Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  “Ngghyaaar—warn him, Lyctor! He has been infiltrated, damn it, and I can do nothing! I am a prisoner of war! If you love him, tell the Emperor that the traitor has already—Nghhhyughh—”

  This last nghhhyugh was nothing to do with you. Coronabeth, face set, had clasped her hand over the Second House’s mouth and manhandled her backward, which was very easy for someone of the Third’s stature to do to someone of the Second’s. Ianthe’s twin was stone-eyed, and the expression she and the captain gave each other was antagonistic, to say the least. Judith was humiliatingly bundled back within the confines of the shuttle—Coronabeth kicked a lever close to the door—the great shady overhead hatch started whining down, and you watched the darkness claim her and the furious dignity of the downed soldier beneath the cold gaze of that too-familiar portrait. Judith was signing something to you, but you could not make out Cohort signals. You’d never bothered yourself with the military.

  Camilla was picking up the crutch. She said, restlessly, “Look, we should go. We weren’t meant to be here.”

  You said, “You are a fool if you think I will let you leave like—”

  “I evoke the rock that is never rolled away,” she said instantly. She was a quick study. “Let us leave. Tell no one we were here. Don’t ask any more questions. We’re not on the same side anymore, Ninth. I owe you. I owe you everything. But—things have changed.”

  It was your turn for your tongue to cleave to the roof of your mouth. The once-cavalier of the Sixth House looked at you impassively, and she said: “I’m sorry, if that helps.”

  You said, “It doesn’t.”

  “Fair.”

  “Let me ask one thing,” you said. “One single question—just the one—for the sake of what I have just done for you, and for the Master Warden of the Sixth House.”

  Camilla looked at you distantly, and eventually said: “Ask. I’m not going to promise that I can answer.”

  You said, “Who took you away from Canaan House? Who are you with, Hect?”

  “You call them Blood of Eden,” she said.

  * * *

  That evening, Mercymorn came to fetch you from the surface of a planet you had killed, with almost no thought to its murder. Indeed, you had felt almost nothing, and you said very little, which met your teacher’s needs excellently as she had nothing to say to you except, “You smell like dirt.” She piloted you back to the Mithraeum in silence. You watched the retreating planet out the window, and it looked no different, except that perhaps the deep water that lined the equator in chilly juxtaposed slabs of ice seemed more cracked and turbid than previous. It was safely dead, with its cavorting animal populace unaware of their long-term death sentence. Worms crawled within the miserable, foetid pit of you.

  35

  “I AM SORRY, NINTH,” Abigail said, in the same hesitantly kind and careful tones you might use to tell someone that their cat would never grow up into a tiger: “I’m not at all an expert in psychometry, and with such an old rapier you’d need both a Sixth House specialist and to get awfully lucky. It was your grandmother’s nine generations back, you said? And it was handled, briefly?”

  “That,” came the soft, funereal voice of Harrowhark’s cavalier, softer and more funereal filtered through his muffler, “was the nature of the condescension.”

  “And the blade has been replaced?”

  “The hilt is original, barring the grip.” Pause. “And parts of the basket.”

  “Right. No chance of it being … bled on?”

  “It was handled. She told stories of how the balance of the sword was complimented. It would have been touched for, perhaps, twenty to thirty seconds.”

  “With gloves on.”

  “That is customary.”

  “Ortus,” she said. “I’m not trained for this. I think our chances are very small. I think we’ve got a similar chance of Magnus tripping over the secret entrance to the lost chambers of the Emperor Undying. Actually, that’s significantly less unlikely, as I’ve come to believe they run sidelong to the facility rather than—never mind. Sir, I am truly, truly sorry, but—Reverend Daughter, is that you?”

  It was not likely to be anybody else standing on the threshold, unwilling to cross over and listen to the rest of the conversation. Harrowhark had been standing in profound silence, without so much as the rustle of a fold of robe, but the necromancer of the Fifth House had demonstrated extraordinarily acute hearing for eavesdroppers. “We’re used to Jeanne and Isaac, you know,” she had said, as though that constituted an explanation all by itself.

