Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  She looked down at the tray of tools—scalpel, saw, little bottle of water with a spray nozzle—and astonished herself by saying: “Ninth. Maybe this is an eleventh-hour point to make, but I find myself making it. Tell me what you’re doing. Tell me the details of your grim, dark, and shadowy plan. If you don’t, I have no assurance that I am not about to have a front-row seat as you reduce yourself to a gibbering wreck—or lower. A vegetable. A hunk of wood. A Fourth House write-in advice column.”

  The nun did not answer. Ianthe made her voice as low and coaxing as it could go, and she pressed: “Make me understand what this is worth to you, Ninth. Think about what you’ve promised. Consider what I am, and what use you might get from me. I am a Lyctor. I am a necromantic princess of Ida. I am the cleverest necromancer of my generation.”

  “Like hell you are,” said Harrowhark.

  “So impress me,” said Ianthe, unmoved.

  In the mirror, that paintless, unfamiliar face tightened. The lips pressed together until they were the pale brown of roses, ashen. Ianthe found herself thinking what the face could have done to it—the top lip was softly curved, as though the painter had not been able to help embellishing where they thought nobody would notice; the arch of that philtrum was close to a poem. The cheek was unreasonably smooth, considering the amount of topological greasepaint those Ninth House pores must have seen; those heavy eyelids, deep-set, thick with black lashes, a vanity that nobody in that shuffling mausoleum had thought to shear. And that was not even considering that the face was taut and stricken with the starvation marks of agony; that she had shaven her head almost fully bald for this, leaving only pinpricks of black stippling her skull.

  Then there were the eyes themselves: that solemn and lightless black that, whatever rictus the nun’s face might assume, could not hide the woman; they stared out of Nonagesimus’s face now with mute, flayed appeal, as stark and discomfiting as skinless muscle.

  “I will impress upon you this,” the Ninth necromancer said forebodingly, and stopped.

  Then she said: “I asked you for a reason. That reason was not your genius, which I admit exists. Nobody who reverse-engineered the Lyctoral process could be anything but a genius. But I haven’t seen anything that makes me believe you are more than—a kind of necromantic gymnast, doing showy tricks without concern for the theory. You’re not of Sextus’s calibre either.”

  “No,” said Ianthe lightly, “but Sextus’s head exploded, proving to the world that he hadn’t accounted for everything.”

  “I may have been Sextus’s necromantic superior; but he was the better man. You are not even so worthy of that brain as to wipe its bloodied remnants from the wall,” said the Ninth. “You are a murderer, a conwoman, a cheat, a liar, a slitherer, and you embody the worst flaws of your House—as do I … Nonetheless, I did not ask you because you are a Lyctor, Third. I did not even ask you because you know significantly more about your subject than I do.”

  “Tell me, because I am hugely bored of hearing all my flaws,” said Ianthe, with lessened patience.

  The shadow cultist stared into the mirror. Those great black eyes were empty pools: abyssal holes—an oil spill in the dark—or unfilled sockets.

  “I asked you because you know what it is,” she said haltingly, “to be—fractured.”

  Of such banality was grief made.

  “Harrowhark,” said Ianthe. “Let me give you a little advice. It is free and smart. I’ll walk this back now—I’ll adopt the sweetest good humour about everything you’ve done for me already—if you admit that you are running away. And running away is for fools and children. You are a Lyctor. You have paid the price. The hardest part is over. Smile to the universe, thank it for its graciousness, and mount your throne. You answer to nobody now.”

  “If you think that you and I are not more beholden than ever,” said the girl, “you are an idiot.”

  “Who is left? What is left?”

  Nonagesimus shut her eyes briefly. When they opened, one was—not correct. She stared at her own heterochromatic, night-and-day gaze, at those celestially mismatched irises. One black. One gold.

  Then the Ninth House Lyctor said tightly: “We are wasting time. Open me up.”

  “It will be worse for you in the end, Nonagesimus—”

  And Harrowhark roared: “Do it, you faithless coward, you swore me an oath! Expose the brain—guide me—and let me handle it from there! There’s still time, and you thieve it from me!”

