Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  If you prayed for anything, you prayed for clarity. You prayed that you might look upon the face of each remaining Lyctor and that the Body would quietly point to the apostate. You prayed that it had been Cytherea, traitor even in death, and that her body had somehow been tossed out of the Mithraeum’s airlock. You prayed that the whole thing had been an illusion, and sometimes nearly convinced yourself that it was; that you had imagined the dead of Canaan House alive again, impossibly drifting through the jungles of your victim planet, far away from where their bodies had gone to rest. But then why had their coffins on the Erebos been empty? And why now was one of your letters missing, and another two freshly opened?

  Whenever you thought about it, enervated lines of thick, hot blood drooled from each ear, so that your canals were perennially stained deep brown. You prayed to live just a few more weeks.

  * * *

  One month ago, after you distractedly slit the jugular of your fourteenth planet, you were praying thus when a great alarm began pounding through the halls of the Mithraeum. You did not recognise the klaxon—red lights replaced the soothing blue glow of the habitation lamps lining the walls, strobing anxiously on and off.

  And then a huge shutter slid over your window. You stood in front of the weirdly bending, echoing light in front of the plex, and you watched a great metal panel crunch into place with a silent grinding and huge vibration, slowly cutting out the light. Your rooms grew profoundly dark except for that excited red blinking; the klaxon continued as you were left in that red-hued darkness, tight with anticipation, ready to die.

  The voice of the Emperor of the Nine Houses rasped over the comm speaker beside your door, and you rushed to stand before it as he said: “J. G. calling in. All clear. Lyctors, do you copy?”

  “A. A. calling in. All clear.”

  “G. P. calling in. All clear.”

  A pause. Then you heard Ianthe’s cool, detached tones, as if she hadn’t even been asleep: “No one has yet seen fit to grace me with a callsign, but nonetheless, all clear.”

  Augustine: “You’re I. N., of course. Harrow’s H … Yes, Harrow’s H.”

  “H. O., calling in,” you said instantly, and you ignored Ianthe’s audible sniggers. “All clear. What’s going on?”

  And God said urgently, “Mercy, do you copy? Who pulled the alarm?”

  The communicator crackled. Somebody breathed deeply. Then there was a lowing over the system—a terrible animal call of uncomprehending pain—and it did not sound like the Saint of Joy. It sounded like a shower of static, and a bitten-off sob, and then a great, wet, horrible thump.

  The Emperor said, “Someone unlock my door so I can get to her.”

  Ortus said, “I’m closer.”

  Another wet noise of contact. Then Mercy said hoarsely, “No. No. I am coherent. I just … less than a second of visual. I looked away, Lord, but it was optically magnified … there in the centre … It is here! The Resurrection Beast is come! The seventh colossus, brood of that which murdered Cyrus the First, packmate of that which murdered Ulysses the First, the one and the same that Cassiopeia died for. Oh, God, John, sometimes I wish I were capable of dying—I saw it! I saw it, and it is blue like Loveday’s eyes! It knows what you did to its kin, and it sees my cavalier’s mortal soul burning in my chest!”

  The mechanical clank of a door unlocking was also audible over the line. The Emperor said, “Thanks,” and then his side of the communication cut off. Nobody else spoke on the line.

  The klaxon ended. It kept ringing in your ears long after it was gone. Augustine’s voice crackled over the line, quite wearily: “What a dolt. She knows not to look within a kilometre of the thing’s predicted arrival. Well, it’s here early, and so are we. Back to bed, everyone.”

  And you went back to bed. The shutters did not come up again. You would learn that they would not; you would learn that the Mithraeum would only be privy to even more shielding in the days ahead, lest the Emperor of the Nine Houses look upon what approached. But that night you just lay next to the Body, and you noticed that her eyes were open very wide, and that in the darkness they were death-mask gold.

  You said, “Beloved?”

  She said, “It’s coming,” with the most anticipatory astonishment you had ever heard in her low, many-personed voice—right then she used the voice of your father’s cavalier. And: “It’s near!”

