by Tamsyn Muir
One tall, astonishingly built Third House princess had chosen to sit among their number like a butterfly in a grey bog: she wore a silk robe in gold and breeches that showed off a calf too fit to be called a necromancer’s, and she was holding a glass of champagne and laughing at something she was being told. The rest of the noble House of Ida made intermittent attempts to chivvy her back, in case being seen among the Sixth House proclaimed her too hopeless to win the attention of Her Divine Highness, but the Third princess kept waving them off.
Harrowhark’s anticipation was at a fever pitch by the time anyone approached her. She did not know why her heart was beating so hard; she did not know why she was afraid, other than that the crowd was unmanageable and that there was too much noise and light. She knew her eyes were too wide within her sacramental paint—the elegant skull called simply the Chain, which she had been practising for months—when a couple approached, without a retinue. A man and a woman, the lady with the hint of a necromancer’s build: she was arm in arm with the man, and he appeared to be eating a canape on a stick with his other hand, and so Harrowhark refused to look at him. The lady wore a deep cocoa satin gown with a train, and when she stood before Harrowhark she coughed, discreetly, into one buff glove. The simplicity of the gown revealed little about her, but the cut said more, and the cursory little gold tiara perched on the gleaming brown braids of hair said a lot and loudly.
“Lady Abigail Pent,” said Harrowhark, who had been practising that as well.
“To be honest,” said Abigail, “I’m quite sorry to crash this one, as I would love to see where this mixer goes.”
“I, also,” said Harrowhark’s cavalier primary, from behind her shoulder.
Magnus had finished his canape, and added enthusiastically: “Agreed. This is top. Have you ever eaten party food before, Lady Harrowhark? Because if you haven’t, this is a very good approximation. No taste, but incredibly salty.”
Harrow said frigidly, “Pardon?” before she remembered that she could not have known Lady Abigail Pent by sight.
“This still isn’t how it happens,” said the Fifth—
42
MONTH??? DEATH
“LIEUTENANT!” CRIED A VOICE. “Wait up—please.”
Coming out of the briefing room, still a little bit pinched with space exposure—she had learned belatedly that after the first week it was considered namby-pamby to wear one’s placket of grave dirt anywhere visible, and it made a bump within the uniform—Harrowhark stopped and pivoted to the two soldiers behind her. She came to the unpleasant realisation that she would be forced to salute, and duly did so: although the navy-rimmed pins in front of her denoted the same rank as her own, the burnished steel pins on the opposite lapel indicated that these two had seen action. This was not greatly surprising, in the context of the navy edging of the Fourth House. She had already heard a great many jibes to the effect that Fourth House arrivals ought to be issued with both a medal of honour and a coffin. But they were very young. They were younger even than her, which was grotesque. She recognised them before they had finished their responding salute, which was significantly worse.
She said stiffly, “Lieutenant Tettares. Lieutenant Chatur. Do you require the service of the Black Anchorite?”
“No, because who would, ever,” said Lieutenant Chatur, whose corkscrew hair had been bound up at the back of her head. She did not resemble Harrowhark’s idea of a cavalier primary, even with the rapier bound to her hip. She was looking Harrow over rather critically in return. Harrow had been allowed her paint—she had been granted her jewels of office—as a chaplain, she had even been allowed a bit of robe, though a cursory Cohort robe that pinned to one shoulder and was about as much use as a sugar-spun bone. The starched white shirt and trousers seemed to take away all her substance. The more substantial child before her was saying in a piercing voice: “I heard they actually had to exhume a book as to how your lot work, because we haven’t had a black friar for fifty years.”
“Then I will take my leave—Lieutenant. Lieutenant—”
“Excuse her, please, she sucks,” said her necromancer briefly.
(“Thanks?”
“You do though?) Look—I wanted to introduce myself. You obviously know who I am. But we’ll be going through training together—we’re the only House heirs entering on the same footing—I don’t think it would be stupid to keep together. And you’re here without a cavalier. Nobody knows why the Reverend Daughter’s signed up for action. But I can’t judge—I’m the Baron of Tisis, and they’re probably going to haze us all until we’re half dead. Now we’re all together, I’d like to be friends. Pax?”
Harrowhark stared down at the gloved hand proffered, then at the hand’s owner. He had recently taken out quite a lot of earrings, and his ears were riddled with little empty punch holes, as though he were the recent victim of some guerrilla sewing. Both faces were, in fact, turned to her with none of the disgust she had initially fancied; their enthusiasm, she had to admit, was sincere. She did not shake the hand, but she reached out to briefly touch the fingertips with her own, and she said, “I would advise you against this. The Cohort were … opposed to my inclusion.”
“Oh, you have to get over that,” said the cavalier dismissively. “We could’ve papered the walls in strongly worded Cohort letters. It’s not like you’re the only one. The Cohort hates it when the actual heir joins up. They legitimately tried to give us mumps—”
(“They did not legitimately try to give us mumps. My little brother gave us mumps.”)