  “All right, sister,” said Ianthe, and she reached for the awl first. The hammer would be second; the hammer for the living hand, the awl for the dead. She rested it high on the frontal bone, squinted, and gauged. “Time to absolutely fuck you up.”

  She struck.

  * * *

  Once Harrowhark was sleeping a sleep she might never even wake from, her face marked with the lines of weary, heart-heavy exhaustion, Ianthe sat and watched. She had not been allowed to watch the entire process; for a stretch she had been forced to sit behind a screen and twiddle her thumbs as those paranoid amateur hands rummaged around in a way that would hopefully mean Harrowhark couldn’t coordinate enough to piss, if life was remotely fair. Now she pressed her fingers over that scalp, trying to work it out, trying to see exactly what had been done.

  She gave up within a few minutes—impossible to tell with Lyctor privacy, even this close. No bleeds, certainly. Everything in the right place. Maybe a little reduction in the temporal lobe, a few out-of-order bumps in the temporal gyrus that might have been there already. As a last act of pettiness, Ianthe coaxed a new crop of that lightless black hair out of the scalp, and fidgeted with the follicles so that they would squirt out a little extra, cursing the Ninth House nun to almost ceaseless haircuts. It was the little things that mattered.

  She stood at the doorway and watched the breath minutely fill those lungs, in—and out—and in. There were smudges of sweat on the face that in this light looked just like tears. It tickled her fancy to imagine Harrowhark falling asleep crying, like any lovelorn child. What a fool. What a destructive, romantic, ridiculous act. It was always a certain kind of ass who approached love like that—a certain kind of very good, talented ass, who had been overly used to their hands on the reins and never could cope when they were taken off—nor had the personality to put them back on again.

  Ianthe had that type of personality. And she had a few years on Harrow.

  “Someday I’ll marry that girl,” she said aloud. “It might be good for her.” And: “Probably not, though.”

  And then Ianthe the First went to see a man about a queen.

  ACT FIVE

  40

  ?????????

  HARROW NOVA HELD HER black rapier thrust upward in the direction of the top tiershaft. She laid her offhand arm across her chest, her knuckles against her collarbone, where the black chain of Samael Novenary—true black Drearburh steel, each link a death’s head, the weighted end a carved butterfly of pelvis in lead-filled bone—clinked unmusically against itself. Her nerves were steel; her guts were some lesser material due to a curious admixture of fear and fury. They had assumed the qualities of gruel, or hot porridge. “To the floor,” she said.

  “Harrow,” said the cavalier opposite her, “we don’t have to do this.”

  “Then withdraw your claim and acknowledge me as the cavalier primary, you weed, you worm, you slime. I’m your superior in every way. I do not possess your size—I do not possess your strength—but I have trained for one singular purpose, and I will not be denied this chance.”

  “Yes, Harrow; but my father would kill me,” he said.

  Ortus Nigenad hulked before her sadly. Massive in his new robe and boots, with new panniers too, and his grandmother’s rapier—the new boots and rapier she envied, but the panniers she did not. They were freshly crafted of obsidian and the strongest type of canvas, which must have emptied out the treasury. Harrow wondered bitterly if her parents had flogged something.

  Ortus was all muscl
e and fat; he had the desired enormity of the modern Ninth House cavalier, and she never could have hoped to match it. She had never tried. Harrow realised early in her career that if she could not have the size, nor the weight, nor the sheer breadth, that she would have the speed, the technique, the agility. She had decided this at around five years old.

  Denied of weapons, it had been Harrow who had climbed the Anastasian monument and retrieved the chain of Samael, the sacred relic of the long-dead warrior servant of the original tomb-keeper; for that sin she had been forced to strip before the very altar she stood before now as the Reverend Father whipped stripes into her back, until the Daughter had intervened. Now Harrow had the chain, but the Daughter never let her forget the intervention.

  “Harrow,” said the skull-faced cavalier of frightful aspect—upon stepping down from his post five years previous, Mortus had scarified the skull into his son, when the adopted necromantic heir had confirmed Ortus for her cavalier primary; the cicatricial lines showed clearly beneath the paint—“they will never let you go. I truly wish they would. I do not long to travel to the First House—I do not dare imagine to serve a Lyctor, let alone stand against one, as in the days of Nonius.”

  “Matthias Nonius never stood against a bloody Lyctor.”

