Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  Silence.

  “You’ve been a revenant for nearly twenty years, Wake. It’s extraordinary … You really are everything they said you were.”

  Silence.

  “You’re not a necromancer—”

  “Necromancy is a disease you released,” she said. “Necromancy needs to be strategically and deliberately cleansed.”

  “Don’t spout bigotry, Commander, I won’t kill you for it and it hurts your cause,” he said calmly. “I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something, and nobody likes toddlers juxtaposed with cleansed.”

  “How many babies died in the bomb, Gaius?”

  “All of them,” he said.

  And after a moment, he resumed: “I’m not really interested in this particular game, Commander. Let’s speed this up. You tell me the thanergy link you rode to get here, because you certainly weren’t in Cytherea’s body back at Canaan House, and you tell me what you were doing at the Ninth House nineteen years ago, and I’ll put you back in the River where you belong— Who’s there?”

  I thought we were rumbled until the outer door swung open wider, damn near squashing me and Ianthe behind it. There was movement past us, a swirl of white fabric, and the little clink of God putting his teacup down. Stuck in the coatrack behind the door, we were left with a view of two people in stained white robes, quietly facing where God must have been. It was the Lyctor who’d tried to kill you, and the Lyctor who’d been afraid of my face.

  Everyone was silent. The whole room held its breath. It must’ve only been a second or two before the Emperor said urgently: “Number Seven—”

  “Number Seven can eat us, for all I care,” said Mercymorn. Her voice was quiet: the untrembling calm of someone who had done all their trembling already. “It’s over, John. It’s all come out … it took ten thousand years, but it’s all come out.”

  No response. Everyone in the room was still as a mock-up in a doll’s house.

  Then he said, as though puzzled, “What’s all come out?”

  “I suppose it would be disappointing if you made a clean breast of it now,” said the Lyctor called Augustine, after a brief moment. “But go on. Try. Confess, and be the man I want you to be, rather than the man you apparently are.”

  “Look, I hate to be flip,” said God, “but—am I in trouble?”

  The Saint of Joy sat down on the empty chair and burst into angry tears. She pressed her face into her hands and sobbed violently for something like four seconds—we’re talking brief—and then she stood up again, having apparently gotten it out of her system.

  “Because this maybe isn’t the time,” he said, “given that we’ve got—company.”

  Again, thought we were rumbled. But he was just gesturing to the person in the body of Cytherea, still tied to the other chair. Both the Lyctors stared at her as though they hadn’t even noticed her.

  “Mercymorn the First, Augustine the First, meet Commander Wake Me Up Inside, sincerest apologies if I got that wrong,” said the Emperor. “Wake—Mercy—Augustine.”

  “Oh, we’ve met,” said the corpse, with immense satisfaction.

  Both Augustine and Mercy drew their rapiers with one long metal whisper. I couldn’t see their faces. Next to me, I couldn’t even hear Tridentarius breathe: being Lyctors, maybe neither of us had to. I wasn’t in a hurry to experiment.

  The voice from the other end of the room said, “Sheathe those.”

  They didn’t. Neither did they go for the shackled corpse—Wake. She had turned her head to look at them. There were petals in her hair. God said quietly, “You’ve met, Commander? Can you tell me more about that?”

  “I met the woman. I never met the man. She was the spokesperson for both.”

  Mercy said, “It can’t be. This can’t be happening. This cannot be happening,” and the other Lyctor said, “It evidently can.”

  And God continued, “In what context?”

  “They were working for me,” said the dead Commander.

  Mercymorn demanded, “Are you flattering yourself, or being wrong on purpose?”

  The other Lyctor interrupted, “Joy—” but she was saying, wildly: “Oh, let it happen! If this is happening, let it happen … We had a deal, Wake! Where the hell have you been hiding for nineteen years?”

  “Where—you—fucking—left—me,” she ground out. “In my bones. Then a blade. In—that—fucking—hole.”

