Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  Then God’s eyes widened fractionally, and his voice became altogether different when he said: “Harrow, who the hell’s been tampering with your temporal lobe?”

  Your body rolled itself off the table, with such a reflexive suddenness that you were not sure that the action was through your conscious effort. Your meat floundered to stand, wild with shards of lead crystal and a dozen cuts through your clothes, and you turned away. The Emperor said, “Harrowhark?” as you stumbled away from the table, and more plaintively—“Harrowhark!” as you unerringly careened to the door, but he did not follow. Somehow your hand slapped the pad that slid it open—somehow your meat dragged itself away from him—and you walked, and you walked, and you walked.

  As the door closed you might have heard, “Damn it, John—damn it.” But the last thing you were going to do was trust your own ears.

  38

  YOU ONLY STARTED TO accept your death after that terrible evening. It was impossible to ignore the manifold symbols of desolation. For example, the Body had made good on her word, and disappeared. She had been your quiet companion since your Lyctorhood—she had faithfully kept tryst with you—and in the morning after the sleep you could not remember and the walk back to your room you could not recall, it struck you that she was not coming back. Nobody would come for you. The path was cleared for you to die, and the lovely woman lying chained to the marble had not been able to bear to watch your progress on it; or perhaps it was just that she had never existed, except within a ten-year-old’s fever dream.

  The hours stretched themselves out to snapping point. You ate with a mechanical stolidity, even if you would rather not have. You washed yourself, and you dressed yourself, without a flicker of interest. Now when you caught sight of yourself in the mirror it was with a certain repelled bewilderment, as if you had never seen your face before, and it honestly seemed as though you had not. On one of the last days you discovered with distant consternation that you were trying to leave your rooms without even applying your paint.

  You thought of trying to write a letter. To whom? Crux? Captain Aiglamene? Your wretched great-aunts? To God, to Ianthe? Should you plan your funeral, aiming to beat the Saint of Joy’s frugal twenty-four minutes? Once you would have asked your corpse to be sent back to your House, to be walled up in the Anastasian, the last daughter in the tomb-keeper line: but perhaps even your empty vessel would attract a planetary revenant. No, your body could never go back home. You decided to write, Toss me out the airlock, but thankfully this puerile self-pity sobered you up a little, and you did not bother to begin.

  The only real advantage to those last few days was that of the swordsman with the thousand scars: one more could not harm you. There was very little left to surprise, and very little left to sicken. But on the penultimate night before the Resurrection Beast was due, you dropped your glove down the side of the bed; you had to kneel down to retrieve it. And you found that far beneath your bed—hidden in the darkness where you had once lain, waiting for the Saint of Duty—lay an inert corpse: the missing body of Cytherea.

  You lay in that gap between the frame and the floor on the outside of the bed for quite a long time. You had not sensed any foreign thanergy in your room, nor trace of hostile theorem. Even now, she lay docile and dusty, empty in your sight. You extended your fingers to brush her arm—and there was the ever-present sign of God keeping her preserved, with the hot lemon scour of his divine necromancy punching the back of each sinus. She lay still as an abandoned doll. You even said, “Get up. I can see you,” but this command did not rouse her, for some reason.

  At the time you did not wonder how the body had breached your wards, which you dutifully reapplied each night with fresh blood. You considered the corpse; you bracketed thick bone clamps to its dead ankles and dead wrists; and then you strode down the corridor, and when Ianthe answered your crabby knocking with a sleepy, “Nonagesimus, what do you—” you did not give her time to finish her sentence, but dragged her, by the icy gold of her skeleton arm, back to your bedroom.

  She did not protest, or make a comment, coarse or otherwise. She was too surprised. Ianthe raised her eyebrows at you as you pointed her to beneath your bed; but she took her nightgown in her fists, and crouched down to look between the mattress and the floor.

  And she said after a long moment: “What am I looking at?”

