Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  I swung. She parried automatically. The sword knocked her rapier to the side, and I backstepped. I needed space. I tried to remember everything you’d learned about this crazy-eyed witch, but it was like thinking through mud. I knew I didn’t want her to touch me, but I didn’t quite know why. The heat haze was turning the room into a sweaty fog, making the red light pouring down from the alarms overhead a wavering strobe. It made her look like she was moving when she wasn’t—she just stood there, perfectly still, that lovely balanced rapier still wet with your blood and that net looking like it was twitching in her hand. All I could do was circle, sword held in a guard across your chest like this time I could protect your heart. Even if I’d been in my own body, I would have been panicking; but I was in yours, and she knew the only game I had. The fuck was I going to do, regrow your thumbs at her?

  The net flicked. The damn thing looked like a gossamer slip, but it was weighted; I thought she’d just use it to tangle, not like freaking bolas. It caught me by one ankle and sent you to the ground because I still didn’t understand your weight—knocked all the air from your lungs and dragged us to her. With one flick of her arm we were lying prone in front of her. She flipped that rapier downward: thumb on the pommel, hilt high over her head, readied for one downward thrust that would go right between the eyes, slamming through cartilage, angled upward into your brain.

  And then there was a haptic click and a huge blasting noise that ripped the Lyctor’s chest all to fuck. She stumbled forward; I rolled us away. Mercymorn was on her knees, and she was screaming. Not in pain, but in the way we’d first heard her screaming, that warbling bellow of absolute fear, her arms and legs twitching in helpless, spasmodic wriggles. Then she tipped over in a growing pool of blood on the floor.

  I was on your feet with the sword, panting; in the doorway I’d come from stood a woman. She was shouldering a huge double-barrelled gun, and the wisps of smoke from the barrel shimmered in that red heat.

  She wore a little white tunic, stained with blood. Her feet were bare. Her head was bare. Her pale sugar-brown curls frizzed in that moist, smouldering air, and her face was too pale, and her eyes were dark and dull, not the incandescent blue that was like staring into radioactive water. I would’ve known her anywhere. We’d killed her.

  I breathed, “Dulcinea,” because I was a chump, and then—“Cytherea.”

  The dead Lyctor did something with that heavy gun again—she angled it open with a click, and more thin streams of smoke emerged from the other end of the barrels. She wore a bandolier of bullets, and she palmed one and slid it in the barrel and pulled the body of the gun back over it. She was incredibly quick, and I didn’t quite follow her. Mercymorn was still juddering and crying out—it didn’t seem like she was actually dying, but she was frothing at the mouth like a rabid animal.

  Cytherea looked at me with that dead-eyed, stony expression; and then, very slowly, she pointed the nose of the gun down.

  I didn’t know what to say—Thank you? Is this like round five now? I didn’t have to say anything, because her mouth opened, and the voice was Cytherea’s but the gravelly, hard-as-nails tone wasn’t. “Goodbye,” she said.

  And Cytherea’s body turned around and, gun raised, slowly stomped back out into the corridor; walking heavily and painfully, like it hurt. I was too amazed to do anything. I stared at that thin back—those pronounced, painful shoulder blades, the fine bumps of the spine.

  Sorry. Maybe I should’ve gone for her. Like, I can imagine what you’d say. All I can say is that it was complicated back in Canaan House, and sometimes a cute older girl shows you a lot of attention, because she’s bored or whatever, and you sort of have this maybe-flirting maybe-not thing going on, right, and then it turns out she’s an ancient warrior who’s killed all your friends and she’s coming for you, and then you both die and she turns up ages later in the broiling heat on a sacred space station and like, it’s complicated. Just saying that it happens all the time.

  All I could do was stand there, sword raised, as the Lyctor thrashed mindlessly on the floor next to us, and say: “What the fuck is going on?”

  47

  THEY PLACED THE CANDLES in a ring around the Sleeper’s coffin. Abigail was busying herself with an immense chalk diagram, which took some time because she had to put her red, numbed fingers back in her glove every few minutes, or have her hands warmed between her husband’s. Harrowhark drew wards at the apex of each candle, as instructed, squatting beside the smiling, no-longer-intubated face of Dulcie Septimus.

