Harrow the Ninth Page 29

  The incinerator buckled. The alarm screamed. You grabbed Ortus and pulled him down the side of the room as a mass of hot melted bone sludged from the door. You dragged him away from that singeing, choking, killing mass, and you laid him against the bulkhead.

  He was almost totally incapacitated. His eyes were closed. You moved his hands away and looked more closely at that shattered heart; the wounds were closing, but slowly, far more slowly than you would have expected. His cyanosed lips bespoke terrible effort as his heart knit back together. He was a myriad-old Lyctor. You did not understand.

  The Saint of Duty said, with a kind of hoarse solemnity: “Fresh blood wards. Every night.”

  You said, too surprised not to sound like a moron: “What?”

  He said, “Can’t bleed thalergy … not fresh thalergy. Thanergy, easy. Mixed with thalergy … much harder. No bone wards. Blood wards. Understand? Fresh blood wards. Each night. Can’t break those.”

  This was all said in staccato, at the apex of each wheezing breath. The incinerator continued to spew out a white-hot lahar of semi-liquid bone, and it smelled ferocious. The Saint of Duty did not open his eyes. He just concluded doggedly: “You’ll be safe from us.”

  There were smarter questions to be asked in response. The one that came to you first—and in your defence it was not a bad one—was: “Why?”

  He did not answer. He buckled as he turned his head and coughed, more wetly. Then he reached out, and he put his bloody hand to your head, nearly covering your face, the tips of his fingers to your temples and your cheeks, like a smothering, or a benediction.

  “I know you’re there,” he rasped. “Kill me all you like. I would know you in the blindness of my eyes … in the deafness of my ears … as a shadow smudged against the wall, annihilated by light … stop. Not here. Not now. Let it go, love. I just want the truth … after all this time.”

  Ortus dropped his hand and said, with intent: “Just tell me—back then—why you brought along the ba—”

  A voice down at the other end of the room bellowed: “Harrow!”

  It was God, at the stairs. Mercymorn, dishevelled, was beside him. A few steps behind was Augustine, even more dishevelled, with lipstick on his collar. Ortus did not continue. You stood, the air sizzling the ends of your hair, slapping your face. The Emperor stood on the bloodied steps opposite you, amid the wail of the alarm. The incinerator wheezed dolefully—someone was moving in the little plex office—and then clanked off. With a sudden white shock to the sinuses the bone gunge melted to fine powder, and then, as you looked, dwindled to invisible soft dust.

  You said insistently, “Why I brought along what? What do you mean?” but Ortus had opened his eyes now, with all their bizarre green sweetness, and he was staring up through you and up through the ceiling as though he could see through the very hull of the Mithraeum; and he looked up, and beyond you, and he said no more.

  * * *

  How much God believed your side of events—how much you believed, in relating the story, hot with adrenaline and regret and the helpless self-doubting rage of the psychotic who knew what she saw and was still able to dismiss it—was not clear. He was very weary. The buttons of his shirt had been done up with the wrong buttons in the wrong holes. You were acutely aware of his displeasure, but did not entirely understand it.

  As God, Mercymorn, and Augustine looked over the incinerator, they left you alone, sitting in the filtration room with Ortus. You did not often trust instinct, but you were not afraid of him then, seeing him sit on an upturned box the same way you were sitting, wiry, and empty-faced, and defeated. You were just angry.

  “You saw what you saw,” you said. “You must have seen her stab you. The blow was from the front, with your own spear.”

  Ortus said, “I don’t know.”

  “You were conscious. You spoke to me.”

  He said, “I don’t know.”

  “We had a conversation. I want to know what it meant.”

  He said, “I don’t remember.”

  You looked into his clear green eyes; his expression had not changed, and neither had his voice. You could not keep the disbelieving contempt from yours when you said, “You don’t remember?”

  The Saint of Duty turned his body toward you. He was clutching his rapier; but it was idle, in the crook of his elbow, in more the manner of an abandoned broom than of a weapon ready for war. His eyebrows were very slightly drawn together, a sort of exhausted crinkle. He looked at you, and he said in a voice you had known since you were eight years old: “I sometimes—forget.”

  It was the tone—clinical, enamelled, half-defensive, half-endangered—the tone of someone admitting a final frailty. It was familiar because you had used it yourself. Understand I am insane.

  Later on, when the Mithraeum was searched, Cytherea’s body was no longer on its altar; and God said he could not detect it anywhere on the station at all.

  * * *

  When you were back in your rooms—your now-familiar, almost-welcome, neat and empty rooms—you opened a vein and set about replacing all your bone wards with blood. It took you hours. You did not fully ward the plex outside, which would have needed complex and careful remote construct work, but you placed an extra skein of wards around the interior windows, and hoped the quick fix would do for one quiet night. You were standing in your little foyer blowing a fine grit of bone dust over a wet blood ward when you heard footsteps outside your rooms.

  You stood very still, and you listened.

  “I hope you’re happy.”

  “Not a bit.”

  “What a farce … what a grotesque, awful, miserable farce.”

  “Well, for goodness’ sake, how was I to know they’d trip the incineration alarm? God, it’s always the one you don’t turn off.”