“—there’s a whole bushel of rules about asking permission to engage, and if there’s a war on we’ll get packed off to the back, so if you’re smart the first thing you have to say to your commanding officer is, ‘Excuse me, I don’t want my rank to get between myself and the troops,’ and then she can ‘forget’ to follow the safety missive, and you can get put on the post-thanergy front, where it’s interesting— Do you want to go to the cafeteria?”
Harrowhark did not want to go to the cafeteria. Lieutenants Tettares and Chatur accompanied her to the cafeteria anyway, a place she had contrived never to visit unless absolutely necessary. She felt acutely visible standing in the queue in full view of all the other officers-in-training; the massed necromancers and sword-handling men and women of the Nine Houses who had passed examinations, or paid money, or whatever it was they did in the other Houses, to acquire an officer’s rank. She was the only one with a black-enamelled lieutenant’s pip; she was the only one with black slashes at her sleeves. All the while, the Fourth pair kept up a stream of meaningless chatter, like two human waterfalls. Crux would have said that their tongues were hung in the middle. If, Emperor forbid, she had been a flesh magician, she would have been very sorely tempted to hang their tongues in the middle herself.
Harrow tuned back in to the cavalier-enlisted saying, enthusiastically: “—tried the coffee yet?”
The coffee had, in truth, been a long way down Harrow’s list of priorities. In the face of Lieutenant Chatur’s bewildering ardour, she could only muster a chilly: “No.”
A strange ripple passed over the younger girl’s face, as though she were trying very badly not to laugh. But she said, “It’s not like anything you get back at home. It’s got extra stimulants and things—like, acids—for space exposure. Bio-adaptive … Can you tell me what it is, Isaac?”
He screwed up his narrow eyes, sighed a little, and then supplied: “Bio-adaptive reuptake inhibitors.”
“And what do we call it?”
“BARI,” he said.
“Yeah, BARI! It makes the coffee taste weird, but if you make it the right way, with like spices and stuff, it’s actually great. The Cohort wouldn’t run without the on-duty coffee adepts. We wanted to try this deck’s cafeteria, because they’ve got a hotshot new BARI star.”
Harrowhark found herself at the front of the queue beyond which this BARI star apparent waited; and she found herself looking down at the counter, her tongue tied.
“Let me guess,” said a voice. “You take it black.”
She reached out for the cup. The server pushed it toward her in the same instant—their fingers brushed awkwardly in the act of transmission, and in a mummified moment of time, they looked at each other.
The coffee adept was a girl that Harrowhark had never seen before, though she must have been part of their training platoon. With the plain shirtsleeves and apron, and a cloth slung over the shoulder obscuring her insignia, it was impossible to tell her affiliation: the arms beneath the rolled-up sleeves betrayed lean, taut muscle, a little dewy with sweat and steam from the mess. But it was the face that sent her neurons in a thalergetic spin. When Harrowhark looked at that face, she found a curious heat travelling all the way up from the pit of her pylorus to the high collar of her Cohort shirt. It then traversed her cheeks, her nose, her brow, her temples. The other officer smiled a firm-jawed, long, crooked smile at her; Harrow was electrified by the fact that beneath the hastily brushed crop of red hair those eyes were—
“Absolutely not,” said Abigail, from beside her.
43
ONE NIGHT BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
HARROW THRASHED ON THE mattress and breathed in lungfuls of splintering air. She writhed like a shot animal; arms pinned her down—“Stay with us, Ninth, come on,” someone was saying—and a sudden spasm seized her, shaking her from the inside until she was certain she would vibrate out of her skin. There was a susurrus of hushed mutters coming from above her, urgent voices, none of which made sense to her:
“Are we stable—?”
“I hope so; another pull like that and she’ll bring the children back wholesale, and I don’t think I can bear sending them out again—”
“Why now?”
“Wasn’t that—?”
“I honestly preferred some of those to—”
“No. Better the rules we have,” interrupted the second voice. “We have no idea of the limitations in those other scenarios.”
Another breath—and her throat refused, closing up in protest; she turned her head and coughed, affronted, affrighted—she opened her eyes, and the world rushed up to meet her.
She awoke convinced that she was staring up at Dominicus framed within a blue sky, a lambent and unreal blue, a nonsensical backdrop. A familiar voice—Magnus’s—said kindly, “You’re fine. You’re fine.” The sky was the ceiling, and the ceiling was a decrepit room in Canaan House, veiled with the hot white breath from her own throat. When the world finally landed its long wound-up sucker punch, a tangled howl came out of her throat, and she was shocked that she was able to make such a noise. Memory hit Harrowhark Nonagesimus with the inexorable gravity of a satellite sucked from orbit, flinging itself to die on the surface of its bounden planet; the world hit her like a fall.
There was a blur of faces, of movement. Harrow found that she was not shocked, after all. She was consumed. She was the kindling for the arson taking place in her heart, her brain dry wadding for the flames, her soul so much incandescent gas. She could not do this. She absolutely and fundamentally could not do this.
“Harrow?” said someone close by—someone familiar; her vision swam.
“If I forget you, let my right hand be forgotten,” her mouth was saying. “Add more also, if aught but death part me and thee.”
And, unsteadily: “Griddle.”
