Harrow the Ninth Read online

  That night in your bed, you did not weep. Your body tried, and failed, to produce tears. Afterward, God was more careful with you than ever, and he had been careful before; sometimes you caught him glancing at you as if he was trying to see something in the confines of your face, but whatever he was looking for it was not what your parents had done. At the time you swore that you would tell him about the Tomb: you would find it within yourself to admit that also. You had never told anyone about the Tomb, but you would tell him—you would tell him if he asked—no, that was equivocation. You would tell him of your own free will, and be glad of any punishment he saw fit to give you.

  Before you’d left him then, when your tea had cooled sufficiently that you were no longer required to drink it, you’d asked: “What does BOE stand for?”

  “Blood of Eden,” he’d said, slowly.

  “Who is Eden?”

  “Someone they left to die,” said God wearily. “How sharper than the serpent’s tooth, et cetera … Harrow, if you bother to remember anything from my ramblings, please remember this: once you turn your back on something, you have no more right to act as though you own it.”

  At the time, that had made perfect sense to you.

  15

  ONE OTHER CONSOLATION WAS THE BODY. She kept close by in the months that followed; she walked around in an old bloodstained copy of the scintillating First House robes, and you startled whenever you saw her. But you took enormous comfort in watching her pace your sterile, empty quarters, and in watching her kneel before the mummified assembly that lived within the corridors and apses of the Mithraeum. The greatest gift she gave you was that when you laid yourself down on your bed to sleep fully clothed, you would dream of her with an uncanny, profound regularity. You could not in fact dream of anything else.

  In dreaming you would return to your old bed back in the sanctuary of Drearburh—your childhood bed, getting a little bit short in the toes for you now. You prayed at its foot, no longer bracketed by either gruesome great-aunt. Instead, opposite your cot would be the Body, her hands neatly folded on the ancient shawl that your mother had always laid on the bed—the electric light in the sconce shining down on the firm musculature of her forearms, the calluses upon those dead palms. Her eyes she kept closed, each wet and frozen lash brushing cheeks blanched by expiration.

  “I’m afraid,” you’d say.

  She would say softly, in the voice that prickled each hair on your scalp with a sweet, deep electricity: “What of, Harrowhark?”

  “Tonight I am afraid to die.”

  “That is the same fear as failure,” she said once. “You don’t fear dying. You can tolerate pain. You are afraid that your life has incurred a debt that your death will not pay. You see death as a mistake.”

  You said, a little bitterly: “What else is it?”

  The dead corse of the Locked Tomb—the death of the Emperor—the maiden with the sword and the chains, the girl in the ice, the woman of the cold rock, the being behind the stone that could never be rolled away—said, in half-confused tones she had never taken with you: “I don’t know. I died, once … no, twice,” but then she had said no more.

  Another time you said, “I’m afraid of myself. I am afraid of going mad.”

  Another time, “I am still afraid of Cytherea the First.”

  And, “I am afraid of God.”

  And again: “Do I have Ortus’s eyes? Are these ones mine? I never really looked at them— Beloved, what were my eyes like?”

  Unfortunately, that time she answered. Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she talked to you, quietly, about discursive subjects, and sometimes she didn’t say a thing. But now, that which was buried insensate said quite calmly, “She asked me not to tell you.”

  You awoke, flat on the floor in front of the water-pump sink, screaming until your throat was broken. When you stared at your bloodshot eyes in the mirror and tried to remember Ortus Nigenad’s, you couldn’t recall a difference: they were both that deep and fathomless black, the colour Ianthe called black roses, because Ianthe was overfamiliar and frankly a pervert. You tried to imagine Ortus’s sad, heavy weariness staring at you from your own mirror. It did not work. You were both terribly relieved and terribly frightened.

