Harrow the Ninth Page 18

  The thing was, life in the Mithraeum was very comfortable. You wanted for nothing. There was plentiful food and heat and water, none of which you could ever dismiss, having grown up in Drearburh—having pored so long over whether or not you had food and heat and water enough to support your dwindling population. You lived in the midst of a beautiful memorial to those who had offered the Nine Houses their bravery, and skill, and their lives, the very best of the best, whose deeds were proven now by the presence of their bones in the holiest temple in the holiest system in the holiest part of space. The House of God. The Temple of the Nine Resurrections. The Necrolord Prime.

  Looked at objectively, there were really only two things wrong with your life. One was that you were not a normal Lyctor. The other was even less complicated.

  ORTUS??? (WHILOM???) THE FIRST, SAINT OF DUTY

  Wants me dead.

  18

  IT WAS ORTUS NIGENAD who took charge of the body, washing it and laying it out with the help of Magnus Quinn. Harrowhark was surprised that Ortus had the trick of it, let alone the will to do so. In the room off the kitchen, in the chilly little morgue that doubled as a pantry, their breath hung in diamond clouds midair. She found herself watching their process: dressing the eyeballs in spirits, supporting the jaw with a bandage tied neatly behind the dark head, doing up the shining copper buttons of the no-longer-white Cohort jacket. Harrow had questioned this, but Abigail said that once they had extracted the projectiles from the wounds, Captain Deuteros might be decently arranged. Harrow was astonished that decent arrangement could still be constructed: the body had been in poor condition.

  There were eight bullets in all. On flimsy, Harrow had calculated the trajectories and forces needed to compromise the axial skeleton in such a way. Lady Pent had assisted. Her thick brown hair was pinned up high on her crown and supported her first pair of glasses, swapped out for another, apparently totally different pair of glasses while she leaved through an ancient gloss-pulp book, with gloves on to protect the fragile pages from her sweat. Harrow had sworn to avoid Pent at all costs, but the corpse in front of them had rendered that impossible.

  Harrowhark said: “The first projectile caused enormous trauma to the heart, and would have been fatal. The second hit the clavicle. The third passed through the abdomen and lodged in the spine—and so on. The important note here is the first bullet. It accurately destroyed both atria.”

  Abigail turned another page and said, openly baffled: “So why keep shooting?”

  “Panic,” suggested her husband, straightening up from the corpse.

  Ortus was still busy dabbing blood away from a popping bruise on the body’s temple, but said, “Anger, perhaps. I have often heard that anger may carry one beyond the initial act of murder.”

  Abigail said, “Ah. Here’s the puppy. Reverend Daughter, look at this.”

  Harrowhark stood and crowded in at the Fifth adept’s shoulder. She was being urged to look at a diagram of a bullet. Harrow reached over to take one of the less-crumpled projectiles between thumb and forefinger, to hold it close to the picture and compare, and she beheld the drawing opposite: a long stock, an immense barrel, a jumble of triggers and mechanics and protrusions that she did not understand. Carbine rifle, read the key. For a moment she pitied Judith Deuteros’s last seconds. To be killed with this ancient piece of grave goods! It would have been like being set upon by a ghost out of time.

  A brief skim of the blueprint showed her the problem immediately. “This weapon can only fire six projectiles before needing to be replenished,” she said. (“Reloaded,” added Abigail helpfully.) “The assailant fired eight.”

  “And must’ve known that poor Judith had no hope after the first hit. So reloading is odd, to say the least. Did anyone get anything pertinent out of the lieutenant?”

  Magnus said soberly, “She’s waiting outside. I offered to wait with her, but she turned me down. Don’t know Dyas very well and didn’t want to push … It’s a bloody business.”

  When Lady Pent went to the kitchens, Harrowhark accompanied her. They found Lieutenant Dyas not sitting down, or even leaning against the wall as anyone else would have spent the full hour or so they had been with the body, but standing ramrod-straight to attention. Her crisp white jacket appeared all the crisper and whiter after the wreck of her necromancer’s. Her scarlet necktie looked redder too—by the time they’d gotten hold of Judith Deuteros the blood had dried hers nearly black. Ortus had sponged it, and was attempting to dry it over a stove. At their approach, Dyas drew herself up to her full height, and she looked at Harrowhark, not at Abigail.

