Harrow the Ninth Read online

  “About any of this. Going to Canaan House. Becoming a Lyctor. Coming to the Mithraeum.”

  You were not at all certain. “No.”

  “No, I suppose not,” she said thickly. “You were more farsighted than I was … Me? I’ve never regretted anything, as a rule. Good night.”

  For a long time in the darkness you wondered at that, her good night hanging unanswered. You were more farsighted than I was. It was the easiest compliment to you that had ever passed her lips. You did not set store by compliments—it was vanity to accept them, and patronizing to give them—but this one echoed in your head. You were more farsighted than I was.

  You looked at Cyrus the First’s cavalier before you closed your eyes, though not to appreciate her details. You were more struck by the idea that she must have died back at Canaan House, when the work was finished—when the Lyctoral theorem had been cracked. Her necromancer had brought these ghoulish remembrances on purpose. He had surrounded himself with pictures he had painted, of him, and of the cavalier whose soul now fuelled the battery of his heart. You were lucky that the memory of your own cavalier did not hurt you—except sometimes in the form of a sick headache in your temples, or in words stuck on repeat in your head.

  Some of those words were eating at you now, and you recited them to yourself in the quietude of your brain:

  Warrior proud of the Third House! Ride forth now as my sister! Ride we to death, and the proving!

  Ride we with heads held high; we shall bloody our blades in the foe’s heart; death shall we bring to the foul ones—

  Death shall we win for ourselves, as the prize for our high deeds done on the ash-choked plains of the ravens!

  Book Eleven. Matthias Nonius and the cavalier secondary of the Third House would proceed to destroy a whole legion in exhaustive detail, after which the grievously injured daughter of the Third had to be carried over a thanergy-irradiated desert while Nonius mused aloud on the nature of fate all the way into Book Twelve. You fell asleep.

  * * *

  By the next afternoon, an envelope had been slipped under Ianthe’s door. It was paper of a deep, creamy brown, and sealed with wax. When Ianthe broke it open, you peered over her elbow at the contents. A single page—also real paper, also dyed a creamy tan colour, lettered artistically in flawless handwriting and deep blue ink:

  AUGUSTINE THE FIRST, LYCTOR OF THE GREAT RESURRECTION, FOUNDER OF THE COURT OF KONIORTOS, FIRST SAINT TO SERVE THE KING UNDYING

  REQUESTS THE HONOUR OF THE PRESENCE OF HIS YOUNGEST SISTERS

  IANTHE THE FIRST, EIGHTH SAINT TO SERVE THE KING UNDYING

  &

  HARROWHARK THE FIRST, NINTH SAINT TO SERVE THE KING UNDYING

  DINNER WILL BE SERVED AT HALF AN HOUR PAST EVENING COMMENCEMENT

  ATTIRE: FORMAL OR CEREMONIAL DRESS

  Your head pounded with a tedious recognition.

  “No,” you said.

  Ianthe tapped your shoulder with the invitation in her usual parody of playfulness, which was a little like being batted around by a predator while still alive. “This is the plan, Harrowhark. Just sit back and watch my teacher work.”

  You said, “I do not understand the faith you place in that man.”

  It was no good. You would have preferred a time that was not hours hence; you would have preferred a plan that did not involve a formal invitation, a dress code, or dinner. The last dinner you had attended had not gone exactly to plan, and you thought another dinner in poor taste. But you had not reckoned on your roommate, who—as a princess of the Third House—thought of dinners the way you thought of morning orison.

  “I still have my robes of office,” you said as she tore apart her wardrobe, fingering each article therein before tossing it aside.

  “It’s no longer your office. No—no.”

  “It’s technically correct.”

  “Not this time, my child. I’m sick of being associated with a half-snapped stick of liquorice, dressed in a tent— No—hideous—not even Corona would wear that. No—no.”

  “My shirt and trousers will suffice, then. Beneath my Canaanite whites.”

  “Even worse,” said Ianthe, and wrestled from its housing what appeared to be a full tulle skirt in midnight purple; skirt and woman scuffled momentarily before she heaved it across the room. “No—yes, for a different and much better party—no—no. Sometimes I think the Emperor of the Nine Houses favours you because you’ve got the same taste in clothes. God, what’s this? That’s a bit risqué—”

  You grew desperate. “Let me pick.”

