Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  Naturally, you had not been told about the stoma. Your teacher simply said, fractiously, “She’ll never see it! Why bother?”

  “If I have my way, we’ll leave Ianthe safely in the mesorhoic. We three old lags will be more than enough to take it down,” said Augustine sharply. Ianthe’s languid brown-spotted gaze dragged up to him as though it barely had the energy to do so. “That thing has a ferocious gravitational pull. It’s not for neophytes.”

  “Excuse me, we may not all of us be alive by the time the thing is exhausted, so I would stop swaddling your squalling baby—”

  “You never did take the stoma seriously, which is why your whole damned House sucks at it like a grotesque teat—”

  “Don’t be coarse—”

  “It is the mouth to Hell,” said God.

  He stood in the liminal space between dining room and kitchen, the biscuit tin clutched in his hands. There were crease marks on his clothes from too much wearing, and there was a faint smudge of blue where he had been writing with ink and touched his temple. He said, “A genuinely chaotic space—chaos in the meaning of the abyss as well as unfathomable … located at the bottom of the River. The Riverbed is studded with mouths that open at proximity of Resurrection Beasts, and no ghosts venture deeper than the bathyrhoic layer. Anyone who has entered a stoma has never returned. It is a portal to the place I cannot touch—somewhere I don’t fully comprehend, where my power and my authority are utterly meaningless. You’ll find very few ghosts sink as far as the barathron. If I believed in sin, I would say they died weighted down with sin, placing them nearer the trash space. That’s what we’ve been using it for, in any case. That’s where we put the Resurrection Beasts. The rubbish bin … with all the other dross.”

  Then he said, “So who wants a bikkie?”

  37

  THE ATMOSPHERE ON THE Mithraeum crystallized into hot, waiting agony. You would walk down a hallway and find Augustine and Ortus fighting—their eyelids glued together in pink, smarting lines as they sparred blind, in tight corners, rapiers flashing like light over water—then stopping apparently at random, before the Saint of Patience would say something like, “Okay; again, but airless,” and you would hear a sudden pounding wheeze as both of them emptied the air from their lungs. Generally, you then took another corridor.

  The Lyctors also did what they perhaps should have from the very start, and organised loosely planned, often contradictory sessions of instruction for Ianthe—and for you. You went en masse into the River, leaving your bodies behind to slump into C-curves—or at least, yours did, the rest of them stood—and crunched the silvery sand of the bank beneath your feet as the three saints led you both to assemble wards. No blood or flesh or bone here: the first two might be scavenged, the last swept away by the capricious tide. You collected bits of dried wood—dried wood?—and empty-coloured stones—stones?—from the banks of the River beyond death, and you collected armfuls of the sharply unkind osiers and tall, feathery plants, the ones with long fibrous stems as tall as you were and thin, tangled leaves. Filthy salt wind whipped your faces as you formed wards from the flotsam that grew, apparently, on the bank. And no ghosts passed you to wade down to the water—no ghosts heaved themselves out of the waters of the layer that Mercymorn had called the epirhoic—they had fled for different climes.

  “The poor bastards are terrified,” said Augustine.

  There was nothing to see in the River yet; no brain, no hint of Beast, no far-off haze that indicated anything amiss. When you came around, you found that you were the only one sitting in a circle of standing Lyctors, their faces like blank flimsy, their rapiers in their hands, their offhands at the ready. The Saint of Duty with his spear. The Saint of Patience with his smallsword. The Saint of Joy with her net. Ianthe, with her trifold knife. You stared numbly at these faces, wondering which one would betray God at the last.

  At the beginning of that last week, you still believed you might live, despite the briefing’s assumption that you would not. In the middle of that last week the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, invited you to his rooms after supper, to talk; when you sat in that now-familiar armchair before that now-familiar coffee table—the great window now a flat darkness, the ship a belly you were all nestling within—he surprised you by only offering you water and a very plain cracker. You found yourself able to nibble its edges, and tasted only flour and salt.