  She said, with uncharacteristic frenzy: “Why am I here?”

  Pent said, “Just to answer questions, Lieutenant Dyas.”

  The lieutenant said, “I want to know—I just want to know—”

  “What you know is of vastly more importance,” said Abigail. “Please, if you can, tell us exactly what you saw down there.”

  Marta Dyas looked at her. There was no woe on her face, only a deep, almost thirsty terror, an enormous anticipation, which animated what was usually a schooled Cohort mask. “I was in the chamber when it happened,” she said, “already engaged with the target construct. The room was closed off from the adjoining chamber where—the captain was.” (There had been a brief pause. Harrow wondered if the pause had meant to contain Judith.) “I didn’t hear a shot. The target disappeared—the chamber unlocked—when I came out, the captain’s door was open, and she was inside. No … vitals.”

  Pent said, “How long from that chamber unlocking to you reaching her?”

  “Five to ten seconds to exit the chamber and get there,” said Lieutenant Dyas. Then she said, “In hindsight, the door must have opened when she died.”

  “Did you hear any subsequent shots?” Harrowhark asked.

  “No. The test chamber was soundproofed.” Dyas continued, a little mechanically, “I left Captain Deuteros. I moved to the corridor. I saw, at the very end, the Sleeper.”

  “Please describe it, if you can,” said Pent. She added: “Take your time, Lieutenant. I recognise this is difficult…”

  Dyas said, ragged, “I just want to know—”

  “You will. I give you absolute surety that you will. What did the Sleeper look like?”

  “You’ve all seen it through the glass,” said Dyas. This was not entirely true. Ortus refused to go anywhere near the glass-faced coffin in that central room, or the somnolent corpse within, and quaked at his own breathing. Harrowhark did not fear to look more closely at the death Teacher had promised them, ensconced within that frozen, clouded plex. She had been nonplussed to discover that the Sleeper slept dressed for an emergency, as Dyas recited now: “Breathing apparatus over the face—orange hazard suit—oxygen hood.”

  Harrowhark said, “Easy symbols to fake. It could have been someone dressed as the Sleeper.”

  “It was carrying a weapon,” said Dyas. “One I hadn’t seen anywhere in or on the coffin before. I called out, but it wouldn’t stop … I pursued it to the central atrium. The Sleeper’s coffin was open and empty. The figure climbed inside. Pulled the lid down, snapped it shut.”

  Abigail prompted, “And then you escaped and raised the alarm.”

  The lieutenant of the Second looked at Abigail as though she had suggested And then you went for ice cream.

  “I went and got a piece of tubing from the mortuary room,” she said monotonously. “I hit the coffin. I hit the coffin repeatedly. I did so for maybe a minute. You found blood on the glass. It’s mine. I tried my fists and my feet and the butt of my sword—that plex glass isn’t plex. Or glass.”

  “That could have easily meant all our deaths,” said Harrow; she had tasted hypocrisy on her own lips so often that she hardly felt the sting.

  “Emperor’s breath, Dyas!” said Lady Pent, white lipped, a little more tactful in her shock. “That didn’t—rouse it?”

  Dyas said, “No.”

  Harrow had only halfway noticed Ort
us edging closer, ostensibly to check on Judith Deuteros’s blood-crusted necktie. He had stopped in his ministrations to listen in the dreamy, part-transfixed way he always seemed to listen to everything, with slight tonal differences depending on the person. He listened to Harrow with the happy demeanour of a person far away in his mind palace, unless what she was saying had a direct impact on him, at which point he merely got very sad.

  The Lieutenant’s gaze—unsettling and part feral, giving the impression that she was now a bag with ten snakes inside—fell on Ortus, and the stained necktie he had been wringing out. Harrow stepped forward, trying to place herself between the sightline of the Second cavalier and her own. But she moved to protect the wrong cavalier.

