by Tamsyn Muir
“Griddle—”
Gideon limped over near the dusty flowerbeds. WHAM—WHAM—WHAM— She didn’t have much time, but she only had one shot anyway. She struggled out of her black robe and thought about taking off her shirt, in one mental blurt of panic, but decided she didn’t need to. She peeled her gloves off her wet red palms and rolled up her sleeves for no reason, except that it gave her something to do with her shaking hands. She made her voice as calm as possible: in a way, she was calm. She was the calmest she had ever been in her entire life. It was just her body that was frightened.
“Okay,” she said. “I understand now. I really, truly, absolutely understand.”
Harrowhark had leant back on her elbows and was watching her, black eyes lightless and soft. “Nav,” she said, the gentlest she had ever heard Harrow manage. “I can’t hold this for—much longer.”
WHAM—WHAM—WHAM!
“I don’t know how you’re holding it now,” said Gideon and she backed up, looked at what she was backing toward, looked back at her necromancer.
She sucked in a wobbly breath. Harrow was looking at her with a classic expression of faint Nonagesimus pity, as though Gideon had finally lost her intellectual faculties and might wet herself at any moment. Camilla watched her with an expression that showed nothing at all. Camilla the Sixth was no idiot.
She said, “Harrow, I can’t keep my promise, because the entire point of me is you. You get that, right? That’s what cavaliers sign up for. There is no me without you. One flesh, one end.”
A shade of exhausted suspicion flickered over her necromancer’s face. “Nav,” she said, “what are you doing?”
“The cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole entire life, believe me,” said Gideon. “You’ll know what to do, and if you don’t do it, what I’m about to do will be no use to anyone.”
Gideon turned and squinted, gauged the angle. She judged the distance. It would have been the worst thing in the world to look back, so she didn’t.
She mentally found herself all of a sudden in front of the doors of Drearburh—four years old again, and screaming—and all her fear and hate of them went away. Drearburh was empty. There was no Crux. There were no godawful great-aunts. There were no restless corpses, no strangers in coffins, no dead parents. Instead, she was Drearburh. She was Gideon Nav, and Nav was a Niner name. She took the whole putrid, quiet, filth-strewn madness of the place, and she opened her doors to it. Her hands were not shaking anymore.
WHAM—WHAM—WHAM. The structure bowed and creaked. Big chunks were falling away now, letting in wide splotches of sunlight. She felt movement behind her, but she was faster.
“For the Ninth!” said Gideon.
And she fell forward, right on the iron spikes.
ACT FIVE
37
“OKAY,” SAID GIDEON. “Okay. Get up.”
Harrowhark Nonagesimus got up.
“Good!” said her cavalier. “You can stop screaming any moment now, just an FYI. Now—first make sure nothing’s going to ice Camilla—I meant it about not wanting an afterlife subscription to Palamedes Sextus’s Top Nerd Facts.”
“Gideon,” said Harrow, and again, more incoherently: “Gideon.”
“No time,” said Gideon. A hot wind blew over them both: it whipped Harrow’s hair into her face. “Incoming.”
The shield sighed, shuddered, and finally broke. The ancient Lyctoral construct surged forward, triumphant in its brainlessness. Harrow saw it for what it was: a spongy breadth of regenerating ash, and many lengths of teeth. For all its killing speed before, it now crested before them as though it were travelling through syrup. It shivered in the air, a hundred white lances ready.
Gideon said, “Take it down.”
And Harrow took it down. It was bafflingly simple. It was nothing more than a raised skeleton, and not one that had been formed with any particular grace. It was half gone already, having torn itself free like an animal from her trap. The head was just a chitinous plate. The trunk was a roll of bone. The remaining tentacles fell like rain, arrested in midswing. The bone responded to their call, and together they sailed the thing through the cracked glass panes of the terrace garden to fall—a huge white comet, with flailing tails of bone—into the rolling ocean.
“There’s my sword,” Gideon said. “Pick it up—pick it up and stop looking at me, dick. Don’t. Don’t you dare look at me.”
