by Tamsyn Muir
When you stepped back into the room and knelt on the bed to peer out the window, it was the same. The vision was all the same dead terrace, and a sliver of ocean, and stone: craning to look either way revealed that great and terrible whiteness. The window was solid and did not open.
You said, “The barrier begins where your line of sight ended. It’s derived from everything you saw.”
He said, “And it doesn’t change … the sea is still. It looks like it’s moving, but it’s not—it’s like one of those holographic pictures where turning it up and down lets you see another part of the image. There is nothing here, and that nothing never changes.”
You sat down on that overcushioned bed, and you looked up at his long, grave face; you tried to remember if you had ever seen it, before it was summarily blown off by gunshot. You really did try. When you closed your eyes, there was nothing cauterized upon your eyelids—except a little redness. You said, “A human mind cannot live this way, Sextus. Being stuck in place is any revenant’s undoing, unless it has a very specific anchor. Eventually it will lose purchase—it will let go—it will return to the River. I cannot imagine the type of mind that would hold on to that edge, and keep holding.”
“I can, and it scares me,” he said heavily. “Look. How long have I been dead, Nonagesimus?”
“Eight months,” you said, “give or take.”
He took off those thick lenses and looked at you with diamond-grey horror. His face was homely; he looked somewhat like a beak, a chin, and a jaw put together as a joke—but the beauty of his eyes made the whole attractive, as though they were a mould colonizing the rest of the stratum.
He spluttered, “Eight months?”
“I don’t have an exact record, but—”
“What? Why did it take you so long? It should have taken you a week, tops.”
“Excuse my apparently sluggard pace,” you said, feeling that this was an unjust accusation, “but your cavalier only just brought me your bones, and regarding that I have more than one question to ask her—”
His brows were crisscrossing like swords. “How did you and Cam get separated in the first place?”
“I was not aware I owed a debt of care to—”
“I mean she wouldn’t have left your side, if you’d given her half a chance—”
You lost your patience. It was difficult to say if you’d ever had any; you’d just spackled over the hole with curiosity.
“Warden of the Sixth House,” you demanded, “why are you acting as though I should know you? Why are you acting as though your cavalier knows me? I am Harrowhark the First, formerly and in everlasting affections the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh: I am the ninth saint to serve the King Undying, one among his fists and his gestures. I did not know you in this life, and I will not know you in the next one.”
He stopped dead.
“You became a Lyctor,” he said.
“That was always the plan.”
“Not for the Harrowhark I knew. Tell me you did it correctly,” he said, and there was a quick, questioning eagerness to his voice, something beneath the confusion. “Tell me you finished the work. You out of everyone could have worked out the end to the beginning I was starting to explicate. Your cavalier, Reverend Daughter—”
“Has become the furnace of my Lyctorhood,” you said.
The dead Warden stopped. He looked at your face as though his eyes could peel through dermis, fascia, and bone. And he said, quietly: “How God takes—and takes—and takes.”
There was an enormous rumble overhead. It sounded like some great mechanism grinding against itself with unlubricated joints, a turbulence of machinery sobbing to life. There came another, farther off, and a bright white light at the window that made you think of the Emperor. Thunder, and a sweep of lightning. Palamedes’s lovely eyes widened, and he said, “That’s not possible,” and darted to the window.
You went with him. A squall of rain tossed itself at the window like a bird. Through the smeared glass—the still and static light outside was suddenly overcast—you looked down.
On the terrace stood a figure in haz orange, swathed in crinkling safety material from neck to feet. A breathing apparatus obscured the face. And in one gloved hand, clear even from this distance, you saw it: a huge two-bore gun. The figure stared with empty goggle eyes as the wind lashed, and as the thunder boomed, farther away now.
Sextus was saying, “The hell is—”
You said, and your voice sounded strange to yourself, as though you had heard the word only in dreams and never articulated by waking tongues: “The Sleeper.”