  “As though I meant that.”

  “If you mean the other—you were in serious danger of overegging the pudding. Nobody would ever believe you would get that drunk accidentally.”

  “Piss off,” came the response. “I nearly slapped you. Don’t you dare use her as a lever, ever again. Bringing her into it … and your nincompoop brother with her … almost isn’t worth the payment.”

  “She should be so lucky as to be any kind of use, as she wasn’t any in life. Damned proud of my straight face. Oh, Cristabel, all is forgiven! Good night, Mercy; my lips are sealed, but if you’re going to make deals with the devil, do ask to see the goods beforehand. I hope you choke before I regret it, and I hope you know that one day I’ll wrench Cristabel’s rotten ghost from your corpse, and eat her … Where did you stash Cytherea?”

  More footsteps. A voice rose: “I told you once and I’ll tell you again: I haven’t touched her, you vile, condescending son of a bitch…” And then—nothing. You ducked back into your room.

  At last you were able to wrench off the scarf that posed as a dress, and button yourself into a nightgown of your own, and you were able to brush your hair, and scrape off your paint, and wash off the blood from where Ianthe kissed you, and you were able to lie in the silence of the night with your sword beside you and the evening behind you.

  Next to you, the Body said quietly, “The water is risen. So is the sun. We will endure.”

  ACT FOUR

  32

  TWO MONTHS BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER

  THE FOURTEENTH PLANET YOU were sent to kill was the thriving, thalergenic satellite of a hot little star. It was lush and terrestrial, with a thick carpet of vegetation and plenty of animal life, and nobody particularly wanted to be responsible for taking it out. Unfortunately, it was right in the current path of Number Seven; and Number Seven, as Teacher put it, would view such a planet like a hot pie. You were the youngest. It was left to you, and to Mercymorn.

  Cytherea’s body had never been found. An attempt was made, in those first few days, to search for it, but it seemed that the only one still anxious about it was the Emperor. You knew that Augustine suspected Mercymorn, though you did not know why; Ianthe s
uspected Ortus of squirrelling her away, no matter your doubts. (“You know,” she persisted in saying, “for … sex reasons.”)

  She had not blamed you for failing to murder him. Surprisingly, nor did the Saint of Patience, who had allusively apologised for his failure to account for the incinerator alarms. You had not seen any great changes between him and Mercy—except that they were fractionally more short-tempered with each other—or between him and God or her and God. There was no embarrassment, nor any pause when they met at breakfast, or in the corridor, and clasped arms with the same warmth or lack thereof that they had always shown. The total absence of appropriate shame made you suspect that this had happened between them before, a thought that made you want to give yourself a lobotomy.

  And, despite the overwhelming disappointment of God, the Saint of Duty had tried to kill you twice since then. But even he seemed to be weary of it. And your wards had held.

  At the start of your latest excursion your teacher surprised you: when you landed on the planet’s surface and confirmed that the atmosphere was breathable (“Keep an eye on what you’re breathing in anyway,” said the Saint of Joy. “Planets are dirty.”), she had given you a pack, and a water canister and a beeper, and told you to go away. There had been no room to land the shuttle at the planet’s lush and forested pole, and so you were faced with a short hike.

  “You can do it by yourself,” said Mercymorn. She was snappish and fretful, but Mercymorn was always snappish and fretful. She had not become any less snappish and fretful in the last handful of weeks: simply abstracted, as though her eyes already looked to the River. “I’m going to go do the moonlet next door. It’ll be covered in reflected thalergy. Time yourself—don’t let it get away—most of the life on this thing is in the ocean, but if I’ve made a mistake, don’t get eaten by some sort of creature while you’re under.”

  You said, “Sister, how am I meant to protect myself when I go under?”

  “I’m not the genius two-year-old, am I,” she barked. There were red rings about those hurricane eyes, and she kept wringing her hands together and looking down through her lashes when she spoke. “I’ll be back in about six hours. Goodbye!”

  It was the first time you had been left alone on a foreign planet. The earth beneath your feet reeked of moisture, and little worms and beetles moved within it. The foliage was a violent effusion of greens—fresh, lemony greens, and dull dark piney greens, and in-the-middle dun greens, and a rustling, bristling canopy of leaves. The air was hot and wet, like the inside of a mouth. The sun beat down on your head in gouts of ultraviolet radiation—your eyes squinted against the light—and the sweat made your hair start to curl thickly about your neck. It very badly wanted cutting now.

  Two days ago God had taken you into his little sitting room and given you a glass of water, which showed that he had learned, and a biscuit, which showed that he lived in optimism. And the Emperor of the Nine Houses had said, “Harrowhark, when the door comes down behind me, I want you in that room.”

  You had said, “No.”

  “Harrow, there has been no progress. That’s fine. I understand. But I want to give you more time … I want you to have a future.”

  You had said, “Augustine the First has trained me in the River. My necromancy there is nonpareil, and has been since the first. When the Beast comes, I will be ready to meet it, on its turf.”

  God had looked at you, and he had quirked his mouth in something like a smile, and said: “You’re even stubborner than I am. I thought I’d cornered the market.”

