by Tamsyn Muir
That white face in the darkness sharpened. I heard her indrawn breath. “You’re certain that Mercy tried to kill Harrow?” she said, after a moment.
“Yeah.”
“But that doesn’t— Why would she—?”
“Do not fucking ask me for information. I could not be more lost right now.”
“Help me down, Ninth,” she demanded. “I cannot walk on these things without succumbing to a strong desire to scream and loose my bladder, and we have to talk, you and I.”
I kicked a path for her—rolling some of the bees clear with your arms, shouldering them out the way until a thin aisle was cleared for Ianthe to walk through, shuddering all the while. When we made it out into the hallway, she took a few moments, leaning against the wall, framed against the unbelievably tacky bone decor—all the skeletons in their little outfits, and the mummified busts in niches, and the fanned-out rings of arms holding jewels or swords or whatever. That place was like a party where everyone was dead. She froze when we heard that infernal buzzing, from down the corridor. It was followed by a shout.
“Stay here,” I said.
“Get fucked,” she said thickly. “I absolutely did not become the eighth saint to serve the King Undying so Gideon Nav could play hero for me.”
“Why did you ascend to be a Lyctor?”
“Ultimate power—and posters of my face.”
Fair.
The end of the corridor opened into a wider hallway, obviously meant to showcase that same King Undying’s every grotty little trophy. The hall was lined with pillars of bone sweating in the heat—runnels of moisture trickled down the pale carvings—and I readied my sword, but I was too late. The bees were already dead. They were strung up neatly from the ceilings in strangling nets of tendon, squeezed to death, thick streams of green slime dripping from their bodies all over the black-and-white tiles. Some of the lamps had been smashed in the chaos, and even now swung dangerously from the ceiling, strobing over these hideous parcels.
A figure stood in the hallway, breathing hard into the crook of his elbow. He hadn’t even drawn his rapier, though somebody obviously had at some point, as piles of dead bees lay in the corner segmented neatly. It was the Lyctor you called the Saint of Patience, alive and unhurt, apart from a gleam of sweat and blood on those snobby, aristocratic features. I was struck again by how almost-unreal Lyctors always looked—or like they were more real than anyone else was, more present, painted in more saturated colours. He kept running one hand over his flat combed-back cap of fair, greyish hair, and looked as though he was thinking seriously about power-chundering. When he saw us standing in the doorway, he approached and snapped: “Chick, we have to get back in there. Gideon hasn’t surfaced, so he’s fighting the damn thing alone. Help me find your elder sister—wait, Harrow?” His surprise shifted almost immediately to distracted annoyance: “For the Emperor’s sake, Harrowhark, if you lived could you not, at least, have dropped in to assist—”
But he had stopped dead, and he was looking at us.
At your face. He looked at my eyes in your face in the same way the other Lyctor had, and any colour in his own drained straight away.
I’ve seen a lot of things in my time—swords, pictures of ladies who lost their clothes in an accident, a bunch of corpses—eclectic, maybe, though now I think about it maybe not the widest variety—but I have never seen anyone look at anything the way those Lyctors looked at us. Mercymorn looked at us like we were the picture in the dictionary next to unhappiness. Augustine looked at us like we were the last thing he’d ever see.
“John,” he breathed. And: “Joy.” And then—he fucking legged it.
When I turned us around to look at her, Ianthe was watching us with cautious, half-suspicious curiosity. She never did show all her cards. It was pretty shitty the way she towered over you—over a head above your height, a bleached and charmless reed of a human. She’d never seemed that tall back at Canaan House, but I wasn’t used to your eyeline.
“Mystery on mystery,” was all she said. And then: “How I hate seeing you in her face.”
“You’ve got two short minutes left before I punch you right in the butthole,” I said.
“Follow me. We haven’t got much time—quite apart from your hurtful threats of sexual violence,” she said. “Why, your fist is so big, and my butthole is so small.”
“Just move, Tridentarius! I’m not ready to laugh at your goddamn jokes!”
