Harrow the Ninth Read online

  Harrowhark knew from experience that no what-for was in the offing. Matthias Nonius never did battle in The Noniad (Matthias hight Nonius his Deeds and Accomplishments) without a significant amount of talking first. He generally spent at least fifty lines destroying his opponents in speech before he began to destroy them physically, wading through the giblets of the immoral for another two hundred or so. This part was no exception. It was hardly to be borne that Ortus would launch into The Noniad in company; she had been subjected to so much of it herself because she knew he hoped that one day she would be deeply moved by it, release him from the duty of cavalier primary, and make him a Ninth bone skald. The idea that he would give a public reading ought to have been a whipping offence.

  Now he stood, wide and black and shadowy among all the brushed-steel shelving. The necromancer and the cavalier of the Fifth sat at a table spread wide with books, and fragments of delicate loose-leaf paper safely slipped into plex covers, and browned-out flimsy, and pens. The necromancer looked entertained, and the cavalier looked beside himself. The necromancer, the woman who had been so delighted with the idea of independent research, a grown woman with a very even smile, did not put Harrowhark in any good humour. Even she had heard of Abigail Pent.

  “Lady,” said Ortus, and, sorrowfully: “Forgive me. Nonius has heroic standing among the priests and anchorites of our House,” he added to the others. “Perhaps I do him wrong by making poesy of the sacred mysteries.”

  “I never realised that Nonius had passed into cult worship,” said Pent.

  “He has not,” said Harrowhark shortly, and then was forced to admit: “Or, at least, the idea is passé.”

  “Heroes are passé, you see,” explained Ortus with heavy sadness.

  She did not murder him. It was a very near thing. Sir Magnus Quinn, that perambulating white-toothed smile, intervened quickly: “Have you made use of this space yet, Reverend Daughter? We prefer it for the moment to the idea of going downstairs. We’re taking up the biggest table, I am afraid—my wife found an annotated copy of The New Necromancer—my only contribution was that in the gentleman’s restroom, I found what is almost certainly an ancient theoretical epigram. That is how we got Ortus the Ninth onto the subject.”

  “An epigram?”

  He hesitated. Pent said mildly, “Magnus is being amusing. It reads as a dialogue between magicians from the schools of flesh, spirit, and bone magic, the punchline being: Yes, but my bone expands when I touch it, which at least proves that joke is as old as the Nine Houses themselves.” Before Harrowhark could take this prompt to make a hasty exit, the necromancer of the Fifth said without transition: “Are you interested in Lyctoral materials?”

  This was an introduction, or a probe, or something different altogether. Scrutiny into the Ninth’s affairs might be deflected. She was more intrigued by the idea of an introduction.

  “If you are asking whether or not we have any within my House,” said Harrow slowly, “I will not answer that question.”

  “What a shame! I understand,” said Pent, who did not appear to be discomfited by refusals, or by the sacramental paint. “It was more to gauge your interest though. This library is stuffed. The books, now, the books are interesting—but the Lyctoral traces—phwoar.”

  Abigail Pent had not seemed the type of woman to articulate phwoar. She said it very boyishly. On any other day Harrowhark would have been pushed beyond measure hearing phwoar after bone-related jokes and made her exit. But she was aware that priggishness was not a virtue. She was also aware that winnowing the secrets of Canaan House was going to take more than the skeletons she could construct and the diary she was documenting. She was very tired. She was being offered something. Wary of offering herself in return, she took it.

  Harrow crossed around the table to see what was spread out in front of the adept of the Fifth. It was a curious assortment of the high and the low—a warped automatic pen with a thin inner cylinder of ink and a plex casing, rather more antiquated than one with an ink cartridge; reassembled scraps everywhere, like someone cleaning confetti up in an overly orderly fashion after a parade. A strand of hair. An open book with black ink still clear in the corner: This is nonsense.

  “The books come from a later period, so I gather,” said Abigail. “The notes are priceless.”

  She had reassembled a torn half page of flimsy that read:

  After that cut into cubes, fry in the butter or oil, turn it occasionally until it is crispy. Cut up the pickle so there are no big chunks and mix it into the pan before taking off the heat.

