked vines were the only greenish things among an array of spindly leafless trees. A shelf held a few desiccated books, one standing out like a fleshy corpse among skeletons. Your eyes fell upon the title: The Necromancer’s Marriage Season.

  “It’s a historical,” said a voice behind you. “Abella Trine, inevitably of Ida, is considered a poor prospect on the marriage market because she’s too skinny, her tract-specialist flesh magic is too good, and she wears her thick chestnut hair in an unflattering bun, which is mentioned at least twice a chapter.”

  You turned around.

  A man stood in the doorway to the tiny room. He was taller than you. His dull robes lapped around a body of starvation thinness. He was toying with a pair of glasses, and he stared at you with naked eyes of exquisite, pellucid grey: the softness of charcoal burnt nearly white, with the glass clarity of quartz.

  He continued, “There’re a few suitors vying for her affections, though Abella’s such a pain in the arse I’ve got no idea why. There’s a spoiled swordswoman I’m quite fond of, but the narrative doesn’t like her because she goes to sexy parties every night, which I’d regard as a blameless enough hobby—and then Abella meets an insanely tedious widower from the outskirts of Tisis, whose saintly husband ate a grenade in the war. After two massive misunderstandings, they hook up, and then there’s a time skip to their adorable baby, who talks with a phonetically impossible lisp and can already form a kidney. The whole is unspeakably sordid.” He slid the glasses back on to that beaky nose. “Long time no see, Reverend Daughter.”

  Then he did a very terrible thing. He stepped forward, and he pulled you into a wild embrace—the hold of a man drowning in deep water who cannot help but drag his rescuer down to the bottom with him. He dug his fingers into you in a way you were a little familiar with: tight against the chance that the person in front of you might be a cloud, or a mirage. He lifted you off the ground in his impatient, overfamiliar eagerness, and then he set you down again and saw your face.

  “Excuse me,” you said, with sodden asperity.

  “Oh. Apologies,” said Palamedes Sextus. “Misread the moment. Let’s call it cabin fever. Nonagesimus, is Camilla—”

  “She sent me,” you said, wringing out your wet hem. “She is alive and well and living.”

  He whistled a sigh.

  “Oh, thank God,” he said a little unsteadily. “Thank God for that mad, stubborn, lovely girl. Speaking of. Harrowhark, you are a sight for sore eyes.”

  You frantically clapped your hands to your exoskeleton, but knew as your fingers touched the representation of bone that it was no good. There were no letters there; they could not transfer when you did not know their contents–and there had never, in any case, been a letter addressed to Sextus. The previous Harrow had never bothered to think of it. You knew full well she had seen Hect and Sextus dead; why account for one’s reappearance, but not the other’s? This was a mystery you had no answer for; you were utterly on your own, in this nonsensical miracle of a room.

  You said instead, “A projection. A projection in the River?”

  “I’d call it on the bank, though that’s not accurate either,” he said promptly. “I couldn’t anchor myself to my body properly when I was about to render myself down to my component parts. So I established a kind of bubble attached to the Riverbank and anchored it to myself at the cellular level—not one thick rope, but lots of tiny little strings. Like a spiderweb, I suppose. As long as anyone could find any bit of me, be it never
so small and soggy, there’d be a couple of strands still clinging to it, and me on the other end. Or that was the hope. Couldn’t test it, of course.”

  You said: “I have been inside the River, Sextus, multiple times, both in spirit and in flesh. You cannot build a bubble there.”

  “Okay, wrong word, perhaps, but—”

  “You cannot build in the River! It is a dimension of perpetual flux—defined space is nonsense here—you might as well try to wall off time with bricks and mortar.”

  “Yes. Sort of. But by our very presence in the River, we briefly exert space on non-space. Think of how, when you blow air into water, you make bubbles. The water can’t be where the air is. It’s like the air temporarily enforces its own rules over a localised area. If you were in one of those bubbles, you could do things under air-rules—like talking, or lighting a fire—that water doesn’t permit. Like water rejecting air, the River instinctively rejects what lies outside it—it doesn’t want any here in its hereafter. So you can impose your own rules on it, to a very limited extent … I could write at least six very good papers about this, Harrow. There’s so much work to be done.”

  You quickly scanned the room again and were struck by its nagging familiarity. You should have known it. You did know it. “This is Canaan House,” you said.

  “Moment of death,” he agreed. “I said the rules were limited. I can hang on to my sense of self in here, but not my necromancy. I can’t do anything. All I have is a single still image of the room, and for some reason a single romance novel, which I have read upward of fifty times. Thank God I had a pencil in my pocket; I’m in the process of crafting the sequel on a section of wallpaper.”

  “How much were you able to retain?”

  “Look out in the hallway,” he suggested.

  Cautiously, you stepped out of the doorway. What you had taken for an exit consisted of no more than the view from the door, with some leeway for peripheral vision. It extended maybe a foot in either direction, and then gave way to an enormous white blank: when you walked toward it and pushed (“Steady,” Palamedes warned), the white was solid, though with a vague sticky jellified quality to it. It was an abyssal whiteness. It was an absence, resolved into touch.