Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  She roared, her voice not so much a ringing trumpet as it was a howling alarm:

  “Nonius, wounded full sore, spat blood and gave him a grim smile; nor did the sword in his hand shake–”

  From behind her, Ortus said weakly, “Harrow—”

  “Boldly he answered the saint: ‘’Tis true that—’” and there she hesitated. Nonius’s responses were generally where she began to think about anything else in the whole universe.

  She became aware that Abigail was chanting: her voice did not betray any fear, nor sense of desperation. The words melted together like wax beading on an edge of a candle, sublimating into pale liquid, resolving into beads that stuck midway down the taper. Harrow caught her plea, distracted: “—when I come into my homeland, my family will sacrifice in their halls for you: the best of all our blood, the freshest; the best of all our blood, the oldest—”

  As Harrow floundered, Ortus whispered—

  “‘Your power is great…’”

  She continued hastily, “—‘your power is great, o servant of masterful Canaan; nor may I hope to be counted your equal in skill, nor in craft, nor even in bodily vigour…’”

  The Sleeper smashed a last skeleton into powder with a blow from her gloved fist that looked almost dismissive. “It’s over,” she said, and aimed the gun at Harrow’s head.

  The candles burst forth in chrysanthemum flames of blue, fully six feet high. Time seemed to gel, and Harrow, hands outflung, watched the bones she had scattered pause in midair, like falling white stars. The fire wailed upward. She swept her gaze across the room—there lay Magnus and Dyas and Protesilaus, still where they had been felled; there was Dulcie Septimus, propping herself up in a doorway with wide and violent eyes; and there was—

  Abigail Pent blazed like a flare from a blue and alien sun. Long prominences of light trailed from her fingers: it seemed as though she held in her hands a book, with all the pages fleshed from that same azure radiation. Amid that frantic cold, Harrow saw that Abigail was soaking wet, wreathed in hot mistlike shimmers by spirit magic—she had thrust off her jackets and her mittens and stood there in just a dress, and her robe, and bare arms. A reek hit Harrow like a faceful of snow: water, brine, blood. A multitude of voices lifted up in Abigail’s, and screamed.

  Glutinous time unglued. There was a crack as the Sleeper fired, and a sharp metal spang, and nothing hit Harrow in the head. A shadow rose before her, and it was all the shadows of the room. The candles were no longer columns of great blue light, but had sunk to billowing black flames. She was frozen by the sound of a great bell: BLA-BLANG … BLA-BLANG … BLA-BLANG.

  The First Bell of Drearburh, of the House of the Ninth, sounded loudly in that laboratory atrium. And a figure stood between Harrow and the Sleeper.

  The figure wore a cuirass of black laminate that had not been favoured by the Cohort for years and years. Fibre armour, matte and unpolished, shadowy, rather than shining obsidian, with small overlapping plates layered across its surface. The rest of the armour was more timeless: black canvas breeches tucked into black greaves of leather and plex, and the stiff, unpretentious frieze hood of Drearburh, not worn up, but loose on the neck. Worn-out black polymer mitts, no more sophisticated than Griddle’s.

  In one of those gloved hands was a rapier of lightless black metal with a plain guard and hilt; though from that hilt clanked delicate rows of knucklebone prayer beads, terminating in what was unmistakably, even by candlelight, a carving of the Jawless Skull. In the other hand was a simple black metal dagger, its blade thrust out horizontally a few feet in front of Harrow’s face, where it had blocked the Sleeper’s bullet midflight.

  The new arrival turned its head to look from the Sleeper to Harrow. In those black and spitting flames, what she could see of the face was—quite ordinary. Dark Drearburh hair, cut fairly short but not sacramentally shorn. The skull paint was cursory in the extreme: a few lines painted along the bottom jaw and chin, the merest suggestion of teeth and mandible.

  The flames guttered around Abigail Pent. She looked terrified, uplifted, and openly astonished; she looked faraway, as though she were no longer even truly with them. Her spectacles had slipped off her nose, and in that blazing blue corona her eyes were dark and liquid and—feral. The House of the Fifth always skinned itself over with such airs of civilisation, with so many manners and niceties, but they were spirit-talkers, and speakers to the dead. And the dead were savage.

