Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  The station listed again. I said, “Okay. You’re a necromancer. Are you going to do something, or what?”

  “My necromancer is dead,” said Gideon.

  He took my sunglasses off his craggy, blasted face, and he looked down at me with eyes that would’ve surprised me first thing if I’d bothered to look at your memory files. They were a deep brown, with a kind of red spark to them; the brown of fractured rock glass, all mixed in with dark pupil, eyes that gave very little away. They suited the face better than the scintillating green ones you’d last seen.

  “He fought it alone for hours,” said the stranger. “Then with some ragtag cavalry led by that mad sweetheart Matthias. They almost had Number Seven … almost. Gideon never could walk away from a losing fight.” Before I could respond to this, they added, “He and your mother alike.”

  “Why does it always come back to—my mother?” I said, my voice rising to a squeal like an emptying balloon. “Who are you? How the hell did you know my mother, who seemed like a real dick, by the way?”

  “My name is Pyrrha Dve,” said the ghost in question. “Commander of the Second House, head of Trentham Special Intelligence, cavalier to a dead Lyctor. We compartmentalized from the Eightfold Word, just like you and your girl—though I’m an accident, and he took more from me than got taken from you. I was able to go underground, even from him. Two years before you were born, my necromancer started an affair with your mother … not knowing I’d also been doing the same thing, using his body.”

  I said, “What the fuck.”

  “She was the most dangerous woman I’d ever met who wasn’t me,” said Pyrrha Dve. “You’re right, though. She was a real dick.”

  At this point I was beside myself and more or less demented, so I kind of just squawked: “But what do we do?!”

  “No idea,” they—he—she said calmly. “I’d aim to get out of here alive, but our odds don’t look wonderful. If we stay put, we get squashed, or eaten. If we swim, we probably still get squashed or eaten. I heal quicker than a normal human being, but not that much quicker.”

  Before I could just fundamentally lose my shit, Pyrrha suddenly sucked her breath in through her teeth, and said: “That’s your plan, Augustine?”

  I pressed up to the plex. The River bumped into visual depth.

  We were in a huge gyre, lit by the furious electric glow from the falling station. Outside—another kilometre down, maybe—was the pale belly of the River, studded with rocky promontories. And right at the bottom—the water was churning. The station tilted forward, and I could see clearly.

  A hole had opened. It was big enough to swallow up the whole of Drearburh and have room to spare. It was a huge, hideous, dark expanse, and it had seething, weird edges; it took the lights pattering over them for me to see that the edges of the hole were enormous human teeth. Each one must’ve been six bodies high and two bodies wide, with the dainty scalloped edges of incisors. The teeth shivered and trembled, like the hole was slavering. And that hole had nothing in it; that hole was blacker than space, that hole was an eaten-away tunnel of reality.

  And there—falling to its centre—wrestled the miniature figures of Augustine and the Emperor. Ianthe had separated from them somewhat, floating high above, though the nerve it must have taken to position herself above that tooth-serrated expanse forced me to reframe Ianthe Tridentarius in the wake of this absolutely galactic ballsiness.

  “The stoma’s opened for John,” said Pyrrha, and she sounded—detached, rather than triumphant, rather than grief-stricken. “It must think he’s a Resurrection Beast.”

  The Emperor was struggling. I would’ve thought he could have just dropped out of the River—done what he did to Mercy, and blown Augustine to smithereens—but some kind of current was whirling them around like dolls. It seemed like it was all he could do to keep his position. Augustine had lashed them together, somehow. He was wrestling the Emperor down, inexorably, toward that mouth. Overhead, the station crunched; the plex in front of us was making a little high-pitched squealing sound.

  Over and over Augustine and God rolled in the water—and then the tongues emerged.

  A blast from the hole. The water boiled upward in huge, bloody-looking bubbles. Streamerlike lingual tentacles emerged—the unassuming pink you got on normal, non-Hell-bound tongues—easily a thousand of them, jostling, questing, blindly thrusting up out of that mouth. Pyrrha flinched. They were writhing together, wild and excited—the current swirled in an agitated pandemonium—there was a massive sickening jolt, and the Mithraeum started to slide again, forward … tilting … sliding.