Harrow turned her head away from the iron railing and picked up the longsword, and cried out: it was far too heavy, far too awkward. Gideon reached her arm out to steady Harrow’s sword hand, shifting the other arm around her in a strange embrace. Her fingers wrapped around Harrow’s, scratchy with callouses. The sheer weight of the thing still stretched the muscles of Harrow’s forearms painfully, but Gideon clasped her wrist, and despite the pain they lifted the sword together.
“Your arms are like fucking noodles,” said Gideon disapprovingly.
“I’m a necromancer, Nav!”
“Yeah, well, hope you like lifting weights for the next myriad.”
They were cheek to cheek: Gideon’s arm and Harrow’s arm entwined, holding the sword aloft, letting the steel catch the light. The terrace stretched out before them, glass shards spraying in the wake of the construct, falling as slowly and as lightly as down. Harrow looked back at Gideon, and Gideon’s eyes, as they always did, startled her: their deep, chromatic amber, the startling hot gold of freshly-brewed tea. She winked.
Harrow said—
“I cannot do this.”
“You already did it,” said Gideon. “It’s done. You ate me and rebuilt me. We can’t go home again.”
“I can’t bear it.”
“Suck it down,” said Gideon. “You’re already two hundred dead daughters and sons of our House. What’s one more?”
Before them stood Cytherea the First, though they noticed her only as an afterthought. She stood with her sword down, just watching them, her eyes as wide and as blue as the death of light. The garden narrowed to her and her bloody green sword. Her lips were parted in a tiny o. She did not even seem particularly troubled: just amazed, as though they were an aurora, a mirage, an unreal trick of the sunshine.
“Now we kick her ass until candy comes out,” said Gideon. “Oh, damn, Nonagesimus, don’t cry, we can’t fight her if you’re crying.”
Harrow said, with some difficulty: “I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it.”
“Yes you can, it’s just less great and less hot,” said Gideon.
“Fuck you, Nav—”
“Harrowhark,” said Gideon the Ninth. “Someday you’ll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then. For now—I can’t say you’ll be fine. I can’t say we did the right thing. I can’t tell you shit. I’m basically a hallucination produced by your brain chemistry while coping with the massive trauma of splicing in my brain chemistry. Even if I wasn’t, I don’t know jack, Harrow, I never did—except for one thing.”
She lifted Harrow’s arm with the hilt clutched in it. Her fingers, rough and strong and sure, moved Harrow’s other hand into place above the pommel.
“I know the sword,” she said. “And now, so do you.”
Gideon brought them into position: weight on the forward foot, knee bent a little, light on the right. She tilted the blade so that it was held with the blade pointed high before them, a perfect line. She moved Harrow’s head up and corrected her hips.
Time sped up, blurred, moved in bright lights before them. Now the old Lyctor Cytherea—wretchedly old, it seemed impossible that they could have ever taken her for anything else—stood there at the bottom of the stairs. Her radioactive blue eyes were quiet; her sword was held at the ready. She was smiling with colourless lips.
“How do you feel, little sister?” she said.
Harrowhark’s mouth said, “Ready for round three,” and, “or round four, I think I lost track.”
Their swords met. The noise of metal on metal screamed in that empty gar
den. Cytherea the First had been Cytherea the First for ten thousand years, and even ten thousand years ago her cavalier had been great. Time had made her more perfect than a mortal cavalier could understand. In a fair fight, they might even have fought to a standstill.
It was not a fair fight. As they fought—and fighting was like a dream, like falling asleep—they could see Cytherea was made up of different parts. Her eyes had been taken from somewhere else, two blue spots of someone else’s fire. Within her chest another conflagration burned, and this one was eating her alive: it smoked and smouldered where her lungs ought to have been, bulging, dark, and malignant. It had swollen to the bursting point inside her body, and most of Cytherea’s energy was being expended on holding it still. Harrow could touch what Palamedes had done; nudge it; knock it out of Cytherea’s grip.