  Had she ever been astonished before? Had she ever been uneasy? You were lying face-to-face with her, centimetres from the wet sheen of her skin that ought to have made an imprint on your pillow, facing that crinkled lower lip. Her eyes, which the night lights had turned the sick amber of a healing bruise, stared through you. The Body was troubled: in that hovering place so close to the end of your life, it seemed only natural that you should reach for her. The fear of death had remade your worship into desperation, or maybe desire. You reached one hand out for that frozen tangle of hair at the back of the skull; you closed the gap between you, and you kissed that lovely corpse mouth.

  Of course, you could not. There was nothing there. Contact made her drift away, just as with any of your hallucinations. You had not touched her. Maybe you had not even reached for her. The Body watched you with an expression you were terribly afraid was pity.

  You said, “Please,” and you reached out again. A wave of dizziness rocked you. You pushed at the robe lying crooked at the slope of her shoulder; you pressed your hand low to her belly. Her dignity was untouched by this gross urgency, this coarse frenzy; or maybe, again, you had not done it. You said again, “Please.”

  As though you had crossed no boundary, and above the soundless rough shouting in your ears, the Body said: “I have to go away for a while,” and you regretted everything.

  “I have done wrong,” you said.

  There was the tiniest suggestion of a furrow in that cool unbreathing brow, and she said, “How?”

  You did not begin to know how to answer that. The Body reached out, and stroked her fingers forward, as though to close your eyes: you were too tired to imagine how those fingertips would feel on your lids, how that thumb might brush down the bridge of your nose. You closed your eyes in obedient response. And then—you poor brokenhearted sad sack—you fell deeply asleep.

  In the morning, the Body was gone.

  * * *

  “Here is the strategy for engagement,” said Mercymorn.

  She had wheeled a large piece of opaque white plex before the dinner table where you and Ianthe and Augustine and Ortus were seated, clustered close to her, with the Emperor at the end of the table busying himself with his own work—with his tablet and his diagrams, with his styluses and flimsy. By this point, it had been nearly two months since the death of the fourteenth planet. All the window shutters had been down for weeks. This contributed to a general sense of living inside a box, which you did not mind: there were no windows in Drearburh, though there had always been a sense of depth that made you feel freer than you did upon this flat collection of rings and corridors.

  Your teacher stood before this assembled throng in her Canaanite robe, looking fragile as a white flower with a rotten-peach heart, and she said, “The engagement could go on for three hours. It could go on for eight. It could go on for a week … Assume that timing is labile, and proceed accordingly. Next!”

  The Saint of Joy drew a large cylindrical tube on the plex whiteboard, with a fat black soft-tip pen. She segmented and labelled the cylinder from top to bottom, each a neat interval apart: EPIRHOIC. MESORHOIC. BATHYRHOIC. BARATHRON.

  “The greatest portion of the fight will take place here, as normal,” she said, emphatically underlining EPIRHOIC. “We must use the bank as much as possible. Once the Beast tires—you’ll know because it will try to run—we wrestle it down to the mesorhoic layer, then the bathyrhoic, and then to the barathron. Once we’re there, the stoma will open—and we push it through. Simple!!

  “Not,” Mercymorn added acidly, in case anyone had mistaken her.

  Ortus sa
id, “I maintain we should drive it downward at the start.”

  “No thanks! Not all of us are spearfishers! Next!” she said, but the Saint of Duty wasn’t done; as he occasionally did, he ground forward with the force of gravity, and added doggedly:

  “Our swiftest fight against a Beast took place in the bathyrhoic layer.”

  “Yes, and Number Eight wasn’t tired by the time we got to the barathron, and Ulysses the First had to wrestle it through the stoma, and he is as we speak languishing in Hell! It’s a Resurrection Beast, honey! Thank you! Next!!”

  From the end of the table, his white-ringed eyes still bent down upon his papers, the Emperor said quietly: “His was the action of a hero.”

