by Tamsyn Muir
Ortus said, “Come down. Hear the plan. I helped craft it—it is not complicated, but it is the only plan we have.”
“I will,” she said.
Harrow bent to retrieve the book he had dropped when he had stood—it fell open at the flyleaf. A message was still readable, written in faded ink, in strong, cramped letters:
ONE FLESH, ONE END.
G. & P.
She and Gideon had looked over the contents of the drawers. Cigarette ash. Buttons. Time-abandoned toothbrushes. An ancient emblem of the House of the Second. Whetstones and guns. She now knew what the P stood for: Pyrrha Dve.
But what about G? What if one had altered one’s temporal bone to affect the tympanic lobe to overwrite a specific word with something different? Her adjustment had been meant to catch a name, but it had ended up catching two. Mercy, and Augustine, and God must have thought her mad. As for the Saint of Duty himself—
“His name isn’t Ortus,” she said, totally bewildered.
She found Ortus looking at her with a helpless and equal bewilderment. He offered, “Pardon?”
“I thought you were named for him—you’re not,” she said, conclusions spooling out in front of her like an unravelled tooth, in hideous naked majesty of enamel and nerve. “My mechanism worked too well. It did not account for context. Ortus doesn’t come from a Lyctoral tradition. But what if hers did? What if we named her, accidentally, for him?”
But what could that mean? Mercymorn had said their names were considered sacred and forgotten, except for Anastasia’s, who had never attained Lyctorhood. Why would a necromantic saint’s name be evoked in such a way?
The page fell over her thumb. On the second page—much fresher—Harrow read:
THE ONLY THING OUR CIVILISATION CAN EVER LEARN FROM YOURS IS THAT WHEN OUR BACKS ARE TO THE WALL AND OUR TOWERS ARE FALLING ALL AROUND US AND WE ARE WATCHING OURSELVES BURN
WE RARELY BECOME HEROES.
She opened her mouth to ask her dead second cavalier a question about her dead first cavalier—a pattern that was starting to look less like tragedy and more like carelessness—but downstairs, Abigail was saying:
“Harrowhark? Ortus? If you are ready, we might want to move. Dulcie’s found some good-quality candles of animal fat—there’s no hope of blood, of course—but ‘fire and words’ were scourging enough with the children…”
Both Fifth adept and cavalier had the happy, quasi-contented faces of people about to embark on a favourite activity, like a hike or a game of chess, and the cavalier of the Second House had two guns slung over her back and the pressed expression of a Cohort soldier about to embark on her least favourite activity. Harrow knew with a sinking bone magician’s heart what everyone was about to do before she asked the question, but asked it anyway.
“What is the plan, Pent?”
“Why, to let ghosts bury ghosts,” she said. “With everyone’s help, I am going to exorcise the Sleeper.”
46
THE NIGHT BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
LOOK, I HAD THE best of intentions for your body. I was very aware that I was walking around in borrowed clothes, and I did not want to scuff them, mangle them, spindle them, or otherwise do long-lasting damage. All of the moral high ground I got by falling on a spike for you would have been undone immediately if you came back to one arm, half a foot, and a disfigured ass.
But the reality was this: it took me five nightmare bees to learn how to deal with your grip, your core strength, your arm strength, your thigh muscles, and your height, and the operating thing I had to deal with in all cases was lack thereof. Even if you’d ever toned a muscle, you weighed half of me. They tossed me around like one of your skeletons, and I died three times in that buzzing, filthy, hot bedroom.
The only thing that stopped them from coming at you all at once was a lack of space: they moved as one coordinated, buzzing, snapping posse. To win, they only had to swarm us and they knew it. I played for space and position, kept the two-hander low on the hip because I needed whatever cover I could get you—locked three of them at bay with big cross strikes, and then I overcompensated because the weight of my sword pulled you with it, and one of the death bees did a little jiggly skull dance to the right and planted that massive stinger right in my side.
