by Tamsyn Muir
“Someone will come for you,” said Teacher gently.
“Cool. Palamedes—”
He met her eye. He had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them with one of his innumerable handkerchiefs.
“Ninth,” he said, “if she were capable of anything, in order to become a Lyctor—don’t you think she’d be one already? If she really wanted to watch the world burn—wouldn’t we all be alight?”
“Stop flattering her. But—thanks,” said Gideon, and she darted off into the corridor after Harrow.
31
IN THE CORRIDOR, HER necromancer was staring distantly down the passageway at the disappearing hems of the Third: her brow had furrowed a wrinkle into her paint. Gideon had intended to—she had intended to do a lot of things; but Harrow left her no opening for the actions she’d planned and offered none of the answers she’d wanted. She simply turned in a swish of black cloth and said, “Follow me.”
Gideon had prepared beforehand a fuck-you salvo so long and so loud that Harrow would have to be taken away to be killed; but then Harrow added, “Please.”
This please convinced Gideon to follow her in silence. She had more or less expected Harrow to lead with “What were you doing in my closet,” at which point Gideon might well have shaken her until the teeth in her head and the teeth in her pockets all rattled. Harrowhark swept down the stairs two at a time, the treads creaking in panic, as they went down the grand flight that led them to the atrium: from there, down one corridor, down another, one left, and then down the steps to the training rooms. Harrow ignored the tapestry that would have taken them to the hidden corridor and the ransacked Lyctor laboratory where Jeannemary had died, and instead pushed open the big dark doors to the pool.
Once there, she tossed down two grubby knuckles from her pockets. A substantial skeleton sprang from each, unfurling. They stood before the door, linked elbows, and held it shut. She scattered another handful of chips like pale grain; skeletons rose, forming and expanding the bone as though bubbling up from it. They made themselves a perimeter around the whole room, pressing the knobbles of their spines against the old ceramic tile and standing to attention. Shoulder to shoulder they stood, as though bodyguards, or hideous chaperones.
Harrow turned to face Gideon, and her eyes were as black and inexorable as a gravity collapse.
“The time has come—”
She took a deep breath; and then she undid the catches to her robes, and they fell away from her thin shoulders to puddle around her ankles on the floor.
“—to tell you everything,” she said.
“Oh, thank God for that,” said Gideon hysterically, profoundly embarrassed at how her heart rate had spiked.
“Shut up and get in the pool.”
This was so unanticipated that she didn’t bother to question, or to complain, or even to hesitate. Gideon unhooked her robe and hood and pulled off her shoes, unstrapped her rapier and the belt that held her gauntlet. Harrow seemed ready to enter the greenly lapping waves wearing her trousers and shirt, so Gideon figured Oh well, what the hell and made the plunge almost fully clothed. She jumped in recklessly: tidal waves exploded outward at her passing, peppering the stone sides of the pool with droplets, gushing and foaming. The seamy, distasteful feeling of water seeping through her underwear hit her all at once. Gideon spluttered, and ducked her head beneath, and spat out a mouthful of liquid that was warm as blood.
After a moment’s consideration, Harrow stepped in too—walking off the side carelessly, slipping beneath the water like a clean black knife. She disappeared beneath the surface, then emerged, gasping, spluttering in a way that ruined everything about the portentous entrance. She faced Gideon and trod water, flapping her arms a little before she managed to get her toes touching the bottom.
“Are we in here for a reason?”
Their voices echoed.
“The Ninth House has a secret, Nav,” said Harrow. She sounded calm and measured and frank in a way she’d never been before. “Only my family knows of it. And even we could never discuss it, unless—this was my mother’s rule—we were immersed in salt water. We kept a ceremonial pool for the purpose, hidden from the rest of the House. It was cold and deep and I hated every moment I was in it. But my mother is dead, and I find now that—if I really am to betray my family’s most sacred trust—I am obliged at the least to keep, intact, her rule.”