  You experienced a hot moment of aggravated panic; but when you crouched down with her, the Lyctor’s corpse was still there, dead and unmoving in her bracelets of bone. You said, “It’s right there.” She did not answer. You said: “The body, Tridentarius. Cytherea’s body. Cytherea’s body is beneath my bed.”

  She did not answer. You rattled, mindless: “On its back, arms at the sides, feet arranged at a thirty-degree angle.”

  Ianthe sat up and brushed down her knees. She looked at you with an expression you could not parse in the diminished light, only it had been made with great care. She said: “I—can’t see anything, Harrowhark.”

  You stared at her. The Princess of Ida looked down, then away, and then slid her gaze deliberately back to you, as though it were difficult. You realised: she was embarrassed.

  “Have you been sleeping?” she asked tactfully.

  “It’s no more than three feet away from us, Tridentarius.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you if the answer is no; my beauty sleep is seriously impaired at the moment.”

  “Touch it. Get under there.” She did not move. You said, “Touch it.”

  Ianthe rose soundlessly to her feet, and the long skirts of her nightgown—a brilliant ruffled canary-yellow silk that made her look like a formal lemon—rustled restively around her calves. She said, “I’m going back to bed.”

  Despite the layers of deadened scar tissue, there was still enough limberness in your soul for you to say: “Ianthe, for God’s sake, have mercy.”

  She paused at your threshold. The violent yellow made her hair look white and gave her skin no colour found in skin. She said, light and careless: “Good night, Harrowhark,” and she walked out of your rooms.

  You looked at your door. You looked beneath your bed. You went to your sink, and you ran the tap until you could splash the coldest water possible on your face: you took five deep breaths in, and five deep breaths out. You closed your eyelids and rolled your eyes in your sockets. Then you went and looked beneath your bed again.

  Cytherea was gone. There were cuffs of bone glued to the floorboards. You had left it for maybe three minutes. No ward brayed. You searched the rest of the room, but there was no corpse to be found. You lay down on the bed, and if you’d had the ability, you might have cried bitterly from sheer desire to feel release. But you could not; and no release came.

  * * *

  On the last day, for the last time, the Saint of Duty tried to kill you.

  You were coming out of the habitation atrium—you had stood, briefly, at the entrance to the tomb where Cytherea’s body no longer lay at rest, perhaps in the hope that she might coalesce before your eyes and rewrite reality—and when this inevitably failed to happen, you had walked away, hoping to find the remains of somebody’s leftovers to listlessly gnaw upon in the kitchen.

  Ortus hit you out of nowhere like the hammer of God. He tackled you just as you stepped into the corridor—body-slammed you into the wall with an almighty crunch, prematurely ending the long afterlife of an engraved skeleton inlaid with black pearl that had been fixed to the wall holding a big waterfall sheaf of ebon grasses. You automatically fixed the small cracked oblongs of your nasal bones into position as you flung him away again, reawakening the broken memorial into an array of shoving palms pistoning forward from one almighty synovial joint. He slammed into the opposite wall, and you backed away down the corridor, bleeding a little, measuring the distance between you and his spear.

  He barked, “Draw your sword.”

  Immediately you reached for the bone-scabbarded blade you kept lashed to your back. He said with a touch of frustration,
“Your rapier,” and you just stared. He held his spear in his left hand, its point a razor-sharp omen, and his plain rapier with the scarlet ribbon in his right; an ancient funeral bouquet was in tatters by his feet. Ortus had not shaved his head in the last week or so, and the stubble on his bony skull was a cap of brownish russet fuzz like a splash of forgotten blood.

  “There’s no reason to kill me,” you said, and marvelled at it, suddenly, the ease of the conclusion.

  The Saint of Duty did not answer you. He stood in the corridor with an impassive face, and you said: “The Resurrection Beast will be here within hours. I am going to die. And yet you are here to kill me now?” He did not answer. “That isn’t the act of someone removing a liability. You are either killing me for fun—doubtful—or out of anger—I’m unsure why—or for personal gain.”