  No snow down here. Great icicles like stalactites seemed poised to crumble; oily pink webbing was strung from spike to spike, frosted up with cold. Drifts of broken glass and stagnant puddles of frozen fluid filled each corner, greeny-greyish in the dolorous buzzing overhead lights. Ropes of tube and ice hung over the entrances to each radiating passage in that nonagonal room, swagging over the signs that had once proclaimed each passage’s use. The only letters visible beneath the sluggish, pulsing viscera were a Y, the PR that had once heralded PRESERVATION, the AR once belonging to MORTUARY, and an almost-entirely obscured THREE. The crystal coffin in the centre of the room was misted thickly with cold that did not wipe off even when Lieutenant Dyas, a woman Harrow was beginning to grudgingly admit feared neither pain nor death after experiencing both, scrubbed at it with her sleeve. As such they could not see inside it, which was probably a relief.

  The enormous old metal-rimmed whiteboard with its faded timetable and stained brown patches had been written over again. Harrowhark had startled when she first saw it:

  END OF THE LINE. FALLING. OXYGEN CAN’T LAST THE DISTANCE AND WON’T REDIRECT POWER FROM THE PAYLOAD. INSTEAD I WILL MAKE YOU WATCH EVERY MOMENT AS I GET THE LAST PRIVILEGE YOU CANNOT ENJOY YOU BYGONE SON OF A BITCH.

  I HOPE YOU’RE BOTH AS SORRY AS I AM.

  She had said to Ortus, “I thought the messages were hallucinations, even though I never hallucinated like that before. It was easier to believe I was succumbing to the madness again.”

  “Harrow,” he had said, “I have come to the conclusion that you were never mad … though who can be the judge of madness?”

  It seemed so much worse to her if it wasn’t madness. She’d hate if it was under her control. She found herself saying curtly: “Then what?”

  “The mind can only take so much pressure before it forms indentations,” he had said, meditatively. “It is strange—years and years after his death, I so often heard the sound … the way he pushed at the handle, the way he manipulated the haft … of my father, standing outside the door of my cell.”

  Harrow had asked, “Did you miss him?”

  He had thought about it. In the darkness of the big central room in that downstairs installation—the place he had never come to before, and that she felt she had left so much of herself inside, despite the fact that she had walked its metal-panelled halls for a few weeks only—he looked like an old statue, a Ninth House cavalier carved in the rock of some deep-set tomb.

  And he had said thoughtfully, “Sometimes I imagined him coming back to life so that I might watch him die myself. The fantasy was a relief.”

  Now Harrowhark dropped to her haunches next to the ghost of the Seventh House necromancer as she carefully fashioned wards using the blunt end of a needle. Everyone but Harrow had presented themselves to Abigail to have wards scratched on their palms: she was embarrassed by how long it had taken her to realise that they were counter-wards, and that she did not need one. They were the dead. For now, she was alive.

  Dulcie mistook Harrow’s expression as curiosity over the missing tube, and she tapped one nostril and said brightly, “We thought I didn’t really need it. I’m not breathing at all badly. Abigail and I suppose that we enforce some measure of our own rules here; that’s why I’m not too badly off.”

  Harrow said, “That would explain why you were affected by physical stimulus—why you have needed to eat, and why you experience pain.”

  “Yes, and I alwa
ys believed that so long as I got eight hours’ sleep, did some stretches, and didn’t think about it, I wouldn’t get any worse,” said the adept, and she smiled that dimpled, wasted smile that was the only thing that Cytherea had come close to parodying with any accuracy. She said, “Pal always said I’d be the death of him. And I was … He and I never even got to meet. I never even really got off Rhodes. It seems like such a bastard. You did kill the Lyctor, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Harrowhark.

  “Was it quick?”

  “Quicker than she deserved,” said Harrow.

  “She stabbed Protesilaus before he’d finished taking his sword out the scabbard,” she said, and scratched a flourish into her ward. “Then she started asking me questions. Who were my friends? Was I well enough to go out in public? Was I married? I told her a lot of hot bullshit,” finished Dulcie. “I knew she was going to take my place—thought maybe Camilla, at least, would figure out something was up … no such luck. I don’t even remember dying—I suppose that was nice of her.”

