Harrow the Ninth Read online

  Before the altar knelt Mercymorn. Her shimmering white robe had fallen down her shoulders, and she was weeping—the sound was not articulated aloud, but her shoulders rocked as though her sobs were an explosion. She ground her molars audibly, so much so that they sounded like walnuts going through a rock polisher. You could not imagine the Saint of Joy weeping with anything other than fury or disappointment.

  Next to Mercy knelt God. Next to God knelt somebody new. You could only see the back of the head, and you surmised they were fair-haired. That was all. The stranger was tall, kneeling—taller than the Emperor, and taller than Mercy. They wore the iridescent robe of the First House, and you could not sense them: another black hole in a triplet of black holes, scooping out the space in front of you.

  After a moment, the new figure said in a light, masculine tenor, “I will have a full psychological meltdown if you don’t stop that ghastly noise, Mercy.”

  The Saint of Joy gritted out: “I will kill you if you talk to me right now, you mean-souled little man.”

  The God of the Nine Houses said, “Stop it,” and they were silent.

  The molar-clunching subsided gradually. You wove your fingers together in your deep pearly sleeves and bent your thumbs backward nearly to the point of dislocation. Ianthe looked at you, and when you looked at her in the candlelight—her eyes not betraying her; right now, they might have been blue—you were struck by her exhaustion. She had been dimmed, somehow. Something had been taken from her since you watched her scream on the floor of the shuttle. Her line of sight flicked to the gap at the front of your robe—you shouldered forward to close it—and she quirked her eyebrows in brief, enervated amusement.

  You mouthed, Where are we? But she did not answer.

  After a moment, the Emperor spoke at the corpse, in the smiling cadence of a man giving a talk at a dinner party:

  “When they first brought her to Canaan House, I thought there’d been some mistake. You know that I’d been to Rhodes, to see the miracle, but I asked not to see the woman—just so I could be a disinterested party—and of course once I saw that she was necromantic I said yes, she should come to me to be a disciple. She was just shy of thirty then, I recall. And I knew she was sick, but I had no idea how bad it was until Loveday brought her in, looking as though she wanted every one of us beaten to death, and she could hardly walk … I went to kiss her hello, and she said: ‘Lord, I can’t kiss you back. My lipstick’s perfect and I refuse to smear it.’”

  The strange Lyctor barked out a hollow laugh. They—he?—inclined his head, and you saw him in part-profile for the first time. He was very fair, but in a greyish, damp, slicked-back way that showed off the promontories of his skull. Fine, impatient lines were set around his drooping eyes, and quite deeply carved into his mouth. He looked older than your father had looked, when he died. These haughty features were set in a tall, aristocratic face, with an arched and supercilious nose, which nose he was currently staring down at the Emperor with an expression of supreme suffering.

  “It wasn’t, though. She had it on her teeth.”

  Mercymorn muttered, but not so quietly that it wasn’t audible: “Of course you’d notice that, Augustine.”

  But Augustine was adding, in a light, cultivated voice: “I remember now … Lord! The time flies!… That was a damnable business. They sent her to us barely alive, and back then none of us could do anything for her, excepting you. Was she the first gen, or second?”

  “Second,” said God. “Early second. We were still experimenting with getting the Sixth installation up and running. Some of the Houses were empty.”

  Mercymorn spoke up: “No. We had it running by then. Because Valancy was with us, and Anastasia.”

  The Emperor clicked his fingers, as though she had triggered some neuron flash. “Yes, you’re right. We were all there to meet her. All sixteen of us—and she acted as though she were at a wedding and was doing a receiving line of tedious cousins … I could hardly keep a straight face. When was the last time you saw her?”

  This last question was asked a little abruptly. Both Lyctors fell silent for a moment, and then the one they called Augustine said: “Recently. Ten years ago. I told her she was getting to be a bit of a hermit, and she acted as though I was rather stupid … but she seemed in good spirits.”

  Mercymorn said: “Cytherea was good at seeming,” to which Augustine just said, a little distantly: “You’d know, I’m sure.”

  Before this could decompose further, the Emperor pressed: “And you, Mercy?”