  No hope of disappearing back into the corridor, or taking refuge in audacity and answering, No. The Reverend Daughter swept into the frozen library as though she had been noticed at the moment of entry, and found the Fifth and her swordsman-apparent standing before a rack of old and crunchy maps. He had his fragile, rusty sword balanced courteously on his palms before the mild-eyed adept, and she had been rubbing a sort of clear balm over the knobbled base. Ortus, as blackly gowned, deep-eyed, and sadly painted as ever, had taken to wearing his black canvas panniers all the time. His hood was recklessly pushed away from his freshly shaven head—it took a sense of duty shading into martyrdom to shave in these conditions—and he looked rather as though he had been caught opening birthday presents a day early. His breath emanated from the black scarf around his face and nose as a pale mist.

  The bloody fog had turned to sleet; the sleet had, in its time, turned to ice. A soft snow began falling like volcanic ash about a week after the first hailstorm. Banks of snow piled up through the cracks in the windows and blew loose into everyone’s faces in the more exposed halls and ways of Canaan House. Sometimes the snow fell red, and the ice settling into the cracks of the paving stones and the steel of the dock terraces was a deep, unsettling carmine. The fresh vegetables had died, and they were down to preserved food. The rainbow-girdled constructs had kept fishing in the still-moving salt sea, but Teacher had taken one look at their catch and refused to have it cooked, or to let anyone else even see it.

  Nonetheless, the snow and the bloody ice proved to be the least of the changes facing Canaan House.

  Ortus sheathed his rapier with more care than finesse, and he asked: “How fare the preparations, Lady?” at exactly the same time Abigail said, “You shouldn’t really be walking unaccompanied, Harrow.”

  “Quinn and Dyas were with me until the end of the corridor. We’ve laid all the wards,” she said. Harrow had not bothered with scarf or muffler, and every so often regretted it: her lips were cracked, and so were her paints, no matter how much she powdered herself beforehand, which gave her skull the appearance of a worn-down fresco. “No matter their efficacy, they’ll tell us something—if the Sleeper trips them while moving, that will tell us one thing; if the Sleeper doesn’t trip them while moving, that will tell us another.”

  “You did not attempt to move the coffin,” her cavalier said, with only the faintest flicker of hope.

  “Of course I did,” said Harrow, and he briefly closed his eyes in a full-face wince. “Nothing. It is absolutely immovable. Dyas pried up the panelling to see how far down it extends—it is laid like a pillar. I didn’t hold out too much hope that we could simply drop the thing into the ocean, but I admit to being disconcerted.”

  He said, “Mistress, you might have woken it up.”

  “And that would have told me something else,” she said.

  “I wish that you would not take such enormous liberties with your own life.”

  Harrowhark said, “Would you rather I took enormous liberties with yours?” and did not intend it to be unkind; had thought it even faintly reassuring. But Ortus’s dark eyes chilled in their sockets, as though the icy cold had reached them also, and his lips curled downward, and he said, lowly: “That is my purpose, yes.”

  “You hate the facility. It makes you sweat. You have begged not to be taken down there.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then try to not to mourn when everythi
ng goes according to your request,” said Harrow, and then they were both irritated—she knew that he was irritated because a conversation had not gone the way he’d overplanned it, and she knew that she was irritated because each time she tried to blunt the razor edge of her tongue, he somehow grasped the blades of her anyway. Nothing in their exchange had been less than typical of the Locked Tomb, and yet ever since she had come to Canaan House she had found it all—wanting, somehow. She did nothing to stanch the flow when she said, “Are we in agreement? Are we clear?”

  “Thoroughly,” said her cavalier sadly.

  Abigail had been making herself look busy as only a member of the Fifth House could. Harrowhark was learning that a scion of the Fifth House might busy themselves politely during a murder, or an orgy. Now she said briskly, “I’m glad you’re here, Harrow. I wanted to talk to you about what happens next.”

  She sat down at the table and tossed her thick, painstakingly brushed sheets of smooth brown hair behind her—Abigail Pent would present smartly in earthquake, fire, or flood—and Harrowhark said, “I assume you mean the organs.”

  “Yes. Those aren’t great,” said Pent.

