Harrow the Ninth Read online

  You withdrew, finally, your mouth from her mouth. Ianthe was left, lips slightly parted, eyebrows raised, her bloodless face untouched by maidenly blushes.

  “I pledge myself again to the service of Ianthe Tridentarius, Princess of Ida, daughter of the Third House,” you said. “I swear again to honour any previous agreements I made to her. I swear by my mother; by the salt water; by that which lies dead and unbreathing in the Tomb; by the ripped and remade soul of Ortus Nigenad.”

  “Who?” she said. “Oh, yes—the cavalier.”

  Ianthe wiped the pad of her thumb over the blanched bow of her lips, then considered her fingers. “Well,” she said eventually, “that constitutes some improvement over your sewing my lips shut, like you did the … no, pardon me, I agreed not to mention incidental detail.”

  “Wait. You submitted to be made a Sewn Tongue?”

  “Ask me no questions and I shall tell you no lies,” said the Princess of Ida, wiping her thumb against her bottom lip again, very delicately. “Look, all I shall say is that for a House that trades solely in bone, you own some enormous needles. I accept your fealty again, Ninth House, and can only assume that you have now read the agreement.”

  You sat back down on the bed and placed your hand on the sword, which had the effect it always did: your oesophagus gave a little exhausted shiver, your salivary glands jolted, and the nausea rose up behind your eyeballs. “You have wrung a great deal of blood from what seems to be a very little stone,” you said.

  “I gave you something you cared about very deeply at the time,” she said, idly swinging one leg to perch over one knee. “I don’t consider my price all that high … and neither did you. What’s more, now we are about to embark on what promises to be a truly beautiful friendship, with me the lone fruitful thing in your salted field, et cetera, so I’ll thank you to not embark on the I have been hard done by act.”

  Your fingers pressed down hard on the wide breadth of steel. The thundering in your ears was a patchwork of sound and adrenaline, and your heart was sore. “The pledge did not condone disrespect,” you said. “I will not suckle at your bootheel.” (“Unnecessarily descriptive,” said Ianthe.) “I will not suffer insult. I am the Reverend Daughter. I am a Lyctor. I am in your debt … but I am not here for your amusement.”

  “Not in that thing you’re not, certainly,” said Ianthe, whose lip was curling. “You look like a huge peppermint. Take this—and this.”

  This—as Ianthe reached suddenly beneath her chair, right arm still strangely flopsome—proved to be a great shiny wadded-up bundle. She tossed it lightly at you—you didn’t even try to catch it—and it landed in a lovely pool on the bed. It was a mass of the same thin and frivolous material that currently shrouded Ianthe: a robe in mother-of-pearl colours, all its wrinkles and creases disappearing as you tentatively shook it out. It had a hood. It had deep sleeves. That was all you needed. The colour was not going to become you, but it was hugely preferable to the turquoise shift. You squirmed inside it with unseemly haste. You pulled the hood deep over your head and did not bother to hide your sigh of relief. You were clad from the arms down to the legs, if not modestly; the whole rest of your face was on show.

  And this was a neat stack of flimsy envelopes, the same as the first. The Harrowhark who had addressed them had taken the time to write their labels—apart from the numbers—in neat crypt-script. You flicked through them to count, and could not help scanning the requirements. Some of them were plain and stark. To open in the event of the Emperor’s death. To open in the event of Ianthe’s death. To open if the Ninth House is in mortal danger. Some of them were opaque to the point of madness. To open if your eyes change. If met, to give to Camilla Hect.

  You wondered, mystified, if you had ever known the last name of Camilla the Sixth, a woman you could not recall interacting with at any point.

  “I will remain in possession of the last two,” said Ianthe, having risen to stand. It was always difficult when she stood: she looked so completely like a shoddy wax cast of some more beautiful sculpture. “I will tell you openly that there’s one I get to open in case you die, which is fun.”