  “We’re in the current now,” said Pyrrha calmly. “We’ll be pulled in, if the mouth doesn’t close.”

  I said, “Does this not worry you? Shouldn’t we do something? Shouldn’t we be, I don’t know, getting the fuck out?”

  “I have been trapped in the back of a brain for ten thousand years, and my necromancer is dead,” said the other cavalier. “Emotions are difficult right now. I do have a loaded revolver.”

  “So what—we each swallow a bullet?”

  “It’s an option,” said Pyrrha. And: “Joke.” And: “Mostly.”

  In the centre of that whirlpool, the tongues had breached—the two wrestling necromancers now faced each other and a panicked, delighted nest of wet pink tentacles. Spires of blood rose from the water as those grotesque, infernal muscles dissolved wholesale—sheared away—destroyed. But the Emperor was thrashing—one had wound around his leg—one of his hands was wrapped around Augustine’s wrist, and one of Augustine’s around his, as though in a parody of saving each other. Another tongue snaked upward toward Ianthe, and she sent a thin whiplike flicker of blood to cut through that water.

  Augustine was gesturing. From this far away, it looked to me as though he were screaming, hopelessly, soundlessly—beyond speech—into the water; maybe Ianthe could understand it. A tongue jerked him downward. He kicked it away, but as they shrivelled more joined their place. As he struggled, he somehow pushed the Emperor into a waiting, frenzied bed of the things, which wrapped around his legs—and the stoma sucked down.

  The Mithraeum went with it. I didn’t see what happened before everything rolled—pieces of the station broke off; I could see metal bouncing along the Riverbed, then whole sections of station, then garbage—panels and mechanisms, pieces of hull—twisting down to join it. The huge, encompassing weight of the ship was slowly ploughing forward, toward the hungry stoma.

  It caught on some rock face. I heard rushing water, and snapping metal. That was enough.

  “Fuck this,” I said.

  Pyrrha said, “Bullets—water—or waiting?”

  I’d had this choice before. The different deaths. The death of waiting; the death of optimism. Harrow, the last time I chose to die, I died with your face the last thing I ever looked at. Let me tell you a secret: it was easy to die thinking I wouldn’t have to see you go. It was so easy to check out before you did.

  Now here I was, alone, holding your body hostage, in a space station at the bottom of the River and getting sucked into some kind of heinous underworld that only opened for the undead souls of monstrous planets. I had the choice of shooting myself, being crushed by the water, or waiting to get squashed by tonnes of falling metal. Or I had the choice of living to get pulled down into Hell.

  I wish I could say I was thinking about you. Harrowhark, there was so much I wanted to tell you. I wish that on the edge of an ending bigger than I understood, that I was thinking about you, that the last word on your lips would be me saying your name, taken down to the dark heart of some world beyond.

  But my whole life and death had come crashing down around me. It turned out I was the child of God—hey, suck it, Marshal—but also nothing more than a stick of dynamite. I was nothing but a chess move in a thousand-year game.

  I mean, yeah, I was thinking about you too; if I could’ve turned that off I would’ve turned it off years ago, but more importantly—I was absolutely
fucking out of my mind Ninth House big pissed off.

  As I dithered, Pyrrha sandblasted me with the calm, “Your mother would’ve picked the bullet.”

  “Yes, well, jail for Mother,” I said.

  And taking a leaf out of your book, I thrust my sword into the whimpering plex.

  It gave. Both of us got knocked back flat on our asses by the gush of foaming, filthy, hideous water—I had to hit the deck—and that whole corridor deformed: it was like a popped balloon. The world went dark. I went under before I could take a breath. We bounced off about twenty surfaces, and as water closed up over our heads, the both of us made for the hole in the side of the ship. We squeezed through a narrowing, breaking tunnel and pushed through, and then we were out.

  I couldn’t swim, but never fucking mind. I couldn’t even tell if Pyrrha had been right about the breathing. It was like I had Crux standing on my chest. Something hideous happened in your ears. We tumbled over and over and over in the water, and I thought for the first moment that it was really the end. I thought your eyeballs were about to burst in your head.

