by Tamsyn Muir
Abigail was looking at her very carefully, with a different expression than before. Harrow knew she sounded a little irascible when she said, “What?”
“I think we are talking over each other,” said the Fifth adept, rubbing her mittened hands together. “I’m not asking about the preserved soul that made you a Lyctor, Reverend Daughter … though that’s also filled in some of the pieces. Harrowhark, I am referring to the invasive soul.”
“The invasive—?”
“You are being haunted,” said Abigail calmly. “I had assumed you had picked this battlefield deliberately, and raised an army to fight alongside you. I didn’t quite know why you’d chosen us. Now I know, but it seems you did not. You are possessed by an angry spirit, Harrow, and you are losing the war.”
Harrow reflexively tried to pad out her fat reserves; it was really shockingly cold. She was stopped when she realized she could not identify where they sat under the skin of her arms, let alone augment them. The limitation was familiar: it was the limitation she had lived with all her life, when she was Ninth, and not First. Her furnace of power was gone.
She reached for the memory of her other self—no; she underserved herself by separating herself into two halves, Harrow First and Harrow Secundarius, as though she were following bells. They were all one Harrowhark, wearing different clothes. And she was no better now that her vestments were black—in a way she was greatly worse. But the memory was there.
Think of how when you blow air into water, you make bubbles …
It was getting chillier. The wind howled against the darkened window. There was no good weather in her brain. She said, “We are in the River.”
“Yes,” said Abigail. “That was my first realisation.”
“This is my creation.”
“Yes. You set the parameters,” said Abigail. “We realized through process of elimination, as we each recalled ourselves in the end. You didn’t. Ortus was convinced it was your creation from the start—I’m sorry that I disbelieved him.”
That was for later mental delectation. “I made a bubble in the River, just like Sextus did. But unconsciously, shoddily…” Sextus must have thought her such a churl. It would have been an enormous relief to have Palamedes Sextus with her then, if only so that she could, perhaps, offer some paltry thanks. But to have him see her so slow on the uptake would be hideous— “Why Canaan House? Why Ortus Nigenad? To fill the hole in my memory.”
Thankfully, Pent was quicker on the uptake. “You didn’t remove the memories of your cavalier, Harrowhark. I think that would have been beyond even the powers of a Lyctor. You falsified them. You skinned them over with something that looked good.” What a waste of a woman, to have ended her life at the bottom of a ladder.
“But why make so many changes? Why is this narrative so different? This isn’t how it happened at all. I understand that … that Gideon had to be—absent, but why…”
“This isn’t a picture you’re drawing, Harrow,” said Pent. “It’s a play you’re directing. You set up a stage in the River, you pulled in ghosts as your actors, and you enforced certain rules to keep your cast on-script. But now another director is trying to hijack the play, and the struggle for control backstage is leaking over into the action out front. You’re being ousted.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know,” said Abigail candidly. “And there are other discrepancies I’d hoped you could have shed light on. Why did you only pull some of us as ghosts? Why did the others appear as—varyingly ludicrous constructs? Lieutenant Dyas was certain Judith was wrong before she even died, that she was like a confused parody of herself.”
“I never could have called the ghost of Captain Deuteros,” interrupted Harrow. “Deuteros lives.”
Abigail leaned in eagerly. “Tell Dyas that. She’ll want to know. The princesses…?”
“Alive.”
“Their cavalier—”
“Breakfast.” At Abigail’s bewilderment, Harrow qualified: “Ianthe Tridentarius is a Lyctor.”
“Blast. It should have been Coronabeth. Ianthe never was quite the thing. The Sixth—”
“Camilla’s alive. Palamedes … enjoys extenuating circumstances.” At this second round of bewilderment, she qualified: “The Master Warden found the idea of dying inconvenient.”
Abigail brightened. “Say no more.”
The Fifth House necromancer sighed in obvious pleasure, a simple delight that some of them had lived where she herself had not. A deep guilt sparked within Harrow’s ribcage. Pent even murmured, “The King over the River is good,” which filled Harrow with another sensation entirely.