Gideon blinked.
“Oh shit,” she said. “You really meant it. This is it. This is go time.”
“This is go time,” agreed Harrowhark.
Gideon swept both of her hands through her hair, trickles going down the back of her neck and into her sodden collar. Eventually, all she said was, “Why?”
“The reasons are multitudinous,” said her necromancer. Her paint was wearing off in the water; she looked like a grey picture of a melting skeleton. “I had—intended to let you know some of it, before. An expurgated version. And then you looked in my closet … If I had told you my suspicions about Septimus’s meat-puppet on the first day, none of this would have happened.”
“The first day?”
“Griddle,” said Harrow, “I have not puppeted my own parents around for five years and learned nothing.”
Anger did seep into Gideon then, along with a couple more litres of salt water. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me when you killed him?”
“I didn’t kill him,” said Harrowhark sharply. “Someone else did—blade through the heart, from what I saw, though I only got a few minutes to look before I had to run. I only had to push the theorem the most basic bit before he came apart. I took the head and left when I thought I heard someone coming. This was the night after we completed the entropy field challenge.”
“No, you monster’s ass,” said Gideon coldly. “I mean, why didn’t you tell me you’d killed him before you sent Jeannemary Chatur and her necromancer down to the facility to look for the guy who was in a box in your closet? Why didn’t you take the moment to say, I don’t know, Let’s not send two children downstairs to get fucked up by a huge bone creature.”
Harrow exhaled.
“I panicked,” she said. “At the time I thought I was sending you down a blind tunnel, and that the real danger was Sextus and Septimus; that either one might ambush you, and that the sensible solution was to take them both on myself. My plan was to get you clear of a necromantic duel. At the time I even thought it elegant.”
“Nonagesimus, all you had to do was delay, tell me you were freaking out. All you had to do was say that Dulcinea’s cav was a mummy man—”
“I had reason to believe,” said Harrow, “that you would trust her more than you trusted me.”
This answer contorted Gideon’s face into her best are you fucking kidding me expression. Opposite, Harrow smoothed her forehead out with her thumbs, which took away another significant portion of skeleton.
“I thought you were compromised,” she continued waspishly. “I assumed you would assume that I dismantled the puppet as an act of bad faith and go straight to the Seventh. I wanted to do enough research to present you with a cut-and-dry case. I had no idea what it would mean for the Fourth House. The Ninth is deep in their blood debt and I am undone by the expense. I—I did not want to hurt you, Griddle! I didn’t want to disturb your—equilibrium.”
“Harrow,” said Gideon, “if my heart had a dick you would kick it.”
“I did not want to alienate you more than I already had. And then it seemed as though—we were on a more even footing,” said Harrow, who was stumbling in a way Gideon had never before witnessed. It looked as though she were ransacking drawers in her brain trying to find the right set of words to wear. “Our—we— It was too tenuous to risk. And then…”
Too tenuous to risk. “Harrow,” said Gideon again, more slowly, “if I hadn’t gone to Palamedes—and I nearly didn’t go to Palamedes—I would have waited for you in our rooms, with my sword drawn, and I would have gone for you. I was so convinced you were behind ev
erything. That you’d killed Jeannemary and Isaac. Magnus and Abigail.”
“I didn’t—I don’t—I never have,” said Harrow, “and—I know.”
“You would have killed me.”
“Or vice versa.”
This surprised her into silence. The wavelets sploshed gently at the tiled edges of the pool. Gideon kicked off the bottom and fluttered her feet back and forth, bobbing, her shirt billowing out with water.
“Okay,” she said eventually. “Question time. Who did all the murders?”
“Nav.”
“I mean it. What’s happening? Is Canaan House haunted, or what? What—who—killed the Fourth and the Fifth?”
