Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  “I shall be glad to stand beside you, Ortus Nigenad; never again will I doubt the will of the Ninth,” said the unbelievably tedious hero of the Seventh, who then cleared his throat and said:

  “In the storm, the tree is glad of the root,

  Not of the branch.”

  “Well expressed,” said Ortus.

  “It’s from a longer work of my own,” admitted Protesilaus.

  From behind them, Lieutenant Dyas said, “I’m going too.”

  They all turned to look at her. Her injured hand was stoically clutching her rapier; Harrow noticed that she had tied the hilt to her glove with a length of wire, so that it could not fall out of her grip. She was bloody, smeared, and untidy, but perfectly calm. “I’m going,” she repeated. And she shrugged. “Cohort rules.”

  “What Cohort rule, Marta?” Abigail asked, bewildered.

  “‘Chickenshits don’t get beer,’” Dyas said. And, after a pause: “Might not be the official wording, but that’s how I’ve always heard it.”

  Magnus said, more than slightly delighted, “I have never heard that one.”

  “As it happens, I have,” said Matthias Nonius.

  They all looked to Harrow, as though on fatal cue: legends, soldiers, poets, Magnus.

  “Nonius. Nigenad. I cannot in good faith hold you,” she said, finally. “You have both served your House ably, and I thank you both. Nonius, if you owe something to the Saint of Duty, he could probably use your help. Go now. I have to get back as soon as possible myself.”

  He stepped back and bowed to her. It was an unpretentious, entirely modest movement. In The Noniad it might have taken half a page. There was no time for him to make any kind of speech, but despite over twelve books of Ortus celebrating his verbosity, he did not seem the type of man to make one; all he said was, “Many thanks, and farewell. Spirit-guide of the Fifth, can you send us four to the shore’s edge?”

  “Easily,” Abigail said. She stepped forward and put one hand on Protesilaus’s and Ortus’s shoulders, and she peered through her thick glasses at them, and said quickly: “Are you—”

  “For the Seventh,” said Protesilaus.

  “For the Second,” said Marta.

  “For the Ninth,” said Ortus.

  The candles flared up again, that black flame threatening to scorch the ceiling, and Canaan House seemed to rock again as though with some earthquake—the electric lights overhead flickered and died briefly—and all four cavaliers were gone, back into the River. Harrow found herself imagining them in her mind’s eye: rising out of those turbid waters before the Saint of Duty with his spear and his sword, something looming behind him, bigger than the eye could comprehend. Bluer than death; unimaginable, advancing to greet the four dead swordsmen and the Lyctor.

  She had not said goodbye. Harrow so rarely got to say goodbye.

  * * *

  The lights flickered again. A fine haze was rising from the grille beneath their feet, carrying a thin suggestion of smoke. The candles had gone out entirely, and their thin satiny souls were rising to heaven in the metal rafters. There was a pervasive, clinging smell of burning dust, and the continuous rumbling of softly piling rock and bending metal. They stared at each other with a left-behind, exhausted bemusement: Harrowhark and the ghosts of Dulcinea Septimus, Magnus Quinn, and Abigail Pent.

  With rising agitation that she could not quite quell, Harrow found herself asking curtly: “What’s my role in this exodus, Pent?”

  “If you stay, there’s no question of you absorbing yourself or expelling yourself,” said Abigail, and there was something quite careful in the way she said it. “You’re the host soul, and can only be displaced willingly—or with the kind of violence the Sleeper attempted. Spirits always wish to return to their bodies, and pine without them. The only exits for you now are the River, leaving your body completely—or you can simply go home, and wake up.”

  Gideon.

  It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon. For one brief and beautiful space of time, she had welcomed it: that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall. Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.

  She could let herself go, or she could go back to her body, and let her go.

  Nav had made it her decision, when it came to imminent death either way. The free will to say Harrow dies or Harrow lives. And she had said, albeit fuck her for saying it: Harrow lives, which required its opposite balance: Gideon dies. Now here she was back again with what she had always wanted—the choice to say Yes, and the choice to say No, with the needle of No sliding fatally back toward Yes.