  You heard the molar-grinding again. Then the Saint of Joy said, colourlessly: “Nearly twenty years ago.” And: “She laughed too much.”

  All three of them fell silent at the altar. The wasted body in front of them would no longer laugh too much, in any case. Augustine said, “Does anyone remember her name—her actual House name? Didn’t she have one?”

  The Emperor suggested, “Heptane,” but Augustine said, “No, you’re thinking of Loveday. We’ve forgotten it! That’s unnatural. Who would have ever thought we could forget—a thing like that?”

  Mercymorn stood. She tucked her hair behind her ears and away from her deceptively serene oval face, and she crossed primly to the back of the altar. She put her hands behind her back as though afraid to touch anything with them. She looked at Cytherea’s dead face with an intensity that was in its own way worse than tenderness. It was as though she were willing something from the corpse; like she could conjure something through sheer force of wanting. “Call her Cytherea Loveday,” she said. “That’s what she wanted to be called—and I found it unbearable and glutinous then, and I find it unbearable and glutinous now; but that is what she said … I never saw her cry except once,” she added in a pointless rush. “The day after. When we put together the research. When she became a Lyctor. I said, There was no alternative. She said…”

  At this point, she broke off. Thankfully, she did not glance in your direction. Augustine was staring at the floor, hands crossed demurely in a posture of awkward respect, and the Emperor was looking up at Mercy, but all you could see was the back of his head where mother-of-pearl leaves and baby fingerbones adorned his hair. The candlelight flickered heartlessly over you all.

  He asked, “What did she say?”

  The other Lyctor said nothing, for a moment. She cleared her throat: “She said, We had the choice to stop.”

  After a second, the Prince Undying sank his head into his hands. A stylus fell out of his pocket and rolled across the sleek black-and-bone tiles. It was the first time that he had seemed at all mortal. Humanity touched him briefly, like a passing shadow.

  Then Augustine said, quite irrelevantly: “I wouldn’t have called it glutinous. She was just lucky that Cythe-re-a Love-day trips off the tongue. Now, mine would alliterate in a way I couldn’t have abided. Abode?”

  “I will say this,” said Mercy presently, acting as though Augustine had never said a word. “I never mourned for Loveday Heptane. She did one good thing with her life, and she knew it.”

  “Eulogise her,” said the Emperor, through his hands. “For God’s sake, eulogise her anyway. Eulogise them both.”

  Augustine reached over and squeezed the shoulder of the man who became God and the God who became man and yet still invoked himself, apparently; the Lyctor got up with a grunt as though it hurt him and went to stand at the foot of the altar. You saw now that he was tall, and not particularly imposing, but—there was something removed from real life in the lineaments of his face, as though he had once looked at something terrible and it had lodged in his cheeks and forehead. He twitched open his First House cloak and stuck his thumbs in the belt loops of his elegant trousers—his white robe floated around his shoulders like an overjacket, filmy and beautiful—and he cleared his throat.

  “Cytherea was gorgeous,” he said simply. “Ten thousand years, and I never heard her say an unkind word except when it was very funny. She loved us unguardedly, all of us, which showed both her patience and
her enormous capacity … She was a worthy Lyctor and a beloved Hand—and Loveday gave her to us, so I suppose God bless Loveday.”

  Mercymorn pressed her hand down close to the small fat blush roses. She had to draw herself together quite tightly. Her voice was light and a trifle strange when she said, “She could be a dreadful little fool. But she was generally an endearing dreadful little fool, and her death was beneath her.”

  She slowly turned those dreamy hurricane eyes on the pews, which meant she turned them on you and Ianthe, and she started. She said, “The infants are awake.”

  The Kindly Prince craned his head over his shoulder and saw that you, the infants, were awake. He stood and, horror upon horrors, came down the aisle to you; he looked you both over, as though he were glad to see you, as though he were glad to see Ianthe, some nameless softening in his face and in those white-ringed, primordial eyes. He reached out for your hands. You could not refuse him, and in any case had no choice of doing so; your body reacted long before your mind did, and the meat of your meat and the flesh of your flesh belonged to God. And so, with your hand in his left and Ianthe’s in his right—Ianthe had arranged herself so that she had given him her left hand, rather than her less-favoured right—he said, “Welcome home. Come closer—we’re just saying goodbye … we’re used to saying goodbye.”

