Harrow the Ninth Read online

  “Ortus!” said Mercymorn. She did not sound horrified, but deeply peeved. Your vision swam, and you smelled hot toast. “What are you doing??”

  You curled on your side. The black haze was already starting to dim around your edges. You were not so apt with healing yourself, back then. You heard: “Is she dead?—Stay there, you idiot! Hands where I can see them! What were you thinking? Oh, he’s going to be furious! You egg!”

  It seemed hateful to you that in death you should be treated like a prey animal some domestic predator had brought inside. You heard the Saint of Duty say in his flat, joyless voice: “I don’t answer to you.”

  The spear was removed. You still remembered acutely what that felt like. In the midst of that sensation, quick, light fingertips tapped a symphony over your back, arresting the flow of blood, seizing your flesh, cutting off circulatory shock; it was only then that you really began to understand what Mercymorn could do. With another fingertip, she tapped above your eyebrow, and your pituitary gland spewed out a flood of neuropeptides that immediately replaced the adrenaline squirting through your system.

  She was saying: “It’s not fair of you to try to bump them off when we’d get in trouble for it. They can die well enough on their own, you toad. This one’s all of twelve years old.”

  This was not close to accurate, even given your lie, but fine. He murmured something. She said back, sharply: “Quick enough for anyone’s satisfaction. Look! Look!! She can’t even heal … told him her integration had retarded … said she couldn’t stanch … and I’m not cleaning up this place, you are. Yuck. There’s bone in the grouting.”

  Ortus the First said, “The Heralds will be here in eight months.”

  “I’m well aware of that, thanks,” said Mercy. “You go flip some planets to give us a firebreak.”

  Ortus the First said, “Now you’re telling me my own job.”

  “Oh, I hate you! I’ve always hated you, you dreary, repetitive leg,” said Mercymorn passionately, and then you felt her thumb press down on your lower back, and your gastrointestinal tract—so interrupted by spearpoint—flushed, deep and warm, and you felt some of that twisting pain within you. You could barely feel it anyway, you were so running with hormones. It was the best you’d felt since before you’d gone to Canaan House. Then she said, more reasonably: “I know what you’re doing, and it’s not like I don’t understand it, but if you’d wanted to smother the kittens you could do it more cleanly by knocking her out and dropping her out the airlock…”

  She trailed off suggestively. The Saint of Duty said stonily, “I do things face-to-face.”

  “I am not trying to be cruel,” she said cruelly, “but that is what got you into trouble nineteen years ago.”

  There were heavy footsteps on the tiles. You were rolled onto your back, where the scabbard made you roll backward and forward, like a tortoise with a knobble on its shell. You were filled with a great sense of calm as the world rolled back into focus. It had been psychologically dreadful to see Mercymorn tapping your chest and your midsection, mouth screwed up as though she were cleaning your vomit, but you were wrapped in a beautiful fug of oxytocin and did not care about other Lyctors, your assassination attempt, or anything much. It meant you could look up fearlessly, and nervelessly, into the eyes of Ortus.

  Ortus’s face, stretched too tightly over its frame and locked into a long, lugubrious expression, had no reasonable relationship with his luminous green eyes: a soft, buttery green, less startling or harsh than the green of a shoot or the green of a leaf, but instead liquid and fluvial.

  The Lyctor leaning over you said warningly, “Don’t you do a thing. I’ll have to fight you, and I cannot begin to tell you how much I don’t want to do that. Oh, why did I stop?” she wailed. “I should have kept walking. I hate reasonable culpability.”

  “I want that sword,” said Ortus the First.

  “What?”

  “Give me her damned sword,” said Ortus the First.

  “You’ve already got a whole complement of oversized weapons, greedy.”

  Even an overexcited pituitary gland could not mask the sharp shank of fear that sliced down the length of your heart. You tried to raise yourself up on your elbows before you wobbled weakly back down. You said hoarsely, “No. No. It’s mine.”

  Mercymorn lost her patience on an almost professional basis. “Oh, just get out of it,” she said peevishly to Ortus. “Leave the baby alone.” Before you could feel indebted to her, she added: “Next time, try this at night! When I’m sleeping! If I see you hurt her I have to intervene, or Teacher will lose his nana.”