  “It is clear in the histories—”

  “Half the page was gone!”

  “A suggestive emendation makes it clear that—”

  “I am the daughter of the House of the Ninth,” she said, cutting off whatever he had to say about suggestive emendations. “I am the unfulfilled vow and the bloody teeth of the unkissed skull. I acknowledge myself as a cruel disappointment. I may have been supplanted—I may be no real heir to the mysteries that belong only to the Reverend line—but I will bear the sword! If I am no adept, it is my right to carry the blade instead!”

  Ortus Nigenad wiped the sweat off his forehead. The candlelight limned the carved hurts of his face, but his expression did not match their fearsomeness. The panniers of bone at his back rustled pleasantly, in the manner of a child’s sandpit.

  “Harrow,” he said. “You do not even really want to carry the blade for her.”

  “No,” she said. “I hope she gets boiled alive in oil. I hope she falls into a hole with a crowd watching. I hope someone takes a large pair of secateurs to the muscles at the backs of her heels. I so genuinely and wildly long to see that. I would buy tickets.”

  Ortus said tremulously, “But you know she quite—”

  “No.”

  “And they say she is petitioning for—”

  “Continue that sentence,” she said, “and I’ll make it to the pain.”

  “Harrow,” he said doggedly, “I would become cavalier secondary in the veriest heartbeat. How honourable still, to be a cavalier secondary of Drearburh! And to stay at home and look faithfully after the family, and not go out into the unkind arms of space, and to foreign houses! But even if I said, Yes, I acknowledge Harrow Nova as my better, your—the Reverend Mother and Father would not accept it. You would have to kill me before they would consider you. And it is the least of my desires, to be killed.”

  “You are right,” said Harrow.

  His relief was palpable. His shoulders sagged forward, though that was possibly due to the panniers hastening his scoliosis. Aiglamene was always scolding him about posture. Look at Harrow. She stands like a monument, she would say. You stand like a damned fishhook. Ortus leant heavily against the pews with a sigh of relief, and he said: “Thank you. Good. I am glad.”

  “And I consider it a salient point,” continued Harrow.

  She took the sword from her chest, and slung her chain from over her shoulder, and seized one weighted end between her gloved fingers. The welter of fury inside her resolved into a wet rush, like metal poured into a mould, and as it always had, the sword became an extension of her arm. “Prepare to die, Ortus Nigenad. Commit your soul to the Locked Tomb, and to the rock, and to the chains, and hope it floats high on the River.”

  “For God’s sake, Harrow, please.”

  Their voices had carried. The little sacristy door flew open; Marshal Crux emerged, hoary, wearing his most formal mouldering leathers, his raddled face aghast and his liver-spotted hands trembling with indignation.

  “Swords drawn!” he cried. “Swords drawn in the narthex—before the altar, and before the vesting tables, and with the icons watching! You besmirch us. You sully us. You debase this place.”

  “Forgive me, Marshal,” said Harrow.

  “I do not speak to you,” croaked Crux, with solemn dignities. Crux was the only reliable source of sympathy in Harrow’s life; sympathy always delivered in such a way as to be horribly unfair to everyone else, but sympathy all the same, and as unpopular as it made her she would not have swapped it for—anyone else’s tenderness. “I speak to the cavalier primary. Ortus the Ninth, fool that you are, you ought to know better.”

  “Forgive me, Marshal,” said Ortus humbly, as was his wont, as though he had any part in it. Sometimes Harrow hated him for that.

  “I will not,” said Crux indignantly. “Go rush to your cuckoo’s side. They are nearly done with the arrangements.”

  The cavalier primary stiffened, and with the faintest note of reproach he murmured something. The tone of his murmur did not quite make it to defensive; Ortus, even being well over thirty, could not do anything but mumble before the marshal.

  Crux barked out a noise that was too old to be a laugh.

  “What’s that? What’s that, you egg? I oughtn’t to call her such? Choke yourself—burn yourself—bury yourself. If you have the bottle to tell that cockerel what I name her, I will think the better of you for it.”