  16

  IN THE FIRST FEW weeks you had created a new cipher, based off the original with a few mathematical changes just in case Ianthe had gleaned too much data from the envelopes. In this you started to collate your thoughts and findings on the Lyctors around you: a pitiful memorandum of opinion and perceived fact, mostly useless, gathered in the hope that by examining your findings in aggregate you might somehow receive wisdom. You had always liked to write notes. You grieved the loss of your diary from Canaan House, but your things had been filtered through Ianthe back to you, which meant that all you got was a small supply of sacramental paint and your old clothes. When you inquired about the diary, you received the blunt response that it had been burned on your own orders.

  Your section on Ianthe was very short:

  IANTHE (WHILOM TRIDENTARIUS) THE FIRST

  Unworthy of trust. Suspects me mad.

  You should have known the former, and the latter was all your own fault. The first slip was the matter of Cytherea’s tomb.

  The Emperor had laid the corpse of Cytherea the First in a small chamber off the central residential atrium, a little too close for comfort. This atrium was a well of corridor shafts off to other rings of the station, and its floor was an exquisite mandala of hand bones under glass—each metacarpal dyed the colour of its House, dominated by ombres of white to crimson for the Second and white to navy for the Fourth. Around the mandala were tiles of raised brown stone that rapped sharply when one stepped on them. There were no windows to speak of, just strong electric lights from round holes in the ceiling, and in the middle hung a delicate chandelier of white crystals. The room was pillared with three massive steel-edged columns on either side, each a cacophony of exposed wire under smoked glass. These wires were thronged about with bone, with glistening strands of fat wrapped around some of the threads of copper, instead of plex; they reeked of naked thalergy, and their purpose was still not immediately apparent to you. Every so often a whole arm bone would peek out of this nest of soft yellow fat-wrapped wire. You assumed it was not another memorial.

  There were nine decorative arches on the east-most side of the room. You had by now investigated each arch carefully. The brown floor tiles were inlaid halfway up the walls in these arches, and then became glass of every different colour, and in the centre of each polychromatic sweep was a sword-bracket. Some of the brackets were empty, and some held rapiers. One in particular always drew you back to it: a black rapier with a basket hilt formed of ebon wires. At the termination of each wire was a single canine tooth, and the end—pommel!—was a soft, worn knob of black-dyed bone.

  The side room they put Cytherea in was not so decorated. The door was always open to reveal her laid out on a stretcher, with candles all around her that never seemed to go out or melt down, covered by those chubby blush rosebuds that also never seemed to open or rot. In these two miracles you detected the hand of the Emperor Divine. Every so often you saw him in there, having a quiet conversation with the body in the same way one would talk to a sleeping child; sometimes Augustine was there, and once Mercy. You never saw the other. You had ventured in there yourself often, even though it was gauche, even though you had done enough damage. Something about her troubled you, and you thought it was the paranoid madness, but you couldn’t be sure. Your brain told you that the arms so chastely crossed over that skewered chest had been moved a little. Your brain told you that the lips were a little too parted. When you had told Teacher of your worries—you little imbecile—he had grimaced, and worried his forehead with his thumb momentarily, and said:

  “Nobody would touch her, Harrow. I haven’t.”

  “I know, I just—”

  “Augustine wouldn’t, out of love,” he said. “Mercy wouldn’t, out of supe
rstition. And Ortus…” He looked at you carefully, as always when he mentioned the other; the name always came awkwardly to his lips. “Ortus wouldn’t out of respect, believe me. He wouldn’t even think of such a thing. Doesn’t sound Ianthe’s style either.”

  “But I thought…”

  “I think perhaps you should try to avoid that room,” he had suggested, sympathetically.

  You had burned: you had been molten with shame and resentment: you had been reduced entirely to flame. Yet for all that you now walked devoutly past the doorway where lay the peaceful corpse of Cytherea the First, you entered that doorway in your waking nightmares: watched, lost in the hallucination of your mind’s eye, as those frozen fingers twitched into arcane formations, as each bare toe on each chilly foot shivered as though the corpse had been touched with an electrified wire.

  Your mistake was the time you stopped just outside the room, arrested by muffled creaks at the edges of your hearing; tortured past any shame, you turned to Ianthe and said:

  “Do you perceive any sound from within the mortuary chapel?”