  The Sleeper stepped away and lowered her gun.

  “Ninth was my name,” said the new arrival. “Ninth was my hearth, and my homeland. Here have I come at your calling. None may return from the River unless he be bidden by blood-rite; tell me, why have I been drawn here?”

  And Abigail said: “I speak your name, Matthias Nonius, cavalier of the Ninth House. I charge you to protect the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, and to slay her enemies.”

  “Waste not your breath,” said the ghost of Matthias Nonius. “Such was my task when I lived; why now in my death would I need a reminder?”

  Harrowhark said, mostly to herself: “Oh, God.”

  As the newcomer spoke, he had circled very slightly to the right, away from Harrow. The Sleeper had kept her gun trained on him the whole time, cautiously, as though waiting to see what he would do. Now she fired, and Nonius moved. In one long liquid evolution, he seemed to flatten and extend himself; his whole body became a single smooth device for deploying his rapier’s blade, like a needle flicking out of a spring housing. The point bit into one orange flank, and the Sleeper stumbled backward. From this new tear, Harrow saw dark liquid trickle.

  Nonius’s body folded back into place somehow, his rapier held with the hilt low and the tip pointing up at his opponent’s face. He resumed his slow circular drift.

  “A tool for a killer of beasts,” he said. “What warrior wields such a weapon in honourable service of combat? Has dignity wholly departed the Houses since I saw the starlight, or are you some raider or cutthroat?”

  “You’re just a ghost like the rest of them,” said the Sleeper, but this time the flat voice that emanated from the haz mask carried a tinge of disbelief. “You don’t get special rules.”

  “In life I was only a man,” the ghost agreed. “But the Ninth House granted me honour, and made me, unworthy, its servant. I speak with the voice of the Tomb, and my strength is the strength of the Black Gate—why am I talking in meter?”

  The Sleeper fired twice, but the sword flicked up diagonally across Nonius’s body, hilt at his face, before Harrow had even heard the shots. One bullet ricocheted off into the darkness; the other seemed to hit the armour, and Nonius jerked slightly with the impact, but again the blade shot out so fast and sure that the movement hardly made sense to the eye. The Sleeper sounded a muffled curse through the face mask and dropped her weapon, which clattered on the tiles. Then she snatched back her hand and brought it out from behind her back holding a significantly longer and fatter gun. This one had a blunt, squat barrel that even to Harrow’s untrained eye looked like bad news. The Sleeper braced it in both hands against her shoulder, pointed at Nonius’s face.

  “Go back to Hell,” she said, and pulled the trigger.

  There was a flat metallic snap, and nothing happened. She pulled again: nothing. She threw the gun to the side, and before it had even hit the floor it had been replaced with a long, elegant rifle. This yielded a hollow clunk, and a distinct lack of anything else.

  The Sleeper backed away a few more steps, her plex mask as impassive as ever. Nonius followed, not closing the distance but matching it, echoing her movements.

  “You ought to look after them better,” he suggested.

  “I killed wizard’s filth like you all my life,” snarled the Sleeper. This time the object that appeared in her hand was not a gun: it was some sort of fat cylinder. She flicked it downward and a slim black baton, perhaps three feet in length, telescoped suddenly outward with a noise like a bolt going home. “I killed them with guns, and bombs, an
d knives, and gas, and when I didn’t have any of those I just got in real close and put my thumbs through their fucking eyes. You can flick that little skewer around all you like, boy. I’ll choke you with it.”

  “I certainly hope you’re a fighter,” said Nonius, and raised his dagger-hand. “God knows you’re not a debater.”

  They both lunged forward at once. As the first crack of plex on metal sounded, Harrow dropped next to Ortus. She grasped him with her hands and with a pair of skeletal arms for good measure, and started to haul him to safety.

  He did not help. He was too busy watching. Much like Abigail, he was transported; not to some kind of ancestral state of primaeval ghost worship, but to a wide-eyed heaven only he understood. She had never seen Ortus look triumphant. She had never seen Ortus in the eye of any storm of his own making.