That brought with it a reminder so savagely stupid she was astonished that it had not been her first thought. Her hands flew to her midsection. She closed her eyes. She leant back into the soft curve of her spine—she took the reins of the River in her hands, and she walked out into the waters, and she walked, and she walked.
As her—cavalier—might have put it, absolutely butt-fuck nothing happened. She could not access the River. She was not aware of it. There was no awareness of the anchor of her body; just as with the removal of her Lyctoral magic, there was no exit route. She was trapped within the bubble, writhing like a fish. And somewhere back on the Mithraeum …
“Time,” said Harrow urgently. “How does this track with time?”
“Based on my assumptions about spirit magic and the nature of consciousness,” said Abigail, “this—stage—only exists when you have limited or no conscious awareness. While you sleep, or while you have been knocked out, or otherwise disconnected from outside stimuli. I have not experienced any breaks in time—it’s seamless from this side. I imagine the simulation runs within your sleeping mind’s understanding of time, if somewhat contracted and dilated … How much time has passed in the—er—real world?”
“Nine months.”
“Good Lord.” She was genuinely upset. “I would have put us at about eight weeks. Oh—my family’s probably been told … They’ll be wondering where the living hell my spirit is. My poor brother—Magnus’s parents—my fern collection—”
“Lady Pent,” said Harrowhark forcefully, “forget the ferns. In the real world, I have been fatally stabbed. The place that holds my body is about to be overrun by thanergetic monsters created by a galactic revenant. I am, put bluntly, on the verge of death. My soul is under siege, and I overwrote my real memories with a ghost-filled pocket dimension, which has now apparently been co-opted by some kind of poltergeist. From what I can tell I am stuck in here. I cannot get out. And I am about to die—I may even be dead already—which will render this all somewhat moot.”
The window cracked. At first she assumed it was the howling, killing wind; but as she and Abigail watched, a questing pink tentacle, crackling with ice as it shifted and slithered, made a ropy trail down a broken hole in the glass. A long, pulsing tube. As they watched, a sphincter opened in the end, and from that hole emerged a clattering pile of plex scope slides, the type you would preserve a cell sample between. The door to the bedroom had been flung open: the previously dead Magnus Quinn was there, wearing a huge furry coat, cavern-cheeked from the chill, saying, “They’re breaching the walls, dear.”
“Tell Protesilaus and the lieutenant not to touch them.”
“Too late, and I can’t blame them, these things are vile—”
“Leave your body to your body, Reverend Daughter,” said Abigail, rising shakily to stand, her teeth chattering. “If you were dead on the other side, we’d all be gone by now. If you die in here, your soul is gone forever. Right now, in this moment, you are alive—let us ensure that if your body survives, you will remain at the helm.”
Harrow fought to be heard over the screams of the wind. “But I was stabbed through the stomach! What’s happening out there?”
44
THAT SAME NIGHT BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
THE BLADE OF THE rapier tangled in your skin. Big hanks of dermis kept wending their way up al
ong the fuller, unsure where to head from there; as organs knitted together inside your abdomen—as interstitial meat threw itself against the invasive blade—the bloodied tip quivered, pushed this way and that by the regrowing tissue. You’d been stabbed from behind, and you’d collapsed backward onto the rapier’s hilt. Its foible pointed upward where it protruded from your torso.
And you’d gone and left me behind.
I arched up on your hands, rested your weight on your feet—the blade stayed stuck—and I pushed up against the corridor wall, and I got you to stand. Your legs were trembling. The only thing I could think of to do was to wad up your hands in the robe, give myself a count of three, and push the rapier tip backward as hard and as quick as I possibly could. The noise that resulted—I’m not doing it justice when I say it went SCHHHLIIIIICK, which also doesn’t describe the pain of a full foot of steel being pushed back through your innards and out the small of your back as carefully as I could do it, which wasn’t very. The sword fell to the tiles with a sad rattle, and I took a couple of moments, and by the time I reached down to get it you’d just—healed up. No more pain. No more stab wound.