Her necromancer also pulled her feet up from the bottom and floated, momentarily, chin-deep in green salt water. Her eyes were narrowed in thought. “I can’t say,” she said. “Sorry. That’s not a fruitful line of inquiry. We are being pursued by revenants, or it’s all part of the challenge, or one, or more, of us is picking off the others. The murders of the Fifth and the Fourth may be connected, or not. The bone fragments found in everyone’s wounds don’t match, naturally—but I believe their very particle formation points to the same type of necromantic construction, no matter what Sextus says about topological resonance and skeletal archetype theory…”
“Harrow, don’t make me drown myself.”
“My conclusion: if the murders are linked and if some adept, rather than a revenant force or the facility itself, is behind the construct you saw—then it is one of us,” said Harrow. “We’re the only living beings in Canaan House. That means the suspect list is the Tridentarii; Sextus; Octakiseron; the Second; or myself. And I haven’t discounted Teacher and the priests. Septimus has something of an alibi—”
“Yes, being nearly dead,” said Gideon.
Harrowhark said, rather grudgingly: “I’ve downgraded her in some respects. Logically, judging by ability, and mind, and the facility to combine both in service to an end, it’s Palamedes Sextus and his cavalier.” She shook her head as Gideon opened her mouth to protest. “No, I realise neither has, as you might put it, a fucking motive. A logical conclusion is worth very little if I don’t have all the facts. Then there’s Teacher—and the Lyctor laboratories—and the rules. Why those theorems? What powers them? Why was the Fourth cavalier killed, but you left alive?”
These were all questions that Gideon had privately asked the dead of night many times since Jeannemary had died. She let her shoulders slide back into the water until it was cold up to the backs of her ears, staring at the single fluorescing bar that swung above the pool. Her body floated, weightless, in a puddle of yellow light. She could have asked Harrow anything: she could have asked about the bomb that had taken Ortus Nigenad’s life instead of hers, or she could have asked about her whole entire existence, why it had happened and for what reason. Instead, she found herself asking: “What do you know about the conditioner pathogen that bumped off all the kids—the one that happened when I was little, before you were born?”
The silence was terrible. It lasted for such a long time that she wondered if Harrow had slyly drowned herself in the interim, until—
“It didn’t happen before I was born,” said the other girl, sounding very unlike herself. “Or at least, that’s not precise enough. It happened before I was even conceived.”
“That’s unwholesomely specific.”
“It’s important. My mother needed to carry a child to term, and that child needed to be a necromancer to fill the role of true heir to the Locked Tomb. But as necromancers themselves, they found the process doubly difficult. We hardly had access to the foetal care technology that the other Houses do. She had tried and failed already. She was getting old. She had one chance, and she couldn’t afford chance.”
Gideon said, “You can’t just control whether or not you’re carrying a necro.”
“Yes, you can,” said Harrow. “If you have the resources, and are willing to pay the price of using them.”
The hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck rose, wetly.
“Harrow,” she said slowly, “by resources, are you saying—”
“Two hundred children,” said Harrowhark tiredly. “From the ages of six weeks to eighteen years. They needed to all die more or less simultaneously, for it to work. My great-aunts measured out the organophosphates after weeks of mathematics. Our House pumped them through the cooling system.”
From somewhere beneath the pool, a filter made blurting sounds as it recycled the spilloff. Harrow said, “The infants alone generated enough thanergy to take out the entire planet. Babies always do—for some reason.”
Gideon couldn’t hear this. She held her knees to the chest and let herself go under, just for a moment. The water sluiced over her head and through her hair. Her ears roared, then popped. When she pushed above the surface again, the noise of her heartbeat thumping through her skull was like an explosion.
“Say something,” said Harrowhark.
“Gross,” said Gideon dully. “Ick. The worst. What can I say to that? What the fuck can I say to all that?”
“It let me be born,” said the necromancer. “And I was—me. And I have been aware, since I was very young, about how I was created. I am exactly two hundred sons and daughters of my House, Griddle—I am the whole generation of the Ninth. I came into this world a necromancer at the expense of Drearburh’s future—because there is no future without me.”