  There were many days when you felt his disappointment as a vise, as a long-imagined hessian pressure against the bones of your throat. There were equally as many days when his nightmare eyes relieved your dry exhaustion like a long, chilly drink of water. Your love for God was akin to your love of the beautiful riverbed edge of the iliac crest. Your love for God was like those moments of reprieve, immediately after waking, when you were not sure who you were; those moments of living in another Harrow’s skin, a Harrow who understood everything with a purity of completeness. It was a relief, to worship thus. You had once thought your capability for adoration had been consumed when your eyes had bent upon that face in the Tomb, dead and irresistible, the interment of beauty. You were relieved to find some scraps left over.

  You raised the hood of your mother-of-pearl Canaanite robe over your head. The sunshine beat down through it and pattered prismatic light over your face. Birds shrieked above. They were not large creatures, and you were not afraid of them, but you almost pitied them. It was an uncomfortable thing, to remove the soul of a planet like this: it would be the first time you had done it, and the first time you had killed any planet alone. The creatures would not die immediately when the planet did. But they would—slowly—come to change, and in the end they would be thanergy mutants who could not reproduce. A rather Ninth House death, and the death that came for all flipped planets, in the end.

  The forest floor was gnarled and uneven—for the first hour you walked stoically, and you sipped your water. When you grew tired, you spent the second hour in the arms of a large, hulking, ambling skeleton, and you had to brush away the branches and leaves as a second skeleton stormed ahead, cutting down all this boil of thalergy as it went. It was with an ache like nostalgia that you thought of Drearburh, and home: that you thought of the vast gyre at the very apex of your temple, which seemed like a pinprick from the bottom tier, that thin, watery cloud of pumped atmosphere and the dead of space beyond. You thought of the murmurous prayers within the chapel. You thought of the Secundarius Bell, its booming profundity, its black tongue’s clangour, of waking to the CLANG … CLANG … CLANG.… as some ancient bellringer hyperextended his biceps in trembling, sacred eagerness to yank that rope.

  The Body walked beside your construct. The sun did not dry the melted ice upon that indistinctly coloured hair. The moist warmth of the jungle around you did not impede her, and exertion brought no flush to those long, thinly muscled arms, nor to the slender, gracile legs, nor to the dead cheeks. She had been with you very often, of late.

  You saw all the signs of your undoing. You had few months to live. It could be quite easily counted in weeks now. God had been correct: you had not changed—you were not fixed. You were the last, lone, assailable Lyctor. The others were now distant from you, looking to the Resurrection Beast that came to punish their mortal sins and kill their Kindly Prince.

  And yet—there, in the alien slather of forest, among the ferns, and fronds, and greenery arching against a skyline that was a more reticent verdancy paling into navy blue—you could almost believe that you had the capacity to be happy again. You were an unfilled hole, but even a hole might be content in its emptiness.

  At that point, though you did not know it, you were a mere kilometre from this insubstantial contentment’s obliteration. A hole might also be filled with worms.

  33

  INTO THE FOURTH HOUR, you realized you were being followed. A very dim awareness of some large presence pierced the curtain of so much other thalergy, and you were instantly irritable—Mercymorn had failed to gauge the planet’s character. It was plain there were large mammals in this region, and you’d have to come up with some way to carefully plant yourself so you wouldn’t get chewed on while you severed the planet’s soul. Your annoyance turned to suspicion when it became clear that the thalergy signature was following you—it was keeping careful pace about a hundred metres behind you, stalking your path. This was not hard. Your skeletons trod heavily. You were leaving a trail that a blind idiot might’ve followed, in the middle of a dark and moonless night; you went back to being irritated, this time at your own foolishness, and you stopped.

  You waited in a clearing for your predator. You caulked a space over that rich red earth with bone, so that you could stand on a little platform of it with the tip of your sword touching that mat and not worry that some annelid was about to squirm over your feet. You checked yourself over to make sure that no airbo
rne foreign body was making inroads on your immune system. You pulled your hood deep over your head, and you waited.

  The thalergy made its approach. You realised with a deep and slithering horror that it belonged to a person.

  And then a woman was standing at the edge of the clearing. She wore a peaked cap to keep the sun off her dark-eyed, scissor-slash face; a woman in a grey robe with the ends tied in a fat knot about her middle to keep them from dragging in the dirt. There was a rough canvas bag around her neck, an arresting, festering mass of thanergy amid all that clear and comprehensible life. She had two shabby scabbards peeking up over her shoulders, and chin-length, slate-brown hair tucked behind her ears, the colour of ancient tiles in an abandoned temple.

  Your voice did not feel like it belonged to you when you said, “I saw your corpse.”

  “Well,” said Camilla Hect steadily, “don’t tell everyone, or they’ll want to see it too.”

  From the distance between you, you considered her; you also considered a body with a ruin for a face, lying on a long length of plastic sheeting. The sobbing, shrieking birdcall around you resolved into an indistinct burble, and you raised your hand to your right ear, and your fingers came away thick with blood so dark that it was almost purple. She took a step toward you; you retreated one, equalizing the distance, and she did not close the approach. You looked at the cavalier of the Sixth, and you bled.