  “I know you said no, the last time,” said Teacher. “I respected it. I won’t offer again, except to say—if at any point, before the final shutters come down—if at any point before Mercymorn locks me in—you come to me and ask to get locked in with me, it will be done. You have ten thousand years before you, Harrowhark.”

  You did not address this. Instead, you said: “Lord?”

  “Teacher.”

  You said, “You are the Prince Undying. You are the Necrolord Highest. Why do we lock you inside an airless room?”

  He rested back in his chair and locked his fingers together over his belly. “You’ve hit upon a sore spot, Harrowhark,” he said affably, brown brows crinkling together. “I am your salvation and your light. Who should I fear?”

  “I never meant to,” you said, leaning forward. “I just want to understand. Please.”

  “What happens to your body when you go under, Harrow? When you go into the River?”

  You had long passed the point where you needed to think about it. “The body enters a senseless state. The Lyctor doesn’t perceive anything around them in any sense; even their necromancy fails. Instead, the secondary soul comes to the fore—the protection mechanism—that can wield a sword even if their mind is gone … without conscious thought or awareness of its own, but with a perfect sword-hand.” If they were functional.

  The Emperor of the Nine Houses drummed his fingers over his belt. It still hurt you a little, to look into his terrible eyes: the irises like black shadows of the Canaanite white, that iridescent absence of colour, a shade rather than a tint; the purity of the white ring; then the matte black of the sclera. You had never become used to it.

  “A myriad ago, I resurrected nine planets,” he said. “And I reignited the central star, and I called it Dominicus. As a reminder. Dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea, quem timebo? God is my light. Harrowhark, if I went under—I’d enter that senseless state, and I am God. What if, forty billion light-years away, my people looked up to see Dominicus falter and go out? What if the very House beneath their feet died all over again, as I turned my back upon it?”

  You said, “So if you die, the Houses die with you. The star warming our system fails, and—becomes a gravitational well, as I understand it?”

  “Yes. A black hole, like the one that took out Cyrus,” he said. “I can only hope you’d all be dead already. Oh, there’d still be Cohort ships … hold planets … a scattering of us … but we would be so few, and so many people hate us, and my work is not yet done. I cannot behold that apocalypse, Harrow. I think you are one of the only Lyctors who can really and truly understand apocalypse … It is not a death of fire. It’s not showy. You and I would almost prefer the end, if it came as a supernova. It is the inexorable setting of the sun, without another hope of morning.”

  Both of you fell into silence.

  “If I fought the Resurrection Beast I’d leave my Houses to die,” he said. “If I fought the Heralds, I might well go mad, which would be the same thing. So I’m shut in here—walled in, really—to prevent the Nine Houses becoming none House, with left grief.”

  He looked very tired. He looked very rueful. He said, “Once again. You’re not the only one with limitations.”

  “May I ask you a question, Teacher?”

  “You’re not sick of them yet?”

  You said, “Who was A.L.?”

  His eyes flew open. God sat up straight in his chair, looked at you in open astonishment, and he said, “Are you sure you want to go with—that one? Let’s go through all the other, less awkward ones first. How is a
baby made? I can do that, easy. I mean, I don’t want to, but I’m ready. I have this little book about babies, bodies, friends, and family. Are you and Ianthe being safe?”

  It was your turn to sit up straight in your chair and intone, constructing each syllable with the same rigid emphasis you might give to a skeleton: “We—are not—intimate.”

  “Sorry—I mean, you’re about the same age, I don’t really know how this goes anymore, we’ve all been alive for too long…”

  “Neither are we romantic—neither are we, frankly, platonic—”

  “Sorry! Sorry. Sorry,” he added, “I should not assume these things.”

  If your paint could have baked upon your face and crumbled off like clay, it would have. If you could have willed the Saint of Duty to burst through the door, skewer you through, and parade your gored body around the room, you would have. You began to get up. “If I have overstepped, Teacher, forgive me. I withdraw the question.”

  “No,” he said. “Let’s talk about her. Let’s talk about my bodyguard.”

  Carefully, you sat back down.

  God said, “You’ve been listening to Augustine and Mercymorn.”