  Her cavalier cleared his throat—oh, damn:

  “My sister, I envy your fortune; fearless you forge yet ahead, through the cold grey flood of the River.

  “Fallen in war for the fame of the House is the death every warrior fain would win at the finish;

  “Laggard I linger behind; hold fast on the far bank’s beach-head! Blood shall repay your blood spilt.”

  Book Eleven. For a moment, at the lieutenant’s expression, Harrow thought that she might draw that practical Cohort rapier and go for Ortus there and then, which his turgid verse probably did not deserve but which his choice to quote it unwanted and in public very much did. She closed her thumb and forefinger over a chip of patella in her pocket. But then Dyas’s hands trembled, and her eyes dropped to the floor, and she said lowly: “I can’t hope for that anymore.”

  Abigail Pent said gently, “Lieutenant—” but Dyas was saying, low and fast, and this time to Harrowhark herself: “Is this really how it happens? You know of no hope for her?”

  “She had eight metal projectiles spun at high speeds through her midsection,” said Harrow. She knew that some people took comfort in the idea, so she added: “She would have died very quickly after her heart was destroyed.”

  “No,” said the lieutenant, and now Harrow thought she seemed dazed. Her fingers kept working the hilt of her rapier, from which hung a neat scarlet riband. “That’s not … Don’t know why I thought … No.”

  “You have faced down a monster that is likely to be the doom of many, and many less able than Captain Deuteros,” said Ortus. Harrow regretted not making him take a solemn pledge of silence, to walk the place as the mute and intimidating bulk his father had been; but only a very obedient idiot of a cavalier would have stuck to that. “I include myself among the latter. Is there no hint of our salvation?”

  Abigail said, “Ortus the Ninth is right, Lieutenant. If there are any details, anything else you might be able to tell us—you’ve taught us so much already, even if the price was too high.”

  The lieutenant drew herself up again. Her mouth was now a calm line that betrayed nothing but classic Second House stoicism. Harrowhark admired her for that.

  “One,” she said crisply. “The Sleeper can move from its coffin. Two, the Sleeper can pass through necromantic wards. Three, Teacher told us not to wake it. I don’t know what does. Noise doesn’t.” (“Not necessarily, no,” said Pent, who never did truck with unconditional statements.) “Four, it’s carrying a rifle.”

  “Like something from an old story,” suggested Ortus.

  “Like something. That’s all the facts I have,” said the lieutenant. “Don’t want to guess. One more thing—I’m not saying this with absolute certainty. I only got a glance before the lid closed and the plex fogged up again. But there’s something else in the coffin. The Sleeper’s lying on it.”

  The lieutenant closed her eyes, though her precise posture did not shift. When she opened them, she said, “I don’t know if this matters. But it looked like a standard-issue infantry sword.” She added, with Cohort precision: “A two-hander.”

  19

  TEN MONTHS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER

  THE FIRST TIME THE Saint of Duty tried to take your life, you did not anticipate it. If you had been a kernel less paranoid, a trifle less disturbed, you might have given Ianthe Tridentarius the pleasure of opening the note labelled Upon the death of Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Your only hope for that note was that it contained a single sentence along the lines of, Get what joy you can from my corpse, you devious bitch, but it was written by a previous self and you could not risk a guess.

  It was only a few days into your internment within the Mithraeum. Ever since you disgraced yourself with Cytherea’s midsection you had avoided all social meals, and you tended to scavenge food as you passed through the bizarre space that everyone called the kitchen. It was a long, clean, barren room where electric lights cast long shadows on pots and pans older than Drearburh, yet spared time’s depredations. At this point you had not yet figured out your exoskeleton, but had managed to fix a prototype bone scabbard to your lower back, and spent most of the time limping around with it as though scoliotic. You had taken a portion of some kind of murky stew left warm on top of the stove, ravenous, not yet knowing what the Emperor would tell you later: that a Lyctor could persist perfectly well without food, but would not last long without water. (“Cyrus was half-mummified before we worked that one out,” he would go on to reminisce fondly.)

  Your mistake was not spiriting the food back to your rooms. Ianthe’s room was not yet an option. In that first week you were still numb; you were tired, you were hungry, and you sat down at the countertop to eat your tepid supper, and had gotten through maybe five spoonfuls before the sword emerged from the middle of your chest.