  M told us yesterday that Nigella “eats like a child,” so I

  Harrowhark said, “This proves by itself that antiquity does not give an object automatic value.”

  “I disagree. With this,” said Abigail smilingly, “some blood—positive identification—perhaps a few more examples—I will be able to call the writer’s ghost.”

  Then she added again, “Phwoar.”

  “She can, you know,” said Magnus, reading disbelief in Harrow’s carefully schooled expression. In fact, she was cursing inwardly; she felt cold and thoughtful. “Though I have, er, asked her not to.”

  “You would need something for it to feast on,” said Harrowhark, and not to Magnus.

  “Yes.”

  “A ghost that old—the feeding—”

  “It would be unprecedented,” said Pent. She was talking a little bit too much, too fast. “I mean, there’s the issue of whether the Lyctor in question is even dead. That’s the first thing to consider. As a speaker to the dead, I really am at my best when people are not alive … If they are in the River, whatever the depth, I can only hope that a handful of minor relics and the new blood of my beating heart will tempt them to the surface. Nobody has ever tempted a Lyctor before. I am not even certain where they go. Do Lyctors enter the River? Do Lyctors pass as we pass? I don’t know where they wait. I don’t know how to direct them. But I would so love to try.”

  Harrowhark waited, her thumbs pressed together within her sleeves.

  From the half a step behind her, Ortus said: “Your indefatigability in the face of ancient death becomes you.”

  “Stop flirting with my wife,” said Magnus. (Harrowhark had forgotten that he was Abigail’s husband, and found the concept of making eyes at one’s cavalier too revolting to bear.) When he caught sight of Ortus’s expression over Harrow’s shoulder, which Harrow could only imagine, he said hastily: “Joke! A joke. Wouldn’t suggest it of you, Ninth.”

  “I would like to give you something,” said Abigail Pent.

  This was to Harrowhark. She watched as the capable hands—strong, for a necromancer’s, beautifully formed and with very even nails—took a bit of folded paper from the table. She passed it to her Ninth colleague as though it did not hurt her to give away such precious material. She was smiling, very slightly.

  “Scholarship is best made as a communal effort,” she said. “If you can tell me anything of interest about that paper, I’d be very grateful for it. If you could tell me anything tedious, I’d still be thankful. Bone adepts do have such a notorious eye for detail.”

  Harrowhark Nonagesimus was of the Ninth House; if it had been her in possession of Abigail Pent’s resources, she would have kept them all to herself. On dying she would have put them all in a chest and buried them to keep them from the greedy eyes of other scholars for another thousand years. She took the gift with gloved fingers, turned it around in her hands—it was just paper; it had the thanergy of paper, and unlike flimsy, she would be able to feel the seethe of bacteria eating away at it if she pressed it to her bare skin.

  “I am—obliged to you, Fifth House,” she said.

  Magnus was saying: “Ortus. What does happen to Nonius, after he faces the ensorcelled swordsmen? I assume they fight?”

  Harrowhark was surprised at how immediately she could answer in her cavalier’s stead: “He cuts down seven men in about as many lines. Then the leader of the swordsmen approaches, carrying
two swords. I would have assumed there was a swift rate of decay in the efficacy of additional swords. The others part to let Nonius and him fight. Nonius wins easily, though he takes eight pages to do so. The remaining onlookers he kills, rather more cursorily, as it only takes around four lines.”

  She was surprised to find Magnus looking at her, and not at Ortus; was unsettled by the press of his mouth, of his good-natured and rather foolish expression, of his curly well-brushed hair and slightly wanting chin. She was mostly unsettled by his eyes, which were of a colour suddenly hard to define, and whose focus was on her entire.

  “Is this really how it happens?” he said.

  “Pardon?” said Harrowhark.

