Harrow the Ninth Page 17

  “Let go,” you heard him tell her once.

  “I’m assuming you mean metaphorically.”

  “Younger sister,” he said cordially, “some nice boy spent his life learning that sword for you, now you are trying to add your opinions to his, and they are simply not worth half a toot in this hot and terrible universe. Stop holding it like it smells—or like a banana you’re trying to burst—Emperor almighty, Ianthe! I’ve seen you do this perfectly, so why must you persist in doing it poorly?”

  At that she had said a rude word, flung the sword down, and fled. Augustine finished his cigarette in a ruminative manner, and you stared at the rapier you had been given. The Emperor asked you to handle it, so you scheduled some time for handling it, with absolutely jack shit arising from the exercise.

  “She can do it, you know,” he remarked to the air. “She simply needs to quit steeping in self-pity.”

  You said, “Humiliating her is perhaps not the best curative.”

  “Harrowhark,” he said, smiling, tapping his cigarette out on the skull of some long-dead Cohort hero, “if Ianthe’s opinion isn’t worth a fart in a hurricane, try to imagine how much less I value yours.”

  So far away from Drearburh; so far from your congregation, and the elders and laypeople who had blushed to kiss your knucklebone prayer beads. You felt you actually had valuable information in this instance, but Ianthe’s secrets were not held in common, for you to spill so thoughtlessly. “Then that is your downfall,” you said.

  “You are Anastasia come again.”

  In a perfect world, Augustine’s cool would have warmed Mercymorn toward you. She did cultivate a distaste for Ianthe, but did not become any less shrill, acid, or contemptuous in your direction. Naturally a large portion of your education fell to her—with Augustine busy, there was nobody left for you—but she more than once expressed her view that Augustine had nabbed the “working baby” on purpose, and left her the dregs to spite her.

  Once when you were tired you had said to Ianthe, “Doesn’t it chafe, carrying on after him the way you do? Picking up his things? Smiling with your teeth showing?”

  “My teeth are extremely white and I brush assiduously, so I see no problem showing them off,” said Ianthe.

  “Lighting his cigarettes and cooing, ‘That is so fascinating, elder brother.’”

  “I intend to take on the habit myself,” said Ianthe. “Cigarettes! On a space station! What a power play.”

  “Do you ever wake up and think to yourself, When did the Princess of Ida become this grovelling slime?”

  She smiled at you, with those teeth so brushed and white. The eyes that had once been chill lavender were now blue, pattered with brown flecks, and as mocking as ever. “Most days,” she said. “Oh, for crying out loud, Harrowhark, smiling and listening to some quite interesting stories about his ten thousand years is no hardship. Especially not when it may make him think twice about leaving me to be eaten by a Resurrection Beast. Carrying off Corona’s con for over twenty years taught me that shame is a privilege. We’re puppies, you and I: I with my lame paw, and you with three legs missing insisting you can make it on your own. And God help us both, because we are surrounded by wolves.”

  Ianthe ended this startling speech by chucking you under the chin. You were too outraged and befuddled to dodge her. She said, “Show your endearing side, Harry. It may save your life.”

  Spirit magician.

  Another terrible understatement. Augustine was a spirit magician like the Mithraeum was a box with some bones. You did not begrudge him this expertise. Spirit magic had never been your forte. He had a Lyctor’s power, and a myriad’s refinement: he taught to a curriculum you had barely known existed. The dead Harrowhark of your letters had told you to take instruction: and so did God, shepherding you and Ianthe both to take lessons from the Mithraeum’s resident expert in Resurrection Beasts.

  “It’s not my primary wheelhouse,” Augustine explained. “But since our last expert vanished into a large intestine, unravelled by a troop of ghosts, I’m the last spirit adept standing.”

  “He’s being modest,” said God. “The barriers between us and the River are Augustine’s. He could plunge half a city into it, if he wanted.”

  “What a gorgeously futile idea,” said Augustine warmly. “I should chuck things in there more often. There’s no way that could come back to haunt me. No, my Lord, I am not Cassiopeia; I am a spirit generalist, and happy with my lot.”