  But they didn’t, and so I saw what happened as we rose from the wrecked body of that dying space station. High above the nest of tongues, Ianthe was poised as though flying—fluttering white flimsy in the heart of that vortex—as God and Augustine thrashed together. The tongues had retracted almost to the rim of the mouth, and God was not winning. Those demoniacal tongues had him almost entirely in their grip as Augustine pinned him down. The tongues seemed more interested in the Emperor than in Augustine, though they weren’t uninterested in Augustine. God’s desperation, even in your darkening eyeballs, was clear.

  If Augustine wanted to free himself and get clear, he’d need to stop fighting. Or he could keep fighting, make sure the stoma took the Emperor, and be taken himself in the process. Above them both the third option floated like a panicking butterfly. Ianthe could make the difference. If Augustine gave God a last good shove down into Hell, and then Ianthe pulled him free of the tongues, they could probably both escape.

  I watched, dimly, as Ianthe lifted her hands. The current parted—the water flumed around her in thick, opaque curls, red with blood—the tongues lashed out all at once.

  I watched Ianthe dart down, rip the tongues from the Emperor of the Nine Houses, and wrestle him clear. The tongues entwined in a bower to bear Augustine silently down to that ravenous mouth, to the Hell where only demons went.

  Which was Tridentarius all over. She got one choice, and not only did she blow it, but she blew it in such a huge fucking spectacular way that you would’ve been impressed had you not hated her for it. Ianthe, throwing in her lot with the guy who had lied to everyone about everything. Ianthe, backstabbing her own cavalier all over again. Ianthe, with the world in the balance, reaching her hand out and pressing down on the weight marked BAD. She surged out of sight, covered and hidden by a blast of water. The tongues retracted and the teeth folded up, to close that chewing great void.

  Then the pressure closed its hands around your wrists, and your chest pounded inward.

  * * *

  Harrowhark, did you know that if you die by drowning, apparently your whole life flashes in front of your eyes? I didn’t know, as I died and took you along with me—having kept you alive for what, a whole two hours?—whether it was going to show me both. Like, at the end of everything, if it was going to be you and me, layered over each other as we always were. A final blurring of the edges between us, like water spilt over ink outlines. Melted steel. Mingled blood. Harrowhark-and-Gideon, Gideon-and-Harrowhark at last.

  But as everything went black and I died the second time round, I didn’t see you. I didn’t even see me. The final thing I saw was a great sunshiny light: a blurred figure, hazing in and out around the edges. At first it looked to me like a woman—a grey-faced, dead-eyed woman, with a face so beautiful it almost went out the other side and became repellent; a woman with my eyes, dimmed dark yellow in death, whose hair fell in wet leaden hanks. I realised with exhausted indignation that, at the end of everything—after all I had been through—after the last word, the last strike, the last drop of blood in the water—your bullshit dead girlfriend had come to claim you.

  And she said in the wrong voice twice removed: “Chest compressions. I know her sternum’s shattered; ignore it. We need that heart pumping. On my mark.”

  Hands pressed. We died.

  53

  HALF AN HOUR AGO

  “YOU’RE SURE,” HARROWHARK SAID.

  “Of course I’m not sure,” said Dulcie Septimus. “But I’m a necromancer of the Seventh House—or I was, when I was alive. Abigail couldn’t have felt what I felt, when we both looked outside. I’m not an expert with revenant spirits, but I know a little something about puppeting. And your body’s not being puppeted, Harrow—something is moving it around, and not a fragment. It’s not the ghost either, because it didn’t feel anything like the Sleeper.”

  Those blue eyes watched her very carefully as she stared, unseeing, at the facility walls: at them buckling beneath the enormous pressure from above, the whole castle doing a neat controlled demolition on itself. Folding up and changing, as though caught in the grip of a giant fist.

  The rips at the side—the huge rents of wall and partition—had begun to alter in a way she had seen before. They no longer looked out into darkness; they looked out into the same white, hard absence of place and time that she had seen within another bubble. A tintless, abyssal wound; her mind’s contraction; her limits within the River.

  “It may mean nothing,” said Dulcie.

  Harrowhark heard herself asking distantly, “Why did you tell me?”