  “Oh, but the problem is that heroes always die,” said Augustine, who was worrying an edge of tablecloth between his long and elegant fingers. “You can’t even really pronounce one a hero until they die heroically. I thought the downward assault was a good wheeze when you two first came up with it, Ortus, but we know now that the last push against a Beast has to be sudden and conclusive. I’d rather have fought nine more hours and have Ulysses sitting here right now, inciting a sexy party, than have watched him wrestle that thing out of sight.”

  “I hated the sexy parties,” said Mercymorn, with an almost tearful vehemence, and Augustine said, “We know, Joy. We know.”

  You had been watching Ianthe. She could not bear meetings, or any kind of organised activity where she might be forced to deal with anyone else’s opinion, which you found strange considering that she had spent her entire life at the hip of her twin sister. She was sitting in her chair with her pallid arm crossed across the shiny gold of her skeleton one, both framed hideously against the coalescing rainbow whites of her robe. Her hair fell in thin, straight sheets over her shoulders, and she rested the back of her head against the chair-back as though she might nap at any moment. She looked to you; you looked away quickly, but you had been caught watching.

  Lately you found yourself praying that the traitor was not Ianthe, all the while having seen for yourself the living Coronabeth in the arms of Blood of Eden: the twin who, as far as you could tell, was the only human being Ianthe loved more than herself. For the sake of this sister Ianthe had held your gaze while sliding a knife through the palm of your hand.

  Why did you pray for Ianthe’s innocence, when it was so dubious? It was not the way of the Ninth House to pray with such wilful credulousness; yet you prayed all the while knowing Ianthe’s facility for tergiversation would have given the whole universe pause.

  That wanton backstabber said idly, “What about the physical form? Is it really invulnerable?”

  “At its current trajectory I have triangulated that it will perch—here,” said Mercy, and fixed a map of local space to the plex with round magnets. You were bewildered by how far the perch seemed from the Mithraeum; your erstwhile tutor had pegged its location at, if the diagram read true, somewhere in the orbit of a planet five billion kilometres away. “The asteroid field means that we’ll only get waves of Heralds around twenty-five thousand strong—it can’t all-out rush us.”

  Ianthe said, “We know where it is. Bomb it.”

  “We tried that, duckling, as I’ve told you,” said her teacher, but quite kindly. He had removed his kit of rolling papers and pouch of evil-looking innards, and had begun to roll a cigarette. “The layer of dead matter and Heralds is two thousand kilometres thick.”

  “Send a Lyctor to penetrate the layer, plant the bomb close up. I’ll do it, if courage fails in the hearts of my elders.”

  Ortus said, “Tried that,” and Mercy said, “Cytherea was mad for weeks. And I do not mean mad cross, I mean mad insane. She didn’t even touch on the surface.”

  “It’s not that getting rid of the corpus wouldn’t be useful,” said the Emperor. “It would be. When Cyrus drew the corpus into a black hole, Ulysses said that it was the simplest thing in the world to dispose of the brain, that it fell into a dormant state, and he could bring it down to a stoma singlehanded … but that cost us Cyrus. And Cassiopeia drove the body into the River alongside its own brain, but only Cassy could have ever done that … or Augustine.”

  It was halfway to a question. Augustine said, “I’m not Cassy, John. It’s all theoretical to me.”

  And God said, “I hope it stays theoretical. Anyway, the damn thing hardly seemed to care. Put the Heralds aside, Ianthe. Leave them to your sword-hand.”

  You said, “And how to defeat the Beast? What does it look like? How will it attack us? What must we expect?”

  Mercymorn took her fat-tipped marker and scribbled on the plex, placing her new object squarely in the epirhoic layer. “This is the Beast,” she said.

  Augustine said, “That’s a muffin.”

  “I see a cloud, but with a face,” said Ianthe. “If you take that main squiggle for an eye.”

  You said, “I thought it was a flower,” and God said, “No, yes, I agree, there’s something—florescent about it.”

  And Ortus said, “Thought it was a snake in a bush.”