  You flipped through. Your eyes fell on: To open if you meet Coronabeth Tridentarius. This was different from the other envelopes in that it was not written in cipher. You were not happy at the idea that Ianthe had spent any time with your code, and thought your past self complacent in the extreme. Ianthe’s eyes fell on it too. “You wrote that one in front of me,” she said. “I can summarise the contents … you are now pledged to me and by extension to Coronabeth, and I tell you for free that one of the riders is that you will never harm a hair on my sister’s head.”

  “Your sister is likely no longer alive,” you said, seeing no reason not to say it.

  She threw back her pale head and laughed outright. “Corona!” she said, when she was done. “My sweet baby Corona is far too stupid to die—she’d walk backward out of the River swearing blind she was going in the right direction. I will tell you when my sister is dead, thank you, Harrowhark—and that day is not today.”

  Your head was swimming. In a way, you were relieved. Part of you was afraid that this was just another complex part of the hallucination; that you would wake up again, and soon, back in a world where you were not part of your own master plan—a plan you resented, as you resented any peremptory order and any attempt to keep things secret from you, but a plan that nonetheless existed. You could follow any blind precept, if the alternative was madness.

  “If it is all the same to you, I would like to be alone now,” you said. “I have a great deal to think about.”

  Ianthe said, “How politely expressed!”

  She drew her skirts around her and curtseyed to you—a beautiful, thoughtless movement, prismatic breadths clutched in her fingers, and it was somehow also mockery. When she looked up at you, you saw her eyes had changed yet again. They were both that bleached lavender now, but freckled with light brown like a constellation of little pupils.

  “Take your time,” she said. “I would have thought time was the last thing we had at the moment … but who am I to judge the King Undying, the God of the Nine Houses?”

  You said, because again you could see no reason not to: “You should have disciplined Tern better, if he’s still fighting you this way.”

  Ianthe considered this. She nudged the confection basket hilt of the rapier at her hip aside, and took out a long knife that, again, ran a hot rill of pain down your temporal bone. It was—though you had never bothered to learn—Tern’s main-gauche, his trident knife, a long blade from which two other blades would spring at the press of some hidden mechanism; she flicked that mechanism now, and with a snickt they burst out like a firework, two hard points of gleaming steel. She flicked it again, and the blades went snickt back into their housing.

  She placed her palm before you, outstretched. Without a moment’s hesitation, or sign of pain, or even much give, she thrust the knife through the meat of her palm. It must have done enormous damage—to flexor muscles, to the nest of carpal bones—and ruby drops of blood splattered the sleeves of her shimmering robe.

  As she withdrew it, the wound knitted together as though it were nothing. She simply withdrew, and the skin closed up—the meat bounded back on itself, elastic—the hole sizzled to a close, leaving her palm whole and unblemished except for a few wet drops of crimson red. These she shook off, and they disappeared into powder. For the first time, when you looked at her, Ianthe gleamed with thanergy as a coal gleamed red with heat.

  “Hold out your hand,” she commanded.

  You did, knowing full well what was to happen—you did it without hesitation, as she had done it without hesitation. Ianthe held your hand gently, by the wrist, considered the angle, and thrust the blade home.

  Every fibre in your being bent toward not throwing up. The delicate tendons in your palm snapped under the razor-sharp blade; the steel juddered against a metacarpal—chips went flying into the muscle bed—yo
ur blood sprayed promiscuously against your face, a hot, salty thickness of it against your lips, your nose, your right cheek. Your eyes rolled back in your head in an ecstasy of suffering. The world rocked. You saw the Body, pressed against the back wall, her hands clasped together as though in prayer; you looked at the blade sunk deep into your hand and looked at Ianthe, and for a moment understood that she was about to press the mechanism and rend your hand utterly—leave your palm a smoking ruin of gore and muscle, of whiteness of bone—that you were being punished both, perhaps, for the kiss, and for something you could not even recall doing.