  The Saint of Duty looked down at you, sprawled so awkwardly in a pool of blood, free of the two new punctures he had given you in such a short space of time. He took his spear and shook it like a bedsheet, and the bone haft folded in on itself until it was no longer or thicker than a mace handle. This short, fat handle and spearhead he shoved into his belt, then he sheathed his rapier, turned around, and left.

  His sister-saint bawled after him: “I mean it! You clean this place up!” but he was already gone. She stood and smoothed out the front of her beautiful mother-of-pearl robe—the blood came off it in great gouts of reddish powder, dwindling to nothing—and she said, her placid face creased in complaint: “This place has gone to the dogs … What did you say, to make him try to kill you?”

  “Nothing.” The hormones were beginning to cease their pleasant flow, but you were still preternaturally calm when you said: “I came in to get some food. I did not perceive his entrance. The first thing I knew of him was when he stabbed me.”

  “Oh. Then he just wants you dead,” she said, with perfect unconcern. “Good luck! Not!! That man is Teacher’s attack dog … If he thinks you’re a threat then I would advise you to settle your affairs.”

  You stared up at the ceiling and noted the bone-strewn scrollwork between the frames of the panelling, all about the long planks of electric light. And you said: “But why does Ortus the First want me dead?”

  “Who?” said Mercymorn, indifferently.

  20

  YOU HAD NOT LEFT behind any notes about what you wanted done at your funeral. This was not due to a surfeit of optimism, though you were determined that your end would not come at the end of Ortus the First’s sword or spear: it was because you found the idea of a funeral for you too pitiful—what would be said, and what would be done? What fitting epitaph for your fragile bones? (Perhaps: Here lies the world’s most insufferable witch.)

  In the following months the Saint of Duty attempted to kill you, by your count, fourteen times, and you never came to understand the motivation. Often you were saved only by intervention. Sometimes this came from one of the other two Lyctors. Once, vilely, from Ianthe; she had ensconced you in fat and rolled you down the hallway out of danger, and still laughed whenever she thought about it. Once it even came from God. He had walked in as your pelvis was run through by your elder brother’s razor-sharp, scarlet-hilted rapier—so sharp you could never comprehend it—and God had laid you down on the big broad dining table of brown wood, and the world had whited out for you and reverberated up your nostrils and sinus cavities, then arced down the bottoms of your feet, as your skin and flesh closed over whole and perfect. Even your back ache had disappeared. Your body had hissed all over as it sealed, reborn in the hot white light of the Necrolord Prime.

  And he had said: “Ortus, have pity.”

  “This is my pity, Lord,” said the Saint of Duty.

  “She’s your responsibility, not your punching bag.”

  “I find the responsibility a hard one.”

  You’d lain dazed and stunned on the tabletop, and you heard the Emperor of the Nine Houses say: “I don’t want to argue with you. This is ham-fisted. Get out.”

  If you had thought God’s intervention might be final, might enforce some terms of peace, it had not. It had seemed—difficult—to raise the subject, when God did not want to bring it up himself. What would you say? (One
of your fingers and gestures is trying to kill me on the reg. Is this … fine with you?) When you finally approached him about it, his wince made you wish that you had not.

  The Emperor said, carefully: “He made a pact, with an authority I have no power to gainsay, that he would protect me from all dangers. Now it has been put to him that you are that danger. Harrowhark, forgive me. I need you to face him—each time—knowing your life is in danger…”

  Here he broke off, and just said: “Will you wear a rapier, if I give you one?”

  “For what purpose, Teacher? I could not use it, having misapprehended the Lyctoral process.”

  “Just in case,” he said, and it was the first time you had seen him wretched.

  “You say you misapprehended the process,” said your Teacher, leaning forward and crossing his shabby-sleeved arms over his knees. “I don’t believe you did, Harrowhark. I really don’t believe you did. I’ve only seen one person get it … fundamentally wrong … and I hope I never see what happened to Anastasia and Samael again.”