“There,” said Gideon, in Harrow’s ear, her voice softer now. “Thanks, Palamedes.”
“Sextus was a marvel,” admitted Harrow.
“Too bad you didn’t marry him. You’re both into old dead chicks.”
“Gideon—”
“Focus, Nonagesimus. You know what to do.”
Cytherea the First vomited a long stream of black blood. There was no fear in her now. There was only anticipation verging on panicked excitement, like a girl waiting for her birthday party. The weight of Gideon’s arms on Harrow’s forearms was getting more ephemeral, harder to perceive; the brush of Gideon’s cheek was suddenly no more substantial than the remembrance of an old fever. Her voice was in her ear, but it was very far away.
Harrow placed the tip of her sword to the right of Cytherea’s breastbone. The world was slow and chilly.
“One flesh, one end,” said Gideon, and it was a murmur now, on the very edge of hearing.
Harrow said, “Don’t leave me.”
“The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee,” said Gideon. “See you on the flip side, sugarlips.”
* * *
Harrowhark drove the blade home, straight through the malignant thing in Cytherea’s chest: it bubbled and clawed out of her, a well of tumours, a cancer, and she seized up. It ran through her like a flame touched to oil, seething visibly beneath her skin, her veins, her bones. They bulged and buckled. Her skin tore; her heart strained, stretched, and, after ten thousand years’ poor service, gave out.
Cytherea the First sighed in no little relief. Then she toppled over, and she died.
The sword made a terrific clatter as it dropped to the ground. The breeze blew Harrow’s hair into her mouth as she ran back and strained at the arms of her cavalier, pulled and pulled, so that she could take her off the spike and lay her on her back. Then she sat there for a long time. Beside her, Gideon lay smiling a small, tight, ready smile, stretched out beneath a blue and foreign sky.
Epilogue
HARROWHARK NONAGESIMUS CAME AROUND in a nest of sterile white. She was lying on a gurney, wrapped up in a crinkly thermal blanket. She turned her head; next to her there was a window, and outside the window was the deep velvet blackness of space. Cold stars glimmered in the far distance like diamonds, and they were very beautiful.
If it had been possible to die of desolation, she would have died then and there: as it was, all she could do was lie on the bed and observe the smoking wreck of her heart.
The lamps had been turned down to an irritatingly soothing glow, bathing the small room in soft, benevolent radiance. They shone down on her gurney, on the white walls, on the painfully clean white tiles of the floor. The brightest light in the room came from a tall reading lamp, positioned next to a metal chair in the corner. In the chair sat a man. On the arm of his chair was a tablet and in his hands was a sheaf of flimsy, which he would occasionally shuffle and take notes on. He was simply dressed. His hair was cropped close to his head, and in the light it shone a nondescript dark brown.
The man must have sensed her wakefulness, for he looked up from his flimsy and his tablet at her, and he shuffled them aside to stand. He approached her, and she saw that his sclera were black as space. The irises were dark and leadenly iridescent—a deep rainbow oil slick, ringed with white. The pupils were as glossy black as the sclera.
Harrow could never tell precisely how she knew who he was, only that she did. She threw off the rustling thermal blanket—someone had dressed her in an unlovely turquoise hospital smock—and got out of bed, and she threw herself down shamelessly at the feet of the Necromancer Prime; the Resurrection; the God of the Nine Houses; the Emperor Undying.
She pressed her forehead down onto the cold, clean tiles.
“Please undo what I’ve done, Lord,” she said. “I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav.”
“I can’t,” he said. He had a bittersweet, scratchy voice, and it was infinitely gentle. “I would very much like to. But that soul’s inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I’d take yours with it and destroy both in the process. What’s done is done is done. Now you have to live with it.”
She was empty. That was the terrible thing: there was nothing inside her but the sick and bubbling detestation of her House. Even the silence of her soul could not dilute the hatred that had fermented in her from the genesis of the Ninth House downward. Harrowhark picked herself up off the floor and looked her Emperor dead in his dark and shining eyes.
“How dare you ask me to live with it?”
