Harrow the Ninth Read online

  You said, “There’s nothing wrong with the arm.”

  “It’s not mine,” Ianthe said vehemently.

  “Then cut it off.”

  “So typically Ninth—”

  “Let your vaunted Lyctoral abilities kick in,” you said. “See if it regrows.”

  “It won’t,” she said, taking you quite seriously. “Teacher said Lyctors don’t survive decapitation, and that a lost limb would heal as a stump. And I know that if I try to make myself a new arm I’ll leave something out. If it’s not perfect it won’t work, and I won’t want it.”

  The once-Princess of Ida did not say this petulantly, but used the resigned, rather furrowed tones of someone mildly aggrieved by self-understanding. You suggested, “So get the Saint of Joy to do it. She can be relied upon for physiological perfection.”

  “Oh, you crack-up,” said Ianthe, not lifting her eyes from her soup.

  “I personally would not let our eldest sister regrow any of my limbs,” you said, “but if perfection is what you desire—”

  “Boo to that,” said Ianthe.

  You grew bored. “Teacher, then.”

  “He’d tell me how wonderful it would be to do it myself. We’re not all Teacher’s sweet little darlings for whom he would do anything,” she remarked. “I have never been good at attracting indulgent fathers.”

  You bristled, but had no adequate comeback. You were busy massaging your itching fingertips, which were still red and sore: the cellular degradation was subtle enough that you were healing one layer at a time, to ensure you’d got everything. Not for you the smooth stump of a regenerated Lyctor: you had to do everything yourself. Yet you also would not turn to God, who might heal you in one blinding, soul-nauseating instant, flensing you utterly from the bones upward, and who might also awkwardly pat you on the shoulder, or look at you with that solemn, half-troubled smile that you both craved and hated.

  “Then I do not know what to tell you,” you remarked, “except that if you persist in asking for my opinion, at least pretend that you want it.”

  Ianthe pushed away her empty soup bowl and sat up, looking at you, stolen eyes narrowing with a sudden spurt of inspiration. Her paste-blond hair fell lankly over a face that should have been beautiful and over shoulders that should have been exquisite, but only contributed to the general impression of a wax figure in a pink dolly dress. You had never been given the option to play with dolls, but given hindsight you could not see yourself ever volunteering to have done so.

  “But you might do it,” she said, softly. You saw her looking at the necklet of bone that peeked out from the collar of your shirt, the top of your homebrew exoskeleton. “You could do it, Harrowhark. And maybe I’d even let you, seeing as we’re comrades-in-arms. Seeing as we’re intimates.”

  You stood up, more than a little repulsed, and your exoskeleton creaked as you bent to pick up the two-handed sword. “I am not perfection yet, when it comes to meat,” you said. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t be close … but you want something I can’t give. Nor is it something I’m prepared to give. Being honest, I am mildly disgusted you asked. Is there soup left in the kitchen?”

  “Oh, heaps,” said Ianthe, who appeared not to have taken offence at your rejection. It was so impossible to tell, with Ianthe. “I made it. It’s vile.”

  Were there less likely bedfellows now than you and she, the daughters of mystical Drearburh and self-regarding Ida? It was not a connection formed of any mutual admiration; if anything, the more you saw of Ianthe the less likely you were to mistake her for likeable. She made herself like an overdecorated cake: covered so thickly in icing and fondants and gums that it would take serious excavation to find any bread. As a necromancer she was a genius, though you thought she relied too much on shortcuts and circumventions. She had an exceptionally fine mind. She was not afraid of rigour. She was also obsessed with what might lie beneath the River and, though this was a touch hypocritical coming from you but never mind, a fucking crank.

  But a crank who had attained Lyctorhood. A crank whom you were now obliged to call sister, though you thought it hurt her to call anyone sister much more than it hurt you. A crank whom a dead self had respected enough to include in the work. A crank who had found you, distracted nearly to death, beside yourself, disgraced, having thrust your blade straight through a dead woman’s sternum, and simply said: Wish you’d taken off her arms. Perhaps there were more likely bedfellows, but yours hadn’t killed you yet.