  And thus, unintentionally, you also confronted him with Anastasia. You could not trip in the Ninth House without falling over an Anastas, an Anastasia, or an Anastasius; or, in later years, bumping into their niche. Anastasia had been the mythic founding tomb-keeper and grandmother of the House, and the subject of at least two Nigenad poems (’Twas deep in Anastasia’s time, I wot). She was namesake of the deep inner monument where lay the sacred bones of tomb-keepers past and those who fell in battle. You were profoundly upset to learn that she had been real; that the rooms you inhabited—the empty, tintless, quiet rooms—had been intended for her.

  As you often sat, mute and still, a statue of yourself, opposite the Emperor of the Nine Resurrections, caught between pleasure and pain at listening to him speak, he did not wait for you to ask. He said, “Out of all of us, only Anastasia got it wrong. She’d researched it too much. Typical Anastasia. She’d seen some pathways in it that simply didn’t exist. She spoke the Eightfold Word, and it didn’t … work. After we—cleaned up—she asked me if I might end her life. Of course I said no. She had so much more to give. Later I would ask of her a greater and more terrible thing. I had a body and I needed a tomb … you might know of the body, Harrowhark, and you will know far better the Tomb.”

  At the time the Body had stood at the curtained plex window that stared out onto the field of slowly spinning asteroids, the mother-of-pearl robe slipping from her supple, naked shoulders, still moist as though just taken from the ice of her grave. You watched a droplet of water trickle down the column of her spine.

  “The tomb that was to be shut forever,” you said, and found the words so strange. “The rock that was never to be rolled away. That what was within should remain buried, insensate, with closed eye and stilled brain. Every day I prayed for it to live, I prayed for it to sleep.”

  Your voice dredged up from your brain, which dredged up from your heart, which dredged up from the oily, filth-stricken depths of your soul, and you said: “God, who did you bury?”

  Teacher worried his temple with his thumb, and then worried his other temple with his other thumb. He took a biscuit and dipped it into his cooling tea, then ate it, then swirled the tea around in the cup and set it down again. “I buried a monster,” he said.

  From the glare of the plex window, beside some perfectly ordinary white twill curtains, the buried monster turned herself so that she was lit in the light of the undead stars. The curve of her cheek—the thick, black lashes that fringed her golden eyes—the thumbprint divot that lay pressed like a kiss within the bow of her lip—you had not known you were shaking until God himself reached out to still your wrist, so that you mightn’t spill your tea over your knees. He unhelpfully passed you another biscuit.

  “Eat up, there’s nothing to you,” he said gently. “Have two, get some fat reserves. Do you like poetry, Harrowhark?”

  “I have never been a fan,” you said fervently.

  “Poetry is one of the most beautiful shadows a civilisation can cast across time,” he said. “Go on … eat up, they’re good for you. Here, I’m going to pretend to read this one off my tablet, when in fact it’s been with me for over ten thousand years. Here’s my favourite part…”

  That night, the Body consented to embrace you. You so nearly felt those long arms wrap around your neck, your middle. You were so close to feeling that press of graceful forehead to yours, the long, lean, dead body chilling yours to the shivering point, as you all but perceived one cool corpse thigh touching yours from hip to knee. You had been nearly eight weeks in the Mithraeum. The sword that you bathed in your own arterial blood was sheathed in bone and heavy on your back. You no longer knew what it was like not to be afraid.

  You—with your unfortunate memory for poetry—could still hear Teacher’s verse, in his low, soothing, ordinary voice, chase itself round and round your head:

  For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

  * * *

  THE EMPEROR OF THE NINE HOUSES, THE PRINCE UNDYING (WHILOM??? JOHN???)

  Who was A.L.?

  21

  RAIN STARTED FALLING ON Canaan House early one morning, and it never stopped again. For the first few hours it was the normal, leaden fall of water Harrowhark had become used to in her time at Canaan House. She found it merely unnerving now, not a killer of peace and sleep. Around midday a fog began to boil off the saw-toothed waters at the bottom of the tower. It rose up to the lower levels of Canaan, and kept rising. The fog was bitterly cold, and the rain stank like engine lubricant and blood; it tasted indescribable. Teacher and the other priests unearthed great spiny patchwork compasses of oilcloth and metal struts, which unfolded at the press of a button, and Harrowhark and the others were obliged to walk around with them over their heads even inside the main atrium, where the water leaked through the walls and ceilings.