  She said, “Do you try to sound as portentous as possible, or does it just sort of happen naturally?”

  “Answer the damn question, Tridentarius!”

  You did not call her Tridentarius outside of a locked room; so she looked at you queerly, and said, “No,” and then, as though more enlightened by what she saw in your face, gently: “No, I don’t, crazycakes.”

  And you did not ask her again.

  There was so much more you might have written: Eyes have not reverted to lilac since the River. Arm is continued weak point. Still cries at night. Cannot actually be anaemic considering diet primarily red meat and apples. Regularly undersleeps. Begrudges my relationship with Teacher. Knows too much.

  Your other sections were more substantial:

  AUGUSTINE (WHILOM QUINQUE) THE FIRST, SAINT OF PATIENCE (WHY?)

  The name had been easy to get. You had simply found him at his midafternoon cup of tea and cigarette—the Saint of Patience was as regular as a worm, and had no apparent fear of fire, or having to regrow his own taste buds—and asked him outright.

  “Ah! Finally, my biographer,” he had said, rubbing his hands together in a show of deep satisfaction. “I’ve been waiting for this, Harrowhark. A, U, G, U, S, T, I, N, E, Augustine; height six feet; visage can be described as attractive but grave; eyes can be cinereous; and if you’re appreciative of poor little Cyth’s tradition—” She was always poor little Cyth, while he smiled, and looked directly at you.”It’s Augustine Alfred. Alfred was five foot ten—let’s get that down for posterity. He was my other half—get that down too, for the human-interest aspect.”

  You were momentarily revolted by the apparent Fifth House tradition. “You and your cavalier were—wedded?”

  He did not turn a hair at wedded, or, as Ianthe would, say back exactly what you had in a high-pitched voice, for which you would one day jerk her white and beating heart from her colourless ribcage and eat it dripping before her. You did not examine eat it dripping as you maybe should have done. He just laughed in the uproarious, slap-your-thigh way that the Saint of Patience always laughed. It was not a laugh that really ever seemed to find anything genuinely funny. When this peal of performative humour had died down, Augustine said, “Bless you, sis! He was my brother.”

  Killed own sibling.

  Augustine the First was the closest thing you had ever experienced to human plex. On the outside, he was perfectly painted, in a sort of antique Fifth House style: all manners and politesse and over-easy familiarity. Yet there was nothing inside him but an equally easy contempt. It was as though ten thousand years had built up a shell and left a space at the centre. Nothing seemed to touch Augustine. He was effervescent and charming in a way you found a little tedious and flip, especially on those teeth-grinding occasions when God called you all to eat a social meal together. But there was never any real emotion, or reaction, or opinion—his mouth said one thing, and his face could contort itself into any number of silly expressions, but those eyes were devoid of substance. Cinereous was at least correct: ash also looked solid upon first glance, but was insubstantial filth on contact.

  Poor relationship with Mercymorn.

  You had written this understatement of the myriad when you thought that highly strung Mercy was easily out of patience with the sillier and more frivolous Augustine, in those first few weeks. He cultivated a specific expression whenever Mercymorn was talking: an expression that was meant to say to all assembled, At least we suffer together, and that more than once you had seen Ianthe smother a laugh at, so comical was the mouth. But that was the painted-on expression. The plex had been shaped differently. Though you often saw them pass in the hallway as if the other did not exist, you once spied a different encounter while safely ensconced in an alcove. They’d stopped in front of each other, with Mercy trying to pass left—Augustine made himself intangibly too much left to pass—Mercy trying to pass right—Augustine made himself intangibly too much right to pass—and Mercy saying, tightly: “Get out of my way, you miserable ass.”

  Augustine had said something you did not catch, but then something you did: “—back to the bad old tricks of decades past.”

  “Oh, as if you’re my keeper, you chattering imbecile!”

  “But does John know, my child?” said the Saint of Patience, smiling.

  Mercy had bristled, the nacreous whites of her robe visibly shivering. “That,” she said, “is a foul implication.”

