Harrow the Ninth Read online

  There were two days left before Ianthe’s deadline, and all the Lyctors ate with a distinct lack of relish. You watched Ianthe take a spoonful of food as you struggled with your cutlery. Your soup did not look like a bad effort, and you had been vaguely proud of it: the thick, translucent gold-whiteness of the pot liquor; the unburnt onion floating in white, stratified wedges; the candy-orange of the stored carrots. You had read up on vegetables carefully, trying to overcome your aversion to their colours: you had not wanted anything that might dissolve entirely in the soup over the length of cooking called for. “Needs salt,” was Ianthe’s judgement.

  “Too much water, but not a bad effort,” said Augustine with forced jollity. “Broth needs to thicken over time, Harrow.” (You had let it thicken for hours, then added a great deal of water, in a panic.) “Do not get me wrong, sis. Eating a new cook’s food after ten thousand years is frankly exciting. Let me give you a list of my favourite meals so that you can get them interestingly wrong.”

  The Saint of Duty ate your soup at a stolid, uninterested, mechanical pace. You had noticed at previous dinners that he did not like some particular vegetables, so you had put them all in. Deprived of solid choices, he was mostly drinking stock. God had taken a spoonful, eaten it, then put down the spoon, then taken a discreet sip of water. He said nothing. The next sixty seconds were occupied with the wet, semiashamed sounds of people eating soup.

  “If we’re going to do these awful shared meals, at least someone provide conversation,” said Mercy waspishly. She was removing thick pieces of root vegetable and eating them delicately off her fork. “I can’t bear to sit here and eat mediocre food in silence. I can do that by myself.”

  You said, after a moment to peel up the edges of your words, “Is it mediocre, elder sister? I followed a recipe.”

  “Cassiopeia’s? Now, there was a woman who could cook,” said Augustine, and his granite-coloured eyes grew soft and nostalgic in his long, hawk-featured face. “Not without injuring herself, mind. John, d’you remember that time she took half her finger off getting the meat out of that coconut? She didn’t tell anybody until after we’d eaten the meal. That’s a lesson for you, Harrowhark: confess, first thing, before we find a finger in the soup.” (You flinched, then tried to smile; perhaps that was called for. Ianthe looked at the expression on your face and shuddered visibly.) “What’s the meat in here flavouring the broth? If there’s chunks, it’s all rendered down.”

  You closed your eyes and tried to think. It was so difficult. You so badly wanted to sleep. You were doing so many things at once—your sole remaining powers of concentration were given over to this moment. For a second or two you forgot the word that you were looking for—it was on the tip of your tongue—while you were building, minutely, stromal cell by stromal cell.

  “Marrow,” you said.

  The Saint of Duty exploded outward as your construct emerged from his abdomen. Your soup was watery and mediocre, as soup went, but as a delivery method for gelid explosives—marrow rendered through so much water as to not pass comment—it was perfect. Half a dozen arms shattered him in the soft electric light from the overhead panels. You let out your breath, and coalescing scythes destroyed intestines—lungs—heart. Then you fired upward, toward the brain.

  And God said, “Stop.”

  The world slowed down. Augustine and Mercymorn stopped, arrested in the act of half-rising from their seats. Ianthe stopped, left arm paused, outflung, to shield her face. You stopped, sitting upright in your chair: your bones somehow rigid and still, and your flesh chilly and rigid around those bones. The shrapnel spray from the Saint of Duty did not stop—it cascaded across the table like the crest of a pink waterfall, pitter-pattering down on bowls and the tablecloth and the polished dark surface of the wood. But what remained of him stopped too, half man, half rupture—his prurient details hot and white, naked insides clothed with the sinus-drying burst of the power of God.

  The Emperor of the Nine Houses—the Resurrection—the First Reborn—sat at the end of the table, his plain face splattered with gore, and his eyes were the death of light.

  The Necrolord Prime said, very calmly, “Ten thousand years since I’ve eaten human being, Harrow, and I didn’t really want an encore. Now tell me what you have done.”

  Your body was unyielding, but your mouth had purchase. You said, “I reconfigured a clump of marrow stem cells into sesamoid bone. From the sesamoid bone, I made a construct.”