  14

  THE MITHRAEUM, THE SEAT of the First Reborn! The Sanctuary of the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the bolthole of God—the removing place of hallowed bones, and the ossuary of the steadfast! A space station hidden forty billion light-years from the ever-burning light of Dominicus, lit by thanergetic starlight, set in the midst of the circumstellar disc, an ancient jewel within so much dead gravel.

  Your new homestead was perched in the middle of an asteroid field, made up of concentric rings, like a jeweller’s toy. It consisted of habitation quarters—a doughnut ring of them on the outer edge—an inner ring of preparation rooms, a couple of laboratories, a reading room that was bigger than Drearburh, and a storage lazaret where the foodstuffs were held frozen in time, unperishable. The other Lyctors complained that there was a strange aftertaste to thousand-year-old food kept necromantically pure, but you couldn’t taste it. There was also a water-replenishment plant and incidental rooms. The chapel, and God’s rooms, were at the centre. Everything else was for the dead. Arrayed were the bones of the dead and the bodies of the dead and the mummified heads of the dead, and the retrieved flesh-and-skeleton arms of the dead, preserved immediately after they had been blown off the bodies of the previously living, and the ashes of the dead and the hair of the dead and the fingernails of the dead, and the folded skins of the dead and the eyes of the dead, jarred in long and exquisite crystal containers filled with aldehydes. A Lyctor sitting on the outside of the rocky ring that haloed the Mithraeum would not think it hidden: they would see it as a screaming beacon of thanergy—a burning gyre of death—letters writ large in space, HERE IS THE GRAVEYARD AND WE ARE THE GRAVES.

  Your first months of Lyctorhood passed in an echoing, vaulted set of sterile rooms specially allotted to you. They were neutrally coloured in whites and greys and blacks, scrupulously clean, and relatively empty of bones. Unlike Ianthe’s, they had never been used. They had been intended for a Lyctor who had never slept between their sheets, or hung their clothes in the closets, or bathed their face in the water-pump sink. To you, who had lived and breathed the aged dust of family members past, and worn their clothes and used their things, to get an unused set of rooms was new and enticing. You folded your clothes into drawers that had never seen clothes and kept the few small items in your bureau neat and organised, finding some measure of satisfaction in returning each night to such a place. You had never become content, and you were still helpless, but you might take chilly gratification in the small things.

  No servants here, in the bolthole of the Necrolord Prime. Not a construct in sight. You all cooked your own food—or at least, Mercymorn cooked, and Augustine cooked, and even God himself cooked—you did not know about the other. Augustine was deigning to teach Ianthe, or at least make the attempt, but you did not see cookery in your future. You so rarely ate for pleasure that it was beyond imagining that you would become a normal human being who learnt how to make a sandwich. You were born of the Ninth House even if you had risen to the First, and you were happy with a cold collation. Ingredients could be taken from the storeroom and eaten as they were, in the broad steel kitchens so antique in their style: chrome-brushed countertops, wide square ovens, and a ring where a gas-lit fire came out if you swivelled a dial. Often you could find the Emperor of the Nine Houses there, sitting at one of the plex counters and drinking from a chipped mug of hot coffee.

  He was wholly Teacher now. His personal sitting room, a quietly appointed little space with a few chairs and a low table all comfortably faded wi
th wear, had become a familiar sanctum. The rest of his private chambers remained a forbidden tomb. You’d traditionally been drawn to forbidden tombs, but this one repelled even your curiosity. The doors were always locked, and you nurtured no ambition to see them otherwise. He often summoned you for a theoretical lesson, or the cups of tea you still hated but would have rather seen your skin flagellated off than say so, or simply to sit in silence. He had a trick of asking you to come over and talk, and then never actually talking, but sitting with you watching the asteroids continue their graceful orbit around a thanergenic star.