  “Yes.”

  “It wouldn’t be Ortus. Poor Augustine. Poor Mercy. They still feel badly … they still carry their apportioned blame. I think, yes, that it’s time for you to know about A.L.”

  He pronounced her name, as both his wayward saints had, as two clearly separate letters: you could hear the A and the L. He said, “It stood for a couple of things. A joke, mostly. I often called her Annabel Lee. Annie Laurie. When I first met her I just called her First, One. She had a real name, but I buried it with her, and nobody says it anymore.

  “She has been dead for nearly ten thousand years, but she keeps her vigil with me, as a memory, if nothing else … Annabel Lee was my—what do I call her? Guide? Friend? I’d hoped so…”

  You did not know how to respond to this. He did not seem to need a response. God said, “She was the first Resurrection. She was my Adam. As the dust settled and I beheld what was left and what was gone, I was entirely alone. The world had been ended, Harrowhark. One moment I was a man, and then the next moment I was the Necrolord Prime, the first necromancer, and more importantly, a landlord with no tenants.”

  You said, “Teacher, what destroyed the House of the First?”

  “Not much,” said the Emperor, and he tried to smile. It was awful. “Rising sea levels and a massive nuclear fission chain reaction … it all went downhill from there.”

  This quiet admission provided the first details you had ever heard of the pre-Resurrection extinction. As mythologies went, it felt distant and unreal. He continued, “It wasn’t gorgeous dust to be left in, Harrow. I was dazed … I was bewildered … and she was my defender and my sole companion, and my colleague in the scholarship of learning how to live again. It was bloody difficult. I had never been God.”

  He trailed off here. Then he said: “She lived to see what happened at Canaan House. Not that she took much interest. My first Resurrection was not a normal human being, Harrow, and she struggled to pretend. Anger was her besetting sin. We had that in common. And when the cost of Lyctorhood was paid, when the emotions were at their peak … we found out the price for our sin. The monstrous retribution. To be chased for our crime to the ends of the universe, to have our deed stain our very faces and follow after us like a foul smell. She died after that first terrible assault.”

  You did not say, I am sorry; you did not offer empathy. As with many mysteries, this one had turned out to be sad and dull: the Emperor of the Nine Houses had someone, and then, like all his Lyctors, the Emperor of the Nine Houses had lost someone. It was your story. It was Ianthe’s story. It was the story of Augustine, and of Mercymorn, and of Ortus. It was Cytherea’s story, and that of all the Lyctors who had died over that long dark sheaf of years.

  “I understand why cavaliers primary carry their House titles,” said God. “It makes sense. But it is a corruption of the original. D’you know why you’re really the First? Because in a very real way, you and the others are A.L.’s children … There would be none of you, if not for her.”

  And then the Emperor of the Nine Houses set down his empty mug of tea with the residue of ginger biscuit crumbs within. You had no idea, in those seconds after the gentle clink upon the table’s surface as the universe held its breath, that he was about to say the worst thing that had ever been said to you. The fine, forbearing lines at his forehead and at his eyes crinkled earnestly, and he said: “I like to think that she would like you. You’d make a hell of a daughter, Harrowhark. I sometimes indulge in the wish that you’d been mine.”

  There had been a moment in your life when you were convinced that you were about to spoil your substance at the foot of Ianthe Tridentarius’s altar. You had been granted reprieve. There was no such reprieve for you in that moment. You had not sold the marrow of your soul for stolen eyes and a half-hearted kindness. What dismantled you—you bereft idiot—was not even the God who made the Ninth House, the Emperor All-Giving, the Kindly Prince; your end appeared in the form of a grown adult telling you that they might have liked you for their own.

  You hurled the glass to the table. It shattered into a flower of water, with a crackling multitude of shards for sepals. You stood upon that table. It creaked beneath your weight. God had half-stood to stop you when you sank to your knees on the glass; you kneeled into obeisance on the razor-sharp fragments, pressed your palms down into the shrapnel, and you folded yourself into wet and bleeding penitence before him.