She took us—gagging every time we got too close to an oozing, sagging space bee corpse, which was a much more comfortable way to laugh at her than watching her mocking mouth form the word butthole—to her amazing gold-and-white room. I was almost too stressed and distracted to appreciate that awe-inspiring painting of the bangin’ cavalier holding a melon, with her necromancer friend standing on a plinth while the wind blew leaves to hide his junk. That was art. Completely worth dying for, just to see for myself.
“Hurry up. I have a letter for you,” said Ianthe.
Harrow, it was in your handwriting. She handed me a fat, bulging envelope with your handwriting, and it said To be given to Gideon Nav, and I felt—strange. Time softened as I held it, and I didn’t even care about the barely repressed mirthful scorn on the other girl’s face. It was your curt, aggravated handwriting, curter and more aggravated than ever, like you’d written it in a hurry. I’d gotten so many letters in that handwriting, calling me names or bossing me around. You’d touched that letter, and I—you know it was killing me twice that you weren’t there, right? You must know it was destroying me to be there in your body, trying to keep your thumbs on, and I couldn’t even hear your damn voice?
I peeled open the envelope—you’d sealed it up tight, though I was pretty sure that Tridentarius had busted it open in between, she was just that type—and found a little piece of flimsy with the edges still ragged from where you’d torn it. The letter was wrapped around a black, folded-up bunch of angles: smoked glass, thin black frames, mirrored lenses. A little bend in one arm, but otherwise—you’d kept my sunglasses.
I slid them on your face immediately. They were a little too big for you. They kept sliding down your nose. I had to bend the hooks behind your ears to make them stay. With my eyes safely hidden, I opened the paper, and it just said one thing—four stupid goddamn words. No dry Nonagesimus explanation. No instructions. No commandments. In a way, I would’ve killed for one of your lists of rules about exactly how to treat your body, how I was going to have to take showers with all your clothes on, which, by the way, I’d already planned on doing.
But I almost knew what you’d written already, so I don’t know why I was surprised.
ONE FLESH, ONE END.
Which did not make me happy, Harrow. It did not fill my heart with soft and sentimental yearning. You set me up. You set all of it up. I gave you one damn job. And instead you rolled a rock over me and turned your back. I spent all that time drowning and surfacing in you, over and over and over, and all because in the end you could not bear to do the one thing I asked you to do.
I wanted you to use me, you malign, double-crossing, corpse-obsessed bag of bones, you broken, used-up shithead! I wanted you to live and not die, you imaginary-girlfriend-having asshole! Fuck one flesh, one end, Harrow. I already gave my flesh to you, and I already gave you my end. I gave you my sword. I gave you myself. I did it while knowing I’d do it all again, without hesitation, because all I ever wanted you to do was eat me.
Which is, coincidentally, what your mother said to me last night.
“She is such a romantic,” drawled Ianthe.
I crumpled the flimsy and crammed it in your pocket.
“Tridentarius,” I said, and I had to take a breath to stop myself from hewing her in half. Then I said:
“If you keep acting like you know her—not even like you care about her, but like you know the first thing about her—I will end you here and now. Everything you did to her, you did because she was alone. You thought nobody gave a shit abo
ut Harrowhark Nonagesimus. You played with her because you thought it was funny. But she never gave you anything. You never got anywhere.”
Naberius’s eyes narrowed. I hated those eyes in that face; I kept expecting to smell hair gel. Ianthe sat down on the bed with her long skinny legs crossed at the knee, that waxen face just one more memorial on this goddamned floating funeral, and she remarked: “Did you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I am talking about forgetting, you big-mouthed warrior nunlet,” she said, and examined her fingernails, and levered a glob of dried-up green from her thumb with a brief flash of nausea. “Good God! Try taking Coronabeth’s memories from me … I’d kill you myself. Love—don’t make that face, child, I have loved plenty—true love is acquisitive. You keep anything … strands of hair … an envelope they might’ve licked … a note saying, Good morning, simply because they wrote it to you. Love is a revenant, Gideon Nav, and it accumulates love-stuff to itself, because it is homeless otherwise. I’m not saying she didn’t care about you. One does care about one’s cavalier, it can’t be helped … but I watched Harry rearrange her brain so that she could empty herself of you.”