The Emperor did not render her down to a pile of ash, as she partway wished he would. Instead, he rubbed at one temple, and he held her gaze, sombre and even.
“Because,” he said, “the Empire is dying.”
She said nothing.
“If there had been any less need you would be sitting back home in Drearburh, living a long and quiet life with nothing to worry or hurt you, and your cavalier would still be alive. But there are things out there that even death cannot keep down. I have been fighting them since the Resurrection. I can’t fight them by myself.”
Harrow said, “But you’re God.”
And God said, “And I am not enough.”
She retreated to sit on the edge of the bed, and she pulled the hem of her hospital smock down over her knees. He said, “It wasn’t meant to happen like this. I intended for the new Lyctors to become Lyctors after thinking and contemplating and genuinely understanding their sacrifice—an act of bravery, not an act of fear and desperation. Nobody was meant to lose their lives unwillingly at Canaan House. But—Cytherea…”
The Emperor closed his eyes. “Cytherea was my fault,” he said. “She was the very best of all of us. The most loyal, the most humane, the most resilient. The one with the most capacity for kindness. I made her live ten thousand years in pain, because I was selfish and she let me. Don’t despise her, Harrow—I see it in your eyes. What she did was unforgivable. I can’t understand it. But who she was … she was wonderful.”
“You’re awfully forgiving,” said Harrow, “considering she said she was out to kill you.”
“I wish she’d said that to me,” said the Emperor heavily. “If she and I had just fought this out, it would have been a hell of a lot better for everyone.”
Harrow was silent. He seemed lost in thought. He said presently, “Most of my Lyctors have been destroyed by a war I’ve thought best to fight slowly, through attrition. I have lost my Hands. Not just to death. The loneliness of deep space takes its toll on anyone, and the necrosaints have all put up with it for longer than anybody should ever be asked to bear anything. That’s why I wanted only those who had discovered the cost and were willing to pay it in the full knowledge of what it would entail.”
All this washed over Harrow’s shoulders. She realised immediately that she was a fool: that she was asking the wrong questions, and listening to the wrong thing.
“Who else beside me is alive, Lord?”
“Ianthe Tridentarius,” said the Empe
ror, “minus one arm.”
“The Sixth House cavalier was only injured when I left her,” said Harrowhark. “Where is she?”
“We haven’t recovered any trace of her, or her body,” said the Emperor. “Nor that of Captain Deuteros of Trentham, nor of the Crown Princess of Ida.”
“What?”
“All the Houses will have questions tonight,” he said. “I can hardly blame them. I’m sorry, Harrow, we couldn’t recover your cavalier either.”
Her brain listed sharply.
“Gideon’s gone?”
“Everyone else is accounted for,” he said. “We have had to settle for partial remains of the Seventh House and the Warden of the Sixth. Only you two were confirmed alive. It doesn’t help matters that I can’t even go down there and search.”
Harrow found herself saying, distantly, “Why can’t you go back? It seemed to be the whole of Cytherea’s plan.”
The Emperor said, “I saved the world once—but not for me.”
Harrow pressed her legs down into the cool metal rib of the gurney. She expected to feel something, but she didn’t. She felt nothing at all. There was a great and gnawing emptiness, which was mildly better than feeling something, at least. A tiny voice in the back of her head was saying, Someone will burn for this, but it was only ever her own.
The Emperor leaned back in his chair and they looked at each other. He had a ridiculously ordinary face: long jaw, high forehead, hair a dull and leaden brown. But those eyes.
He said, “I know you became a Lyctor under duress.”
“Some may call it duress,” said Harrow.
“You aren’t the first,” said the Emperor. “But—listen to me. I will do what I haven’t done in ten thousand years and renew your House.” (How did he know about that?) “I’ll safeguard the Ninth. I will make sure what happened at Canaan House never happens again. But I want you to come with me. You can learn to be my Hand. The Empire can gain another saint, and the Empire needs another saint, more than ever. I have three teachers for you, and a whole universe for you to hold on to—for just a little while longer.”