Gideon’s stomach churned, but her brain was more urgent than her nausea.
“Why leave me, though?” she demanded. “They murdered the rest of the House, but they left me off the list?”
There was a pause.
“We didn’t,” said Harrow.
“What?”
“You were meant to die, Griddle, along with all the others. You inhaled nerve gas for ten full minutes. My great-aunts went blind just from releasing it and you weren’t affected, even though you were just two cots away from the vent. You just didn’t die. My parents were terrified of you for the rest of their lives.”
The Reverend Father and Mother hadn’t found her unnatural because of how she’d been born: they’d found her unnatural because of how she hadn’t died. And all the nuns and all the priests and all the anchorites of the cloister had taken the cue from them, not knowing that it was because Gideon was just some smothered and unfortunate animal who had still been alive the next day.
The world revolved as Harrow floated closer. Memory took Pelleamena’s steady gaze, and refocused the way it slid through and over Gideon from contempt to dread. It took the stentorious, short-changed breath when Priamhark saw her and breathed it again in horror, not in repugnance. One small kid who, to two adults, was a walking reminder of the day they had chosen to mortgage the future of their House. No wonder she had hated the huge dark doors of Drearburh: beyond that portal lurked the used-up, emptied-out shades of a bunch of kids whose main sin in life was that they’d be good batteries. “And do you think you’re worth it?” she asked bluntly.
Next to her, Harrow didn’t flinch. “If I became a Lyctor,” she said meditatively, “and renewed my House—and made it great again, and greater than it ever was, and justified its existence in the eyes of God the Emperor—if I made my whole life a monument to those who died to ensure that I would live and live powerfully…”
Gideon waited.
“Of course I wouldn’t be worth it,” Harrow said scornfully. “I’m an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground. My parents committed a necromantic sin that we ought to have been torpedoed into the centre of Dominicus for. If any of the other Houses knew of what we’d done they would destroy us from orbit without a second’s thought. I am a war crime.”
She stood up. Gideon watched as sheets of seawater slicked down her shoulders, her hair a wet black cap on her skull, her skin sheening grey and green from the waves. All the paint had rubbed off, and Harrowhark looked thin and haggard and no older than Jeannemary Chatur.
“But I’d do it again,” said the war crime. “I’d do it again, if I had to. My parents did it because there was no other way, and they didn’t even know. I had to be a necromancer of their bloodline, Nav … because only a necromancer can open the Locked Tomb. Only a powerful necromancer can roll away the stone … I found that only the perfect necromancer can pass through those wards and live, and approach the sarcophagus.”
Gideon’s toes found purchase and she stood, chest deep in water, goose-bumped all over from the cold. “What happened to praying that the tomb be shut forever and the rock never be rolled away?”
“My parents didn’t understand either, and that’s why they died,” said Harrowhark. “That’s why, when they knew I’d done it—that I’d rolled away the stone and that I’d gone through the monument and that I had seen the place where the body was buried—they thought I’d betrayed God. The Locked Tomb’s meant to house the one true enemy of the King Undying, Nav, something older than time, the cost of the Resurrection; the beast that he defeated once but can’t defeat twice. The abyss of the First. The death of the Lord. He left the grave with us for our safekeeping, and he trusted the ones who built the tomb a myriad ago to wall themselves up with the corpse and die there. But we didn’t. And that’s how the Ninth House was made.”
Gideon remembered Silas Octakiseron: The Eighth never forgot that the Ninth was never meant to be.
“Are you telling me that when you were ten years old—ten years old—you busted the lock on the tomb, broke into an ancient grave, and made your way past hideous old magic to look at a dead thing even though your parents told you it’d start the apocalypse?”
“Yes,” said Harrowhark.
“Why?”
There was another pause, and Harrow looked down into the water. Limned by electric light, her pupils and her irises appeared the same colour.