  She said urgently, “What did you do?”

  “Oh, I did nothing,” he said breathlessly. “Pent … Pent is a marvel. I will write songs for Pent.”

  “Write them later, and hurry up now—”

  “If I die my final death here,” he said, “I will die knowing the only happiness that I have ever known.”

  “Oh, shut up and move,” she said desperately. If all of her cavaliers were this excited for death, she was definitely the problem.

  He did not move. He was smiling. “You were party to the miracle, Harrowhark. Your emphasis was almost perfect.”

  “He smiles grimly at least twenty times in that act alone, Nigenad,” she snapped. “Find a new collocation.”

  It turned out that a relatively small amount of thanergy was all she needed to stanch the blood from his wound. His major organ function was stable enough—whatever that meant, exactly, where a ghost was concerned—and she didn’t want to mess around with complex tissue repair in these circumstances. Harrow’s early training had taken place in freezing, poorly lit crypts, and still this particular crypt seemed unhelpfully dark and unmanageably cold. Having propped Ortus against a wall a safe distance from the action, she turned to see what had happened to the others.

  The surviving necromancers and cavaliers, whom she had to remind herself were here precisely because they had not survived, were arranged silently around the room’s perimeter. Abigail was sitting on the floor, still a coruscating blue flame, and her husband had his arm around her and was leaning heavily into her with a face taut with pain: neither of them watched with any particular joy, but with a hungry intent, a cold anticipation. Dulcinea and Protesilaus had crawled to each other, leaving long snail trails of blood behind them, to meet exhausted at a point in the middle. Only the lieutenant had managed to stand, with the stiff-backed and impassive precision of a woman on a parade ground watching a drill. She looked as though at any moment she might blow a whistle for halt.

  Harrow suspected a whistle would not be enough to halt this particular duel. It was like nothing she had ever seen at Canaan House, nor even like the practice bouts on the Mithraeum, which had been inhumanly fast and skilful but somehow bloodless, more dances than fights. These were two people who had spent their lives doing nothing but fighting, now freed from the shackles of flesh and time, focusing their entire selves on the business of murdering each other.

  If Gideon had been there—no, if Gideon had been there, Harrow still couldn’t have hoped for a running commentary. Griddle didn’t know how to do running commentary. She would suck her breath through her teeth, or mutter in ecstasy words that meant nothing to anyone who wasn’t her, things like, “right foot,” in tones that suggested that if she died on the spot, that right foot would have somehow been the apex of her existence. Nor could she ever explain a fight after the fact in terms that Harrow could understand. But if her cavalier had been there, Harrow was fairly sure that she would have sucked her molars out of their sockets from sheer intensity of feeling.

  Gideon, watching this single combat, might have better appreciated the anonymous monster called the Sleeper for what she truly was. In life she must have had few, if any, equals. Her people—whoever they had been—must have cherished her as their finest champion. She was a prodigious fighter: fast, brutal, ruthless in exploiting advantages, terrifying in her force and aggression. She had gained a wicked-looking knife with a serrated edge in her left hand, balancing the baton in her right, and she struck with it at eyes, groin, or anywhere else she could reach. The heavy haz suit did not seem to slow her at all, and she had a catlike agility in keeping with her earlier handspring; she kept swerving her body away from strikes and mixing elbow jabs, knee strikes, and even kicks into her overall assault. There was no trace in her of the beribboned show fighter: she fought like she wanted to kill you and she hoped it would hurt.

  And her opponent was Matthias Nonius.

  A thousand years ago, Drearburh had produced Matthias Nonius. He had not become cavalier primary until very late—more correctly he should have been Matthias the Ninth, but Harrowhark had never heard anyone refer to him that way. He had never been described to her as anything other than the greatest swordsman of our House. He was rather short of stature—arms averagely long—neither of those was correct, surely. Ortus had always given the impression he was perhaps seven feet tall and three feet wide. Nonius’s ghost had emerged from the fog of legend looking more like a meek priest than a warrior.

