by Tamsyn Muir
The skull paint dripped down your cheeks from the sweat, and from the blood, and from where I’d wiped it accidentally. Your hair was way too long. It was plastered down your neck, and it was seriously itchy. All of that was the same Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Angular. Ferocious. Terrible. But at the same time, it wasn’t.
Main reason: my eyes stared out of your face. The shape was yours, but the yellow-amber irises were as out of place in your face as my sword was clutched in your thin, straining arms. The expression wasn’t right either—my what the fuck? face was very different from your what the fuck? face. It was like watching a shell of you walk around; like the empty puppets you’d made of Pelleamena and Priamhark. Except that would’ve been easier. This was your shell, but it was all filled up with me. God, the double entendres were hard to resist.
I said hoarsely: “Get back here. Get back here right now, or I’ll make you say the worst shit I can think of. Just mean and gross. Beneath even me, is what I’m saying.”
No response.
“Oooooh, Palamedes. I am measurably less intelligent than you. Put your tongue in my mouth, and I’ll flop my tongue against it.”
Nothing.
“I think bones are mediocre.”
Maybe you were dead.
“Ohhhhhrr, Gideon, I was so dumb to think a tub of ancient freezer meat was my girlfriend. Please show me how to do a press-up. Also, I’m very obviously attracted to y—no, damn it, this is just sad. This is garbage.” My temper was going. Maybe your temper was going. “Come back. I hate this. Eat me, and let’s go full Lyctor. I didn’t fall on a fence for this, Nonagesimus.”
Sound. Motion. Another chittering scamper, close to the door. Then another.
I had forgotten there were going to be more of them. Your memory hadn’t happened to me, and even if I’d had a front-row seat for most of it, it was like watching a play through a blindfold. If I wanted to know something, I had to deliberately go looking through your shit. And I’d forgotten because I was an idiot. It was so hot in that room, and my insides—your insides—felt so cold. I shrugged off that stupid white robe—which looks dumb as hell, by the way, like Silas Octakiseron got into the glitter drawer—and I tried to get you back through sheer force of hope, and sheer force of want.
No dice. I shouldered my sword. Your arms blazed in response.
“Whenever you’re ready,” I said. “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll keep the home fires burning.”
And the Heralds piled in.
45
AN AMOUNT OF TIME BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
THE ROOMS OF CANAAN HOUSE were thick and silent with falling snow: red with new blood, and brown or black with old. Ductile, organic tubes and lymphatic nodes pulsed pinkly everywhere: in the corners, bubbling up along the doorframes and the pillars. Outside the windows, stretched webs of organ had wrapped themselves around the tower like nets of sticky venous spiderweb. They choked the stone. They burst through windows, and every so often they would tremble uncertainly and erupt in floods of bloody, foamy water.
That was wretched; but Harrowhark was more interested in the strange garbage littering the snow and the rotting furniture and the underfloor squish of tube and fossa. Pipettes, again; broken glass-fronted containers filled with dark fluid, mysterious lumps floating suspended within; and shattered skeletons, lying in the slithering mass of tubes or on mountains of what looked to be capsules or pills. At first her brain skimmed over the skeletons—it was Canaan House, ergo, there were skeletons—but then the familiarity dawned on her: some of the skeletons were not wearing First House sashes or raiment, but bearing Drearburh tools.
“Keep moving,” said Magnus Quinn, with the friendly and unyielding iron of a parent taking a small child to the bathroom. “No time to take in the scenery.”
She fell in step again and said, “Where is this room?”
Abigail said, “Close by. The others will be there already, if all’s gone according to plan—take my hand; we’re heading outside.”
The cold hit like a slap in the mouth. The snow was falling in driving, vision-obscuring sheets, smarting the skin, with a smell that made them all retch. The Fifth led her along a rope attached to an outside terrace—the obscuring fog could not disguise the roar of the sea below, nor the fact that most of the terrace had gone. Then down again, into a corridor so choked with gurgling pink tubes that they brushed Harrowhark as she followed close at heel, to descend a flight of stairs.