  “So we’re talking about ghosts, and liminal spaces, and hell,” Ianthe said. Ianthe always wanted everything brought back to liminal spaces and hell, as though her rooms were not enough. You could not deny an interest yourself.

  The Saint of Patience never took this bait. “Dear one, I need the right moment to go to hell. But ghosts and spirits are as good a place as any to begin. You might say I like to follow energy trails back to their source. Revenants in particular are fun that way. Resurrection Beasts feed like revenants: they find thalergenic planets and guzzle them up wholesale, crack them open like clams, and take the soul for meat. Then they turn all that remnant thalergy into what we call the corpus, or the hive, and the thanergy—the dead clam itself—for armour. You can ask the Saint of Duty about the thanergy transfer.” (You did not think this would be viable.) “When you look at a revenant on this side, what you’re seeing is the thanergy mass that it’s gathered. Usually revenants can only inhabit things connected to them in life—the best and most desirable would be its own corpse or skeleton, or planet if you’re an RB: you’ve formed a bond with that thing through habit and genetics, it’s your soul’s preferred housing. Unfortunately, apopneumatic shock makes most of us do a blind dash away from the site of our deaths—Resurrection Beasts included. The card up the sleeve of the revenant, and the Resurrection Beast, is that it can inhabit anything it’s got a connection to. Anything thanergetically connected with their death.”

  Ianthe suggested, in what you saw as a low-value suck-up play: “Burial implements. Grave goods. Any possession that they kept over time, that was exposed to their thalergy and thanergy. If they were murdered, the murder weapon.”

  “Bang on,” said Augustine. “Even things that touched the murder weapon, though the connection’s fairly weak there and the revenant would have to be particularly bloody-minded.”

  She pressed, “Could they use thanergy they generated after death? Thanergy directly related to themselves? I mean, things they kill.”

  “You are absolutely and beautifully right,” said the Saint of Patience warmly, and you were not annoyed that she had won such approbation. It was not as though your brain had failed to come to the same conclusion; you simply hadn’t felt like articulating. “This is how the RBs got on, having scarpered away from the Dominicus system. Resurrection Beasts add to their corpus anything they’ve done a good solid murder to. They eat planets; they suck up the thanergy, then add bits of the planet to themselves, getting bigger and meaner each time. Your average revenant doesn’t kill human beings and stick them on its outside—for which I’m devoutly thankful. The last time we eyeballed Number Seven, it was over fifty thousand kilometres in diameter…”

  “This is why you will be sent out to establish the perimeter,” said God, as Augustine was lost in fifty thousand kilometres of reverie. “We can slow Number Seven if we take away its food. If we flip a planet all at once—a thalergetic death—the Resurrection Beast will ignore it.”

  (“This is the way we used to prepare a thalergy planet for necromancy,” God explained to you, much later, after Mercy began schooling you in the way of butchering planetoids. “No adept can perform any substantive work if they’re reduced to scavenging trace thanergy. Even a master of the Ninth can only do so much with a few scattered bones. So back at the start we’d drop in a single Lyctor, unnoticed, to start the thanergy reaction. Not to flip the whole planet, you understand, just to get the juice flowing.” He made a hand gesture for get the juice flowing, which made your head hurt. “The
n within an hour or two you could send down a team of adepts and be confident they’d have all the reserves they needed. Nowadays we can’t afford to use Lyctors, so the first strike falls to the men and women of the Cohort, and they do a magnificent job … but the old way was neater, and kinder too, I think.”)

  Ianthe said, “If the Resurrection Beast is that big, surely the main worry is that we’ll be drawn into its gravity well.”

  “Yes, but it almost never travels as a physical revenant. That’s why it’s so damned hard to track Beasts: much easier if they’d just leave flattened galaxies in their wake. They travel as River projections instead. ‘Periscoping,’ Cass called it. And once they do instantiate, they don’t seem to want to get too close. This is where the Heralds come in. Unlike normal revenants, RBs have developed external actors, and those are the things that will attack the Mithraeum. We’ve nicknamed this the hive, and inside the hive are the Heralds. They’ll look like independent creatures, but really they’re just extensions of it. Spider, web. Hand, finger.”