It went in all the way—a hand wide at the base, leaking acid all over your insides. I slammed the guard down and it snapped off inside you, which hadn’t been what I wanted—the creature fell back, and I staggered and slashed blindly, and the stinger worked its way out with a pop. The sword I had to hold overhead in one hand as I used the other to keep everything inside you; stuff was coming out, Harrow, I don’t know precisely what stuff because I’m not a goddamn necromancer. Let’s call it some small intestine. Whatever it was should’ve stayed safely tucked away in your abdomen but was making a pretty serious bid for escape. We should have keeled over and died saying sadly, Oops.
We didn’t. The slippery coils went in when I pressed, and I had to get your hand out of the way of the skin growing back over your fingers. I got us to the bathroom doorway and tried to narrow the field; I shattered the skull of one scuttling toward me and severed its gross black eye stalks—and they were all different; each one had a different skull, and one traded mandible saws for a mouth ringed entirely in poison stingers, which it pumped like darts into every surface, and after a while I didn’t even bother trying to brush them off your arms. We were upright. That was the most important thing.
I’d just blinded one when the two-hander got seized in a pair of mandibles—you didn’t have the strength for me to tug it clear—and more were crowding the doorway. I was swearing, and yanking, and a skull mouth snapped in close to the hilt and the guard. I didn’t pull back. You weren’t wearing gloves. And it bit your damn thumb off.
Again, let me say: sorry. It was not my thumb to let them bite off. I admit completely that this was my bad, but these motherfuckers had a hunger that only thumbs could satisfy. It didn’t matter—I was yelling, and trying to grab the damn sword away anyway, and I saw it eat your thumb—these details are important, so keep up with me—and your thumb was back in the next half minute. I watched it grow. The gushing stump grew a full bone, and then the meat grew up around it in the next breath, and then it all closed over in fresh skin and thumbnail. I set it back around the hilt and it worked like it had not just been chewed up by a wasp ghoul.
So I braced us in the doorway and kept going. The best place to aim was at the junctures of bodies—thorax and abdomen—as the plates over their midsections were tough as steel. Some of the wasps who were all arms on the bottom liked to come at us with ramming speed: I sawed them through. Others had four legs, and they liked to jump, so I swept their feet off when they leapt. I had to kill the one that ate your thumb by staving in its skull with the butt of my pommel, over and over, until it stopped moving.
Once I thought I’d cleared out the wave coming for us in the bathroom, I left the doorframe—and we died the third time. One of the monsters had been waiting, and it reared up to try to drive that stinger into your brain, but I half-dodged and it just smashed your head against the wall.
Harrow, I heard it. It fractured your fucking skull. I was so terrified. I was undergoing the kind of shit that I had only undergone once in the happy knowledge that it was all going to be over soon. Child, that bee smashed you. A skull should not have made those sounds. The sound of it un-smashing was even worse—like an egg blowing back out again—but as it was saving your only skull, it was music to my ears. I cleaved that bee open from the thorax down, and it disgorged huge amounts of reeking guts and bones and green blood all over me and the carpet.
At the end, we were left in a sea of dead space bees, and you were impossibly okay. Your arms didn’t even hurt, not anymore. You didn’t have your original thumb and I’d touched your intestines, which is usually what, fourth date, but you were fine.
* * *
It was now obvious that the station was crawling with those
things. You were gone, and I did not know where the fuck you were. Our only real options were to stay and fight, or go and fight: the place wasn’t getting any less filled up with wasps. And it was hotter all the time, especially in that room with the steaming piles of revenant bees.
You didn’t have any gloves. You didn’t have any armour. When I took off your robe, which was just puke rags by then, I found you were wearing a whole bunch of bones on your skin for no apparent reason. I was sorry to take them off in case they were any use at all, but whatever necromantic noise you’d used to fix them to yourself wasn’t working, and they were making it even harder to extend your arms. So I closed my eyes and I reached under your shirt and I peeled them all off, and I tied your hair back and took your sword and left. I didn’t look, and I barely touched you. Don’t get mad.