  Augustine said, “Mercy, don’t waste your time. If this really is the lady in question—then Gideon has proved, yet again, that he is unfit for any job beyond making simple gruels and stews.”

  The figure in the chair strained at her bonds with a sudden, animated violence that made each rapier in each Lyctoral hand flinch. The corpse said, “You double-crossing bastards, you sent him after me—”

  “You knew he was coming for you, you’d spent two years dodging him—”

  “You didn’t say he was forty-eight hours away and knew my target!”

  “If you were on schedule it wouldn’t have mattered. You failed to kill him the first time—you were a whole day behind with the delivery—oh, and now I know why,” Mercy cried out. “You broke with the plan, took things into your own hands…”

  “—necromantic wizarding fuckup—”

  “—so you did the worst thing you could possibly have done—”

  “I did what I had to do!” bawled the figure in the chair. She sounded legitimately unhinged now. The mouth sounded gummy, as though fringed with flecks of spittle, but I was pretty sure corpses couldn’t do saliva, so. “I did what I had to do when the dummy ones died—even though you dried-up liches didn’t give me the first fucking clue what I was really doing! Checking for life signs? Retrieving a sample? If I’d known then what I know now, I would have just shelled the place!”

  “Now it comes out,” said Mercy. “Now, I am afraid it all comes out. You would have, wouldn’t you? And when you swore that you’d help evacuate the Houses, you never meant that either, did you?”

  “Stop,” said God quietly.

  And everyone stopped.

  There was a flash of—I don’t know what. If it was necromancy, it was of a kind I’d never felt before. It was too sudden: more taste than theorem. There was this citrus taste in your spit. Everyone shut the fuck up, which, as spells go, was probably pretty useful.

  He said, “Wake?”

  “Yes?” She sounded irascibly eager; breathless, to match her actual breathlessness. There were hard, fuck-you edges to her voice.

  “Will you answer my question now? Why did you go to the Ninth House, nineteen years ago?”

  “To break into the Tomb.”

  There’s an emotion that isn’t fear, and I wish someone would come up with a word for it, Harrow, because right then I sure as hell didn’t have one—it was this sense that started in the balls of your feet and moved right up through your legs to your spine, and I felt it in your hands, I felt it on your tongue. I felt it go chattering up the back of your head. It made your scalp softly fuzz over with electricity.

  Maybe there is a word: omen.

  “But you can’t get into the Tomb.” God sounded genuinely interested, but in this deeply casual way, as though he were hearing the result of a competition. It was the interest of someone at a party hearing the end of an anecdote. “Not without me.”

  The corpse was grim. “I came armed.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you came armed with, Commander—”

  “I had the baby,” said Wake. “The baby I’d had to incubate myself for nine long fucking months, when the foetal dummies these two gave me died.”

  “Oh, God, it was yours,” said Augustine, in horror. “I thought you’d used in vitro on one of Mercy’s—”

  “I said they all died,” said Wake. “The dummies died. The ova died. Only the sample was still active, no idea how considering it was twelve we
eks after the fact, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “So you used it on yourself,” said Augustine. “Anything for the revolution, eh, Wake?”

  “Are you judging me?”

  “Only your intense self-delusion.”

  “I always see the job through.” Wake sounded bored. “You sent me out there to kill a baby and open those doors. Whose baby didn’t matter on my end. I carried that thing under my heart … threw up every morning that first trimester … felt it kick … had to induce labour and give birth in a shuttle, alone, knowing by then that Gideon was catching up … Do you know, I gave that thing a nickname, my whole pregnancy? I used to call it Bomb.”

  Anything could have happened, then. One thousand futures stretched out in front of me.