  The snow had settled; the ice, in pinkish, crackling drifts, had formed miniature fernlike cherry-shaded patterns on all the ancient glass. In their wake, great slithering, pulsing tubes had worked themselves up through the cracks in the floorboards, or wound down among the frozen weeds. The tubes were a fresh, clear pink, with redder veins beneath the translucent topmost layer. At intervals, black clusters swam within, this way and that, like frightened fish. When one cut them, they bled a gush of filthy water, then the wound closed up as one watched. The cold had deepened to the point where a few hours would freeze this substance solid, a sort of brownish cloud with a misty, gelid surface.

  The tubes were not homogenous: every so often they would pouch out, or fall in dramatic drapes along the wall or from the ceiling, with whitish, pearl-bubbled globules secreted away within their flesh. The surviving inhabitants of Canaan House were united—even Harrow—in agreement with Dulcie Septimus’s pronouncement that it was “absolutely ghastly, bordering on shitty.”

  Abigail considered Harrow gravely, with her hands tucked into a pair of her husband’s outsized woolly gloves, and she said: “Reverend Daughter, we look to you.”

  Harrowhark had been looked to before, though rarely by anyone under seventy years old. She kept her gloved fingers within the folds of her robe, flexing them occasionally, and waited. The Fifth historian continued: “My necromantic scholarship is specific, my general practice—scattershot. I never did hold ambitions in that quarter. I can command a skeleton, but I can’t create one. I can work tendon or a muscle, or settle skin into a gash, but if that can be weaponized, I’d love to know how. And as for the Duchess Septimus…”

  All things considered, Dulcinea Septimus was a medical miracle. By her own account, her lungs were blown-out sacs of inflammation from the last round of pneumonia she had fought before her voyage to the House of the First; the cold ought to have already buried her beneath those deep, cerise snows outside. But there was seemingly very little wrong with her, apart from the occasional cough. Harrowhark had been ready to denounce her as a lifelong hypochondriac, except that Septimus herself was the first to insist as much: “I have always said that thinking one is sick is probably what makes you sickest,” she once said hopefully, while avoiding attempts on her cavalier’s part to feed her evil-smelling linctus from a spoon.

  Abigail said, “She should be incapacitated. It’s marvellous that she isn’t. But her flesh magic is inward-supporting—she says the Master Warden of the Sixth House gave her instruction when they were children, though goodness knows he would have been what, nine years old—and that she neglected her other studies. You, the lieutenant, and Protesilaus the Seventh constitute our front line.”

  Harrowhark very specifically did not look at her cavalier to see how he took this pronouncement. He had formed a violent passion against the heroic knight of the Seventh House; she thought it was nice that he had a hobby. She said, “If the temperature drops further, I am in danger of becoming less useful. I have been experimenting with heating marrow to stop it from freezing, an art I have as far as I can tell only just invented, but it is fiendishly difficult. I do not admit this lightly.”

  “Oh, damn!” the Fifth necromancer said softly. “Damn, damn! I hadn’t even thought of that. I mean—gosh, that’s fascinating, you ought to tell me the details at some point, but—damn!”

  Harrowhark rubbed her hands against her ribs through her robes and gloves, and said: “This is all precaution. I’m still fit for purpose, so long as the temperature doesn’t fall.”

  “Then time is against us,” said Ortus.

  “Time was always against us,” said Abigail.

  “Oh, time … time,” said a voice from the doorway. “Time means very little … mastery does. This temple stood for ten thousand years untouched by all but time’s clumsiest pawing … but then its master was the Master, for whom even the River will part. Time is nothing to the King Everlasting.”

  It was Teacher. He wore his white woollen tunic with its beautiful rainbow sash, and his sandals and a little white half cape, but nothing else to keep out the cold. He had a bottle of apple-coloured liquid in his hand that he took a pull from every so often, the sharp reek of which made Harrow’s nose crinkle.

  To their silence, he added: “I believe we are now being punished for what they did. Even the devil bent for God to put a leash around her neck … and the disciples were scared! I cannot blame them! I was terrified! But when the work was done—when I was finished, and so were they, and the new Lyctors found out the price—they bade him kill the saltwater creature before she could do them harm … Oh, but it is a tragedy, to be put in a box and laid to wait for the rest of time. It happened to me, but I was only a man, or perhaps fifty men … Reverend Daughter, your whole House treads upon a knife’s edge, as keepers of such a zoo.”