There were other sounds echoing down the halls by then. I know the clash of swords on bone when I hear it. There was that huge, murmurous buzzing of invading Heralds, and there were more of those baying, bleating screeches, but there was also the absolutely fucking unmistakable sound of rapier work. The alarm cawed overhead. I didn’t run, but I legged it pretty quickly down the corridor, and then, beneath the alarm, I became aware of yet another sound: someone was screaming.
In a fork off the hallway, I found the source. Dead Heralds lay in an untidy semicircle around the last living, rearing member of their gang, and fighting this bee—screaming her head off—was Lemon-mouth Prime: the Lyctor you called Mercymorn.
She was shrieking, drunk and howling off pure fright, every so often lunging in the wrong direction as though she couldn’t see straight. I came into the room, not knowing what to do, not knowing how to help her. Despite the screaming, she was holding her own—her rapier was a steel needle flashing in and out, out of the way of the snapping jaws of the Herald, thrusting into the black eye socket in a shower of jelly. There were long, shining folds of a net wrapped around her offhand arm, but the net was not in her hand. She missed a thrust, nothing but wing, and then she drove herself into the Herald and laid that bare hand on its skull. And the Herald just kind of imploded.
The skull disappeared into dust, the thorax collapsed in on itself like a pricked balloon, and the insides blew out the back almost delicately. It slumped, and when it went still the Lyctor stopped screaming. There were thin runnels of blood coming off her face and I thought she’d been hurt, but then I realised they were coming out of her eyes like tears. She stood there with her shoulders heaving and her hand pressed over her face, pinky-reddish hair coming out of her braid, looking unhurt but pretty sorry for herself.
And she looked right at us, before I could duck back into the corridor.
The Lyctor called Mercymorn stared at your face, and I have never seen anyone so totally shocked by misery. It wasn’t just fear: it was this huge, grief-stricken panic, a welter of unhappy terror. It was the face of someone who had just seen their one true love drop-kicked into a meat grinder and come out the other end as a pile of sausages.
“So now you come to me, First,” she said raggedly. “Now you come … at the end of everything.”
She seemed to be waiting. I didn’t know what to say. No way I could pretend to be you; I knew you too well. As we both waited in idiot silence, her fear changed—her eyes narrowed—her mouth hardened from its softer line of anticipatory terror, and she said, “No,” and then, “No,” again. And she was so old, Harrow, I don’t know how you dealt with all these unbelievably old bastards—she was old like Cytherea was old, and her eyes were absolutely abominable. They made my skin crawl. When she looked at us, it was like she could see right through me, and she was seeing shit I hadn’t even heard of.
The Lyctor said: “You haven’t come, have you? You’re not her. That freak would have gone for me already … she never could act human. But you stand like a human—you gawp like a human—you are human,” she said, with a rising horrified disgust. “But I don’t understand! Harrowhark was meant to be eaten by now! She wouldn’t have died for hours, and the Heralds are everywhere!”
“Lady,” I said, “are you telling me you stabbed my necromancer?”
“Yes, and she should have thanked me for it!!” said the Lyctor, thoroughly distracted. “It wasn’t horrible—I dulled her nerves, out of a misplaced sense of affection—I put her out in the corridor specially so she would be eaten quicker, and once she started getting eaten alive, she would have been mad and not feeling a thing! But you’re the soul—the soul of the cavalier that she stuffed in the back of her brain! What happened to your eyes?”
“Let’s go to a better question,” I said, and I raised my sword in your hands. “You know we already killed one Lyctor, right? Me and Harrow? You know we’ve practised?”
“Oh, shut up, Harrow’s cavalier,” she said hysterically. “I’m trying to think. You’re not her—she isn’t driving you—but you have her eyes. Why? When they showed me your corpse I didn’t think to check the eyes. Stupid, Mercy. Oversight. I thought I knew what you were, though I didn’t want to believe it…”
I said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I am talking about the failure of the Ninth House operation,” she said.