  “Harrowhark,” he said, “you cannot have perceived foreign bone marrow within the body of a Lyctor. I’m not sure Mercy could perceive it with her arms draped around Ortus the whole time.”

  “The cells weren’t foreign.”

  “What?”

  “I sectioned my tibia for the soup,” you said.

  God’s eyes closed, very briefly. He pushed his bowl another fraction away. You stared down the table at him: at the blank, remote faces of your two nominal teachers—at the frozen ivory stillness of Ianthe, her hair now whitish pink—at space outside the window, where the asteroids themselves seemed to hang in tranquilized arrest. He said, “You must know that I won’t let either of you kill the other before my very eyes, Harrow.”

  “He attacked me in my rooms. He drained my personal wards.”

  “Coming from the Saint of Duty, that’s a compliment.”

  You said, “Lord, I am hunted. I perish.”

  “Harrow—”

  “I don’t come to you as Harrowhark the First,” your mouth said. “I come to you as a supplicant. I can’t live like this. Lord, do I displease you, that you shield him and not me? I understand that I am a sharpened twig beside your keenest sword, but why do you suffer this twig to live? I can’t live this way. I cannot live this way. I have nowhere to go. I have nobody to turn to. I am a nonsense.”

  You looked at each other down that long, bloody table.

  God said, “Harrowhark, when was the last time you slept?”

  It was with all the dignity of the Locked Tomb, the chill of the stone that had been rolled and of the bones that had been laid, and of the still salt water that shimmered before the whitened monument where your holy monster lay, that you said, “Six days ago.”

  The Emperor of the Nine Houses stood.

  The spell, whatever it had been, dropped like a white sun setting. Your body collapsed back into your chair. The construct gamely clambering out of the Saint of Duty dwindled to a powder of pink dust. The shard you had been driving up the cervical vertebrae to the base of the spine and the brain within its casing simply disappeared: destroyed or removed, you could not tell. The concatenation of Ortus the First’s insides, laced and crocheted over the dinner table, sizzled away to a soft mist. Everyone’s breath spewed from their lungs in one unholy gasp. Ortus’s hands flew to his middle.

  The Emperor did not give anyone time to react further. He said evenly: “Dinner is over. Let us leave the table. Ianthe—take your sister to bed.”

  Everyone began clattering out of their chairs in a wild scraping of wood and tile. Augustine said, “My lord—?” and God said, “Go. Just go.”

  You felt strange and unreal as a white-lipped Ianthe hauled you up from your seat. The skin she touched was merely a thin and pervious netting keeping in your meat, which consisted of ten thousand spiders. She slung your arm across her shoulders, as though you were an invalid. Perhaps you were. Your legs did not feel correct. Your eldest sister, looking distinctly green around the gills and checking long strands of her overripe-rose hair for globs, had also risen—but the Emperor said, “You. Stay,” and she froze.

  There was no thought in you of fighting Ianthe as she walked you away. You could have gone meekly to the slaughter without a muzzle or a leash. Behind you, the Kindly Prince was saying, in far more ominous tones than you had ever heard him use: “Six days. No sleep. She still manages a full skeleton commencement from diluted marrow. What else have you failed to see, Mercymorn—?”

  You were already at the door when her
peevish response came: “But this is insane! She’s only nine years old!”

  * * *

  The Saints of Duty and Patience were out in the corridor. If either had wanted to run you through, you could not have stopped them. You looked at them despite Ianthe urging you away: at Augustine, looking as though he had seen the ghost of someone he did not particularly like, and at Ortus.

  Ianthe kept trying to turn you to face forward, but you kept watching even as she hustled you down the corridor. You saw Augustine fumble for a cigarette, light it with the little silver arc lighter he kept in his breast pocket, and pass it silently to his brother Lyctor. Ortus was impassive. There was not a trace of blood on his clothing. There was not a stray lump of viscera upon the shabby shirt, nor on the mother-of-pearl cloak still slung over his shoulder. There was no betrayal of any emotion on his face: not the surprise that had dawned over his heavy-lidded eyes earlier, nor anger, nor even dissatisfaction. He caught your gaze. You held his.

  And the Saint of Duty lifted his lit cigarette to you in an unmistakable salute.