  He said, “Harrow, no.” He was distraught. He said, “Please—Harrowhark, I’m sorry, I have obviously said something immensely stupid—I do that, eh—I never wanted to hurt you.” He said, “Ten thousand years, and I am still such a fool.”

  You might have told him of the traitor. Instead you said: “I broke into the Locked Tomb.”

  After a moment God said, “You did not.”

  “The wards to the stone were easily bypassed,” you said. “The line of Reverend Mothers and Reverend Fathers has been responsible for their upkeep for years. The barriers and gates beyond were more difficult. I was nine years old when I began, and ten by the time I could traverse the shaft. I spent a whole year working on nothing but those locks. When I came to the blood ward on the stone, the ward of the tomb-keeper, I did not know how to pass. It remains the most complex piece of magic I have ever seen. It was my first vision of the Necromancer Divine … but one day when I was ten years old I decided to end my own life, Lord, and sometimes I think it was that which let me cross the tomb-keeper’s gate. I opened it; I saw the saline water that laps the stony shore, and I walked into the sepulchre. I have seen the Tomb and I have looked upon your death. My parents killed themselves over my heresy. I saw what lies within, and I will love it beyond my own entombing. I— Did I sin, Lord? Did I kill two of my fathers that day?”

  You were panting tiny, sharp puffs of breath from the back of your throat. You knelt on the broken glass on the flat table before him, damp with blood and water; you did not weep, but only because you no longer knew how.

  The Emperor of the Nine Houses could only have been quiet for five seconds. To you, it felt like a hundred thousand years.

  And then he said, very gently: “No, you didn’t.”

  You pressed your face into the surface of the table, and you closed your eyes so violently that the pressure stung your brows and cheeks. No star hung so still as you did then, at the end of its hard hydrogen burn, breathlessly waiting to slough off its outer layer.

  And he said, “Harrow, whatever you thought you did, you didn’t.”

  “I opened the outer door.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “I went up the passage.”

  “I’ll accept it, though that thing’s a literal death trap,” he said.

  “I broke the ward and I rolled away the rock—”

  “There’s where you’re wrong,” he said.

&
nbsp; You did not lift your head but said, “I was ten years old, but I was not a child. I set myself one task. I studied for one purpose. Don’t consider my limitations, God: I am not a person, I am a chimaera.”

  “We won’t get into that, but don’t think I am discounting the genius of a single-minded, necromantically augmented ten-year-old,” he said. “I’m not saying that you didn’t do it because you weren’t good enough. Harrowhark, I’m saying that nobody is good enough. There isn’t a bypass. I built that tomb with Anastasia, designed every inch of it, and I did not include a way in. I never wanted that tomb opened, from either end. I made that ward, me alone, and it wouldn’t answer to the greatest of my Lyctors any better than the meanest infant necromancer in all the Nine Houses. Their might would be one and the same.”

  The supernova of your heart went out; faded, as swiftly as it had shone; it became thick, and miniature, and dense. You lifted your head minutely, and an embedded fragment of glass fell from your temple, from a string of red blood.

  “It can’t be broken,” he continued. “It can’t be contravened. It can’t even fade; its magic was my magic. The line of Reverend Tomb-keepers has laboured under a misapprehension if they think the rock could be rolled away, except by me. It’s a pure blood ward, Harrowhark. Whatever you thought you did—whatever false chamber has been built around that tomb that you mistakenly stumbled into—there is no possibility that you breached the real thing. I am so sorry. You were party to a tragedy based on a misunderstanding.”

  You were rendered down to your incoherent parts. You wanted to say, I saw the Body; you wanted to say, I saw the tomb; but you were seized, all over again, by doubt in the face of fact. The uncertainty of the insane. The conviction of the mad. Nobody had seen you walk through that door. Nobody had watched you leave. What he saw in your face you had no idea; only that he crouched, and he looked at your blind, bleeding numbness with those chthonic eyes, and he wiped his thumb over the part of your temple where the glass shard had buried itself, and he tucked a stray lock of hair behind your ear with the thoughtless gentle tidiness of a parent.