Harrow the Ninth Read online

  God was trying to say something. Augustine parted from Mercymorn with a noise vaguely like a vacuum hoovering up mincemeat, and—with no crash of unholy thunder, and without the rent of the universe in twain, and without his skin melting from his unworthy bones—he turned and also kissed the Emperor of the Nine Houses.

  You were glued to your seat. You were hot from your temples all the way down to the top of your ribcage, with outrage and mortification vying for top place within you. You were frozen as Augustine carefully, thoughtfully, and with a great deal of intent, put his mouth on God’s mouth. As though this were not fodder enough for the coming apocalypse, Mercymorn stood, swaying; one thin dress strap was sliding precariously off her shoulder. When Augustine detached from the Emperor’s solemn mouth, Mercy reached up, grabbed great fistfuls of his shirt, and kissed God too.

  It took Ianthe two attempts to get your attention. Eventually she stood you up wholesale, and with absolutely nobody paying attention to either of you, she propelled you out of the room. You looked over your shoulder as she opened the door—God had just picked up the Saint of Joy bodily and sat her at the edge of the table, and the Saint of Patience had his mouth at God’s neck, which was horrible—and Ianthe hustled you through as though escaping from a fire. You had never seen three people get their hands on one another before—you had never seen two people get their hands on each other before. Ianthe closed the door just as Augustine’s fingers reached the buttons of the Emperor’s shirt, and you had never been so grateful to her in your entire life.

  31

  “THAT WAS THE CUE?” Your voice sounded humiliatingly high-pitched.

  “Harry,” said Ianthe, thankfully also a trifle strangled, “when three people start kissing, it is always a cue. A cue to leave.”

  You said, “I feel unwell.”

  “Yes. Yes, me too,” she said heatedly, in unexpected accord. “That was disgusting, to say the least. Old people should be shot.”

  The underfloor lights glowed their cool blue, trying to soothe you into circadian sleep. A Cohort officer with grey tags at their sleeves lay enshrined in a niche opposite, an eyeless steel mask laid heavily on their face. Both you and Ianthe were breathing as though you had run a footrace, laboured and loud. Ianthe’s hair was in long margarine tangles down her neck, and her mascara was smudged beneath her eyes, and her ribs were heaving as though she were in an asthmatic fit. She carried her high-heeled shoes in her gilded skeleton hand, and they made for a strange juxtaposition. The breath-soft lavender gauze had a tiny violet stain on the front, and her mouth was red: she had been chewing her lips, and they had broken, and split. You realised with an uneasy start that you were both, in fact, quite drunk.

  Ianthe ran a tongue across those wounded lips and said, “I suppose this is it.”

  You said, “I appreciate your part in this, Tridentarius,” but before you could stop her, she drew you close with her living arm, and she bent her head to yours. You understood this inevitability only a second before it happened. Perhaps there was a dark universe in which you reached for her; in another you exploded her heart in her chest. In this one, as she lowered her mouth, you turned your face away, and her kiss fell on the side of your jaw. Both of you reeked of alcohol. Minute traces of blood smudged your cheek with tiny perfume blots of thalergy as she brushed her broken mouth across it with unanticipated tenderness. There was a rigid trembling somewhere in your sternum. When she raised her head again her gaze was cool and mocking, as though your inability to receive a kiss was yet more proof of limitation.

  Your mouth was very dry when you said: “My affections lie buried in the Locked Tomb.”

  “And let them lie,” she said, laughingly, and not very kindly. “Somebody might even exhume them for you. Good luck, Harry … try not to die.”

  She walked off swinging her dancing shoes in her dead arm, and she even hummed tunelessly beneath her breath, before she disappeared down the corridor: a lone wax figure in pale purple chiffon, tall and colourless—except in the greasy metal of her bone arm, which the lights rendered all the colours of the rainbow. You could hear her carefree humming even after she disappeared, as you stood outside the dining room stock-still and frozen.

  When it died away, you turned to your assassination.