  Ianthe looked at you; her blue-and-brown eyes were beatific. “Harry,” she said, and she said it tenderly, “have you never read a trashy novel in which the hero gets a life-affirming change of clothes and some makeup, and then goes to the party and everyone says things like, ‘By the Emperor’s bones! But you’re beautiful,’ or, ‘This is the first time I have ever truly seen you,’ and if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral,’ et cetera, et cetera, the word mewled fifteen pages later, the word nipple one page after that?”

  You said emphatically: “No.”

  “Then we have no shared point of reference. Thankfully, however, this is not that part,” she said. “Not even one of the Emperor’s fists and gestures could give Harrowhark Nonagesimus a sexy makeover. Sometimes I think you look like a twig’s funeral. In the right light though— Oh, this might do, it’s even your colour. Come here.”

  She was holding a mass of black fabric, but no black such as ever existed in the House of the Locked Tomb. You approached with naked horror. Ianthe shook out a long piece of starry sable stuff and held it against you; it appeared to be some sort of—enormous handkerchief. It was not a dress.

  When you pointed this out she said, with some asperity: “Valancy Trinit was my height, weighed more than both of us put together, and—judging by her portraits—had a body that did not quit. Your body, by comparison, gave up at the starting line. Take off your clothes.”

  Take off your clothes was an imperative you never thought you would obey. You did not take off all your clothes, but you consented to strip down to your shirtsleeves, because the shirt was long. The exoskeleton provided some coverage, though not remotely enough for comfort. You stood there with your chin thrust out, expecting a steady flow of crude japery, but all she said was: “Will you take off that grotesque skeleton corset?”

  “No.”

  “What about your face paint?”

  “No.”

  “I do not know why I ask these questions,” she said.

  She wrapped the scarf around you, pinned it, grunted, then took it away. You were left to sit on her bed, eating one of the apples she had not yet used for practice. As you ate you watched her, and you reread the invitation, while—typical of a flesh magician—Ianthe took out needle and thread, and quite happily occupied herself with sewing. She pronounced it “very easy, actually” to thread the needle with her defleshed hand.

  Written on the back of the paper:

  My room, ten minutes beforehand.

  “Try this on,” she said, eventually.

  It amounted to little more than a veil. She pinned it over one shoulder and left both your arms chilly and bare. The material was water-thin and slippery; when you emerged from behind a gaudy screen, she cinched the black, scintillating stuff tight to your body. It was not true black, but shot with a deep chemical indigo, and as you looked in the mirror the shade made your eyes lightless hollows. Above that field of navy-black, little white scintillae trapped inside like luminescent filaments growing in a charred corpse, your irises were devoid of any colour at all.

  Ianthe circled you, tugging and pinning, and you suffered it only because her touch was disinterested and clinical. Neither the touch of her living fingers nor her dead ones lingered. It was as though you were simply her patchwork corpse. You would have been impressed at her craft, except that she dismissed your compliments:
“This is nothing. Naberius could embroider you a full overskirt without pricking a finger.” This might have veered close to sentiment had she not added, “I wish killing him had given me his needlepoint too.”

  Your sister Lyctor brushed your hair and fluffed it out with her fingers. It was long enough to do this. Only a little while ago you had shaved it down to stubble: it had taken fright, and regrown at speed. Terribly afraid that this was your lone symptom of Lyctor regeneration, you had not cut it since. You would not let Ianthe fill any of the holes punched in your ears with metal earrings or pearls, and you refused all other jewellery not bone, and so there was not much else to be done. When she finished, you did not look upon your reflection with revolted shock, merely with a dull and uncomfortable distaste. The worst part was your sudden resemblance to your mother.

  “I am very satisfied,” pronounced Ianthe.

  You said drearily, “I look like an imbecile.”

  “You look just good enough that I’m proud of my handiwork, but not so good that I’ll be consumed with lust and ravish you over the nut bowl,” she said. “I walked a fine line, and I walked it admirably. Go and fix your paint; your skull’s dribbly.”