  True to form, and with no more self-defence than a huge and aggravated sigh, Ortus set off in the direction of the sacristy. As he left, Crux was muttering, “Rueful day when we send flotsam to be our champion … rueful day when we send jetsam to be its sword. Harrowhark”—only Crux added on -hark; it was carefully elided by everyone else, for what it reminded people she was—“be gentle with your weapon, and do not make it naked before the altar.”

  He lumbered closer to her, coughed wetly, and added in a hoarse and patently audible whisper: “There are pilgrims here, even now. It would be pretty to apologise.”

  There were pilgrims; she was embarrassed not to have noticed. They must have come in without her perceiving them. Two visitors kneeled toward the back of the pews, on the kneeling rail, their black church robes taped with brown around the right shoulders to show their House affiliation. She sheathed the rapier in its ragged scabbard, and reshouldered the chain she had polished so carefully, and performed a rather half-hearted bob in the direction of the altar as she made her way down the aisle.

  At her approach, one of the pilgrims shook her hood back. She wore spectacles, and her thick brown hair was neatly bound back in a black fillet, as was customary; the man next to her had shaved his head and kept running a hand over it surreptitiously, like a child at its first cropping. Harrow was surprised to see the first pilgrim give her a weary, troubled smile, as though the woman knew her. It was a smile that was sorry you had missed the mark in your exams, but thought you had not quite studied hard enough. Harrow had never set eyes upon her in her life. She did not know her. She did not know her husband.

  Except—how had she known that the man was the woman’s husband?

  “This isn’t how it happens,” said Abigail.

  41

  ??? BEFORE???

  THE MUSIC WAS RAUCOUS to Harrowhark’s ears. The stringed instruments—viols—a piano—all played in carefully tasteful modulation, but to her affrighted senses it seemed as though they were blasting full bore directly into her tympanic chambers. It was very warm inside the amphitheatre, and despite the kindness of the candlelight—despite the electric lights being dimmed to an attractive submission, playing out over the assorted massacre of the crowd in its eye-hurting panoply of colour—her eyes still felt like they were bleedin
g. The Reverend Daughter’s veil of office had been pinned back upon her head, precisely where it was no use to her.

  The crowd at least thinned out considerably near their delegation: no matter the bewilderment of the occasion, no matter the crush in the room, nobody really wanted to get close to the House of the Ninth. Harrowhark was glad for this on two levels. One, because she hated the press of people; two, because in the dimness, and with distance, there was less chance for other guests to notice the shabbiness of their finery. The lacework of her robes had been patched with thread as close to the original black as possible, but not quite matching, as was the perpetual trouble with blacks. The brocade of her skirts was stiff from bad storage. She was not ashamed of the ancient diadem and torc collar she wore. Both had been taken gently from the corpse of an ancestor, before that ancestor had sighed into powder under the beam of the torchlight. But she did not like what their patches of rust signified of their poverty.

  Harrowhark fretted with the edges of her veil. “It’s no use the damn thing being down,” said her captain, sotto voce.

  “I do not intend to compete,” said Harrowhark—not moving her lips but inclining her face very slightly toward the woman next to her. “If I did, I would never compete with my face.”

  “Yes, but you might as well have one,” said the older woman calmly. “That’s the first thing Her Divine Highness will look for in a bride: presence of a face. It’s a precondition of attraction.”

  “That is not why we are here. Unlike every other House scion present, I will not—flaunt my goods in the shop window.”

  “Emperor knows what we’d even flaunt,” grunted Aiglamene.

  The other seven Houses present were flaunting as though they were birds in a particularly baroque mating season. Her so-called cavalier primary took great interest; he jotted verses on a scrap of flimsy that he palmed discreetly into his pocket every time her gaze fell on him. The other Houses had mingled into a spectrum of colours, interweaving in the dances like a living drift of spangles. Clean Cohort whites with coloured ribands vaunting colour on the pips or wrist; long dresses in iridescent white, a simpering tactic, with hued wreaths on the head to denote the House; necromancers in robes of all kinds, none of them practical. All except for the Sixth House, who did not seem to be represented among the dancers, but sat in a grey puddle by the wall in wallflower blessedness, as though they were a communal gawky child who could not find a partner. They all wore the same dead-dove greys and chattered among themselves. If the situation had been different, Harrowhark might have made an introductory approach to them, but she had other things to think about.