  26

  ONE DAY, HARROWHARK’S EYE was caught by the rain drizzling outside on the docking terrace, and by black figures rising in the fog. They were on the very edge of the terrace. She tugged her hood deep down over her head, walked outside into the rain—she kept bone chips clutched between her knuckles so that they would not grow wet from sweat or weather—and approached. One of the black figures resolved itself in that grey, stinking blanket of cloud: large and imposing, like the midday sun amid clouds. It was Coronabeth Tridentarius.

  She was turned away from Harrow, and her riot of hair—half-caught in a fillet, half-escaping—was soaking wet, a dark and crinkling amber in the rain. She was not fighting or arguing. She was still as a statue, and ready and waiting as a dog.

  The figure behind her was much smaller and slighter, the aseptic robes of his office a bleached, blued grey with the water. The braid pinned high on his head was so pale as to be white, and his rain-sodden chainmail kirtle gleamed, wetly, amid the fog. At her creeping pace, Harrowhark had covered only half the distance when she heard Silas Octakiseron say, clear above the patter of falling drops:

  “And somewhere out there, may all the blood of your blood suffer even a fraction of what I have suffered.”

  He pushed. The eldest princess of Ida dropped from the side of the docking bay with swanlike ease. She simply tipped off the side, neither folding nor seizing—there one moment, a golden star, and then gone. There was no question of going to her aid. The Eighth House necromancer stood there with the wind flapping his wet alabaster robes, his braid torn to wisps and ribbons, and he did not even look over the side.

  But he did look to Harrowhark.

  “Defend yourself, Octakiseron,” she called out. “The black vestals have only one answer for murder.”

  “The black vestals only ever had one answer for anything,” was the reply, in his profoundly deep, gorgelike voice. He looked at her: from their distance of about five bodies apart his eyes were umbrous in his white and stricken face. “The question came, Why … and the black vestals said, Because. Now you have come to me, you cur of the nighttime, you fry of slavery, you have done what you have done, and you say to me, Defend yourself? How could I?”

  “I don’t give a damn about White Glass mysteries or cryptics,” she said. “I care that you just pushed one of the Tridentarii to her death.”

  “Death?” said Silas.

  He looked out again at all the rolling fog, at the clouds that obscured the grinding sea down to which Coronabeth was most likely still falling. From closer up, Harrow saw that he was all in disarray: his clothes were smudged and a few of his buttons were not done up. The rain and the fog had lashed him terribly.

  Harrow took her hands from her pockets and strewed her chips upon the ground. From each chip—she felt a pop, pop, pop at the back of her brain from the thalergy expenditure—she unfurled a full appendicular skeleton, extending the bone in a hurry so that none of the cortex could mix with water. The dull gleam of their compact bone shone like marble in the wet. Silas Octakiseron looked at her five full constructs with his lip curling.

  “Her filthiness is on her feet,” he murmured. “She has not remembered her end.”

  “For God’s sake, raise your hands, Octakiseron,” she said. “Or make me strike down an unarmed man.”

  And Silas said, “Is this how it happens, then?”

  He turned away. She saw what he meant to do, and her skeletons skittered forward on the rain-slick concrete of the docking terrace. But it was for nothing: Silas Octakiseron had launched himself fearlessly into space after the tumbling body of Coronabeth Tridentarius. He fluttered in the wind and rain briefly, like a dirty white bird, and disappeared.

  She pushed through her skeletal crowd to stand at the edge—they held her arms back, for safety—and stared down into the virginal and unbroken bank of salty, reeking fog. There was no sign of either adept. From far below, the ocean howled. Harrow thought she perceived a tatter of something penetrate the cloud. Her heart pounded rhythmically in her ears, and she thought she saw, absurdly, a sudden gush of watery blood, as though the fog itself had been knifed; but it was gone almost as soon as she had seen it.

  27

  YOU LOST A GREAT INTERSTICE OF TIME. The next thing you knew, you were staring at the shadowy bowels of a room, lit only by a soft yellow puddle of light—a bedside table–lamp—sheets slippery and cool over you. For the first time in your life, when you tried to let yourself panic and generate an adrenaline spike, it did not work. That trigger had broken. After too many days of generating cortisol, your pituitary gland was taking an unsanctioned holiday somewhere far away from you, and all you could do was lie, bewildered, in these unfamiliar surrounds.