I laughed right in her face.
“Oh, shit,” I said, once I’d stopped, because it was weird to hear you giggle that much. Sorry. It was pretty funny. “You think you can make me jealous? You think anything I did has been to make her love me? You don’t know. She didn’t even tell you.”
Her face didn’t flicker. The wan features were schooled into a look bright and interested, but those oily brown-pebbled eyes were like a snake’s.
“Enlighten me,” she said.
“Hang on, I don’t want to let this pass by—Harry?”
“I thought it was cute. Elucidate, Gideon, we really don’t have all day.”
“Like I said before. She’s just not into you. She’s into bones. She gave her heart to a corpse when she was ten years old,” I said. “She’s in love with the refrigerated museum piece in the Locked Tomb. You should’ve seen the look she had on when she told me about this ice-lolly bimbo. I knew the moment I saw it. I never made her look like that … She can’t love me, even if I’d wanted her to. She can’t love you. She can’t even try.”
She said, way too carefully: “Oh, please, as though—” but I cut her off.
“Don’t start the I was toying with her, mwah ha ha noise, because I won’t believe it. Your plan backfired, Tridentarius. You’ve got the sickness. I know the signs of Nonagesimitis. You were all lined up for a big hot injection of Vitamin H.”
Ianthe scrubbed at her forehead briefly with her bone hand.
“Really a corpse?” she said, with not totally believable carelessness.
“She wants the D,” I said. And: “The D stands for dead.” And: “Sorry.”
“I think I need a drink,” said Ianthe, and she murmured to herself: “All that fuss about the Saint of Duty. What a little hypocrite.”
“Don’t think this means you get more than the teeny-weeniest smidge of pity from me,” I added. “If you think anything I did, I did to make her love me, then you don’t know anything about her and me. I’m her cavalier, dipshit! I’d kill for her! I’d die for her. I did die for her. I’d do anything she needed, anything at all, before she even knew she needed it. I’m her sword, you pasty-faced Coronabeth-looking knock-off.”
Always your sword, my umbral sovereign; in life, in death, in anything beyond life or death that they want to throw at thee and me. I died knowing you’d hate me for dying; but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.
Ianthe was chewing pettishly on a lock of that bone-yellow hair. I added, “I need you to lay off. I was already the worst thing that ever happened to her, and she doesn’t need you trying to one-up that, like, Bet I can make this double shit.”
I watched her recross her legs slowly at the knee. She was no longer examining her nails. She looked at me with a searching, almost studious expression, pale lashes down over her dead-man’s eyes. Her biceps weren’t bad, actually, there was definite muscle in her remaining skim-milk arm. Nothing to write home about, but she didn’t have to be completely ashamed. Unlike you.
“You’re wrong, you know,” she said calmly. “It’s an interesting revelation. Perhaps it even gives some context. But my … attachment … to Harry isn’t remotely what you think it is. I’m not her cavalier, her servant or thrall. I am a Lyctor … Harrow is a Lyctor … and the centuries will entangle us whether she wants them to or— Nav, if you persist in making jack-off motions when I am talking, I will show you what Harrow’s kidneys look like.”
“That! That’s what I’m talking about,” I said. “Don’t show me her kidneys. Don’t think about her kidneys. Don’t do anything with her goddamn kidneys. Get a grip. Don’t look at her blood, or lick her bones, or do any of the shit necromancers lie and say they don’t do the moment two of them get nasty.”
She shrugged that gold-skinned shoulder.
“What can I say,” she said. “I love a little gall on gall.”
“Reverse everything I just told you,” I said. “Let’s get married.”
“Ah, the romance I have been awaiting all my life,” she said pleasantly. “Babs always said it would come along … or at least, he once said I would go to hell and get fucked, which I took as a roundabout way of expressing the same thing. That’s all I had to give you, Gideon: now we are going to get out of my bedroom, and I am going to take you to Teacher.”
The Emperor of the Nine Houses. The Necrolord Prime.
I said, “No, thanks. I’m good.”
“He needs to know. He can help you.”