  “Okay. Let’s get this straight,” God was saying. “You brought a baby—a baby you’d made inside yourself, well done, that’s the classic—so you could, what, kill it and create a huge thanergy cascade at the door? I wish Harrowhark were here; it would do her good to know there are more people in the world with an imagination like her parents’. But you’re not a necromancer; you couldn’t have manipulated the thanergy burst. I mean, it’s appalling, but it would never have worked—”

  While he was saying all this, someone else had stepped into the foyer. It was a man who looked like he had been stripped bloody by a wind machine and hadn’t healed up all the way; a wiry, knuckled-up tendon of a man, with the face of someone who had been starved once and burned recently. Joining the growing line of antiques on board this place, there was a gun holstered at his hip, and at the other hip a plain rapier with a basket hilt and a piece of fraying crimson ribbon tied to the pommel. His clothes were stained with green slime, and so was the scintillating white robe he wore, hood up over his head—he closed the door behind him and turned to look at Ianthe and me, with that weird scratched-up face and those dark eyes, and I knew that we were now well and truly rumbled.

  He swept aside the robes. He looked at us, Harrow. Then he made this weird, half-grimacing, excuse me expression, and he reached forward. I was so far fucking gone that I didn’t even flinch as he slipped the sunglasses off your nose. He slid them over his face, and then he let the robes drop back over me and Ianthe, and he walked straight into the shitshow.

  Augustine lifted his head, and he said hoarsely, “Gideon?”

  The woman I was pretty sure was actually my mother—wearing the body of a woman I’d had a crush on, who in turn had been wearing the identity of a woman she’d murdered, until I fell on a spike so that my boss could kill her—craned her head around in her bonds.

  Harrow, I will never forget the look on her face as long as I live, or as long as I die. For the first time, she smiled—a small, dusty, crooked smile that was totally alien to Cytherea’s mouth, which had smiled at me often but never like that. It was the smile for your old cellmate who’d just landed back in prison, the one that told them at least you were in it together—or more correctly, the smile of someone stepping out of jail after serving a very long sentence, having seen someone there waiting for her. Someone whose presence meant total reprieve, someone she hadn’t expected. It was a little bit mocking. It was deeply relieved. It was a smile that said: You came back for me?

  The Lyctor who’d taken my shades pulled the gun out of his belt before anyone could stop him. He briskly closed the distance, pressed the barrel up to the base of Cytherea’s skull, and he pulled the trigger. There was a wet sound. The body jerked and its head lolled out of sight.

  God exploded, “Gideon!”

  “Wake,” said Gideon II—I?—as though that explained everything.

  There was movement. Then God said sadly, “Damn it, Gideon, her ghost’s completely gone,” and Gideon said, “Good.”

  Augustine said urgently, “Number Seven—”

  “Got away.”

  “What—what, it ran? You got it to run?” When this was not met with details, Augustine said, “But—you lived?”

  Mercymorn said, “That’s not important right now! I don’t care about Number Seven! I want Gideon to hear this too. I want him to know what Pyrrha died for.”

  Now, finally, the Emperor came into view. He calmly sat down on the chair that Mercy had vacated, in front of the head-shot corpse that was still tied up, opposite. He looked like anybody. His hair was cut short, dark brown, with no different highlights in it. His face was long and square and ordinary. And his eyes were just absolutely, insanely fucked up: deep black wells, this unreflective flat black. Even from where I was, I could see the white light that circled the irises: a cold, flickering perimeter. At the moment, he had his chin rested on his balled-together fists, his elbows set on his knees, and those whites had lighted on Mercy.

  “I think you’re skipping ahead in the story,” said God. “I think you’re glossing over a part … because you think it doesn’t matter? Are you embarrassed? Gideon, were you aware that, when you let Commander Wake get as far as she did—to the House of the Ninth, to one of our own Houses, our own people—that she was pregnant?”

  A pause. “I was aware,” said Gideon Classic.

  “Why the hell did you not tell me?”

  “Because I thought it was—mine.”

  There was a rising call of dismay from that whole room—a sort of strangled yeeeuuurgh from Mercymorn, an exhausted—was it a laugh?—from Augustine. He was laughing—in this eerie, humourless way, this huge, tired, exhausted laugh, until he had to press his face into his hand. Even then, he didn’t quite stop.