  This whole lesson took place with you, God, and Ianthe sitting at the dining table, which still smelled like breakfast, and you did not like the lack of ceremony. Augustine was leaning over the table drawing a careful diagram on a piece of flimsy with a pencil he had borrowed from God. The resulting sketch was almost impossible to follow.

  “You keep saying creatures,” you said. “That is a little—”

  “Nondescript?” said Augustine. “I can’t describe them, sis. The first time we ran into the tools of a Resurrection Beast—and this was just looking at them, I mean, they hadn’t even engaged us—I watched a Lyctor, one I had never hitherto seen so much as cry out, scream like a colicky child. Another two, RIP since, simply vomited.”

  God added, “The Heralds and corpus sometimes vary between Beasts. They are the dead parts their centre has mashed together. Some Lyctors have seen them as insectoid. They’re monstrous, and deadly, and there are often hundreds of them—thousands.”

  Once upon a time you might have asked questions: good, interesting, thorny questions, the difficult ones that showed you knew something and could be relied upon to run where you were directed, blindfolded. This time, you kept blessedly quiet.

  “And they only halfway matter,” said the Emperor, vindicating your choice. “Certainly they’re dangerous. If you are devoured by the Heralds I cannot bring you back. But you can destroy them easily enough, if you’ve a blade and the facility to use it … or necromancy. But as a Lyctor, of course, your necromancy is needed elsewhere.”

  “Would you like to teach this one, John,” said Augustine, patiently.

  “No—sorry—keep going.”

  “I mean, I love the tack you’re taking. I hadn’t thought to scare the living wee out of them with, They’ll eat you alive, starting with your feet.”

  “Sorry! Sorry. Go on.”

  Briefly smiling at God, Augustine pointed at the diagram. “The part of the Resurrection Beast that we can destroy squats in the River, ladies,” he said. “Just as the most important part of the revenant is where the soul is, the most important part of the Resurrection Beast is sitting over here. You’ll leave your bodies, which protect you nonetheless—your good old cav’s right there in your neurons and amygdala, ready to come out for exactly such a happenstance—and they’ll fight it much better than you can because they’re immune to Herald fear. I have lived for a very long time, and when I see a Herald, I still get the most appalling whim-whams. My cavalier doesn’t care. I removed the part of him that did when I became a Lyctor … That’s his main advantage. Your body can’t, and won’t, use necromancy without you. The power doesn’t flow both ways.”

  Ianthe said, “But if we’re in the River, then the ghosts—”

  “You’re a projection. They can’t hurt you,” said the King Undying. “And you won’t even see them. No ghost will approach a Beast submerged.”

  He sat back in his chair. God had a quiet, ambling posture, an upright if slightly stoop-shouldered gait; he was mobile and alive. He was always somehow more alive than everyone else around him, and yet dislocated from what you considered living. A man-shaped eclipse. “And there we fight it,” he said simply. “Much like fighting anything else.”

  Augustine said, “You ward against it. You hack up whatever it points in your direction. You wither its false flesh. It has form as we have form in the River, and it’s vulnerable the same way we are. You get a good tight grip on its soul and you pull the damn thing to pieces. In the end, if you wear it down, you exorcise it altogether. It is a revenant … a revenant of a specific hell.”

  The Emperor said, “Once defeated, it can be forced down into the abyss, and from there it will not return.”

  “We hope,” said Augustine. “Oh, Lord, do we ever hope.”

  17

  MERCYMORN (WHILOM???) THE FIRST, SAINT OF JOY (IRONY?)

  Not forthcoming.

  When you had asked Mercymorn outright for her House name, she had simply stared at you with disgusted astonishment, as though you were a turd who had learned to dance, and then said, “Go away!”

