Harrow the Ninth Read online

  “Time can render one impotent beyond meaning,” said Ortus unexpectedly. He made his eyes downcast again, and said: “I would not expect you to—be crushed by the weight of that particular comprehension, Reverend Daughter.”

  He might as well have said, You are a baby of seventeen, and I am an adult of thirty-five. She regretted, not for the first time, not going for broke and taking Aiglamene. Perhaps there would have been something in rocking up to the First House with an octogenarian in tow: a sort of wild and confident fuck-you—Oh, your cavaliers are young? And they fight? How classic! So jejune!—but that would not have been the wild and confident fuck-you of the Ninth House. The Ninth House character, she was forced to admit, had always been low on wild and confident fucks.

  “Nigenad,” she said, “I am what I am, and I am seventeen. Yet I assure you that I contain multitudes.”

  “I am fully aware of that, my lady,” said Ortus.

  Which was perfectly correct of him to say. But Harrow somehow did not like the way he said it. “They are taking too long to vet us,” she said, and stood, and restlessly pulled down the plexiform barrier between them and the empty cockpit. She was about to press her fingers to the communication button, to ask the pilot what the holdup was and how he was to explain it; but she saw something she either had not seen before or that had suddenly appeared, upon one of the padded seats. It was a piece of flimsy. She took it and withdrew into the bleeding light of the passenger hold.

  She could feel Ortus’s eyes upon her as she turned the piece of flimsy over. It was coloured all over with thin blue ink, scribbled so hard that the termination of each letter pushed holes into the surface, and it read:

  THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME

  She gave it to her cavalier. The shuttle seemed totally quiet now. No mechanism ground; no pipe gurgled. The light was very still and white and she no longer felt it moving. He scanned over the piece of flimsy, frontward, then flipped it over to scan it backward. He cleared his throat—Harrowhark found herself flinching, and nearly tore herself to pieces for it—and he said:

  “It’s blank, my lady.”

  “Fuck,” said Harrow.

  6

  WHEN YOU WOKE, you were already sitting up. Your chin was bowed on your chest so that you had an exciting view of your lap. You were no longer in your bed, and the lower walls and floor were blurring past you in scuffed washes of black stone, bones, and steel.

  Your vision swam. It became apparent immediately that you could not move. Your clinical brain rose to the fore as your meat brain shied and ran around and barked like the badly behaved animal it was. Your clinical brain took stock and realised that you were seated in some kind of chair being wheeled down an Erebos corridor, and that someone had pinched a high cervical nerve right into your spinal cord—not deforming the bone at all, but manipulating the flesh only—in such a way that you were locked out of your body from the neck down. You could not raise your head. You could blink, and breathe sufficiently, and swallow poorly. Otherwise you were as marble. It was an astonishing act of necromancy. You were righteously indignant, but amazed at the act.

  You were still in your beautiful mother-of-pearl robe, head deep in your hood, hearing the thick and papery rustle of twenty-two letters secreted within your clothes. The sword was laid across your lap; a thick, fatty webbing joined the hilt to your forearm, a webbing that you had no memory of creating but was nonetheless your lacework. Perhaps you had woken up at an earlier point to stash the letters down your shift and fix the blade to your arm; you did not recall, but that was not unusual. Sometimes your conscious days were dreamlike ordinances of movement, functions, sounds. Rather than muscle mass within the web, there was a honeycomb of bone stretching out from your forearm through the webbing to the hilt. Nobody was going to get it away from you in a hurry. It was as though you had been picked up bodily, plopped in the chair, and disabled from the neck down. You hoped distantly that your bladder hadn’t evacuated.

  The chair stopped. There were voices. You concentrated hard on whatever had been done to the back of your neck—visualized your known friend, the odontoid peg that protruded from your other known friend, the cervical vertebra—the bracelets that surrounded the vertebral arteries, the tangle of physeal joints. If it had simply been bonework, you would have been able to identify the mischief immediately, and unfuck accordingly. The voices coalesced—

  “—can clear this instantaneously, Saint of Saints, once the Holy Prince has finished giving audience to—”

  This came from in front of you.

  “The meeting! The meeting!!” It was difficult to articulate extra exclamation marks, yet the new voice did so. “Do you think I have time for—for—for the extra hour in which three generals and your Resurrector, the God of Dead Kings, try to schedule another meeting after the first one has done? Do you think I came here to wait for three personal assistants, six calendars, and God himself changing his mind nineteen times??”

  This came from behind you, and above. This voice, in all probability, belonged to the person who was pushing your chair.

  “Sacred Hand,” said another voice, “forgive me. It was his order that she was not to be touched. There were no allowances; there were no riders.”

  The first voice said, “There was no opposition when I ordered the shuttle. Nor to my preparations.”