  At first, she trusted her hood and veil and let the rain wet her where it would. She was soon forced to acknowledge how difficult it had become to dry clothes. Ortus spent half his life wringing out tents of black fabric into the bathroom tub. Harrow was forced in bad grace to consent to him standing over her with one of these umbrella constructions, and listen to the hateful, arrhythmic PLUT … PLUT … PLUT-PLUT-PLUT of water on its waterproof skin. This incidental noise was very difficult for her: it was fertile ground for the false symphony inside her head, and those banging doors and murmurous half-heard ghosts were now joined by a thin background wail, which sounded for all the world like the mewling of a newborn baby.

  “This has never happened before,” Teacher complained at meals, fretfully, as though they were not Lyctors-in-waiting but instead sympathetic building inspectors. “The rainy season won’t be on us for months. It ought to be ten degrees warmer than it is. I have had to bring in all the herbs and put them under a lamp. And this fog … I guess I might as well die,” he concluded, something he now suggested hopefully at least three times a day.

  Harrow found this a suggestion that lacked grace or tact, especially after they found the second round of bodies.

  There were no witnesses to question, when they found the grey-wrappered figures of Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus laid on the stained, brushed-steel slabs in the mortuary. They had been arranged as though whomever found them had wished to present them scientifically. That they were Sextus and Hect was at first only educated conjecture: they were wearing their librarian greys, and one had the battered old rapier that had seemed to be all the Sixth House could proffer for this trial, and the other had ink stains on his fingers. Their faces had been obliterated by point-blank gunshots.

  It was grim. Harrowhark was surprised by her own tranquillity, but concluded she was grateful for it. A strange, tomblike calm had fallen over her when Abigail had first taken her to see the bodies, walking briskly past the Sleeper’s silent coffin with a lantern held high. Harrow admired her for that, for her lack of tiptoe or hush. Harrow had nev
er seen Sextus or Hect except from afar, and had formed an impression that was all abbreviations: grey clothes, hushed voices, angles. It was Ortus who mourned for them, but Ortus was one of the Emperor’s natural mourners. His mother had been the same. They’d both loved a funeral, which had been lucky for them, as funerals were one of her House’s natural resources. When they brought both facially obliterated corpses upstairs under the direction of Lady Pent, she watched Ortus weep stolid, stony-faced tears, which once again turned his sacramental paint into an underwater skull.

  To properly identify them, Abigail’s husband-cavalier scared up the only flesh magician he could find. Finding other magicians at all was becoming difficult: the day-jewel and night-rock Tridentarius twins were so elusive that Harrow grew confused even trying to remember when she had last seen them. There was not enough room in the chilly morgue upstairs, and the dropping temperature was not immediately compromising, so they put the faceless bodies out on rubberized sheets in the dining room. It was there the Seventh cavalier brought his adept.

  She must have seen them both on that first day—that muggy, sun-struck first day, when Teacher had given them the rings and the keys, and told them about the monstrous hypersomniac in the basement—but Harrow found she was startled when they arrived. It would have been difficult not to have been. The cavalier was bronzed and vigorous, an enormous, musclebound man in green, with a seafoam-coloured kilt and tooled leathers. This well-muscled individual was guiding a wheeled chair down the wide aisles between tables, and in the chair was what appeared to be a dead body, holding a little lacy umbrella of her own to keep off the drips. It was gowned appropriately in spindrift white skirts, and inappropriately in a little crocheted scarf of pilling white wool.

  Harrowhark had known Ortus too long not to register the slight curl to his lip and the lack of maudlin suicide in his eyes: he was almost rigid with contempt. She had thought Ortus would find contempt too exhausting an emotion to bother with. The ghost holding the umbrella had her pale, sugar-brown hair cropped short, its curls gathered into a cap of silky ringlets. There was a gracile delicacy to her—a starved, wasted, childlike mien—and when she gave her umbrella to her cavalier, she actually rose to stand. A fine length of tubing emerged from her nose and was discreetly taped into the collar of her dress. Harrowhark had never seen its like before; it was a thin, stiffened cylinder of mucous epithelial tissue.