  “I’m not implying anything. Does John—”

  “—and it’s obscene the way you call him that when—”

  “Mercymorn!” said Augustine lightly. “I won’t fall for any of your worn-out tricks, my girl. Now, look: do I have to kill you before you get us both in trouble, or not?”

  From your vantage point, you could see that the Saint of Joy’s face was a stiff white oval. Those hurricane eyes roiled within a face that was trembling and fixed. You could not see Augustine’s.

  She said, “Don’t threaten me.”

  “Or what? You’ll tell Daddy?” His tone of voice hadn’t changed. “Good grief … You wouldn’t get close enough to touch me, Mercymorn. No, I am not afraid of you. You are not very nice, but you are also not very clever, when it comes down to it. I’m going to give you three recommendations. One is to be in my airspace less. Two is to stop messing around with Cyth’s body. Three is to stop playing the rather dangerous game you’re playing—the one you said you’d stop.”

  “I won’t do a thing you say.” She sounded tearful now.

  “Don’t pull that face. I know you like I know my own soul … you’re thinking, If I move now, can I touch his neck before he can stop me? And heigh ho, there goes my trachea! It wouldn’t matter even if you were quick enough on the draw, you know.”

  “As though you could ever—”

  “If you killed me, I don’t think he’d forgive you, you see,” said Augustine. The easy, confidential tone of voice had gone. It was now flat and immovable and bored. “But if I killed you—if I stubbed you out beneath my foot, which would still be more than you deserve—then I am convinced that it would take me a mere hundred years to get John to say, I know why you did it, old chap, and I’m sorry, and for everything to come up Augustine. You have shot your bolt too many times.”

  “How dare—”

  “You have rendered yourself unlovable, Mercy,” said Augustine. “You’re the second saint. He’s sentimental over you. But don’t forget that he’s spent the last ten thousand years on a perpetual search-and-destroy mission out of, as far as I can tell, purely symbolic retribution. John is never as sentimental as you think. Do you need me to write this down for you, so you can read it to yourself each night? You—are—unnecessary—to—him. Worse still, you’ve become an embarrassment. I wouldn’t set myself up as his replacement A.L. He doesn’t need another bodyguard, and even she was significantly more lucid than you are.”

  You’d e
xpected a response. None came. You looked at the Saint of Joy—and at her expression withdrew into your alcove, flattening yourself, lest she pick you as a target to vent her frustrations on. There was silence from the corridor. Then Augustine broke it: “Stay away from me, Joy. I find myself so profoundly tired of looking at your face,” and his clickety-clackety bootsteps sounded down the corridor.

  Mercymorn’s voice floated back, somewhat strangled: “But I haven’t even touched Cytherea!”

  Afterward you stopped seeing them in the same room, except when the Necrolord Prime called you together for dinner, and then they sat as far apart as possible.

  Favours Ianthe.

  A source of continuing annoyance to you. You’d never been anybody’s favourite anything and did not intend to start. But the idea that the Princess of Ida had managed to capture another’s affection was bilious. Yet from the very start, Augustine had inclined toward her, and she had deployed her whole menagerie of coquettish smiles in return, each looking as though it had spent a month prowling the desert before being captured and put to this circus use.

  She was often seen at his side, fully absorbed in whatever pearls of wisdom were dropping from the Saint of Patience’s lips; drinking calamitous amounts of hot tea with much the same expression, one you thought ill-suited to her shadowed eyes and white mouth; and, though less calmly, taking instruction in the long training hall with its polished wooden floorboards, the wood so new you were hesitant to step on it. It was only then that they seemed at odds, as the so-called Saint of Patience ran out of it every time Ianthe put hand to rapier.

  He smoked his fierce cigarettes as he put her through her paces. She was always so tremendously bored by sword exercises: “I thought the point was to outsource this, elder brother,” you had heard her remark more than once. He would get cross quickly. From what little you could tell, her form was perfect. Her lines were exquisite. She never dropped the sword or fumbled with it, which proved again how inadequate a standard what little you could tell was. But there was something he did not like about how that right arm clutched that sword.