  And Gideon Senior said, “Forgive me, John. I didn’t know anything about it,” which I would have thought was a weird thing to say if I hadn’t been too busy staring at Cytherea.

  The Emperor said, “I’ve made mistakes too, Gideon … but you could’ve told me.”

  And Gideon Prime said, “I didn’t know to.”

  “How long had that been going on?”

  “Nearly two years.” After a moment, he added, “It was complicated.”

  “I’ll bet. So the plan was to kill a Lyctor’s baby,” said God, marvelling quietly. “A Lyctor’s infant child, barely born, to start a thanergy cascade. It was a hell of a plan. But both of you knew it never could have worked … surely you knew it couldn’t have worked. Augustine, for fuck’s sake have a cigarette, you’re getting hysterical.”

  The noise Augustine was making was nearly laughter; it was nearly not laughter at all. The Saint of Patience snapped in pure agitation: “Stop kidding yourself, John!”

  “Everyone’s being very opaque today,” said God.

  “You know we know how the blood ward works,” said Mercymorn. She did not sound hysterical herself; she had swapped roles with Augustine unexpectedly, and now sounded measured and calm, nearly dreamy. “You never kept it secret from us. I always thought it was a little over the top, Teacher … you were always so fussy about never bleeding … but Cassiopeia told me a very interesting thing about blood wards, once. She always said that they should really be called cell wards, because they work off thalergetic enzymes … which can be spoofed with a substantial thanergy burst and the blood of a close relative. A parent. A child.”

  The Emperor said, as though speaking to a kid: “And how would you ever—” and stopped.

  And he said, “Mercy.” And he said, “Augustine.” And he said, “Mercy—” and then, “Augustine—”

  “I wouldn’t think about the practicalities, if I were you,” said Augustine, extracting a cigarette. He tucked it into the side of his mouth. He was pretty good. His hands weren’t even really shaking. “It’s not worth it.”

  “But it was only—”

  “The once? Yes, one evening planned down to the ground for five hundred years,” said the Saint of Patience. He lit the end of the cigarette. “Dios apate, major. We needed your, ahem, genetic material, and it was the only way. It was the first time Joy and I had been in the same place for ten years. You were so damned careful, John. No vulnerabilities, no
lapses. You’d have become paranoid if we’d—gone a second round. Good Lord, it all sounds so coarse. I imagine I might be hurting your feelings. God, I hope so. Right now, I find I hope so tremendously.”

  “It’s impossible. I won’t believe this. How could you even—”

  “Mercymorn,” said Augustine matter-of-factly.

  “I didn’t even—”

  “Mercymorn,” repeated Augustine. He took a drag from his cigarette and said, “Sorry, Gid, didn’t actually want you to know all the scummy details … Cig?”

  “I’d kill for one,” said Gideon, original flavour.

  There was more silence in that room as the Saint of Patience lit another cigarette and passed it to the Saint of Duty. Cytherea’s empty corpse lay still and silent in its chair. The Emperor was staring at the crown of her head, probably where the bullet had exited, which I could not see. The other Lyctor leaned against the wall, staring into a shuttered window.

  “So what,” said the Emperor, “Gideon—you tossed Wake out the airlock—she and the baby died en route?”

  “No,” said Mercymorn thinly. “It didn’t.”

  I pushed out of the robes. Ianthe tried to reach for me; I slapped her hand away. It was seven steps out of that little foyer to the centre of the room where the Emperor sat. I stood, breathing hard, my battered two-hander clutched in your hands, not knowing what to do with your arms, and not knowing what to do with your face. There was this huge, insane roaring in your ears, like close-up electrical static, and it was like I was watching us move from outside—as though we were both out of the driver’s seat, Nonagesimus, and someone else was in there.

  But nobody else had their hands on the controls. It was just me.

  Everyone turned to look at us. Nobody said a word. I stood behind the chair with the dead body in it, a dark hole at the back of its neck. The cigarettes made thin grey ghosts curl up toward the light.