  Both you and Ianthe were led like sacrifices to the bier, to kneel where the other Lyctors had on the black-and-cream tiles. Mercymorn did not deign to look at you, but the strange Lyctor they had both called Augustine did. He looked down his long nose at you both, and he remarked: “Well, which one of the kiddies did her in?”

  The Emperor said sharply, “That doesn’t matter.”

  “It’s not like I hold it against ’em—I couldn’t. Believe me, if she went she chose to go. Well, I’d hate to guess … Two of them! What a funny old world,” he added bracingly.

  The Lyctor came away from Cytherea’s bud-covered feet and dropped to crouch in the transept before Ianthe. He said, “My name is Augustine the First, the Saint of Patience, Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, first finger on the hand that serves the King Undying—and your eldest brother, for my sins. Who are you, my doves?”

  Ianthe said, lifelessly: “I am Ianthe Tridentarius, Princess of Ida,” and you said in the same automatic way, “I am Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the Reverend Daughter.”

  Augustine laughed in a glassy and elegant way that had no relationship with mirth. He reached over and shook both your hands—you were befuddled; you had always considered a handshake the action of a misfit—and he said, “Not any more. Your obedient servant, Ianthe the First—you’re the one who ascended first, didn’t you? So you’re counted as the eighth saint? Your obedient servant, Harrowhark the First—ninth saint, then, looking at you I can tell that’s appropriate. Your allegiance is to one House now, and one House only. Behind you is your eldest sister.”

  “We’ve met,” said Mercy impatiently. “Can we not do this right at this moment?”

  “I imagine she didn’t have the grace to introduce herself, so I must: Mercymorn the First, the Saint of Joy, would you believe. She is a Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, the second finger on those two hands so outspread, that pray to the Kindly Prince. And she is all your sisters now—the one in front of you being, alas, completely dead—and I am the last of your brothers, excepting…”

  He trailed off, as though expecting God to fill in, which God did not. He finished with, “Teacher, d’you think he knows about the missile strikes?”

  “He’s never been particularly interested in the day-to-day,” said the Emperor.

  “But he is interested in you-know-what, and I’m just thinking, if he’s heard, and maybe put two and two together…”

  God said, “He had a mission. The Saint of Duty reflects his name.”

  “Right, right,” said Augustine. “Unlike Joy and Patience. Quite right. Just—coming back here, and not seeing him—it gave me the heebie-jeebies, to be perfectly honest with you. I can’t quite shake the feeling that something’s wrong.”

  “Can we get back to this blasted funeral,” said Mercy. “Sitting through six of these is worse than dying myself. I will let you know now that the plan for my funeral is in my top drawer, and I’ve got it down to a minute-by-minute framework, and it’s only twenty-four minutes, and it’s just lovely.”

  “I can only imagine,” said her brother Lyctor fervently.

  This excruciation was cut short when the doors at the back of the chapel banged open. Everyone alive swung around in a hurry, and in walked the next terrible part of your life.

  It was a man. The missing Lyctor—as empty to you as all assembled, more still even than the frozen corpse of Cytherea the First. Unlike the other Lyctors, all of whom skewed hungry, soft men and women of the necromancer build, his frame carried nothing but muscle. He was sinew over bone. He was a walking tendon. He had a raw, stretched look to him like an idiot’s construct, bones that had been slippered in meaty fibrils to keep them moving. A metabolized, contracted striation, without fat, the only curve a hollow tautness from rib to stomach.

  The Emperor’s face cleared. “Well timed,” he said with naked relief.

  The stranger wore the Lyctoral robe of office slung over his shoulders rather than enveloping him, and it was a shabby thing with a ragged hem that did not look very well cared for. He strode down the centre aisle too swiftly for you to see his eyes. In that brief glimpse you beheld a blunt brown face, skin too close to the skull, all shabby defeated features with its lineaments more temporalis muscle than anything else. His skull was a bumpy, knobbled, close-capped thing, hair shaven nearly to the bone. This hair gleamed a dull and unappealing russet, like a vague and bloody shadow on his head.