  As an act of meaningless rebellion, you applied the sacramental skull of Priestess Crushed Beneath the New-Laid Rock, the least beautiful skull in the canon. When you came back, she was smoothing her hair at her dressing table with a bone-backed brush. She wore a gown of achromatic purple—pale and almost grey, like the smoke from a fire banked with lavender, and made of what appeared to be a few layers of gauze. The back was open, and you could see the fine dents of her spine—her bleached skin bluer and sweeter against the pallid gossamer—and the twin blades of her shoulder blades looked strangely nude and vulnerable to you. She said languidly, “Button me up,” and you obeyed by sprouting three skeleton arms from the bone-impregnated inlay of her chair, glad to hide her vertebrae.

  Ianthe wore her Canaanite robe over her shoulders, but did not slip her arms into the sleeves: you were glad for the feeble, diaphanous cover yours offered. She buckled her rapier belt loosely at her hips; your two-hander you carried on your back. As you followed your coconspirator down the habitation corridor to Augustine’s rooms, a prickle of anticipation washed over the insides of your stomach.

  Just as your rooms bore very little resemblance to Ianthe’s, Augustine’s rooms bore no resemblance to either yours or hers. His interiors were of dark wood. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves ran up most of the walls, and the floor was not tile but deep plush carpeting. It was a much more crowded, lived-in room, and on every surface was a book, or a stylus, or a folded pair of socks. There were baroque leather armchairs with pale weals on the arms and seat from years of sitting, and tasteful paintings with wooden frames, and a general smell of wood polish and book glue. It was a friendlier room than you had expected, insofar as you had expected anything. The wide tapestry sofa was thick with fringed cushions in comfortable disarray. There were vases of eggshell-thin ceramic on the table set before the vast plex window—currently hung with primrose drapes, shut—filled with, though you had no idea where he had procured them, cut flowers in shades of orange, red, and gold.

  The Saint of Patience was bent over a mirror above a wooden washstand, wearing a suit of antique make beneath his robe. You were grudgingly impressed by the sight of a historical artefact actually being worn: black trousers, black jacket, a plain white shirt with a high white collar, very starched. Augustine had combed his hair into a flat cap against his skull, faultless and shiny, with not a strand out of place. Within the collar sat a funny little black tie that was cut in a curve, and he was knotting it into a fat bow.

  “Nicely done, my dove,” he said jocularly to Ianthe, taking her hands and kissing them. There was a tightness around his concrete eyes that belied the good humour. “You put me in mind of a statue of some lost goddess hauled up from the waters, painted lineaments removed but marble intact.”

  “Covered in moss, mould, and gunge,” she suggested, consenting to be kissed on each cheek. “You should see my sister.”

  “You always say that,” said Augustine. He looked at you, and relieved your mind by not kissing you anywhere; he simply raised his eyebrows and said, “And so the crow can be a swan! Ah, this is like the old days … you should have seen the shindigs we pulled off, when we dared congregate. We partied as though it were the days before the apocalypse. I will remember them always. John laughed more then. Mostly at that madman Ulysses, and Cassiopeia, under the table because she’d had a single glass of wine.… All right, kiddies, shall I tell you how we’ll play this?”

  You asked, “Why are you helping me commit murder?”

  He checked his little tie in the mirror again, corrected some imperceptible skew, and straightened up.

  “For reasons of my own, dear girl,” he said, with the glacial cheer that seemed to be his first line of defence. “Once upon a time, if my younger brother had deemed it fit for you to exit this vale of tears, I would not have stopped him, but I admitted long ago that Ortus no longer listens to anyone. He always did get his own bizarre obsessions, and you could never get them out of his head with a pneumatic drill. He has caused me more pain over these last scant forty years than I dare to admit. No, there’s no question of me barring you here. I’ll get Teacher’s undivided attention. You’ll both skedaddle. Harrow will finish her bloody business … if she can, which I am not at all sure of.”