And she cocked her flower-coloured head to the side so that her sweaty hair fell over her face, in that sizzling, gulping heat, and she stared at us, and she said in tones that were almost sedate: “I thought the commander had simply been a bad girl … a workaholic, putting business before family. She was the type … but that would have been too much of a coincidence. Let me think. Let me think. I made her the dolls—they were perfect—and then she must have played silly buggers with—with the emission,” she said, suddenly, impassioned. “Of course it killed her! She was always arrogant! That moron knew Gideon was on her tail!”
Something in your head went spang when we heard my name. It sounded strangely gloopy at first, unreal, as though we were underwater. But then the pain went away.
The Lyctor continued, those weird reddish-haze eyes scrunched up as though she might cry: “And then Gideon ruined everything,” she said. “Then the commander ruined everything. Then you ruined everything. This could have been over eighteen years ago. But now it’s messy … now I have to take the River all the way home and fight my way through Anastasia’s horrid tomb cult just because the commander always thought she was so smart. Don’t know why Gideon was so obsessed with her … he never cared about beauty, and she was repellent to talk to.”
I did not know what the fuck to say to this incoherent spew. She said, ragged, peevish: “What? No tongue in your head, you—you mutant, you mistake, you great big calf-eyed fuck-up? I need to think. I need to think. Why are those eyes now in your face? Unless…”
And then, of all goddamn things, her voice caught in a great, shuddery sob. She paced backward and forward. At one point, she threw her head back as though she were going to yell aloud, and that weird-hued hair shivered over her back. But she said nothing, just stood in the pit of the light, and then she turned back to us.
When she spoke at last, she sounded frozen and numb. “I see. I understand. Lipochrome. Recessive. You are the evidence. He lied to us … and you are all the proof I needed. I don’t have to breach anything. I don’t have to go back.” She exhaled. “Good God … Cytherea would have known as soon as she looked at you.”
And I said: “What the fuck are you talking about? What the hell are you talking about? What other Gideon?”
“The Lyctor sent to kill your mother,” said Mercymorn.
“But Harrow’s mother—”
“I’m not talking to Harrowhark, you facile dead child,” she said disdainfully. “I am talking to you … Nav … Gideon Nav … Gideon! What a laugh … you abomination, you heresy, you failed ambition nineteen years too late.”
I’m sorry, Nonagesimus. I didn’t know what to do. Maybe I should’ve turned and gotten the hell out of there, holed up somewhere to wait until you came back. But I said: “What—about—my mother?”
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“Excuse me. I am wrong. I should not use that term,” said the necromantic saint. She rolled both her shoulders back and wiped those thin dilute tears of blood off her cheeks. “How she would have hated the word mother.”
And she raised her rapier, and she slowly unwound that net from her wrist, and it fell to the floor in great billowy shining knots. Mercy said: “Now I will clean up my mistakes. Cristabel always said I was tidy.”
She darted forward with her rapier close to her body, the net trailing behind—fuck, she was quick—knocked away my sluggish counter, easily a second too late, and she stabbed us neatly through the heart. An easy thrust, with enormous strength behind it, straight past the right breastbone and right to the very centre of your heart, which had been fucked up one too many times in my keeping. It was a surgical, exact thrust. Her rapier was a slender needle, and if you’d carved us open you probably would have found that the slim blade had gone right through the central mass of the aorta. Mercymorn withdrew with the same precise, swift movement and stepped backward, rapier dripping with blood. That was her mistake.
Your heart closed over the rapier as it punctured: your heart closed over the rapier as it withdrew. The slit so close to your breastbone sealed over instantaneously, just as fast as her stab, like an immunisation jab in Drearburh.
I readied my sword, and I saw her eyes widen, just a fraction.
“It’s too late in the game to have learned that trick, infant,” said the Lyctor.