  “I hate you all,” said Mercymorn passionately. “I have hated you for millennia … except you, my lord.”

  “Thanks,” said God.

  “I merely want to put you in a jail,” said his Lyctor, now meditative, “and fill up the jail with acid once for every time you made a frivolous remark, or ate peanuts in a Cohort Admiralty meeting, or said, ‘What would I know, I’m only God.’ Then at the end of a thousand years, you would say, ‘Mercy, I have learned not to do any of these things, because I hated the acid you put on me.’ And I would say, ‘That is why I did it, Lord. I did it for you, and for your empire.’ I often think about this,” she finished.

  The Emperor of the Nine Houses said, “I ate peanuts, discreetly, the once.”

  You said, “Let us continue on the assumption that the diagram is the Beast.”

  “Yes! Thank you,” said your teacher, “except that I noted your use of the assumption, and I would like to remind you, infant, that I also hated you on sight. The Beast’s brain will sit in the epirhoic layer, and it will attack us in—any way it chooses. Each Beast is different. I have fought numerous now, and each Beast is quite unlike any other … Number Two spewed quicksilver and remade itself into hundred-foot spikes. Number Six kept sucking us into enormous sphincters and spraying us with worms. I cannot even remember what it looked like. I remember Number Four … it was a humanoid creature with a beautiful face who held me under the water, and it spoke in a lovely voice but it only repeated, die, die—and I recall Number One as a great and incoherent machine … when I saw it I thought it had a great tail, and a thousand broken pillars on its back, but Cassiopeia saw it as a mechanical monster with swords for wings, and great horns of myelin, tessellated over with graves.”

  It was the Saint of Duty who said, restlessly: “Number Eight was a giant head.”

  “Finned like a fish,” said Augustine, lost in reverie. “Its ribs were bloody bandages, and its teeth protruded through its own skull, tangled about its face like a nest. It was red, and it had a single eye of green that moved all about the body … Look,” he said, coming back to himself, perhaps seeing something in your and Ianthe’s expressions. “They’re not great, is what we are saying.”

  Ianthe said, “Then this is a waste of time, eldest sister. We can’t plan on fighting it.”

  “We can arrange our formation,” said the Saint of Joy primly. “Take your own section of the Beast, and concentrate. You, idiot baby, will take the east. Augustine will take the west, Ortus the north. I will take southmost to its central point, whatever that point looks like, and whatever it may be—it may be we can’t even comprehend it spatially, but at that point, fight it and get out of everyone else’s way.”

  You said, “What about me?”

  No one looked at you, except for Mercymorn. Ianthe’s gaze was fixed in some totally different direction, perhaps her appointed east; Augustine was lighting a neatly rolled cigarette, and
the Saint of Duty simply studied the shield pulled down over the wide window that had used to look out into space. Even God did not look up from whatever administrative work concerned the Prince Undying. The only eyes for you were Mercy’s: that endless, red-shaded hurricane, sinking into those sandy brown depths, moving over the face of grey waters.

  “Just don’t get in the way,” she said.

  Augustine said smoothly: “See where you’re needed, sis. It may be that the Beast has some vulnerability you can mark. Or it may try to attack us from without, which means you’ll be useful on the perimeter. Keep flexible.”

  This would have been a perfectly reasonable request had its meaning not been so obvious. Do not distract us with your death.

  The Kindly Prince said, idly: “He’s right, Harrowhark. From what I can tell, it’s useful to have someone who can move laterally, rather than being obliged to keep to one place … and in any case, like most best-laid plans, this one won’t survive contact with the enemy. Do what you feel is best, and everyone else will endeavour not to swamp your skeletons … Can we have a tea break, Mercy? I’m gasping.”

  Your sister closest in age did not stand, as everyone else did, at God’s request to put the kettle on. She was still looking at the black diagram, and she asked, quite unconcernedly: “What is the stoma?”

  Mercy said, “Augustine, you did tell her about the stoma,” in tones of accusation, but he simply said: “No. I saw no reason to frighten her. Why—did you tell Harrowhark?”