The Sleeper looked at you both. There came another sudden violent burst of obscuring rain, and it was gone. You and the necromancer of the Sixth House moved as one: shouldered both of your bodies against the door to the room until it shut fast, as you slid a crude deadbolt home. You leaned your full weights against it. This was not a very impressive mass. He said, quickly: “Ninth, this place is powered by one single theorem, held together with the fragility of spirit magic. I cannot manipulate it. I cannot change anything about it, not the room, not the cushions, not the astonishingly shitty book. I can’t change a thing about this space—but anyone coming to me could change the parameters, and you’ve brought something with you that’s changing them. Go.”
Both of you froze as you heard shuffling steps outside the door, a low, asthmatic wheezing from the apparatus. Then you shoved your pathetic necro bodies more forcefully against the door. You said, “Don’t be a fool.”
“Go and go now, Nonagesimus!”
“I’m not about to leave you alone with something I have done, Master Warden!”
“That’s more like the old Harrowhark—but I mean it, get out! I’m banking on it going with you. I’ll be fine. Just tell me, what’s Cam got of my bones?”
“Three inches of right-hand parietal, full right-hand frontal, leading down to—”
“That’s enough. Just so I know what to focus on— Can you change that into something more useful?”
You said arctically, “I am a Lyctor, Palamedes Sextus.”
“And I’m so sorry about it,” he said. “Point taken though. Anything that articulates, okay?”
“But—”
The crash against the door rattled you all the way down to your toes. You had no magic in that River bubble; it might as well have been the vacuum of space, before you had built the furnace within yourself. Your necromancy was as still and dead as the room itself. It was surprising, how badly it frightened you. It was only you, and your mind’s outline of your body, and the ghost of a dead man, and the thing that followed you inside.
The door held as both of you strained against it. The next rattle made the hinges squeal in agony. Palamedes looked at you and opened his mouth to say something as a third rattle flung you both back a little; your heads knocked together, and then you heard the deliberate steel rasp of a trigger being cocked.
Sextus was rubbing his temple and looking at you, awestruck, as though he had seen some stupefying glimpse of the beyond; you did not remotely understand the sharp smile that suddenly crossed his face.
“Kill us twice, shame on God,” he said, and he leaned forward, and much to your intense distress he swiftly kissed your brow. Then he said: “Harrowhark, for pity’s sake, go!”
You dropped back under, and you did not hear the gunshot; you were, not for the first time, overwhelmed with the suspicion that you were standing in the middle of what you had thought to be scenery, only to reach out and discover that it was all so much flimsy. You were not a central lever within a mystery, but a bystander watching a charlatan display a trick. Your eyes had followed a bright light or colour, and you realised with a start that you ought to have been watching the other hand. You were standing in a darkened corridor, and you could not turn around: and then a brief explosion of light revealed to you that it wasn’t a corridor at all, and it had never been dark.
But you were always too quick to mourn your ow
n ignorance. You never could have guessed that he had seen me.
34
WHEN YOU SAT UP, struggling for breaths you did not need to take—wet only with the sweat trickling under the dormant bones of your exoskeleton—you saw not the canopy of trees overhead, but a filmy white length of sheeting. You had been moved. You were lying down flat, not bent in the curved posture that you had been taught to adopt, and your sword was tucked beneath your arm, and you had been upended onto a thin blanket that nonetheless let you feel each blade of grass and uneven mound of turf beneath, and feel the beating sun overhead and hear the shrill host of outside creatures.
Camilla Hect sat beside you, and she did not flinch when you sat up all at once. You were in a larger clearing, with a huge mess of crushed boughs beside you, some of which had been pressed into service to hold up the tent you lay beneath; beyond the tent curved the great metal belly of a shuttle.