The hands must have withdrawn; she found herself facedown on the mattress, sobbing as she had not sobbed since she was a child. Someone said, “Everybody out. Go—” But this was more than she could take stock of. Harrow was too amazed by her body’s expanding capacity for despair. It was as though her feeling doubled even as she looked at it, unfolding, like falling down an endless flight of stairs. She dug her hands into the mattress and she cried for Gideon Nav.
She only stopped weeping when her body had physically exhausted itself. The tears could not flow from gummed-up eyes; nor sobs from a cracked throat. For a long time she pressed her face into the wet patch of mattress she had cried into, and smelled the old stuffing, and felt the grief that had multiplied into a universe.
She sat up. She breathed. She pressed her face into the front of her worn black robes, and dried her tears into chilly tracks on her cheeks. Harrowhark looked around her, and the bloody rawness of her throat made her guttural as she asked curtly: “What have I done?”
“That was actually a question I’d hoped you’d answer,” said Abigail Pent.
She was the only one left in the room. Harrow looked her over with new eyes. Even with this new perspective, in all respects Pent was the same as ever. Neat, if a little scuffed around the edges, as though she really had been slumming in an ice-cold Canaan House and had not had a proper bath in a while—brown-eyed and fresh-faced, every inch a daughter of the Fifth. There was a scarf tied around that immaculate hair, and she wore large puffy mittens on each hand.
She was not, more to the point, the ruptured corpse she and Gideon had found at the bottom of the facility stairs: the body with the slit abdomen, with a key sealed neatly inside her kidney. She seemed alive, and well, and living.
“You died,” said Harrowhark. “Septimus killed you. The Lyctor masquerading as Septimus.”
“Yes,” said the Fifth adept. “It was unpleasant. Look, I hate to ask, but did you—get her? None of us are sure.”
“Nav and I drove a sword through her breastbone,” said Harrow, and swallowed against a wad of saliva burning in her throat. Her brain was whirring like an overheated mechanism; she could almost smell the hot dust. It was long past the hour to put herself in order.
She said, “Give me a minute.”
“Take your time,” said Pent.
The cold did not worry Harrow until, as habit, she tried to warm her core from within, and found that she could not. She was somehow not a Lyctor here. Pushing her blood cells around made her feel that old, hungry pang for thanergy that she had not felt for the better part of a year. She closed her eyes so that the only senses assaulting her were the temperature—the reddening burn on her cheeks and hands—and the blackness of her lids, as blank as the pages of an unwritten book.
Sixty seconds. Anything more was indulgence. She opened her eyes and said, “Lady Pent. Tell me about your childhood bedroom.”
“It was the size of this sitting room, perhaps,” said Pent promptly. “Two beds with their heads against the far wall from the door. I liked to have my younger brother sleep in my room sometimes, when I was small. Primrose walls in paste-on flimsy, not wash—a pretty chroma of the Prince Undying, but a little cockeyed—a Vit-D panel in place of a window, with a repeated design on it. My grandfather’s arm bones over the door. A little reinforced table where I played at dolls or read, with a cubby beneath it where I was meant to crouch in case a zonal jet made it past the winnow. Phosphorescent stars painted on the ceiling, a peg on the wall for my gloves and robe. I haven’t thought of it in years. Why?”
“Initial test,” said Harrowhark. “The flexibility of metaphysical solipsism aside, I have hardly any knowledge of the Fifth House and how its people live there. The more nonsensical your answer, the more likely you were to be a construction of my brain.”
Abigail laughed, but it carried a tinge of rue: the laugh of a woman who had opened a long-lost book to find the most necessary page torn out.
“Reverend Daughter,” she said, “I’ve been accused of many things, but this is the first time I’ve been assumed to be a delusion.”
“But you are—”
“A ghost,” said the woman smilingly. “A revenant, more precisely.”
Then she said: “There was so much I wanted to ask. So much I’d assumed! I sought a deliberate pattern in your choices when, perhaps, none existed, which is a shameful mistake for a scholar. Therefore, let us debunk all my pet ideas. You are a Lyctor now, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Harrow. Gideon. Blood. A broken rail. “It was not my intention, at the end. But—yes.”
Abigail’
s eyes grew intent; she leant forward. “That’s one bet won,” she said, with grim satisfaction. “All right. When did you become aware of what was happening to you? When did you realise what was going on with the other soul?”
It was easier to answer questions mechanically. “In the first days. I knew she would be absorbed. I understood that I would inadvertently destroy her soul—the process was already underway. But it hadn’t finished. I had time. I decided to remove my ability to so incorporate her … by removing my ability to comprehend her.”
Easier, now, to recall it. A litany. The same singsong recitation as the Eightfold Word. It could almost live apart from suffering. “I took the part of my brain that remembered her … that understood her soul … and I disconnected it. Then I made rather crude systems—so as not to be accidentally reminded … knowing that the pathways might reopen if they were knocked about. I had an accomplice … someone who knew how to manipulate the fatty tissue of the brain better than I possibly could. I made my skull a construct, programmed to apply pressure to specific lobes. And it worked, Pent. It worked,” she said. “It was stupid. A brute-force solution. But it worked.”