  Ortus looked at you again. Then he sheathed that plain rapier and twitched the wicked point of his spear up to face the ceiling.

  “You’re wrong,” he said.

  “How?”

  “You’re still a liability.”

  “Tell me.”

  You thought he would not answer. But then he said, haltingly, in the manner of a man saying something difficult in a language he did not speak well: “Don’t go to the River. End it yourself. Before they breach. Cut off your oxygen. Or however you like.” At your expression, Ortus added as though it were an explanation: “So you don’t … suffer.”

  “Why do you care if I suffer?”

  “Because I was the one who failed you,” he said briefly. “I pulled too many punches.” And: “Sorry.”

  And, most horribly of all: “This wasn’t my idea.”

  Then the Saint of Duty turned and walked away from you, disappearing out the mouth of the corridor, into the habitation atrium and beyond. You were suddenly seized with the conviction that the universe would not have judged you if you had lain down in that corridor, shed fifteen years, and thrown an absolute tantrum; if you had pelted the cool panel floor beneath you with hands and fists and wailed. It meant so much that you would die with so many questions unanswered, would go to your unkind grave understanding absolutely jack shit.

  “Whose idea?” you called after him, and your voice rose to a shriek. “Whose idea?”

  In a way, it helped. Nothing added to your resolution to live so much as someone else suggesting that you die. Ten minutes later you were eating leftover stew in the kitchen with something close to animation, choking down your last lunch before the apocalypse. And you were angry. You were always such a little bitch when you were angry.

  39

  THE HERALDS OF NUMBER SEVEN—the ghost of a swiftly murdered planet in the demesne of Dominicus—arrived that evening, around forty-three minutes before the habitation lights were due to go off. They had already been dimmed to preserve power, as apparently the defence mechanism locked inside a Lyctor did not need light to fight by—nor senses of any kind, in fact; Mercymorn said they did not even feel pain. Unlike them, you generally needed light and felt pain, but you were the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House. The first was negotiable, and the second was irrelevant.

  When the first Herald broke through the Mithraeum’s honour guard of asteroids, it was not particularly terrifying. You had made your preparations. You sat on the floor before your window that looked out onto nothing. The great sword you had taken off and laid before you, as though it were a beloved talisman and not a sickening, befuddling relic, a back-breaking burden your dead self told you to carry. You were almost fond of it, except when you looked at it, at which point all fondness was dispelled.

  The courier of the Beast landed on a part of the Mithraeum’s hull very far away from you. You did not feel the impact or hear a sound. It was only when Augustine’s voice came over the communicator, “Confirmed impact. West quadrant, third ring, engineering room,” that you even knew it existed.

  God’s voice: “How many minutes before you’re in the halo?”

  “Depends. Impact, again. Also west, third ring, same location. Are they spearheading? Impact. North quadrant, habitation ring. Ortus, that’s quite near you.”

  A crackle. “I’m fine.”

  Another crackle: Mercy’s voice. “Less chatter on the line. Wait until they breach. They’ll try to smother us first, and roast the station.”

  “No temperature change,” said God.

  Then you felt it: the first vibrational thump, and it sounded astonishingly close. From above you—direction was difficult; thanergetic sense irrelevant—what sounded like a small meteor had struck the hull of the Mithraeum. Silence before, and silence after. There was no distant roaring, perceived through the shudder of the hull and shutters—no monstrous noise, no pageantry. The messengers of the Resurrection Beast arrived without fanfare, and for a moment you resented the anticlimax.

  Augustine, on the comm: “Confirmed. East quadrant, habitation. That’s you, girls. Don’t bite your tongues.”

  You thought it was one of Augustine’s little jokes, until the fear hit you.