  She pulled the blade clear. This was also agony. Now you understood the object lesson: there was no sewing-up for you. Your meat was left ripped bare and vulnerable, a gaping, heinous hole in your hand, your skin a pitiful red-and-pink mess of shredded dermis. You grasped the wrist she was also grasping with your free hand; you poured thalergy in with embarrassing torrents, a hot, shameless gush of it, flicking free chips of bone and wending muscle back into muscle. This took effort and thought. You refilled the blood; grew new shiny spans of skin; left your palm as whole as before, your nerves screaming, shaking with the memory of pain.

  “Harrow,” said Ianthe gently, “don’t fuck with me. I’m not here for your amusement either.”

  She turned away from you and walked toward the door. Your mouth was dry. You kept trying to rewet it, but you were afraid that it would come out as bile; your head was swimming. You steadied yourself enough to say, “Is your cavalier a forbidden subject, then?”

  Her hand stilled at the pad of the autodoor, standing by the hanging that showed the First House picked out in white thread. “Babs?” she said. “I don’t care about Babs … Just don’t suggest my sister is dead to me, ever again.”

  She touched the pad beside the door and crossed the opened threshold. The door closed behind her, leaving you alone. There was blood on your face and the knees of your robes. After a moment you shook them clean as she had done, drying out the blood, rendering it powder. You were weak. You staggered over to the Body, standing so quiet by the wall, and you buried your face in her thighs. The dead cool nearness of her was so close to being real that it rendered itself genuine comfort.

  You were close enough to the crates stacked up by the door now to see that they had been placed against the wall hastily, and somewhat ajar. You wobbled to your feet and pushed them down in a domino cascade of clanging plex.

  Behind the boxes were hundreds of thick nail fragments, like the broken horns of some weird animal, scattered on the floor and embedded in the wall. Some of them were brown with dried blood. Long, ragged missiles of keratin were, at some points, finger-deep in the panelling. You crawled back to the cot where the Body laid you down on the sheets, placed the heinous sword within your arms, added the letters to this pile, and gave you the go-ahead to fall unconscious.

  5

  SHE WAS FIRST AWARE OF LIGHT. It poured through the plex windows in lavalike radiance: white and steaming light, making her undershirt stick to her ribs with sweat. In the tiny black confines of the shuttle, the light took up all the space with its irradiating, corneal presence; and Harrowhark cried out as though she were dying from it, and then was tremendously self-conscious and discombobulated.

  “Please,” a voice was saying. “Please, my Lady Harrowhark. Be—be peaceful. What can I do for you? What must be done?”

  Ortus was almost bigger than the light, filling up the black-and-steel spaces of the passenger seats as much as the radiance did. Harrow realised, smarting, that his expression was that of a man who considered her a source of embarrassment. Somewhere down the years, she had come to understand that Ortus Nigenad, that perfect modern Ninth cavalier—perfectly shaved head, perfectly appropriate paint, perfectly grim solemnity, perfect body of two cabinets nailed together, perfect ability to carry six kilos of bone—considered her a slightly sorry object. How sorry an actual object, he could not possibly conceive.

  “Am I making the sign?” she managed. “Am I giving you the signal? No? Then I will remind you that anything else is none of your business, and hope I do not have to remind you twice.”

  He was not sweating as she was, but those lashes were damp from the light. “As you see fit, my lady,” he said. His rapier was not belted at his hip. He carried it over his lap, as though it were someone else’s baby. Harrow was pleased, dimly, to see that for his main-gauche he carried his pannier, despite Aiglamene cutting up so rough at the idea; that felt appropriate. She had always desired a helpmeet, not a circus performer.

  “Where are we?” Harrow added, in another sudden welter of nervousness. “I thought—perhaps—”

  “We must be four hundred kilometres above the surface now,” he said, mistaking her question. “They are securing our clearance to land. We shall leave orbit soon, I trust.”

  Harrowhark rose from the placket of House dirt she had been sitting on, which held the merest suggestion of thanergy at this point anyway, and she crossed to where the light was coming in. At the last moment she remembered what she had brought with her and drew a piece of thick voile from within her sacramental vestments. She tied it around her head and pulled up her hood, which still smelled of the salts that Crux had so carefully packed it away with: that herbaceous, acrid, homelike smell, the one that made her eyes smart again with familiarity. Then she looked through the plexiform window.