  She said: “If I go back, it will finally destroy her soul.”

  It was Magnus who stepped forward and looked at Harrow face-to-face. And perhaps she felt that more keenly: that he was the man who had, in Gideon’s own words a lifetime ago, been nice to her cavalier. His mouth was hard now, but his eyes were as kind as they had ever been. And kindness was a knife.

  “This whole thing happened because you wouldn’t face up to Gideon dying,” he said, which was a stab as precise as any Nonius had managed. “I don’t blame you. But where would you be, right now, if you’d said: She is dead? You’re keeping her things like a lover keeping old notes, but with her death, the stuff that made her Gideon was destroyed. That’s how Lyctorhood works, isn’t it? She died. She can’t come back, even if you keep her stuffed away in a drawer you can’t look at. You’re not waiting for her resurrection; you’ve made yourself her mausoleum.”

  His wife looked at Harrow’s face and murmured, “Magnus, you’ve made your point,” but he uncharacteristically ignored her.

  “D’you know, Abigail broke up with me when we were seventeen? I kept a ripped-up corner of her dance card for three years. It didn’t even have any writing on it, or her initials, or mine. Just a ripped-up corner of card.”

  One of the lights detached from the ceiling above them with a trailing shower of sparks and shattered on the grille beneath. To Harrow, it sounded like a tolling bell.

  “This is your ripped-up corner of card,” said Magnus. “You’re a smart girl, Harrowhark. You might turn some of that brain to the toughest lesson: that of grief.”

  The drizzling dust had become a blizzard, and something buckled against the whiteboard wall. If the destruction of Canaan House kept progressing at this rate, even if it was some kind of metaphorical shift, it would, in a very unmetaphorical sense, squash everyone flat. Rules were rules. If a chunk of her psychological landscape fell on Abigail, or Dulcie, or Magnus, it would be a second death. Their spirits would be erased from existence, never able even to enter the River. They clustered closer toward her, like plants sensing sunlight: as though she were the eye of the storm, the destruction seemed to revolve around her, and the ground beneath their feet was still.

  Harrowhark found herself studying Dulcie’s face: there was a strange, tucked-in stillness that made her old again, those fine sigil wrinkles on either side of the mouth that told her own lesson of suffering. Harrow said, “Then there is the River.”

  “The River means madness,” said Abigail immediately. “You’ve never been there as an unanchored soul. You don’t know what it’s like. I haven’t the faintest idea of what would happen to the secondary soul in a Lyctoral bond if the host soul abandons the body … You are alive, Harrowhark—that does mean something where souls are concerned. Your soul longs for your body, and without something else to inhabit, I could not even promise that in your madness you wouldn’t somehow find your way back, rendering all this moot.”

  Even with her feelings schooled, Harrow’s voice sounded feeble and childlike and plaintive. “Is there nothing I can do before entering the River that might mean I stay put?”

  “No,” s
aid Abigail. “It’s the River. It moves. You’d have to pick the revenant’s path and travel along a thanergetic link, and that’s just madness again: sitting inside—I don’t know—a teapot, clinging on without sense or understanding, going slowly insane. And as I said, your soul longs for your body. What if you lose yourself to eventual madness and are reabsorbed, leading to some kind of melange—you know what Teacher was—a patchwork fusion between your soul and fragments of Gideon’s? Harrowhark, you stand before a known quantity and hideous unknowns. Don’t walk back toward the unknown.”

  “If it were me,” Magnus said, “I’d go home, and live, and live for her.”

  There was a terrific crash from out in the corridor, followed by a hideous creaking as, close by, a girder came down. The noise was awesome. It was as though the world were screaming and bending all about them. The Fifth House spirit-caller lost her reserve, and took Harrow’s hands in her own, and said: “I’m so sorry, Harrow. I wish it were different. I am so tremendously sorry.”