  He caught her gaze on the bottle, and his very blue eyes twinkled a little madly, and he said with greater calm: “It’s thistle shrub, child. I could not get drunk on it if I tried. And how I have tried.”

  Ortus said, “You speak in riddles, old man.”

  “Then let me speak plainly,” said Teacher. “You worship a monster in a box and play at being the masters of its tomb. Now we have a monster in a box, and it has become obvious that it means to master us all. Canaan House has never changed its colour, nor its shape, nor with the seasons. I should know; we measured summer to winter, temperature and precipitation and the acidity of the very sea beneath us, and it never hailed, and it never snowed, and we certainly never saw fimbriae hanging from the rafters. Let me prophesy in my old age: the Sleeper is getting up the strength to wake completely, and colonize what it finds. I fear! God! How I fear!”

  Abigail said, “Teacher, please come and take up residence with us. We have beds—we keep watches,” but he cried out: “And miss out on the chance to die? I’ve been wandering these halls at three o’clock in the morning, saying at the top of my voice, ‘It would be terrible to be shot,’ and the Sleeper still does not come … It is dreadful to be shown a monster’s pity.”

  He pivoted abruptly and took another long suck at the bottle. “Your swords will not rend its armour,” he said, with his back turned to them. “Its weapons will ruin your flesh. It will not stop until it has subsumed its quarry. And it would only acknowledge the blade without … all we have are the blades within. It has seen them and made them dull. There is no hero left among us … and I say, hooray!”

  Teacher, in a mad sprightly dash, clicked his heels together with the ardour and energy of a man a quarter of his age. “Hooray!” he said again. “Into the River with us, boys! Fifty can school like fishes!”

  And he threw his bottle violently at the nearest section of tube, out in the corridor. Harrowhark watched as the shiny red organ gave out a wet, squishing blarp; the bottle bounced off it dism
ally, and as Abigail and Ortus drew close beside her, it rolled sadly beneath another fold of wet, curtaining pink. Some of the bitter fluid within spilt out onto the battered wooden floor. Within seconds, even the ends of that alcohol began to flake into shards of ice.

  “It’s coming for you, Reverend Daughter!” said Teacher. “Oh, it’s coming for you—and once it’s got you, once that rock’s rolled away, once that tomb’s levered open, the Emperor of the Nine Houses will never know peace ever again! The King is dead! Long live the King!”

  Teacher capered madly down the hallway like a child—slapping at long, shivering droplet-shaped lumps of viscus, and whooping as he went. His hooting and hollering rang off the antique walls long after he disappeared.

  Harrow felt the cold as an old friend inside the thick black canvas of her church robe. Her fingers burnt as though she had held them too close to a fire. Her cavalier and the historian did not warm her as they stood beside her: it was as though she were alone in the room. She was startled when the latter touched her: laid her hand on her shoulder as though she were no older than one of the vanished Fourth House duo, a gawky little girl in the face of death.

  “Well, bugger Teacher,” said Abigail Pent crossly.

  36

  ONE WEEK BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER

  IN THOSE LAST LONG, terrible days before the end—those strangled, claustrophobic, white-faced days that stalked the borders of your nights like predators waiting for your collapse—you began to pray again. This was not because you had anyone in particular to pray to. It just helped, in its own ineffable way, to read your knucklebone prayer beads, and to recite childhood meditations you had learned when you were yet too small to look out over the pew. You were filled with the baffling memory of Mortus the Ninth lifting you up to see your mother leading Mass; before you were allowed on the sanctuary, you were seated in front and held by your father’s cavalier, so that you might not stare at a softly powdered stone chair-back for the whole session. You remembered that you had far preferred the strong, sad hands of Mortus to being sat next to your great-aunts and given a stinging piece of peppermint candy to suck, as though you ever needed to be kept quiet. It had been the last assumption of immaturity you would ever enjoy. You had been three years old, maybe.