  “I say, Reverend Daughter, is it an ancestral Locked Tomb tradition for your spirit energy to be so diverse?” Abigail asked brightly. “I’ve counted up to one hundred and fifty signatures contributing to you, and there’s more—they’re stamps rather than complete revenants, of course, which means their spirits were manipulated to leave marks on you in some way, which is fascinating if it means…”

  It took long years of self-discipline not to kill the woman then and there; or at least make the attempt. Against any other ghost-caller, their wards so exquisite and so fatally slow, Harrowhark had no doubt that a single decisive strike would do the job. Abigail Pent introduced doubt. It was that doubt that made her turn and flee—a tactical retreat, as she kept telling herself; Ortus broke into a trot to catch up with her, the rapier clanking at his side. She caught their voices, because she had very good hearing for low, hushed voices of any type. Magnus was saying, “Dear, you didn’t have to…” and Abigail, mildly: “It’s just curious, considering…” and nothing more.

  She left the gas-levered autodoors of the library—which were, as far as Harrow could tell, the only autodoors that existed outside of the deep LED-lit basement with its metal grilles and groaning air conditioners—and stalked down the corridor as quickly as possible. It was hard not to admit that she was badly shaken; and she said lowly: “We now avoid Pent and Quinn at all costs. For the sake of the Ninth House, and of the sanctity of the Locked Tomb. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, my Lady Harrowhark,” said Ortus.

  “If I believe they pose a threat, or that they intend us direct harm—frankly, on any minor excuse—I will invoke Tomb retribution. I’ll kill Pent where she stands if I need to, and you will swear that there was no sin of unjustified House war, no matter the circumstances.”

  Only a pause. “Yes, my Lady Harrowhark,” said Ortus.

  This calm agreement made her all the more furious. She did not examine why. “And it ought to be Non-i-us as three syllables, or Non-yus as two,” Harrow added, taking bloody satisfaction in cruelty. “Not whichever you happen to feel like at the time. It’s amateurish.”

  Her cavalier stopped immediately, like a beast of burden shying before a jump. He said, “Yes, my Lady Harrowhark. I am flattered by your attention to my craft. It’s consciously archaic. Emphasising my commitment to spoken performance.”

  “For God’s sake, Ortus, please stop sounding as though I’m about to whip you. I am taking care of our affairs, despite your ignorance.”

  “Let me not be unpleasing to my lady,” he said. “Let the unseeing eye of the Locked Tomb gaze down upon me, and see me guard her with the unmoving aegis of a cavalier’s love. But I will not modulate my tone for you.”

  She rounded on him. Harrowhark knew that she was being unfair; she knew that she was being petulant—had been scared into it, and could not soothe herself, and was using any means fair and foul to try to do so now. But when she was scared, she was a child again, and she was more afraid of being a child again than anything else in her life. Almost.

  “I have every right to correct you. We are at the gates of the Tomb, even now,” she said. “I carry it with me, and its rules hold clear.”

  “Let us never leave it,” said Ortus. “My lady, I follow your every order … I will accept your chidings gratefully. I will watch you slay whomsoever you feel the need to slay, and I will sponge the blood from your brow … but when I lay me down to sleep, I am a fully grown man who is allowed to feel precisely what I want, about anything I want. There has never been a rule against doing so, and that has always been my deep and unyielding relief with regard to you—to my lady mother—to Captain Aiglamene. Your final will be done, my lady.”

  Then he bowed to her—the very correct bow of a Ninth House tomb swordsman; his paint a perfect, if sad and melting, skull, his attitude sombre, his face the blankness of the grave. And just when his Lady might feel the pain of any reflective empathy for him, he saved her by establishing his position as the biggest source of passive aggression her House had ever produced. “I might also note that synizesis is characteristic of some of our finest examples of early Ninth prosody. I’m certain your studies have kept you from the full breadth of the classics.”

  Harrowhark looked at him, chose to make that look her final word, and then drew him into an alcove. The alcove was shallow, but he provided good cover. Her fingers shook a very little, so she withdrew them into her sleeves, so it might not be too obvious. She took the innocuous piece of paper that Abigail Pent had given her to examine, and she unfolded it.