  There was no resentment in that face, worn out before its time, heavily lined with the marks of pain and care. With her close-cropped curls and soft eyes, Dulcie Septimus in some lights looked like a child; in others, older than Magnus. She had a tip-tilted grin that showed little white teeth, and nowhere in that smile was a hint of pity, nor of condescension.

  “I don’t understand why you’re here,” said Harrow, throwing her House’s caution to the wind. She said honestly: “I do not know you. I barely avenged you. You owe me no allegiance, and nor does your cavalier.”

  “Oh, Protesilaus is here because he wouldn’t be able to help it,” Dulcie said dismissively, putting one of the candles down and, with a total lack of shame, wriggling her hands up into her shirt so that she could warm them on her abdomen. “I love him, but he’s such a pest. I wish he hadn’t even come with me to Canaan House. I feel horrible. He should’ve stayed home with his wife and his sons—his wife does tapestries and he breeds flowers for a hobby. I stayed on their farm right after my pneumonia because they thought the sitting temperature would be better for me, and if I ever see another rose I shall scream … No chance of that now. Don’t worry about Protesilaus. He can’t help being so fantastically, dorkily noble.”

  “But you—”

  Dulcie’s smile became ferocious; her lips curled to show that some of the very white teeth were a little pointed, and her pallid eyes seemed to turn up at the corners. She was no longer languid, but breathless, alive, and resembling nothing quite so much as a malign fairy. Harrow remembered that Palamedes Sextus had made a war of his whole life in order to prosecute his desire to marry this woman.

  “The only thing that ever stopped me being exactly who I wanted,” she said, “was the worry that I would soon be dead … and now I am dead, Reverend Daughter, and I am sick of roses, and I am horny for revenge.”

  Then she took her hands away from her middle and went back to happily fixing the ward.

  It did not take long to complete the circle. They worked swiftly and quietly. When they finished the coffin was cocooned in an enormous circle of enmeshed ward and candle anchorage, although Abigail looked discontented. “I hate doing anything to spirits without something to feed them,” she said, “and there’s no real blood here … there’s nothing to tempt it. I wish we knew what it was anchoring itself to—what’s the thanergetic link, and why has it been able to follow it to you? Harrowhark, you really don’t have any insight into who might be haunting you? Do any of its signifiers mean anything? The suit? The blood? The gun?”

  Harrow’s brain, though still a jumble, was no longer a mess in a darkened room. Memory had gifted her a small torch she could light the disarray with. She remembered the clipped Cohort accents:

  A standard-issue infantry sword. A two-hander.

  “The sword,” she said. “It’s Gideon’s. But none of the other signifiers match.”

  “Did the sword belong to anyone before her?”

  “Not that I know of. Aiglamene petitioned to give it to Griddle from the Drearburh stock. I signed the order. The box was still wrapped.” The light was not proving helpful enough: she was, in desperation, kicking over piles of the rubble in her own brain. “I hated that damned sword for years. I don’t know why; it just felt strange—rancorous. I cannot deny that I often assumed its edge would be the last thing I saw. I don’t know,” she finished, frustrated.

  “Never mind. I’m sure I’ve done worse with more,” said Abigail bracingly. “Get to the perimeter. You’re on point with Dulcie, and I’m pairing Magnus with Protesilaus—and then there’s Ortus.”

  “Ortus shouldn’t be fighting.”

  “He very much wants to. I hope there won’t be any fighting. Are you ready?”

  Harrow’s lips were sore; everyone’s lips were a little cracked and bleeding, and on her and Ortus bloody lips and cracking paint blended in a pinkish-grey mosaic. She found the tip of her tongue worrying the little scabby plates that now lived on her bottom lip. She looked up into the kind face of Abigail Pent, who was dead; and she said: “I owe you a great debt. You have given me much, in return for very little.”

  “Oh, Harrow, bless you, I always was a busybody,” she said smilingly. “Don’t thank me for sticking my oar in. You asked me to come, and I came. I understand you didn’t ask on purpose, but I like to think that there was a grain in your soul that saw yourself in need, and perhaps thought to itself, I wish I had Abigail Pent. It takes a great deal of ego to be a psychopomp. Thank you for letting me be yours.”