Your mind idiotically focused upon its bizarre shape and style: it was not a Cohort shuttle, nor any kind of shuttle of the Nine Houses, and not only because it had not been adorned with even a single bone. It was made of very shiny silver steel, and its heat treatment made it sizzle, with a sort of wobbling radiance sitting just above the hull. It was also thoroughly battered and singed: you would not have flown it ten feet above the ground, let alone into atmosphere or the black depths of space. It was small, no more than three bodies wide and three bodies tall, and the thought of being forced inside curdled you. But your distaste and paranoia were stopped in midswing by Camilla saying with barely repressed intensity: “So?”
You said, “He’s in there.”
The cavalier of the Sixth House looked at you; then she collapsed back in a long, controlled movement. She lay flat on her back staring sightlessly at the sky, half-shadowed by the sheeting, half-glowing in the light. At last she gave a long, shuddering breath and sat back up with the same abruptness.
“Good,” she said, and she smiled, very briefly. This smile lit the corners of her face like a rising comet. It made her look, in fact, ridiculously like her adept. “What now?”
You held the carefully assembled fragments of skull between your hands, and hoped that he is had not become he was. Then you crushed the bone between your fingers—the cavalier next to you reached out reflexively, then stopped herself—and you kneaded the fragments within your palms until you could winnow out the glue, which, thank God, had been chemical in nature. It might have very easily been derived from keratin, which would have been a momentary confusion and annoyance. The glue was expunged as a knotty collection of gummy nodules, which you discarded, and left you with a thanergy-rich clay. You considered this malleable stuff for a moment before knitting it between your hands.
Phalanges spurted from the mass; then a distal row, then a proximal row of carpal bones and a length of articulated wrist. It was not the sheer animal pleasure of Ianthe’s arm, but it was easy and it was satisfying. You said, “I could simply give you a full skeleton frame.”
“Don’t,” said Camilla quickly, and paused, and said: “That’s going to get me in trouble.”
“The Warden specifically requested movement.”
“I don’t mean him,” said his cavalier.
You tossed her the hand bones and she caught them on reflex. You grasped your sword and stood, and, before she could prevent you, you walked around the side of the bizarre shuttle. There was some manner of open cargo-delivery hatch, or means of entrance, with the door hoisted up on a jack so that fresh air could circulate within the shuttle. You stood in the blinking sunlight before this open door, on the flattened grass, and you looked inside. The three inhabitants stared back at you.
The first was Captain Deuteros, a woman whose stretched-out corpse you had last seen riddled with bullets. She was sitting, not in her Cohort whites, but in a drab long-sleeved shirt of indeterminate colour, and dark trousers. She looked like a shell of the crisp adept you had seen back at Canaan House, and less robust even than her corpse. She had lost significant weight from her already fragile necromancer’s build, her cheeks were dark hollows, and she clasped two crutches in her lap.
Another woman sat close beside her, wearing her own shabby shirt of indeterminate colour, but as though it had been designed for her royal use: a woman you had last seen calmly falling to her death. Ianthe Tridentarius’s features stared out of Coronabeth’s face—an aurora of a face, with deep lustrous skin and burnished hair, and eyes of genuine violet, like plums. Both women were seated in the back of the poorly furnished shuttle, amid crude engines set in oil-reeking array beneath a thin metal grille, and a mess of boxes piled in every corner. Yet the Crown Princess of Ida, missing and presumed dead, filled up that space like a mass of flowers on a midden. She was in as blooming good health as could be, as vigorous as Deuteros was frail.
The third staring inhabitant was not a person. It was an enormous flimsy poster in a chipped frame, the only sign of decoration in that untidy little shuttle. A head-and-shoulders photograph of an unsmiling, adamant person, in all assumption a woman, stared fixedly at you as though calculating how much effort it would take to snap your neck. She was dressed in black to the chin, and her red hair curled thickly about her neck and shoulders. Thick, itchy streams of blood began to ooze down your sinuses.
That portrait frightened you more than anything you had seen since becoming a Lyctor; it scared the irresolute piss from your body. Yet you had never seen the face before in your life.
The Second House captain said, somewhat hoarsely: “Ninth?”
You wiped your face before your hands flew to your exoskeleton again. It disgorged one of the twenty-two with ease, and you pulled open the letter marked: To open if you meet Judith Deuteros.