  The ceiling above them buckled and shuddered, but held. Harrow looked at the stricken faces before her: at the now-sombre lines of the cavalier of the Fifth, his jolly face achieving a certain supernatural dignity; his historian wife, a woman whom she now knew could never be properly avenged. The tragedy of the genius and the useless death. The irreparable loss to the universe.

  As though the universe could withstand more holes; as though the fabric of the universe had not become a series of lacework cut-outs linked by the thin, snappable joins of those who remained. Could the pattern sustain itself, with such absences? Could she, who had once thought herself well-versed in absence, endure alone? The answer was so obviously no; she was not even ready to have the question put to her.

  And yet—and yet—

  Harrowhark said, “You’ve got to go before the roof comes down on you.”

  Abigail gave a weary, rueful half smile. A very Fifth House embarrassment. “Not until you tell me what you’re doing. In loco parentis, you see. I’m afraid I feel responsible for you, and need you to promise me you’ll live.”

  “Gideon decided that for me,” said Harrow. She was not really afraid; it was only that her hands were, and were shaking independent of her feelings.

  The first falling chunk of ceiling landed with heavy, balletic stillness, causing them all to stumble from the shockwave. Abigail, Dulcie, and Harrow momentarily cowered beneath the automatic and totally useless arm Magnus had thrown over them, a sort of optimistic human umbrella. Harrowhark said briskly, “Pent; Quinn; Septimus. I’m poor with thanks and worse at goodbyes. Therefore, I won’t bother with them.”

  Magnus said, “Have you—”

  “Someday I’ll die and get buried in the ground and you can take it up with me then,” said Harrow, and found, after all, that she was not really speaking to them. “Until then—I am afraid that I have to live.”

  “Then this is not goodbye,” said Abigail, and she reached forward to brush a stray lock of hair behind Harrowhark’s ear, which was an instinct Harrow could not find it within herself to feel humiliated by. “I believe that we will see each other again.”

  Magnus said quickly: “Jeanne said to tell Gideon hi. If you see her before we do—”

  “Though try not to with any great hurry,” said the Fifth spirit-caller.

  And then that same blue shimmer, and they were gone, without fanfare, leaving her alone—with Dulcinea Septimus.

  The soft ripples within the bubble had not claimed the Seventh. She stood there amid the falling dust and the noises of shrieking steel, her skin like thin awful gossamer and her short sugar-brown curls stuck to her scalp with the ghost of sweat and blood. Harrowhark, bewildered and stricken, drew closer to her as the world fell all around them.

  “Oops! It’s me again, never doing what I’m told,” said Dulcie. “One more moment, please.”

  Harrow said, curt with bemusement, “Hurry up and go. If I ever stand before Palamedes Sextus again, I have no desire to explain to him why I put Dulcinea Septimus back in danger.”

  “I’m going to risk staying here for a moment and getting squashed into nothingness instead, actually,” she said. “The Seventh says nothingness is the only truly beautiful thing anyway, so nyah.”

  “Septimus, if this is about ensuring I get back into my body safely, you can trust me not to change my mind.”

  Dulcinea, with that strange face that was at once the twin to Cytherea’s and yet nothing like it, smiled an extraordinarily rueful little smile that never would have fit the Lyctor’s face. She reached up and clasped one of Harrow’s hands between her own as one of the corridors to their left came down completely.

  “Actually, I’ve got something to tell you,” she said.

  50

  THIRTY MINUTES BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER

  THE WHOLE TIME IANTHE was leading me down those creepy, rainbow-swagged corridors, Harrow, I was wondering what the fuck had happened to you. I’d been pretty convinced that at any moment I’d find myself floating back down in the water, and there you’d be, ready to save my ass from shaking hands with the Emperor of the Nine Houses. I’d never wanted to meet God. Nobody ever met the Emperor in any of the comic books. God only ever appeared as a letter to somebody getting written out of the story, because they had to go serve the Prince Undying. I was irrationally convinced that the act of seeing God—that was the end of the story. Space was being cleared for a new character.