  Once you found him with a sheaf of flimsy spread out over the low table—months-old reports—and he was embarrassed; God was embarrassed. “I still think about it,” he confessed. “The eighteen thousand … the radiation missiles … Augustine says thinking about it before we endure Number Seven is folly, but the way I see it, if I fail with Number Seven nothing matters; if we win, then this is the thing that matters most.”

  It was always I when God ideated failure, as though the rest of you were not accountable for anything. You sat in your lustrous white robe, trying to appreciate the taste of black tea with milk in it, trying to look as though you might at any moment take the hard biscuit and place it in the tea as he did—the God of the Unstilled Mandible always gave you a biscuit—and you said, “Who did it, Lord?”

  “BOE, I’m assuming,” he said, a bit absently; then he paused at your confusion, and said, “That’s an acronym for a group of maniacs. A cult who came to our attention maybe five thousand years ago. We stumbled on them during one of our pushes into deep space. Stumbled … they’d been looking for us the whole time. They hate the Nine Houses.”

  You said, “I have never heard of them.”

  “You might have by another name—or simply as nameless insurgents. They prefer to present themselves as a kind of organic reaction, not a single coherent group. In fact, their existence depends on a secretive central organisation that sends its agents to people we encounter outside the Nine Houses, to populated planets we’re stewarding, and turns them against us from the shadows. But I know about them, and the Lyctors know about them. They upped their game about twenty-five years before you were born. They’d gotten a demagogue, a charismatic leader who wasn’t content to work behind the scenes. Hotspots flared up, but we took them down … cell by cell, bone by bone.”

  You remained silent, fingering the biscuit thoughtfully, developing the fiction that you might eat it sometime in the next myriad. Teacher quirked his eyebrows close together and looked at you with those oil-on-carbon eyes, and said, “I think they were behind Cytherea’s coming to Canaan House. That’s a damned sight more terrifying to me even than old nukes they have in storage somewhere.”

  You said, “Cytherea planned to lure you back to the Nine Houses. To attract a Resurrection Beast to kill you, I surmise?”

  “Lure is a strong word. I still think it was a crime of passion. I’m not saying she didn’t have other reasons. It’s just that I think some of them were heartbreakingly simple. I could’ve gotten through to her, given time,” said God. “Time—it’s always time—she was overworked and underloved. Whenever something needed doing, she’d always say, Me, I will, and because she acted as though she had a leaven of selfishness to her it was easy to say Of course, not recognising how many times she’d said I will … not recognising how she worked herself into the grave.”

  You said, “A Seventh House flaw. A fatal longing for the picturesque.”

  “I understand the Houses have crystallised into … types,” he said, and he dipped his biscuit into his tea and ate it quickly, before the sodden part could lose coherency and fall into the mug. You did not understand why anyone ate these biscuits or drank this tea. “But they got to her, Harrow. I know they got her on side, though I’m damned if I know how they even got to be in the same room. BOE hates necromancers and necromancy. It’s their fundamental tenet. And Cytherea? She would’ve been their bogeyman. A Lyctor. My Hand.”

  You were finding that if you held half a mouthful of tea in your mouth it cooled, and when it was cool it tasted more serene. Unfortunately, while you were still figuring this trick out, the Emperor of the Nine Houses leaned back and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, looked at you seriously, and said: “Harrowhark, how many in your family? Your mother and father are dead, that much I know.”

  You swallowed in haste. How he knew that—the secret you had broken yourself attempting to keep hidden from the rest of the Houses, from the rest of your own House—you didn’t know. But you looked at his kindly, open countenance, and you said with the refreshing candour that came from talking to God: “One, since my parents ended their lives. I was the only child. My mother miscarried multiple times before I was born; I don’t know how many.”

  His gaze didn’t leave yours. “How were you born?”

  “I don’t understand.” You did understand.

  “Harrowhark,” he said, “You are a Lyctor. You generate too much light, or too much darkness, for me to look at you and make out any strong detail. But there are details I have surmised: you were awake during your first time in the River, and you performed necromancy, and believe me when I tell you only one other person has ever done that their first time in. Keep in mind that she was an adult necromancer who went on to found the Sixth House. You have achieved incredible things. I understand your personality and your background, and I understand how they might turn natural talent into … you. But it doesn’t account for what I see in those moments when I can see you clearly. How did they get you?”