  When she saw what was inside her eyes seemed to strobe; the streaked red writing almost hovered above the page, the letters crowding and cramping themselves together as she read—

  THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME SO I DID THE IMPLANTATION MYSELF YOU SELF-SERVING ZOMBIE AND YOU STILL SENT HIM AFTER ME AND I WOULD HAVE HAD HIM IF I HADN’T BEEN COMPROMISED AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE SAW ME AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME

  AND FOR THAT I’LL MAKE YOU BOTH SUFFER UNTIL YOU NO LONGER UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF THAT GODDAMNED WORD

  They were totally alone. Harrowhark nonetheless made her fingers very still, and made the sign she had taught to Ortus—the one that asked the question, What am I seeing? He instantly took the paper from her shivering fingers and scanned it.

  “If you come to my room, I will make you the potato dish you liked,” he read aloud, with gravity. And: “How must we understand potato?”

  “As your closest vegetable relative,” said Harrowhark, who’d never seen one in real life.

  “You are a ready wit,” her cavalier said, with no apparent rancour and every sign of appreciation. “I have always admired your facility for repartee, my lady. Oftentimes someone will say something to me, and later I will think up the perfect riposte—so perfect the hearer could not help but wilt, and be ashamed that they had set themselves up to receive it—but by that point it is often hours after the fact and I am lying in my bed. And in any case, I hate conflict, all kinds.”

  Harrowhark rounded on him.

  “The Tomb have mercy, Nigenad, you should be ashamed to advertise as much,” she snarled, and did not even understand her incandescence. “A cavalier’s life is conflict. She is a warrior, not a human-sized sponge. If only duels took the form of competitive passive-aggression, I’d probably be a Lyctor already. And you have the temerity to call yourself a son of Drearburh? Don’t answer that; I know you barely have the temerity to call yourself anything at all. For the love of God, Ortus, I need a cavalier with backbone.”

  “You always did,” said Ortus. “And I am glad, I think, that I never became that cavalier.”

  Hours after the fact, when she was lying in her bed, Harrow’s brain let the response roll up to the surface: What the hell do you mean by that? Which was not a comeback.

  11

  SOMEONE TOOK YOU TO BED—at the time you had no idea whose bed, or where, or how; you did not wake up for it. Later that night, or perhaps early that morning, you were found by the Lord your God in the little chapel.

  You were leaning over the corpse, your arms stretched high above your head, clutched around the hilt. Your two-handed sword was thrust through Cytherea’s breast for the second time. The rosebuds were scattered and stained with drops o
f old, sour blood. You could never recall how you got there.

  That was how you passed your first night in the Mithraeum, apparently.

  ACT TWO

  12

  SIX MONTHS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER

  ON LAST COUNT YOU’D killed twelve planets, but you still found that first quick slice to the jugular the hardest. You felt your own breath wet on your face in your crinkly hazard suit; worn to keep the dust off; needless, at least for the moment. You judged the angle. You hesitated.

  Your unwilling tutor mistook your hesitation for anticipation, sitting opposite you in her own rustling orange suit, the triple light of the three-star sunset dyeing her face orange through the soft plex stuff of the hood. A light hail of sand and dust particles pattered over the fabric and went plinkety, plinkety, plink.

  “Don’t bother waiting for the timer, Harrowhark,” she said, muffled behind layers of amalgam plastic and thermal fibre. She was already sitting in the posture of submergence: knees high, back a soft curve, hands light over the fronts of the shins. “I’m confident you don’t need a timer anymore, and it’ll drop to flash-freezing out here in half an hour, so hurry up—it won’t be me they’ll be emptying out of the dustpan for the funeral.”

  Mercy added this with no small relish. Your brain said: Fuck you for choosing this particular climate, you bursting organ, you wretched, self-regarding hypochondriac and half-fermented corpse with the nails still on, but your mouth said, “Necessarily, eldest sister.”

  Mercymorn watched as you extracted your sword. Not the rapier that hung from your hip, which God had asked you to wear and which you wore as a sop to his extreme optimism; the great sword that you carried on your back. Your exoskeleton came into play here: the plates you wore in long overlapping scales running from back to ribs to elbow to forearm, the rudimentary apodemes that helped you heave a blade far too heavy for your body. Not for you the light ripple of muscle that now showed on Ianthe’s back and shoulders, especially if she was wet with sweat: for you the socket, the bone, the external ridge.