  “She can,” said Ianthe, ruining it with “probably,” and the Lyctor said: “She can try. I once watched that man fight a city. The city didn’t win. He’ll leave the dinner first, and be in the training room afterward, that’s his habit; you’ll leave on cue.”

  This seemed nonsensical to assume. You said, “He’ll leave?” at the same time the Princess of Ida said, “On cue?”

  “Won’t tell you what it is; if you’re waiting for it, our Emperor will smell a rat. Just believe me when I say that when I want Ortus to go, he’ll be giddy-gone.” (This did not make much sense to you, as a joke.)

  There was a brisk knock on the door. You immediately pressed yourself to the wall, out of direct sight if it opened, and Ianthe tightened bony fingers on the shining end—pommel—of her Third House rapier; but Augustine merely said, “Come in, lynchpin.”

  The lynchpin walked in. It was the Saint of Joy.

  Your erstwhile teacher ignored you, folded into your alcove, and she ignored your sister, whose pallid eyebrows had shot up so fast and so far that they were in danger of breaking the atmosphere. Mercymorn wore a long slip of peach-coloured silk, and her white Canaanite robe was tucked over her forearms and had slipped entirely off her slender, aggrieved shoulders. She had scraped her hair into a merciless and shining coil at the back of her head, and she had no eyes for either of you.

  She said, “You have some nerve.”

  “Not remotely; I never have,” he said, affably. “Do you accept the terms of the offer?”

  “Tell me what you’re—”

  “Accept first.”

  “I’ll accept if you swear on the sword,” said Mercy, with unholy eagerness.

  He raised his rapier up within its scabbard. It had a bright conical hilt of what looked to be copper, with pricked designs all over it. “I swear by the sword of Alfred Quinque, best of men and cavaliers, that the details of your, ahem, business will not be told by me, or revealed by me, or let fall from the lips of my mouth nor the pads of my fingers—even though I think it will be the death of us,” he added. At this, there was a fractional relaxing of Mercymorn’s frowzled brow: not relief, but the germination of the seed of relief. “Accept.”

  “Fine! I accept,” she said. Then she looked around herself, and said: “You do know the children are present? Should I kill them, or what?”

  “Ignore ’em,” said Augustine. “Better you don’t know why they’re here. Look—I need you to fully commit to this one, Joy, and if you don’t, I will consider the oath I just swore tampered with.”


  “Commit! Commit!!” she said scornfully. You noticed she was wearing short strings of apricot-coloured seed pearls in her ears; they vibrated as she folded her arms across her chest. “Stop wasting your breath and tell me the plan.”

  “Once you hear it, whatever you do to me, don’t do it below the neck. None of my other shirts are pressed.”

  “Stop drawing this out! Tell me!”

  He cleared his throat and said: “Dios apate, minor.”

  You had a front-row seat to Mercymorn’s dreamy eyes going quiet; the eye of the tempest, before she reared back and punched him full in the face. There was not much force in that blow, which barely snapped his head back, but he whitened as though her fist had been a battering ram. He gagged, doubled over his washstand, and ejected a mouthful of teeth—a tumbling, plinking bowlful; he held his hand over his red and dripping mouth and closed his eyes, and after a few moments straightened back up, a trifle greyer, running his tongue over his regrown incisors.

  “Minor,” he repeated when he could, taking out a handkerchief and dabbing his mouth. “Minor—how many times must I say it?”

  “You’ve lost your senses,” she said unsteadily.

  “You think I am joking, Mercymorn?”

  They looked at each other. Then followed the type of conversation you had only seen once before, between her and God—that exchange of shrugs, and words begun in the mouth and aborted at the first breath, and at one point she said, “Gradient?” and he answered, “Radial,” and then they devolved again into a shorthand of facial expressions. In its own way, it was swifter and less coherent than what you had seen pass between the Emperor of the Nine Houses and her, that lifetime ago leaving the Erebos; but at the end, her hand fluttered around her mouth, and she halfway wailed:

  “I’m not wearing the right dress.”

  “It’s perfect. You look like a melon.”

  “But I hate this,” she said, quite genuinely, and Augustine looked at her with his insubstantial eyes and said: “I understand. Buck up, Joy; it won’t kill you.”