  Unfortunately, Augustine had been no more forthcoming than Mercymorn. He did not recall Mercy’s House name, would not remember if he could, and had most likely forgotten the information immediately to make room for something more worthwhile, i.e., anything else.

  Poor relationship with Augustine.

  “She might not have even had one,” he said, shaking out an ancient sheet of flimsy newsprint. “Do keep in mind that our holy resurrections were staggered, and it took generations for our merry band to assemble. Alfred and I were there early enough to found the Koniortos Court on the Fifth, but Lyctors like Cyth wouldn’t be born for years and years, and she spent her whole life suffering Seventh House woo-woo theories regarding the value of hereditary cancer … whereas Mercy is the oldest lag except for me, and she was out hammering at the Eighth House before the paint was even dry on the Resurrection.”

  Contentious cavalier.

  When you asked God why she was the Saint of Joy, he simply said: “I really intended those titles to describe the cavalier, Harrowhark, not the Lyctor. Alfred for patience; Pyrrha for duty; Cristabel for joy. Mercy would be the first to tell you that Cristabel Oct was a delight.” He paused and said, “Maybe don’t mention her name to Augustine though.”

  Mercy was not the first to tell you that Cristabel Oct was a delight. When you mentioned her cavalier’s name, she went rigid, as though stung. The Saint of Joy turned to you, scrunch-mouthed and nauseous with rage, and wheezed: “Don’t you ever—ever—use her name with me, you useless child, you impertinent cell,” which was a discovery in and of itself.

  Yet it was Augustine who said fervently, “A total delight. Effervescent. Kind to animals and children. A master of the sword. Did not have the intellect you’d ordinarily find in a sandwich or an orange, and was a sickening twerp into the bargain. The Eighth House will never see her like again.”

  Anatomist.

  What else to call Mercy’s power? As a Lyctor, you could read a human body’s thanergy and thalergy like a book—but a picture book with helpful arrows pointing at places of interest, laying them naked and open to you. If you looked at Ianthe, however, you saw nothing. When you even looked at the nothing, it hurt the eye and wobbled the fat of the brain. Of course, she was no more immune to theorems than you were, but without the clarity of Lyctoral sight those theorems became much harder to use. You could press your hand to Ianthe’s chest, if you wanted—which you didn’t, naturally—and the blood-warm sternum beneath would gradually unfold for you. But it would take effort, and close contact, and you would need to know the sternum.

  Mercymorn the First knew the sternum. Mercymorn the First knew the pericardial fat, the soft-tissue secrets of the mediastinum, the false-heart shape of the thymus. You might have to press your whole palm to Ianthe’s breastbone—doubtless—and take valuable seconds to search out the bone, and the things behind the bo
ne, their characters, their locations. Mercymorn could pinpoint your pineal gland with the merest touch to the skull. This was not due to some Lyctoral power that she alone possessed, no honed necromantic theorem; as God had told you, she had simply memorised the body, by rote, over the course of ten thousand years. She had studied the measurements and their range of differences, and on the rare occasions when she needed to assume where something was or how it worked, her assumptions had the accuracy of ten thousand years’ experience. What Mercy didn’t know about the body wasn’t just not worth knowing, said the Emperor; if she didn’t know it, it hadn’t existed previously.

  Over the dinner table you asked Augustine why, if it was simply a matter of memory, he hadn’t done the same thing. Ianthe choked discreetly on a forkful of boiled flour-paste shapes in red sauce.

  “Lord! I can barely remember what I had for lunch last week,” he said. “Besides, anatomy has too narrow an application.”

  Mercymorn opened her mouth, hurricane eyes promising a coastal lashing, and said, “Application!” but Augustine said, languidly—

  “One would only really need it to kill Lyctors, Harrowhark, and the rest of us never evinced any interest in that.”

  That broke up the dinner somewhat.

  * * *

  There was much you might have written about the last Lyctor of the trio. There was useful information aplenty—you held it all carefully in your head, repeated it to yourself day by day on the basis that it might yet save your life. In a way, you were more intimate with the Saint of Duty than you were with either Augustine or Mercymorn.