  The Emperor had risen to stand with his arms open in offered embrace. The muscle man walked into it briefly—enough to let God press one hand familiarly to his back, enough for him to clasp God round the shoulders—then pulled roughly away and directed his gaze to the figure lying bookended by Mercy and Augustine.

  “She’s dead?” said the stranger. When the Emperor nodded, he closed his eyes, very briefly. Then he opened them and said bluntly: “So are we. Number Seven’s at the rim.”

  At this statement Augustine suddenly leant heavily against the altar. He looked as though he might fall over, like a drunk. Mercy’s lips turned to snow. They became an exaggerated painting of tragedy: a lithograph of the moment before shirts were rent and hair was torn and blood rain pattered over the scene.

  The Emperor had turned his terrible eyes on the stranger, and they looked like dead planets in the pitch of space, and the white ring was like dying. He was no longer human. He was immortal again.

  “It can’t move that fast,” he said. “It never has. You must have seen a Herald, or a pseudo-Beast. Look, don’t scare the children. Come into my quarters and let’s talk this out, all three of you.”

  The new arrival was immovable.

  “It’s Number Seven,” said the stranger. “Run, or fight?”

  Mercy said, “But we reckoned it at five years, just a year ago.”

  “It caught up with us,” said the stranger. “The brain is already in the River. If we drop through the waters we’ll run into it no matter what direction we go. The corpus will be here in just under ten months, and it will be full of Heralds. Run, or fight?”

  “We need to think about—”

  “No thinking,” said the stranger, cutting Augustine off without hesitation. “Run? Two of us take the Emperor and hike to the nearest stele. The one left stays as a distraction, then leads it away. Or fight: we all make a stand. John, I am your servant. Tell me to stay and die, and I’ll stay.”

  You recalled that name from the shuttle, but had ignored it at the time. There was a ghastly moment now when you realised that he had looked at the Resurrecting Prince when he said John; that God had responded to so banal and cursory a word as John; and that he was looking at the rope-made man with something closer
to despair than you had ever seen in him.

  “We’ll fight,” he said. “We made the choice years ago to increase our numbers and fight these things. Five years, ten months … in the end, perhaps it is the same.”

  “Stay?” said the stranger.

  “Yes,” said God. “Stay, I do think.” And, lowly: “Thank you for making it home, Ortus the First.”

  Something pooled inside your ears, culminating in a hot and intense dripping down your earlobes. You touched it and your fingers came away wet; it was blood. Ianthe was staring at you through a fine curtain of achromatic hair, the whitened curve of her lips a tight and careful line. You silently crumpled up in the transept and hit your head quite hard on the tiles before you were rendered senseless. Under the circumstances it took people quite a long time to notice.

  10

  “Then Nonius spake full wroth; thunder’d his voice as the black sea roars on the tomb-gate of Algol,

  “Blazing his eyes with the fell light thrown from the Emperor’s corpse-fires; answer he gave, and he told them—”

  “Stop,” said Harrowhark, from behind.

  This did not go down well with the audience. The steel-panelled, split-floor library of Canaan House was perhaps one of the strangest rooms within it: it was the only room above the facility that evoked the same blunt sense of utilitarian workspace. It was like entering a modern chamber only to find an ancient artefact in the centre. The panelled floors were spread over haphazardly with old and hairy rugs, and the shelves were plain laminated metal. When Ortus declaimed, his voice rang through the place like the Secundarius Bell, except significantly more embarrassing.

  “No, no, Reverend Daughter,” protested the curly-haired moron from the Fifth House, the one whose clothes could have provided the Ninth with material resources for a decade. “Please. Nonius is about to give the rebels what-for. I never got what-for in school. Fifth poetry is very much I come from climes of sulphur gas/I shine in plasma sheet/Er-hem-er-hem-er-hem, surpass/My spot a crimson feat, and by then I was always comatose. One little stanza of what-for, I beg of you.”