  You put your cup of tea down, your biscuit still untouched, and you said as though pushed after long interrogation: “My parents gassed fifty-four infants, eighty-one children, and sixty-five teenagers, and harnessed that thanergy bloom to conceive me. My mother used the resultant power to modify her ovum on a chromosomal level, so thanergy ignition wouldn’t compromise the embryo. She did this so I would be a necromancer.”

  The Emperor of the Nine Resurrections looked at you for a long time, and then he swore, very quietly, beneath his breath. You thought you understood, but then he said: “This was … all so different … before we discovered the scientific principles.”

  “I am assured they had no previous research to go by. They came up with it themselves.”

  God said, a little bewildered, “That’s not quite what I mean. But to concentrate so much thanergy into so precise a task—like using a nuclear detonation to power a sewing machine … The ovum ought to have been obliterated at a subatomic level. Do you understand what they did?”

  “Intimately,” you said. “They explained it to me when I was very young. I could draw the theorem mathematics, if you gave me some flimsy.”

  “No, I don’t mean mechanically. Conceptually. To all intents and purposes, your mother and father committed a type of resurrection,” he said. “They did something nigh-on impossible. I know, because I have committed the same act, and I know the price I had to pay. Thalergetic modification of an embryo is difficult enough, but to achieve the same thing with thanergy…”

  You gave a helpless half shrug. “My parents were not flesh magicians,” you said. “But they were the greatest necromancers the Ninth House had yet produced.”

  “No doubt,” said the Emperor. “But, Harrowhark—even as the product of two obvious geniuses—you are a walking miracle. A unique theorem. A natural wonder.”

  You looked at him, and you said: “I have just told you that I am the product of my parents’ genocide.”

  The Emperor set down his tea and finished off his biscuit, and did that terrible thing that he did, on occasion: he reached over to touch your shoulder in that brief, tentative way, the lightest and swiftest of gestures, as though afraid that he might burn you. Your mother had guided your hands over bloating corpses. Your father had held down the corners of great tomes, and his sleeve had brushed your six-year-old-fingers as he showed you how best to turn their pages. Both of them had presse
d a rough rope made of coated fibre into your hands—you recalled the pressure from their palms, their attempts to be gentle. When the Emperor touched you, your body recalled, unbidden, each rare and terrible touch committed by your mother and father.

  God said, “I will shepherd your dead two hundred. I will take on their burden to mourn and cherish in more ways than you’ll understand right now. And I’ll remember your parents, who did such a godawful thing to my people and theirs. I will remember it until the universe contracts in on itself and wipes clean what they did, and makes blank such an indelible stain. I acknowledge to you and to infinity that I am the Emperor of the Nine Houses—the Necrolord Prime—and that their stain must be regarded as my stain. Consider it my crime, Harrowhark. I pledge myself to making it right.”

  A red heat had begun at your exoskeleton’s necklet—travelled up your throat—darkened your face beneath your paint until you felt as though you had been held too close to a stove. You said, “Lord, you can’t.”

  “Teacher.”

  “Teacher, have mercy on me. Please don’t tell anyone.”

  A child’s plea. Nobody has to know. To God! For a moment, he changed. He grew angry, and you thought it was at the rank foolishness, the irresponsibility of what you’d said. Those monstrous, unnatural eyes narrowed, and his mouth became hard as the stones and rocks that had made up the planetoid you’d later slaughter. For a moment you perceived a hint of his great immortal age—of an enormous distance between you, of an ignition too bright for you to conceive. You were an insect standing before a forest fire. You were a cell beholding a heart.

  “Harrowhark, nobody has the right to know,” he said fiercely. “Nobody has the right to blame you. Nobody can judge. What has happened, has happened, and there’s no putting it back in the box. They wouldn’t understand. They don’t have to. I officially relieve you from living in fear. Nobody has to know.”