“I might lie down and see if this fixes itself,” I suggested.
“Do you want Harrowhark to reclaim rightful ownership of her body, or not?” she asked reasonably.
She knew I couldn’t argue with that, and when she looked at my face, she added: “This is your chance, Gideon. If you want to help her, this is the only way.” And, for the third stab: “I will remind you that a Resurrection Beast is descending on us, on her, as we speak.”
If you’d come back, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up following Ianthe Tridentarius to see God. But you didn’t; you were gone. Might’ve been a good thing in this instance, honestly. I still didn’t know if you were going to kick my ass for that conversation, or if you would be sorry for me. I knew which one would have been worse.
49
“I am the Emperor’s Hand; do not thou persist in this combat; matchless am I with the long blade—”
Ortus Nigenad’s voice reverberated around that ice-rimed, organ-swagged facility like one of the Sleeper’s gunshots. The great body, the one that Harrowhark had in her crueller youth assumed would look best once the man was dead and his bones settled in the family monument, proved to possess a pair of lungs that could declaim to wake the dead.
Abigail’s voice rose with his, though hers was desperate and somewhat wild: “Nigenad, you think too much of me!”
“Never, lady!—Matchless alike in my magecraft. Fall to your knees and be glad that I spare thee; thy courage is mighty:”
Book Five. Harrowhark’s least favourite.
“Oh, God,” she heard Abigail say. “God, please help me.”
Heavy, booted steps approached the coffin. Harrow dared not poke her head around its bulk, and anyway she knew what she would see. Instead, she scattered a fistful of crushed ash in a wide half-circle around herself and Ortus and raised it into a jagged wall of calvarial bone, six feet high and an inch thick: the toughest and thickest posterior parietal she could manage in her pre-Lyctoral state. The shell absorbed some of the force of Ortus’s declamation, rendering it flatter and less thunderous, but it was still impressively resonant as he continued: “‘Mightier yet is thy folly if thou think’st yet to oppose me.’ The Lyctor spoke, and was silent—”
The bone fence shattere
d. It was impossible. Harrow now clearly remembered the wall of bone she had summoned up around herself, Gideon, and Camilla Hect, in those dreadful final moments on the garden terrace. She had been almost spent, and yet her barrier had held off a determined onslaught by one of the Emperor’s fists and gestures for at least a minute. Cytherea had been ten thousand years old and heir to limitless necromantic power. The Sleeper had a baggy orange suit and a gun collection. Yet now she shouldered her way through Harrow’s wall with irritable, disgusted motions, as if it were an unexpected curtain of cobweb in a catacomb archway. The bone barely even seemed to break; it simply flaked away in chunks, like old plaster from a ceiling. The Sleeper forced her upper body through the crumbling wreckage, gun thrust out before her, and shot Ortus in the belly.
Ortus reflexively clutched at the wound, and everything went very still. He took his bloody hand away and stared at it as though awed. Harrow looked from the hole in his abdomen—small and neat, as though drilled there—to his face, and then to the Sleeper, still wedged halfway through that absurd torn rift in what should have been solid bone. The gun sent up a curl of smoke, and that haz-covered face revealed nothing.
Her cavalier cleared his throat again, and said, faltering, working that huge resonant bellow: “Nonius, woun…” He had to swallow. “Nonius, wounded…” But he managed no more.
Harrowhark’s heart crumpled like foil. She latched on to the ripped edges of her wall and drove outward, hard, hurling the Sleeper backward off her feet and through the air. The shattered lumps of debris she spun upward into constructs—so easy even now, easy since she’d been a child—one, two, three, four clattering skeletons flinging themselves onto the attacker to rip and wrench with fleshless hands. The Sleeper was on her feet to meet them. She shot the first through the skull and the whole body resolved into ash, which was not how it worked—did the same to the second—the third managed to lay hold of her free arm before it got a bullet through its spinal column and crumbled into garbage. Harrow’s ears pounded and her head throbbed and her skin felt wet, and she dragged up four more to follow them. She did not know why Ortus had to go mad now, but when the Ninth House advanced, its Reverend Daughter would advance with it.