This was familiar territory. A vestibule, dark and claustrophobic. Malfunctioning lights overhead, fizzing madly. At the bottom of the stairs, glass doors showed the space where the pool had once been—filled now with bloody water, dark, bobbing shapes within. River water. Abigail turned to a tapestry that had been pinned up over one wall, and shouldering it aside revealed a cramped entryway to a hall that Harrowhark knew well. She said, “Surely not.”
“It’s not locked,” said Magnus. “And it’s been left alone—no blood rains, nothing jiggly.”
Harrow was bewildered by another layer of recognition and realisation as Abigail approached the great heavy-pillared Lyctoral door with its reliefs of horned animals and its crossbar of black stone and carved marble, and rapped a sharp sequence of knocks on it that were, after a moment, answered by a scrabbling from within. This was not simply one of the locked rooms of old; it was a person’s room. And as for whose—
The door yawned open. The rail of electric lights shone down on the old laboratory area: a row of benches with scoured, pitted composite tops; books and ancient ring-binders pushed into a far corner; the inlaid tessellation of bones in the walls; and the flimsy poster of a six-armed construct with a hulking body and a flat-skulled head, the old ruler of the Response chamber. The real Septimus was here, poring over a sheaf of flimsy, flipping through it as though looking for something. Nearby was a pushed-together arrangement of chairs, a leather-covered sofa, and a long table where Lieutenant Dyas was laying out the ancient, rusted collection of guns. And then the little staircase up to the split-level platform with its bookcase, and its armchair, and its two beds; sitting in the armchair was Ortus Nigenad, her first—second?—cavalier.
Septimus’s cavalier had opened the door. Harrowhark was bemused all over again by Protesilaus Ebdoma, whom she had never seen alive; if anyone had seen him alive, they never would have mistaken that shuffling zombie for his real self. Cytherea was a Lyctor and could have easily done better; she simply hadn’t bothered. Harrowhark had thought from the start the woman showed signs of suppurating ego, but she had never convinced Gideon to see past the appealing eyes and softly clinging dresses. Protesilaus bowed cordially to them, and he said in his deep and resonant voice: “Teacher declined to join us.”
“Oh, dear. Still hanging out to die, I suspect.”
“Couldn’t say, Lady Pent.”
The spacious apartment was cleaner and more … lived-in than when she and Gideon had first opened its doors and ransacked its mysteries. At her expression, Pent said: “I needed somewhere to keep the children, at the beginning.”
“The who?”
“You summoned Jeannemary and Isaac along with the rest,” said Abigail calmly. “I worked out how to return them to the River first thing. They didn’t want to go, but I overruled them. I would have done the same with anyone else—if only Silas had asked me; what has happened to his soul worries me horribly.”
This sharpened Harrow’s focus. “You have the means to leave?”
“Yes.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Everyone who has stayed,” said Abigail, “has chosen to stay, and risk their lives—or souls, I should say.”
“What is the risk? Can a spirit be harmed?”
“A spirit can be trapped,” said Abigail, “trapped as every spirit in the River is trapped … I know it must sound puzzling, Harrow, so I’ll elaborate. The River is full of the insane, who attempt to cross—”
Magnus coughed in a genteel Fifth House way, and said, “Who wait
for our Lord’s touch on the day of a second Resurrection.”
“Who attempt to cross, my love,” said his wife patiently, “to get to what lies beyond; who throng in their great and endless multitude, mad, directionless; or worse, have been trapped at the bottom, about which I know very little but fear all I know. Jeannemary and Isaac, who already endured so much, and never did anything wrong, other than the time they tried to pierce each other’s tongues, should have travelled lightly through those waters. Harrowhark never should have been able to stop their progress—no, dear, don’t shush me. She knows something of heresy.”
This was in its own way a dreadful slander on the Locked Tomb, and on what lay within it, and on the Ninth House in perpetuity. When she had been younger, and significantly stupider, she might have cared. But Harrow did not care now. She was utterly distracted. She held the even brown gaze of the woman before her, with her tidy hair and her squashy mittens, and she said, “It has been thousands of years since anybody bothered to believe in the River beyond.”
“Yet I believe more than ever, now that I am dead,” said Abigail, smiling.