You translated without conscious thought:
ADDRESSING THE LADY HARROWHARK NONAGESIMUS, KNOWN AS THE REVEREND DAUGHTER BY HER OWN DESIRE, NOW HARROWHARK THE FIRST, FROM THE SAME, NOW DEAD.
LETTER #12 OF 24.
If you meet Judith Deuteros, silence her. Kill her if necessary.
The bones of Deuteros’s jaw fused shut; you glued her bottom molars to her top molars immediately, and cleaved her tongue to her palate. She said, “Nnnngh?”
You took out a second letter to be sure, although this one was in plain script, and you had read it already:
ADDRESSING THE LADY HARROWHARK NONAGESIMUS, KNOWN AS THE REVEREND DAUGHTER BY HER OWN DESIRE, NOW HARROWHARK THE FIRST, FROM THE SAME, NOW DEAD.
LETTER #5 OF 24.
Protect Coronabeth Tridentarius at all costs, even if this endangers your life. The work is forfeit if you contribute to her death by direct or indirect action. In the interests of the work, you may silence her, so long as this causes her no significant pain.
In different handwriting:
P.S. Or any pain at all.
In yours:
P.P.S. I cannot guarantee a total absence of pain.
The first amender:
P.P.P.S. There must be a total absence of pain actually.
In yours again:
P.P.P.P.S. We have jointly agreed on “as little pain as may be achieved via the fullness of necromantic effort.”
And in the first:
P.P.P.P.P.S. xoxoxoxo
Coronabeth Tridentarius had already leapt to her feet and unsheathed a rapier you knew very well, and which froze you to the core to behold. It was a Ninth House rapier. The blade was black metal, with a plain guard and a hilt of the same colour. She stood before the mute shell that now constituted Deuteros, neatly at the ready with the rapier brandished and her left arm tucked behind her back. It was so like looking at Ianthe that you were differently bewildered; but you had already done the same to her—the tongue to the roof of the mouth, the teeth to the teeth—and so all she could say was, “Nnnngh!”
You drew your two-handed sword.
“Stop it.” The Sixth cavalier had joined this shitty tableau; she narrowed her eyes to slits in the sunshine. “I warned them already.”
“I do
this on a greater authority than your own.”
“Balls,” said Hect succinctly. “Let them go.” Then: “Why is that sword gummed up, and who taught you to hold it like that?”
“I refuse to— What?”
“Your hands are too close together. Put your left hand at the bottom of the pommel, tuck in the arm close to the chest. Right hand high on the hilt, close to the cross guard, up a bit with your thumb—yeah—that’s more like it.” You did all this, and she said: “Good … not like you have the muscle for a rising strike. Okay. Now let Coronabeth and Judith go.”
Your grip adjusted, you found it significantly less difficult to hold the sword pointed down than previously. You asked, “Why are you here? Why are you all alive? Why are you on the other side of the universe—in your own shuttle—innumerable years away from the Nine Houses? Why were your bodies not found at Canaan House?”
With her mouth a gruesome, stuck-together distortion, Deuteros had stood with a crutch shakily clutched beneath one arm, and was now hauling herself toward you with an uprightness of posture that belied her physical weakness. It was still the Cohort captain who silently approached, her dark eyes cold and level; you kept your bone-sheathed sword steady, though you would not in any case use it to kill her if you have to. The captain shouldered past an obviously reluctant Coronabeth—their eyes met, and Judith shook her head in a minute no—and she stopped about a step before you.
Then she grabbed a fistful of mother-of-pearl robes. You did not flinch. She said, “Nnnnngh—mmmmf—nghaaaagh,” as though sheer force of desperation could wrench coherent sound from a fused mouth. Camilla flew to her left side and Corona to her right, but she swung her crutch at them. Her grasp was surprisingly strong, and as she said, “Nnnghhh!” you unfused lips, tongue and teeth. You always were too curious for your own good.