  We stopped before a totally nondescript door, halfway open—and I mean nondescript, the doors to the rooms of the Emperor could’ve been mistaken for broom cupboards—and Ianthe stopped dead.

  I cottoned on; that door wasn’t meant to be open. Ianthe pressed a finger to her lips and noiselessly pushed that door further open; we crept into a dimly lit and equally boring little foyer, with another half-open door on our left into a weirdly familiar sitting room. It nagged at the back of my brain: I knew you’d been there, but it was strange how some memories were like my own and some memories were whispers through a hole in the wall. Tridentarius pressed herself up against the wall next to the sitting room, so she could see through the gap, and I did the same because yes, okay, pretty curious.

  In the room was Cytherea. Cytherea’s body, her back to us. She had been neatly tied to a chair with a band of angry-looking tendon. I couldn’t see whoever was talking to her.

  “—not a difficult question,” someone said, without any particular concern. “It’s not as though you have anything to hide. I just want to know—how? Seriously, I’m more impressed than angry.”

  The voice was still gravel. “I charge you with acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the human race—”

  “Commander.”

  “—for which the only sentence is death; repeated mass killings, the utter disintegration of institutions political and social, languages, cultures, religions, all niceties and personal liberties of the nations, by use of—”

  “Commander Wake,” he said. It sounded like he scrubbed a hand over his face; there was a muffled exhalation. “I’ve heard this all before.”

  “Call me by my full name, or don’t name me at all. I’ll be damned if I pass up the chance to hear you speak the words.”

  The Emperor of the Nine Houses sighed.

  “Commander Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead,” he said.

  “All of it.”

  “I can’t believe you feel like you’re in position to demand things of me.”

  “All of it, Gaius!”

  There was the preparatory sound of indrawn breath.

  “Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity,” he recited, all in one breath. “Correct?”

  “They’re dead words—a human chain reaching back ten thousand years,” said the corpse. “How did they feel?”

  “Genuinely sad, bordering on very funny,” said God. “Can we talk?”

  There was silence in that room. The
tangled dead hair was very still. He said: “You’ve been trying to commit suicide by cop ever since I found you, Wake. I know when someone’s trying to get me to do something, and you’re acting like a woman who very much wants me to end her life.”

  “Telepathy,” she said. “Did the ten billion give you that too?”

  “Wish they had,” said the Emperor. “Wake, you’re acting like your mission’s over, and you want me to take you out of the equation.” Silence. “What was the mission?” Silence. “How did it end? What were you trying to do?”

  “I’m not going to talk to you.”

  “We both know that’s not true.”

  A tiny ceramic clink. The Emperor was probably having tea. Ianthe stared into the middle distance, packing herself as tightly into the corner as possible. We shared the corner with a white robe on a hook, and she actually wormed herself behind the robe, like we were playing hide-and-seek. So I did too, and had to watch whatever the fuck was going on through a thin veil of robe, next to Ianthe, so please feel some sympathy for me here.

  He said, “Blood of Eden died with you, Wake. Any further action is just agonal breathing.”

  “We both know that’s not true.”

  “You never would have fired nukes into my fleet.”

  “Yeah, you know a hell of a lot about me,” said the corpse. “Perhaps almost as much as I know about you.”

  “There’s a lot I don’t know about you,” said God. There was a brief flash of him moving through the robes—he had stood. I caught an elbow, and an arm holding a mug; he was leaning against some chair a little way out of sight. “There’s a lot I want to know. Why the Ninth House all those years ago, Wake? There’s nothing there.”

  She was silent. The arm gestured with the mug, and he pressed: “It took Gideon”—still weird—“two whole years to track you down and kill you. Even making you his mission in life, you had plenty of time to do some damage. Why waste your shot on my smallest House? If you’d dropped in on the Third, you could’ve done some real damage. And it wasn’t by accident. You skipped the dummy target in the atmosphere—you found the exact coordinates for the House.” A longer silence. He suggested, “Do you want to talk about that?”