  You kicked off your shoes and left them, as you were still drunk enough to find that reasonable. Most of the alcohol was already in your bloodstream, but quite a lot of it was racketing around in your small intestine. As you walked in silence down the tiled hallways, past the pillars of tendon- and plex-wrapped wire, you focused on working it out of your capillaries and then out through your pores until you were running wet with sweat. Easier to move ethanol through water membranes than anywhere else. The fog in your brain and body burnt away, and you peeled two long strands of articular cartilage and hard calcium from your exoskeleton. These you melded and worked between your hands like clay, until you had a smooth greyish globe of bone.

  There was no question of proceeding by stealth. Stealth required advance preparation, scouting, mapping, and you had not been given time for any of those. You had not known until ten minutes before dinner that your target would be in the training room. You had been forced to come up with tactics that would work on any battlefield. The buzz of adrenaline and remnant alcohol sang through you and made you feel prickly and overwarm, despite the fact that you were as soaked with cooling sweat as though you had stood in a spray of blood. You had been the subject of attempted murder more times than you had fingers and toes. You had sat through a long, agonising dinner culminating in two elderly Lyctors getting their tongues on God. Your mouth had been very nearly kissed. The calm that came over you as you went to murder Ortus the First was the weary calm of someone who had already been tried within an inch of her fucking life.

  You stood before the autodoor of the training room, bowered over the black lintel with rainbow-coloured bunting and tessellated butterflies of pelvises and spines. There was nothing to sense within, but you would never have been able to sense him. You pressed the obsidian tab that opened the doors; you rolled your ball through with a swift underhand movement; you shut the doors again before they’d had the chance to part fully.

  You had thought this through in detail. The Saint of Duty was a thanergy void. This you understood. Send a skeleton construct in, and within a few seconds it would be an inert pile of bone upon the floor. You had wondered about trying to build some complex mechanism with multiple layers—interlocking tiers of thanergy-rich bone, freshly grown from your own body, forcing him to waste time chewing through it all—but then you had remembered the ease with which he had crumbled bone even as it sprouted from your wrists, and realised the risk was too great. You did not know how fast he could work, and you could not base your whole plan on a guess.

  When Ortus the First had dried up your wrist spikes, you had felt him do it. There had been an appreciable jolt, as of a switch being thrown. He had gripped the periosteum in his hands and made something happen. That meant it was a conscious action, not passive. That was only logical, since a necromancer who automatically dispersed the thanergy from his surroundings would be a desperate liability to his fellow adepts. If the drain was a conscious action, it required some measure of concentration. He needed to focus. You could not give him that chance.

  Your bomb exploded into a myriad of bone shards. You felt their thanergy light up like an electrical impulse, through the walls. You made that training room a goddamn hailstorm. Each fragment was no longer than four centimetres; that was long enough to kill, given the pressure with which you shattered them outward. There was a muffled eruption of rattling—a vigorous THWACKETA-THWACKETA-THWACK as thousands of missiles hammered into the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the foot-thick plex window. You thumbed two studs out of your ears, dropped six full constructs behind you in a spirit of pure optimism, and slammed the pad open again.

  The training room was a smoking ruin. The wooden floors were a jagged carpet of embedded bone
caltrops. The electrical lights overhead were smoking, crackling bars of broken housing and tungsten fibre; your bones were cilia inside a cavity, bristling spines on a rose’s stem, fine hairs on the legs of an arachnid. Razor-sharp spikes powdered harmlessly beneath your tread as you ran into that destroyed room wearing little more than a scarf and your paint, with your collagen-coated hands clutching your two-handed sword; and you readied yourself.

  The Saint of Duty wasn’t there.

  You said, “Fuck.”

  Then, more aggressively: “Fuck!”

  The smothering caul of disappointment around your heart was an unhelpful distraction. You sheathed your sword to the back of your exoskeleton and—reminding yourself, yet again, that reliance on others was as taking a brute-force blow with your vulnerable lacrimal bone—you turned off the lights, and you covered the ends of the wires in a thick cap of cartilage, heading off the fire alarm. Then you removed yourself from that bone-strewn ruin, somewhat chastened, thoroughly aggrieved.

  Ortus the First was not in the training room. Fine. He had surprised you before. There was one other place on the Mithraeum where you had found him, at a time like this, when he thought he might not be disturbed; and so it was on swift feet, and with rising determination, that you retraced your steps toward the outer ring and the habitation atrium, and the room where one last Lyctor lay in state.