  Not so unfamiliar. After many long and stupid moments, you realised that you had been laid to rest in the white-and-gold confection of Ianthe’s bed, with its chilly satin coverlet and the lilac flowers embroidered in silk floss on almost every inch of the bedclothes. You willed yourself into panic again, flailing against the mattress, and sputtered out dolefully.

  “Lie back down,” said the Princess of Ida.

  She was standing before the windows. The amethysts dripping from her rapier’s basket hilt flashed and glittered in the darkness: she had her left arm tucked behind her, and her feet arranged a hip’s width apart, and her right arm extended before her, holding her sword. She was moving the sword into mechanical attitudes: blade pointed high, blade pointed low, wrist twisted to sweep the blade into position.

  You struggled to sit up. Your head felt as though someone had studded your skull with fine little spikes that stroked your brain with hooked barbs whenever you moved.

  “I said, lie down,” said Ianthe. “You absolute madwoman,” she added, without any particular emotion. “Can’t believe I ate a whole bowl of nun … I should’ve made myself throw up.”

  The Princess of Ida sounded unlike herself: this was a more detached Ianthe—Ianthe as an arm pulled from the socket; Ianthe as a tooth torn from the root. Your head was so heavy. For a moment it was as though you were back on the Erebos again, when you had been made of cotton wool and black fog.

  She changed form. The rapier came down low over her left side—swung slowly to cover the right—flicked up in a steel shimmer so that the tip of the sword pointed at the ceiling, on guard. Then to the left again, then swinging high to absorb an imagined blow to the head and shoulders. Parry positions, which you should have known but didn’t. Ianthe was training in her nightgown—a grisly floor-length concoction of pale golden lace that made her long, limber body look like a green-veined mummy—and even you could tell that her movements were ungainly and belaboured.

  It took you a long time to say, “Augustine,” and she answered, immediate, impatient: “Are you still awake? Yes. One might’ve hoped that your light dinnertime entertainment would have given me an extension, but not so much.”

  You said feebl
y, “The Saint of Duty—Ortus can suck wards.”

  Ianthe said something very coarse in response. Then she said, “So that’s why you stopped sleeping. Well, if he wants to attack you while you are here, I tell you truthfully that I welcome that inferno.”

  “But—”

  “Sleep, Harry.”

  You were very weak. You felt an exhaustion beyond tiredness; a drugged, unstable fatigue. When you laid your head back against Ianthe’s pillow, you smelled the thin putrefying off-apple smell from her bedside table, and you smelled her, and that scent was now familiar. It was the animal yearning for the familiar that undid you. You closed your eyes, and you were asleep.

  * * *

  How long you slept you did not know. You did not know what dawn of which day you woke to. The daytime lights filtered through the hangings of the four-poster bed with a warm whiteness, a lemony warmth limning the naked paintings that festooned the walls. It felt as though you had slept for a hundred years. The satin coverlet was cool against your arms, and you lay in Ianthe’s bed insensate, comfortable.

  Gradually you felt a heavy weight in a depression next to you. You rolled onto your side, suddenly and deeply frightened that you might see the bed’s owner; your sword had been laid atop the covers beside your body, on the eiderdown, the bone scabbard gleaming a dull grey in the imitation sunlight. This was in every single way a better thing to wake up to than the face of Ianthe “Love My Twin, Also Murder” Tridentarius.

  Then you heard breathing. It was with unexpected clarity of mind and soul that you pushed the eiderdown away and crawled to the end of the bed. And you found Ianthe before you, on the floor.

  She was belly-down on one of the cream-and-gold rugs on the deep honey-coloured plush carpet, and all around her was a growing crimson mat of blood. She sprawled in a puddle of red as though it was her shadow. Her long hair tumbled over her face and shoulders like a veil, and she grunted hard through her teeth, breathing in long terrible breaths like a dying animal. As you watched—a silent spectator on her mattress—she propped herself on her elbows and grasped the ruddy crimson blade of her trident knife in both hands, and she thrust it furiously into the intolerable seam of her right arm.