“But God—”
“I firmly believe that the Kindly Emperor knows nothing of that undiscovered country. He never claimed omnipotence. I longed my whole life to give him my findings,” she said meditatively. “I think there is a whole school of necromancy we cannot begin to touch until we acknowledge its existence—I think these centuries of pooh-poohing the idea that there is space beyond the River has stifled entire avenues of spirit magic, and I believe the Fifth House was waning entirely due to us reaching a stultified, complacent stage in our approach … Oh, I hope so desperately that my brother found my notes! Something has gone terribly wrong in the River, Harrow, and I wish you’d find out what.”
Lieutenant Dyas did not look up from lugging another gun to the table as she said, “Let’s address what’s gone wrong in here, first.”
“Right. You don’t think I’m a mad heretic, do you, Marta?” Abigail suddenly said beseechingly.
“No. The Second House doesn’t overthink the River,” said Dyas. “If we did we’d just have to fill in forms. Quinn, show me where you found those bullets.”
Harrowhark had found her eyes avoiding the stairs, and the armchair; that was cowardly, and now she looked there straight and true. Ortus met her gaze quite tranquilly. He sat in the chair with his hood down, and he had opened up a book; he had been using it as a prop to unobtrusively write something on a scrap of flimsy. She mounted those stairs like a tremulous bridegroom, climbing toward a man who had known her all the days of her life.
At the top, she said: “How long did you know? Did you see it from the start?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “Not fully, until talking to Lady Pent and Sir Magnus, a week or so ago. At times I would recall, and then in the next few seconds, forget I had recalled anything. At times I knew, and at other times I did not. I realise that does not make much sense,” he added humbly.
“Ortus,” she said. “Do not bow and scrape to me. My family killed you.”
“No. Marshal Crux killed me, and my mother too,” he said, and he bent his nearly black eyes to the page balanced within the book, and he scribbled something down. “I knew that, when we discovered the bomb. The pilot found it midroute, and he stopped the shuttle so we could look at it; and my mother wept and wailed as he and I tried to work out its mechanism, but obviously—neither of us were experts in bombs.”
Her heart crushed within her. She said, “I take full responsibility.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Ortus.
“I asked him to put you on the ship—I was trying to—”
“It does not matter what you tried to do,” he said, and he took the flimsy away and put it in his pocket. “If you are culpable … you are culpable only of giving the marshal the means to murder me. Marshal Crux was not a good man … and yet, perhaps, he did what he saw was fit. Perhaps if I had said, ‘No, I must stay and do my duty, and aid the Reverend Daughter whatever her will,’ then I would have lived. But I was a coward, and I let my mother overrule me. My mother was strong … so strong, I hear, that her spirit lasted beyond death. I was weak. I always was weak, my Lady Harrowhark.”
She said tightly, “Don’t call me that.”
“My apologies, Reverend Daughter.”
“Don’t call me your lady,” she said. “You owe me nothing. You don’t owe me fealty. You don’t owe me duty. Though the way I treated Gideon Nav defies description, I treated you in a manner that rejects any claim I had to your loyalty. You don’t have to stay, Nigenad—tell Pent to get you through the barrier and back into the River.” As though the River was the better option. She said, “In the River, you’ll be relatively safe.”
Ortus laid his pen on the arm of the beaten-up chair. He settled his hands over his body awkwardly—there was always so much of Ortus, too much of him for his own comfort: he did not know what to do with his fingers, he did not know how to settle himself into the chair he filled or accept that he occupied space. He asked, “How did Gideon die?”
She closed her eyes and lost herself in that dizzy unreality of blackness: of swaying minutely, of lost balance. So many months had passed: and yet, at the same time, she had only lost Gideon Nav three days ago. It was the morning of the third day in a universe without her cavalier: it was the morning of the third day—and all the back of her brain could say, in exquisite agonies of amazement, was: She is dead. I will never see her again.
Harrow said, “Murder.”