  The Saint of Duty was not there. Neither was the body of Cytherea the First. A trail of blood emerged from the open doorway, smiled on dimly by the electric lights. It led away from the bier where once the necromantic saint had slept so restively. Your heart and brain responded when you bade them both be still, and for a few seconds you stood before that continuous ribbon of blood, almost without thinking—and then you retrieved them both, along with whatever madness-tattered sense you retained.

  You crouched. The blood was minutes old, a tangled skein of oxygen-rich carmine and oxygen-poor scarlet: blood from the right atrium, expelled straight from the heart. You stood and stepped carefully into the room on your bare feet. Behind the abandoned altar there was a criminal crimson splatter of blood on the back wall, more sprayed across the incorrupt petals of the increasingly blush roses. And discarded on the floor lay Ortus’s spear, slick and red from its point to almost halfway down its shaft.

  You did not need a Sixth House dust-botherer to reconstruct this particular tableau. Someone had stood behind the bier, their back to the wall; the spearhead had been thrust through their chest and exited their back with one almighty push—blood had spurted from the exit wound, and then sprayed forward when the spear was pulled back out, with that same prodigious strength. Judging by the mess it had made of the roses, the attacker must have received a liberal coating. Then the victim had been dragged past the altar and out into the atrium, and from there to who knew where.

  The weapon belonged to Ortus; but to whom belonged the blood? You had wet your hands before with the blood of Cytherea’s unbeating heart; this was not hers. One possibility was that Ortus had stabbed a third party, and then chosen to abscond for reasons of his own with both their body and Cytherea’s. That might be the most plausible explanation. But it was not the simplest.

  You followed that long, snaking trail back out of the room. It led down the hallway, then turned an abrupt corner into a feeder corridor to an inner ring. You spurred your exoskeleton into a trot; your chilled feet spattered through the still-warm blood, and you left cooling crimson prints behind you as you ran. You moved along a dimly lit statuary corridor, between the gilded and bejewelled skeletons of Third and Seventh heroes dressed in gold and green robes of necromantic office, with amethysts and topazes and emeralds for eyes; you turned abruptly, skidding a little in the blood, through a low service doorway.

  You had passed through the habitation ring, and the storage ring. You were in the engineering and environmental ring now, with the power systems, and the life-support, and the exhausts and waste. The lights were dim here. There were fewer portholes, and the effect was immediately more claustrophobic, more tubular. Even here, no space was wasted: ten thousand years of memorial meant that even in the sharp yellow shadows of the filtration panels, and past the enormous gurgling vat of the water tank, the inlaid bones of the Nine Houses sat forever watching switchboard lights marked things like END EFFECTOR SUCK—END EFFECTOR WINNOW—END EFFECTOR SIFT. Better to decay to powder in the Drearburh oss than keep watch above END EFFECTOR SUCK until the end of time.

  The blood was still wet beneath your toes, although thinning out somewhat; it trailed in a nearly black ribbon down past the filtration rooms, and you followed it out to the exhausts. It dripped down a short flight of metal stairs into a wide, deep room within the station, not so thickly built up with the accretion of computers and mechanisms from upstairs. You could understand the great scope of the Mithraeum in here. Tall oblong plex windows were set high in the walls, and wads of thermal foam nuzzled up against a little bunker, windowless and solid, with huge valves set in it travelling up through the walls and into chambers unknown. You did not yet know why the station had an incinerator: as far as you knew, it recycled rather than destroyed its waste. Mechanical arms dangled overhead, waiting to place things into the incinerator via a roof-hatch. Partway up the main wall, above the bunker, was a tiny plex-fronted control booth, which you could see no way of accessing; the door must have been somewhere back up the stairs.

  The blood ended abruptly at the door of the incinerator. As though in a dream, you followed it to its terminus. Set in the door was an immensely thick plex panel, yellowed from old fire, and you peered through it.

  Ortus the First lay propped against the wall at the back of the incineration chamber. His chest was a neat, bloody void where the spearhead had gone precisely through his heart. It would have meant instant death for a normal human being, even a skilled adept. He lay with his chin lolled down on his chest. There was nobody else in the incinerator with him.