  But with the sword in his hand—a black prayer-wreathed blade of her House—and his offhand knife in the other—the type of simple black blade carried by chaplains, or nuns—he was a poem. He was absurdly still, which she thought was against the rules of all rapier swordplay; he stood lightly in place, feet positioned hip’s width apart, and the Sleeper would pummel at him—take that black cosh and whip it cruelly at his ribs, gouge that long knife upward toward his inner thigh—and no blow would land. Nonius calmly parried them away as though he’d studied a list of the moves to come. It did not even seem to take him effort to block the lightning action of the knife, or of the club, or of the kick: he just stood there with the black candleflame gleaming off ebony steel and made himself a barricade.

  And then he would move. He had lift Harrowhark had never seen in a human being: as though gravity changed its rules for him. His movements were never hasty or choppy. He would give all he had to one beautiful fall of the sword, and the Sleeper would begin to bleed. There were fully half a dozen slits torn in her suit now, and all of them were smeared with red.

  But she neither stopped nor slowed, and gradually it was wearing him down. Nonius always did wear down, in long fights. From Books One to Four he was matchless—his enemies died if he looked at them—but later Ortus had seen fit to add long specific duels between his god and a few named and honourable rivals. If a foe got a hit in on Nonius, it was a good indicator that they would be present for at least the next ten pages, even if half of that was talking.

  The Sleeper smashed her baton down at Nonius’s skull with enough force to stave it in. Nonius stepped clear and kicked her in the outside of the knee, sending her stumbling for balance, and took the opportunity to lash a clean line down her thigh with his rapier’s tip. Blood spattered the floor. As he slid back into guard, Harrow saw that her clothes had changed. The bright orange haz suit had somehow become a suit of fibre duelling armour much like Nonius’s own, with a padded cuirass sporting several bloodstained gashes and a set of plex-amalgam greaves. The ensemble was still the same warning orange colour, which produced a very strange effect. The blank hood with its face plate was now a peculiar curved mask of what looked like deep gold, wrought in stylised likeness of a proud face with a beaked nose and slitted holes for eyes. Only the knife and baton remained unaltered.

  Bewildered, she looked up to the find the room was changing too. The nine-sided structure was the same—doorways in every wall and the great coffin at the centre—but the doorways were now arched and ceremonial, rather than squared off and industrial. The dark metal panels had become dark stone blocks of a familiar type—although the floor, with its ring of candles and the remains of its di
agram, was still of metal tile patched with frost. Some of the fleshy webbing clung on the walls, but in places it had vanished along with the signs it had covered. In the corner between two arches there now hung a single ragged black banner, emblazoned in white with the Jawless Skull. It was no specific hall on Drearburh that Harrow had ever set foot in, but it was unmistakably a room of the Ninth House.

  By our very presence in the River, we briefly exert space on non-space.

  The struggle for control backstage is leaking over into the action out front …

  She had been, once again, so slow. The Sleeper had found herself unable to use her firearms because there weren’t any firearms in the Noniad. Ortus disdained them: even the nameless enemy soldiers Nonius faced were always described as wielding spears or clubs. Just as the force of the Sleeper’s hatred had translated into unreasonable strength against Harrow’s necromancy—the power to smash through solid walls and turn constructs into dust with her bare hands—now the force of Nonius’s devotion to the Ninth, refracted through the prism of Ortus’s accursed poem, was overwriting the Sleeper’s rules. Even the wounds, she realised with a start, were correct. Whenever Nonius faced a serious opponent, both parties always ended up running with blood from a series of largely cosmetic wounds. In one pivotal duel in Book Nine, Nonius and a rival cavalier fought for a full hour, both bleeding heavily the entire time, and at the end simply shook hands and exchanged epigrams on valour rather than jointly passing out from hypovolemic shock.

  The Sleeper had seized control of Harrow’s staged memory, the story her brain was telling itself about Canaan House, and used it to prosecute her guerrilla war against the Nine Houses. Now Matthias Nonius—or at least, Ortus Nigenad’s version of Matthias Nonius—was trying to turn it into an epic poem.