Ortus said, “I thought—”
“We were pinned down by a Lyctor, our backs to a wall,” she said. “I was utterly spent. Camilla Hect, our companion, had suffered multiple injuries.” It was a blow to her dignity all over again, her unconscious gracelessness to Camilla Hect; a girl whom, in reality, she should have taken by the hands and thanked profusely for every time she tried to save her cavalier. “Nav had a fractured kneecap and a broken humerus. She pierced her heart on a railing because she thought I would use her to become a Lyctor. I will spit in the face of the first person who tells me she committed suicide; she was in an impossible situation, and she died trying to escape it. She was murdered, but she manoeuvred her murder to let me live.”
His face was very sad: a wistful, light sadness, not the ponderous sadness that he wore like his sacramental paint.
“What is better?” he asked. “An ignoble death by someone else’s hands, or a heroic death by one’s own? How should it be written? If the first—that she was cut down by an enemy—I would feel such hate for the enemy … If the second—an ugly death at her own devising—who, then, would be left for me to hate? Who does the poet judge? The eternal problem.”
“Ortus, this is not a poem,” she said.
“I think you must hate her,” he said, and she thought she knew what he meant, until he said: “Don’t. If there is anything I know about young Gideon … if there was anything in her that I too understood … it is that she did everything deliberately.”
Very little in Harrowhark’s life had embarrassed her up until that moment. She had been caught naked in front of a stranger. She had been kissed by a half-drunk Ianthe the First. She had admitted to God her apocalyptic transgressions, and been gently told that she did not know herself. She had been outplayed by Palamedes Sextus, outgunned by Cytherea the First, undone by Gideon Nav.
None of that humiliated her so viscerally as her strangled, bellowing, unchecked shriek now, a child’s cry that whipped every head in that busied room round in her direction: “She died because I let her! You don’t understand!”
Ortus dropped his book. He rose from the chair. He put his arms about her. The dead cavalier held her with a quiet, unassuming firmness; he petted her hair like a brother, and he said, “I am so sorry, Harrowhark. I am sorry for everything … I am sorry for what they did … I am sorry that I was no kind of cavalier to you. I was so much older, and too selfish to take responsibility, and too affrighte
d by the idea of doing anything difficult or painful. I was weak because weakness is easy, and because rebuff is hard. I should have known there was really nobody left … I should have seen the cruelty in what Crux and Aiglamene encouraged you to bear. I knew what had happened to my father, and I suspected for so long what had happened to the Reverend Father and Mother. I knew I had been spared, somehow, from the crèche flu, and that my mother had been driven demented by the truth. I should have offered help. I should have died for you. Gideon should still be alive. I was, and am, a grown man, and you both were neglected children.”
She should have loathed what he was saying to the very depths of her soul. She was Harrowhark Nonagesimus. She was the Reverend Daughter. She was beyond pity, beyond the tenderness of a member of her congregation rendering her down into a neglected child. The problem was that she had never been a child; she and Gideon had become women before their time, and watched each other’s childhood crumble away like so much dust. But there was a part of her soul that wanted to hear it—wanted to hear it from Ortus’s lips more, even, than from the lips of God. He had been there. He had witnessed.
Harrowhark found herself saying: “Everything I did, I did for the Ninth House. Everything Gideon did, she did for the Ninth House.”
“You both had more grit at seven years old than I ever had in my entire life,” said Ortus. “You are the most worthy heroes the Ninth House could muster. I truly believe that. And that is why I am staying. I am not a hero, Harrow. I never was. But now that I have died without hope for heroism in life, I will hope better for heroism in death. And therefore I will fight the Sleeper with you.”
It was difficult to know what to do with this type of touch. It made her whole soul flinch, but at the same time opened some primeval infant mechanism within her, as though the embrace were a mirror: having someone hold up an image by which you could see yourself, rather than living with an assumption of your face. It was not like the touch of her father or mother. When she had first sat by the tomb in shivering awe, she had fancied that the Body’s ice-ridden fingers had shifted for hers, minutely. Gideon had touched her in truth; Gideon had floundered toward her in the saltwater with that set, unsheathed expression she wore before a fight, her mouth colourless from the cold. Harrow had welcomed her end, but suffered a different death blow altogether—and she had become, for the second time, herself. She untangled from Ortus, more reluctantly than she’d expected.