  The showdown between you and the Saint of Duty was already over. Your enemy had been killed without you laying a finger upon him. You felt, dimly, cheated.

  The Saint of Joy and the Saint of Patience were—distracted—with another matter, that matter being God and a heretical three-way division of saliva. Ianthe had walked away from you, all split lips and gay loneliness; had she walked, less drunk with every step, toward the little room where Ortus bent over a dead woman? Was his ruined heart a gesture for your benefit? Would she leave so much blood; would she come here?

  Ortus’s corpse heaved for breath inside the incinerator, and coughed, though you could not hear the sound.

  You watched as, trembling, he slapped a hand to hide his nude and livid wound. All around him, the incinerator mechanism rumbled to life. You spun away and looked up. In the protected plex booth stood Cytherea, spotlit by the strong white light from the panels above her, leaning heavily upon some handle within; a dead woman staring at you through dark and filmy eyes, her face freckled with drying blood, petals in her limp ringlets.

  The flesh was dead, but the hate in that face was alive and well and living. You looked at the walking corpse within the cramped control booth, that wraith of irradiated loathing, and as you were frozen by that gaze she shouldered forward—moving as though throwing her limbs; moving as though she wore her body weightily as lead, and each joint’s flexure meant heaving an enormous mass—and, keeping her eyes on yours, she flipped a switch.

  The valves groaned and popped with heat. They sounded like the acceleration of some great engine. And Cytherea turned, and with each limb dangling out of time with its mate, she limped away.

  Within the incinerator, Ortus looked at you. In the shadows of the incinerator, his eyes seemed very dark. There was no bloom of necromantic power, nor move to save himself: the third saint to serve the King Undying stared at you with something very like helplessness, lying there with his heart exploded, a man before the flame.

  You thought that you might gather up his ashes in a box and keep them
. You imagined what kind of construct might be made from the bricks and mortar of the bones of a sacred Hand, a man who in an act of sacred transgression had used another human soul to fire the ravenous battery of his heart. You thought about sleeping for six whole hours a night, in a bed alone. You thought about proving your sanity: to Ianthe, to Mercy, to God. You prepared to follow Cytherea—to run on bare feet back up those stairs, into the filtration rooms, and to head off that loping, shambling cadaver at the pass. You imagined the answer to that mystery.

  And then you iced your hands over with thick wads of cartilage, slid them into the handle of the door, and pulled with all your might. It did not respond. Living bone burst from your fingertips in grossly exaggerated distal tips, and you snapped them off at their bleeding edge. The pain distracted you, and you screamed aloud, to focus. This bone you unfolded into a seething web of phalanges and nuggety clumps of palm bones, pressed into the door; then those distal tips you turned into fluid, and this fluid you turned into liquid ash a micrometre thick, a very—weeny—construct. You syruped this broth through the microscopic crack in the door’s seam. The incinerator’s mechanism ignited somewhere in the vents above you with a thump—the Saint of Duty followed the flow of a nozzle spraying transparent liquid before his feet—and you wrenched the door from its hinges; you tossed it down the breadth of the room, in a mad, idiot, beautiful rush, and you walked straight into the petals of a chemical fire. An alarm shrieked overhead as though it too were roasting to death.

  In the second that you saw the ruddy white surge of flame, you did not know it was hot enough to melt steel. You only saw the steps of what you had to do. One of the arms with the liquid-ash fingertips had resolved into two skeletons behind you, their outside layers wet with regenerating ash. You rocketed them forward to drag Ortus by the legs. You exploded their spines into a solid wall of regrowing bone, into a rushing avalanche of reeking, liquid, perpetual marrow, plunging it into that fire as a thousand-layered barrier, the fire versus the bone, unfolding and unfolding and unfolding as the flames burned and burned and burned. You stripped the fucking enamel from your own teeth and added that to the squelching, scorching layer. It was the first time, as a Lyctor, exploding such tonnage of bone into an incinerator’s flame, that you looked upon the limit of your power: and that limit still stretched so far out into the goddamn distance that it was out of your sight.