  That rueful smile again, like the shadow of old joy.

  “Because I wanted you to know all the truth,” said the dead daughter of the Seventh. “The whole, unpackaged, slipshod truth. Truth unvarnished and truth unclean. Pal and I were always zealots, in that line. I got told so many lies over my life, Harrowhark, and I didn’t want to go back into the River having myself committed the murder of the white lie. Please understand, I’m being selfish. But I wanted you to know.”

  When she looked into Harrow’s face again, and how it had changed, she said simply: “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s a difference between keeping a shred of dance card,” said Harrow Nonagesimus, “and saving the last dance.”

  Another corridor clenched in on itself. SANITISER’S entrance deformed, and the ceiling suddenly sloped downward at an arresting angle, sending things shrieking overhead. The roof opened like a cloudburst; a huge flank of tile fell down over their heads. Harrowhark backed up against the coffin, and the wasted, hot-eyed wraith before her blew her a dry-mouthed kiss and disappeared under a cloud of rubble, smashing metal, and a soft shimmer of blue.

  Harrow’s heart was beating as though it never had before. She thought it could not beat in truth; she was her own dream, and her heart’s whirring simply another fantasy of the subconscious. But nevertheless, it hammered, hard.

  She said aloud, “No. I’m getting out of here.”

  She stood before the coffin of the Sleeper, and gathered those white, soft, solid rips in her hands, and she popped the bubble, and the River came rushing in.

  It came down around her in shreds, as light and insubstantial as drifts of spiderweb. The water sprayed through white holes, rushing in with a pounding roar: that brackish, bloodied water that only existed within the River. She was buoyed up by a spray of ice water and filth—but she wasn’t; she seemed to be walking down her long black corridor again—

  Then Harrow was back drowning in salt water. Gideon’s arms were around her. They were in the pool of Canaan House, and she had just been ducked by her cavalier. She had held her breath instinctively, though she had been serene at the time; to drown, she thought, was softer death than she deserved, and back then to die in Gideon’s arms had seemed entirely correct. She could feel Gideon’s fingers digging into the small of her back, could feel her shirt bi
llowing in the pool as they sank to the bottom in a tangle.

  Harrow’s head broke the water. A thin skin of ice shivered apart as she emerged, panting for air, her skin burning with the cold. Her flailing sent ripples along those black, disturbed waters, but did not interrupt their gentle tidal lapping along the jagged shore. Above her head the rocky cathedral of the cave shone with a dismal heaven of luminescent worms, blinking softly on and off. They were all undead: revenant creatures and watchers, shifting restlessly forever on the rock of the Locked Tomb. Harrow was home.

  Harrow floundered, not toward the shore, but to the island in the centre—to the black mausoleum of glass and ice, sitting silently and reflectively beneath that sea of dead worms. She hauled herself to shore and lay there, skin crawling, frozen half-solid, shivering and numb in that strange heat presaging hypothermic death. And yet Harrow felt no pain; she felt nothing, in fact, but a welcome sense of homecoming—the strange, tiny, pleased familiarity of finding an old book once beloved, or some other antique of childhood.

  Eager now, she hauled her freezing meat to stand. She passed beneath those pillars as she had as a child, followed the pathway she still traced in dreams. She was exhausted more than cold; her head filled with the soft, heavy tiredness of too much waking and not enough sleep, of a long day on the job without rest or break. She walked into the mausoleum, and she approached the Tomb itself.

  The chains in their great holes were snapped and broken. The ice crawled up the sides of the empty altar. Within that bed of ice and glass, on the stone-shaped pillow to prop the head, that final resting place of Harrowhark’s one true love, lay a sword.

  It was the two-handed sword that had lain at the bottom of the Sleeper’s coffin, just as Dyas had seen it.

  Harrowhark had come home, and she was not afraid. She did not know why she did it, but she climbed inside that empty coffin, and she took the sword within her arms. She was filled with a drowsy, comfortable certainty, as though rather than an icy tomb she had been tucked into a bed with a pillow fluffed beneath her. Her eyelids felt as heavy as the chains that lay broken around the outside of the bier. The sword she embraced shamelessly; those six feet of steel held no fear for her now.