The hilt was so hot and slippery with blood that it was hard to grasp. Your hands were bare. It took a few goes to get it. The grip was made of polished wood or plex, and your fingers didn’t close the way I expected them to, probably because they were shorter than mine.
We were in a narrow, sweaty corridor, dark, lit only by a thin rail of overhead red lighting. There was an alarm blaring somewhere, and a distant white-noise buzzing sound, like you’d get from a piece of malfunctioning machinery. You were soaked through with blood, and where you weren’t soaked through with blood you were soaked through with sweat. The air was shimmering with the heat. Standing in that hallway was like standing next to a bonfire, one that also made you wet.
Beneath you a bunch of blood was smeared playfully on the floor and lower walls, as though someone had rolled around in it, which I guess you had. But there wasn’t that much of it. It hadn’t been a fight. Whoever stuck you with your own rapier hadn’t let you get a shot off. You weren’t around to be furious, but if you had been, I would’ve told you not to bother; I planned on making them sorrier than they had ever been in all their fucking life.
Pool of blood: check. Air so hot: check. Surrounded by big and illicit bones: check. Looking at your hand to keep this tally—what hand there was, beneath the blood, and your fingers, and your small palms, and their absolute lack of thenar muscle—reality went through me. Kind of like a big iron railing, now that I think about it.
You were gone. You’d left me behind. Inside you.
“Fuck,” I said. It wasn’t my voice. “Fuck. Oh, shit. Oh, fucking hell. Help. Yuck. Aaaargh.”
In the darkness of that hot and bony corridor, something bumbled into view before you—us; me—which at least forestalled my full-on physical and emotional breakdown. It was a nightmarish nonsense of wasp, and bone, and meat, and it was alive, and when it saw me it stopped.
The thing’s bulk was set on a stretched-out, humanlike frame—like a person walking crab-fashion, feet planted flat and hands flat backward on the ground, abdomen thrust ecstatically up in midair. But when I say hands and feet, think of hands and feet fed through a shredder, and then all the exposed bone and flesh banded back together with black-flecked orange shell. This was topped with great shiny plates of thorax, a big diamond-shaped thing, and a tiny-waisted abdomen. At its highest point sat a huge skull of something that might’ve been anything, so long as that thing wasn’t human. Its lines were obscured by great slabs of pulsing, greenish, comb-chambered flesh, and here and there someone had slapped on long wicked hairs as thick as your fingers. Which weren’t that thick. I’m just amending here; your fingers are fine. Great serrated beetle jaws emerged from either side of the skull’s maw, dripping steaming liquid, and it snapped meditatively as it stood—hung, actually: transparent wings buoyed it up, moving so rapidly that what with the steam and the blood and the heat and the dark I hadn’t seen them to start with. And as I watched, little pinpoints spun within the black craters of the skull’s eye sockets, and then great wet black eyeballs emerged from those holes.
This would have been a terrific moment for you to come back. It would have been completely sweet. I don’t care how much of a hot badass I’m meant to be, I was in the wrong body clutching a sword I’d never used, and you didn’t have any muscles, and I absolutely did not feel well. I felt bad. I needed a time-out. But the monster screeched in a weird, double-throated bleating chitter, two sounds simultaneously and both of them shitty, and those eyeballs swivelled round and round and round.
I lined up your front foot with your back ankle, thumb wrapped low around the hilt of your sword, which proves that you can put the swordfighter into the necromancer but you can’t, wait, hang on.
And I said, “Goddamn it, I told you to lift weights.”
The creature skittered toward us at an incredible speed. What followed was an absolute shitshow.