  The aim for your pulmonic valve was unerring, but he had put himself at the mercy of your third and fourth ribs. This was a mistake your assailant would never make again. Always your bosom friends, they unfurled for you then like the springtime. Thick ropes of costal cartilage burst from your breast to fix your assailant’s sword in place: your ribs became jaws, your sternum the neck of a spring. Your blood sprayed into your indifferent soup, and the rapier stuck fast. You wrestled yourself backward; your phalanx bones burst through your fingertips like knives, and, too frightened for anything sophisticated, you raked blindly into the meat of the fatless and muscular thighs behind you.

  Your claws turfed up the meat of his hips and pelvis, but you would come to learn that Ortus the First did not respond to pain. He moved—you were dragged with him, off your stool, away from your blood-spattered soup—and you let his rapier go, dilating the bone so that he stumbled backward and you went forward, rolling over the countertop, spilling your bowl, dislodging pots and pans, and causing a hell of a noise.

  A chip of bone floated near where the rapier had clipped your rib. You popped it out of yourself and from that almost-living bone sprang femurs, melted on either side into patella, into pelvis, into a skeleton seething with regrowing ash. You tore one of your construct’s ribs from its cage before it hurled itself at the necrosaint, and the rib you wrenched free had enormous and generous give: the bubbly innards separated from the strong, compact cortex as though created for that very purpose. The centre for shape, the outside for strength. The whole crumbled in your palms when you squeezed. You were borne up by a current of bone, twenty sets of arms sprung from tubercles you had made sticky and thrust into the ground, enfolding you in an armoured nest of skeletal limbs.

  You marvelled at how easy it was. You barely had to think of it and it would be done, at a cost you considered negligible. But your blood was pouring out fast, and something bad had happened to some relatively important muscles, and you had no time to do anything but cut the flow and save the damage for later.

  At that point, you took your first opportunity to really look at him. This was a fool’s move: why didn’t you run? You chose to watch, as though you could learn anything? A less critical party might’ve pointed out that you’d had a surprise gift of twelve inches of steel through the chest and made your pecs sproing the blade back out with your own ribcage, but you had never been party to excuses. You were startled by him all over again: by this ramshackle, burnt-out Lyctor, by
the skin that clung to the skull, by that point-blank, stretched-thin face. Ortus the First did not look as though he needed meat or even water. There was a strangely burnt look to his dark brown skin, a burnt or otherwise oxidised look, not assisted by that shaven cap of rust-coloured hair. You hung, poised, for a moment not sure if you were hallucinating the whole thing. That hesitation cost.

  From protoskeletal dust you conjured five full constructs: five constructs only as good as you were, tired and hungry. They scrambled like huge spiders across the counter and went for him. The Saint of Duty shouldered his goddamned spear. That first time you were absolutely affrighted: a spear, a spear for the offhand. He used the butt of his sword—it would be lying to say that you now regularly called it the pommel—to smash the first construct’s skull to powder. The force was enormous. You tried to prop the skeletons back together from within your net, reknobble the spine, mould it with ash as a second skull’s mandible got flicked off into the stovetop. A third construct was beheaded with the spear, swung through the cervical vertebra—it became a shrapnel of bones—and for the last two, your killer lost patience. He sucked the thanergy from their bones and it felt like a slap to your face. They disappeared into gritty puffs of bone smoke.

  At this point you finally thought to run. More fool you. The nest of arms swung you around, prepared to be squeezed through the doorway. You shaped the net into a tight fretwork, springy, malleable. Although this was beautiful and worked a treat for mobility, you sacrificed resilience in the process. He threw his spear, almost casually, into this fretwork, and the net deformed fluidly on impact, and so it was through the bone that his spearpoint lodged into your large intestine. This sounded similar to a nail being rammed into a sausage. Your blood gushed like carbonated water. You tumbled through the doorway in a cascade of jostling, bouncing bits of bone, the scabbard jolting you roughly, rolling over and over until you lay bleeding at the feet of—