  From space, the House of the First resembled a box of tumbled jewels. Haloed in white, its blues deep and brilliant and oxidised, a planet of water, close enough to the fiery gyre of Dominicus that the water was not allowed to freeze yet nor so close that it burnt away. Insubstantial and ever-shifting ocean, as far as the reddened eye could see. Her smarting eyes fell upon a tiny jumble of squares, ringed around a central greyish smudge.

  She turned back to her seat, and found herself saying, restlessly, “At times now I forget … I thought I was dreaming, perhaps.”

  “I find it perfectly normal, my lady,” he said. “Perhaps I am right in perceiving that you thought it might surprise me, your being … with the infirmity of…” When she looked at him, he immediately seemed to find the rattle and thump of the shuttle’s mechanisms overpowering, and began a traditional Ortus shutdown. “Your … so-called … the frailty.”

  “Nigenad, use your words.”

  “The insanity,” said her companion. Her shoulders relaxed a fraction. He mistook her rising relief for an emotion he ought to have known she never felt. Ortus said, distracted: “The only surprise really being in it expressing this way, rather than … No, I am not surprised, Lady Harrowhark. Perhaps you may yet have cause to find it useful.”

  “Useful.”

  Ortus cleared his throat. This engendered many emotions in her—Ortus Nigenad cleared his throat with the import of a sword being slid from a scabbard, or knucklebones jostling in the pocket of a Locked Tomb necromancer—but it was too late, as he was already declaiming:

  “Then did the dire bone frenzy fall upon Nonius, the mightiest arm of the Ninth and its bulwark;

  Spasmed his veins with the death lust; his great heart roared like a black iron furnace, hungry for corpses…”

  “Ah,” said Harrowhark. “Yes. Book Sixteen.” And, presently: “I think ‘bone frenzy’ might be a term open to coarse misinterpretation, personally.”

  Better death by the drawn sword, and better the death of the knucklebone. There was only one trigger to drive Ortus Nigenad so comprehensively berserk, and she had forgotten that it was not a trigger to use lightly. Ortus primly said he thought that nobody who read the Noniad would be the sort of churl who misread a simple and evocative collocation like bone frenzy; he went on to suggest that such a person probably didn’t even read in the first place, and would be more inclined to trifle with prurient magazines or pamphlets than to bother themselves with a complex epic such as the Noniad; he said that he wouldn’t want such a person to read his poetry anyway.

  “At least now I possess the time to finish
it,” he added a little moodily, but apparently satisfied with that thought.

  This surprised her only in that it was so obviously expressed. She did not voice what she thought: that even if he was right—even if the last thing Harrow wanted was for Ortus to get in the way as she studied the paths of Lyctorhood, to become a finger and a gesture, to take the only divine path that had ever opened for her in order to save her House from a destruction she herself had inflicted—it didn’t behove him to say as much. She hoped he never finished it. She hoped there was never world enough or time. Harrowhark had always thought Matthias Nonius, legendary cavalier of her House, sounded like an absolute horse’s ass.

  “Harrowhark,” said her cavalier, “I wish to ask you a question.”

  He did not sound timid now; his mood had shifted to a more typical restrained sadness, though she thought, perhaps, there was something else within it. Harrow took a moment to study his face. Ortus would be a good rest cure, should the homesickness get too acute. He had classical Ninth eyes: a tintless shade very close to true black, sharply ringed around the iris, very like her own.

  Ortus said a little restlessly: “What do you think it is like—to be a Lyctor? Do you think it is a central tragedy to them, their great age, their timelessness?”

  She was surprised again. “Nigenad, what would be the tragedy in living for a myriad? Ten thousand years to learn everything there is to know—to read everything that has ever been written … to study without fear of premature end or reckoning. What is the tragedy of time?”