For us. Not it. It was fine and dandy. Turned out that when it approached, its wings lifted it high enough to expose a fat, savage stinger on the end of that abdomen—the sawlike mouth shot a high-pressure squirt of transparent liquid directly into our eyes, which I narrowly dodged by swinging your blood-sodden arm across your face—fun times, because the liquid turned out to be insane monster acid. I heard the robe sizzling away on contact, then I heard your skin sizzle too—felt the strips fall away from your arm, first of cloth and then of actual dermal layer—and I took a couple of steps back and I bit about three holes through your tongue, but our pain receptors were still all fucked up. I’m not saying it didn’t hurt like a top-notch bitch, because it did, but when I shook the worst of the unholy insect spit off our mess of an arm I found your skin growing back as I watched. Hell of a party trick, Nonagesimus, I mean, damn.
I parried a smashing overhead blow from the stinger, which was beading more clear fluid from a tip that could’ve jerked our heart out, and my borrowed arm clanged my borrowed sword into the saw mouth. I kicked the stinger with your booted foot, which was like hitting a wall with a feather duster, ducked under another stream of acid, and then, sorry, turned and ran for your goddamn life.
I burst into the nearest room. The bedroom. I kind of knew the layout, but I’d never really been able to use your eyes. Living inside you—if I start I’ll never stop, so we have to move on—was like living in a well, and every time I bobbed to the surface I kind of got clotheslined back down to the bottom. I’m not complaining, I just want you to know. Even so, I knew enough to bust through your foyer and to the remnants of that ash barricade you were an idiot to make, heading for the thing I knew I would find right where you left it, with its thick white scabbard cracked into pieces all around.
The creature squirmed through after me, made that shitty bleating half-curdled chirrup, and spat another stream of evil saliva at us. I hit the floor, ditched the rapier, and grasped the hilt of my two-handed sword.
Which was, by the way, in fucking abominable condition. There is so much I should have told you. I just didn’t have time. I didn’t know. I didn’t know I’d have to say: A sword doesn’t hold an edge on its own, you sack of Ninth House garbage. I didn’t know I’d have to say, If you dip a sword into melty bone, the metal gets more pitted than an iron mine, you cross-patched necromantic shit.
I think the main thing I should have said was, You sawed open your skull rather than be beholden to someone. You turned your brain into soup to escape anything less than 100 percent freedom. You put me in a box and buried me rather than give up your own goddamned agenda.
Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it.
Actually, scratch that, the main thing I should have said was, SQUATS ARE A START, OR A COUPLE OF STAR JUMPS, THEY’RE NOT DIFFICULT.
As I stood with that sword grasped between your hands, the hilt of the two-hander bit our skin, but not fatally. There were a coupl
e of callouses now on those soft necromancer’s palms, and I was proud of you.
When I met the first strike of that poison-dripping stinger, our limits became obvious—the first strike ripped your extensors to shit, clanged down your forearms and up into your feeble upper arms like a miniature strike team had entered the tendons and set the whole thing to blow. The pain came in waves. But some ancient engine had revved to life for me in a way it never had done for you, probably because I am a good girl and you are an evil nun, and it tore through us almost simultaneously: renewed those shredded muscles, tied back together that multitude of miniature rips. My first overhead strike shattered the stinger, and the heinous thing reared and then sheared our cheek open before I could duck—but the only thing I cared about was the superheated steam feeling in our arms, and the swing, and the arc of my broadsword as I cleaved a neat arc through that creepy insectoid waist.
The creature toppled into halves. It curled up horribly in a death throe; those humanlike fingers and toes on the bottom of the frame curled in on themselves, and all the meat parts depuffed and shrivelled, and putrid-smelling guts squeezed out of the skull’s mouth hole. In that panting dark heat, the death reek was intense. And your shoulders wouldn’t stop shaking, even when I leaned against the bed.
It was only when I saw us in the mirror by the dresser—saw me, in you—still not saying anything—that it hit home what you had done. Your face was a mess. It was such a weird goddamn melange of us: your pointy-ass chin, your stubborn-featured, dark-browed face, less battered than the last time I’d seen it, but—wearier than I’d ever known it to be. Your eyes had little smudgy lines next to them, and they were there at the corners of your mouth, marks of this huge, exhausted sadness. You could always leave everything else behind, but you never got rid of being so absolutely fucking goddamn sad.