  And she curtseyed to Harrowhark, with enormous grace. Harrowhark bowed in return, and found herself saying, “The body of the Locked Tomb preserve you and yours, Pent,” and meaning it.

  “Do you know what’s in there?” asked Abigail, eyes sparkling.

  Harrowhark cleared her throat and said, “Yes.”

  “Is it intensely mysterious?”

  “Yes.”

  “God, I love tombs,” said the Fifth House necromancer. “Right-o. The curtain lifts … Places, people.”

  In that echoing metal silence, they all moved to make their perimeter around the diagram. Harrowhark had dug big handfuls from Ortus’s panniers, and stood shod in a crunchy, perfectly pulverized pile of bone. She watched Abigail and Magnus cross on tiptoe, nimbly dodging any line that their shoes might scuff, and in passing turn and kiss each other gravely. She was not embarrassed to see this intimacy; in fact, she found that it was vaguely interesting to see a marriage play out in front of her. There were many strictures against a necromancer marrying their own cavalier, and whatever road Abigail and Magnus had chosen to walk had been a difficult one: she knew that the marriage had preceded the cavaliership, which perhaps had made it less grotesque for both. They kissed as chastely and briefly as children; Magnus touched her cheek and said quietly, “Godspeed, my darling,” and she said, “You too.” That was all. No more, and no less.

  It was still entirely uncertain whether her skeletons could handle this freezing, wretched cold. If she was bound by the rules of her pre-Lyctor state, it was going to be difficult. The candles wheezed and flickered but kept burning gamely on. Protesilaus stood opposite his necromancer. Ortus was there beside Harrowhark, a big black-wrapped bulk in her peripheral vision, trembling a little from cold and probable fear.

  Lieutenant Dyas was her opposite. Harrow had told her back in the laboratory that Judith Deuteros was alive, and she’d gotten a rather curt “Thought so” in reply. Dyas had begun to turn away, then surprised Harrow by turning back and suddenly saying, “She’ll give them hell,” in tones that were scarcely less blank; but with an expression that was far from it.

  Now Magnus stood at the head of the circle facing the frozen-over coffin. His necromancer did not put herself at any particular point. She had taken a jug in her hands, one of a set that Protesilaus had carried with care down the long facility ladder, and Harrow did not know what had been put inside it.

  “Here is th
e libation, for what good it may do,” said Abigail.

  She carefully poured a measure of the jug’s contents at the foot of the coffin. A brief spill of thin, milky, whitish liquid pooled at the base, sluggish in the cold.

  “You come to conquer,” she said, and spilt another runnel.

  “You come in fury,” she said, and spilt another.

  “You come bearing ancient weapons,” she said, and another.

  “You come with a sword of the Ninth House,” she said, and one more.

  “You come to claim a body,” she said, and upended the jug, and shook out the last pale drops. “This is all we know. You helpless ghost, this is not supplication … We came at invitation; whither did you? I am a spirit-caller of the House of the Fifth. I am Abigail for my mothers, Pent for my people. I who died am come in the fullness of my power, at the bidding of the Lyctor you seek to supplant. I will sever the thanergetic link you have to this woman, and I bid you—get the hell out.”

  Abigail withdrew her hand from the fat glove and laid it bravely, bare, on the icy front of the glass-covered coffin. She did not wince from the cold. A chill blue light emanated from beneath that hand, as though somebody were shining a light from beneath the necromancer’s fingers. Harrow was struck by a thirst for her rightful power—to understand the theorem through a Lyctor’s eyes. All she could do was watch with her senses dulled.

  After a moment, the adept said: “The ties lead outside this place, Harrowhark. The spirit is linked to some physical object.”

  Harrow said, “Then—what?”

  “Oh, we can get the spirit out of you,” said Abigail. “But we can’t kick it out of its other anchor. In other words, just because we banish it here doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily banish it there, outside the River … but let’s give a good, hard pull and see what emerges.”

  The candles flared. Where before they had burned with a meek yellow flame, now they burned as strong and blue as the spirit-magic emanation from Abigail’s hands.