  It hit as a smell. Your nostrils quivered, and your head was filled with a strange petroleum odour, redolent of old machines; but there was a sweetish underlayer to it, like vomit. It assaulted you in the manner of a migraine headache. Then the punch—like the Saint of Joy to one’s kidneys—low in your stomach, racing up the central line of your body, seizing your heart in its teeth and shaking. Your palms ran wet. You made a gulping, golloping sound in the back of your throat—you tried to close your eyes as though that were some escape, but it was not—you tilted forward, gasping, your pulse bellowing, your ears deafened. You were suddenly convinced that there were little things crawling over your skin—you rubbed frantically at your forearms—you shivered convulsively, as though to fling them off; you touched obsessively at your ears; you cringed when a stray hair fell across your forehead.

  But as you lurched—fretted—perceived—you fought. You made yourself one inhalation and exhalation—reduced yourself to one sensation, following it from down at the toes up all the lines of your body to the crown of your head. As the sensation rose, you filled with contempt for a stranger’s insanity. You had enough of your own to contend with. After a few minutes, you came to with nothing more than a sense of embarrassment, a desire to itch, and a mild heat rash.

  Ianthe was screaming over the comm. Everyone waited politely for her to stop.

  You said: “Is that all?”

  And with a crackle, God said: “It will be like this until they breach, Harrowhark.”

  The Princess of Ida’s voice came over the communicator, a little ragged. “How long?”

  “Over an hour,” said Mercy.

  And Augustine said: “Sit tight, kiddies. The fun starts now.”

  * * *

  Your room had long ago plunged into near-complete darkness, leaving no distraction from the great rocking thump—thump—thump—of body after body flinging itself against the great mass coating the hull. There was nothing to see—the shutters were down—but you could feel the terrible vibration, hear the groan of chitin on metal, the cataclysmic rending of steel by fungous claw.

  It was very cold. A fine shimmer of frost now coated your cheeks, your hair, your eyelashes. In that smothering dark, your breath emerged as wisps of wet grey smoke. Sometimes you screamed a little, which no longer embarrassed you. You understood your body’s reaction to the proximity. Screaming was the least of what might happen.

  God’s voice came very calmly over the comm: “Ten minutes until breach.”

  * * *

  And you walked to your death like a lover.

  EPIPARODOS

  NINE MONTHS AND TWENTY-NINE DAYS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER

  “THESE TWO ARE INTENDED FOR YOU,” said Harrowhark Nonagesimus. “They are to be opened only in the event of my death or of the other happenstance, though I have very little hope of you not opening them the moment my back is turned. The other twenty-two are written in an unbreakable code only I can decrypt, intertwi
ned with a false chamber-code that, if even merely beheld, curses you, your family, and the restive bones of your ancestors, for as long as the name of Ianthe Tridentarius is whispered in necromantic hearing. Twenty-four, in all.”

  “I would have just gone with a blood ward, personally,” said Ianthe.

  “A blood ward is for those without imagination,” said the astonishingly nude-faced girl. The Ninth necromancer unpainted was revealed to be a lean-faced, diamond-jawed nunlet, with very dark brows divided by a crisscross frowning mark—striking looking, certainly, even spiritual, a good subject for a painting if you were ready to settle for The Ninth House Frowned. “As I cannot reasonably expect not to bleed for the next myriad, I cannot rely upon a blood ward, and neither should you. Are we going to do this, Third, or not?”

  “This may not work.”

  “You have reminded me.”

  “I’ll say it again. The procedure could fail. Or it may work, but only temporarily. There could be any number of side effects—physical disorders—if you push your brain too hard, any surgery could simply heal over—and if you’re doing what I have a suspicion you’re doing, it could play merry hell with scar tissue. This is profoundly experimental. More to the point, it is totally fucking demented.”

  Their eyes met in the mirror. The ex-Reverend Daughter had set one up in front and one above her head, which was being held by two of the obedient skeletons of the sort she so obviously loved. Ianthe still did not understand the entrancing appeal of the dark aptitude of the bone; it was as though somebody had decided to make flesh magic less flexible, less subtle, and much less interesting to look at. What was the joke again? That the Ninth House knew a thousand shades of off-white?