  “The order regarding Harrowhark Nonagesimus was specifically stated by him, Holy Finger, Holy Thumb.”

  The voice above Harrow said, “And is my order suddenly not God’s order? Am I no longer Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, the second saint to serve the King Undying? Have I lost my rank among the Four—or, now, as I so horribly find, the Three? Am I not the last sister serving in a charnel house of dead sisters, all of whom gave their long and dutiful lives so that your squalling children and their germ-ridden children’s children’s children could bask in the light of Dominicus?”

  The other voice paused. “No,” it said. But then it added, and there was a hint of stoic wretchedness: “Most Holy Saint of Joy—forgive me—I still ask you to please wait until the meeting is done.”

  There was an explosive sigh. “It’s all right,” the voice said, quite normally. “It’s all right, Lieutenant, I understand. You’ve only met this baby and the other baby. You’ve never met a Lyctor. You’re not to know … even if you’re in his presence, it’s another thing altogether to understand…”

  The voice trailed off, and the person standing behind your chair crossed over to the person in front of it. You were distantly interested in what happened next, if only because you were not used to being granted a front-row seat. You beheld one normal person before you—the other was a black hole, and now you knew why—and that person had two kidneys. A sudden one-two punch of thalergy emerged from nowhere, as far as your senses were concerned—no, not punches: a stiletto, an unutterably focused dart, a syringe—and each kidney was hosed with angiotensins. A perfect spike. Blood pressure plunged. A body joined the shoes and trouser bottoms in front of you as the officer fainted, and the chair was wheeled around the neat human pile.

  The voice behind the chair was muttering:

  “Horrid … just vile! Erebos placements never do have any horse sense … told him time and time again to rotate them each decade … just a nightmare. My presence ought to have the same effect as a fire alarm … I do not want to wait … I do not want a cup of tea. I am not asking for feudal submission; I am asking for understanding!”

  This blast of volume might have made you jump, had your spine been connected. The chair paused in front of one of the elevator shafts; the dark doors whispered open to the rainbow inlay and the hangings of the lift chamber, and the chair was rolled inside. You were busy flexing the ragged end of your dorsal root—you had assumed it must have been severed, which would have been the simplest thing to do, but you realised all at once that it had been tied into a knot. It had been bowed out, twisted, and looped.

  The keypad made lo
w, electronic chirrups as somebody pressed down upon it. A mass of fabric whispered past you—you could not feel it on your body, but you felt the air upon your cheek—and then a person knelt in front of your chair. A shining, shimmering billow of pale fabric came into your field of vision, a rainbow-hued whiteness that ran through shades beneath the hot tungsten light, like the reflection of coloured glass on ice, the same stuff that now was draped around you. Then, awfully, your vision was lifted. Someone had pressed a finger lightly beneath your chin, and they were tilting it up so that you could see their face.

  You looked at the Lyctor. The Lyctor looked at you.

  The face beneath the icy parti-coloured hood was a prim, virginal oval; much in shape and feature like the shape of a saint’s face in a portrait, or a death mask. The nose and jaw and forehead were all carven and serene, and therefore had the same indifferent dullness of a well-formed statue. You noticed the colours first, beneath that harsh and unlovely light: that the hair was a dead flower or apricot colour, and that the skin and lips and brows were of a similar hue, so that beneath the nacreous cowl the saint looked like a painting with a very limited palette; and the eyes …

  You had seen a Lyctor’s eyes only once before. Lyctors kept their own faces, but the eyes they stole from someone else. You had been lucky that your own transition was not as startling. This pair of eyes were a slumbrous, sand-tinted hazel with grey-madder clouds within them, like a red hurricane moving over a gaseous mantle, like a storm-ridden planet of red dust. The expression did not match these dreamy and quite beautiful eyes: the expression was paralytically repellent in ways that had nothing to do with your dorsal nerve. It saw right through you, marked what you had done, and let you know that there would be a reckoning. No signs of age touched the corners of those screwed-up, dust-storm eyes, but nonetheless it was a gaze as elderly as Crux’s. There was something in the look she gave you—after she read the whole of your features, as though searching—that puzzled you. Then fell the final indignity. She hooked her finger into the seam of your hood and tugged it down to your neck, so that she could look at your whole face without permission, bloodied skull and all.

  You flushed until the tips of your ears were red hot. Fear and humiliation formed a bone hook at the back of your superior articular facet; acrimonious rage drove it forward, caught the loop, and withdrew it backward, as though unknitting your nerves. The scythe of pain that swept over the back of your scalp nearly made you sick again, and you would have been if you had not of late become the Saint of Emesis. You squeezed the nerve flat with the muscles around it and wedged the minute hook back into your spinal mass where it belonged. This resulted in a whole-body case of pins and needles so profound that all you could do was thrash like a fish on the end of a line. The finger was withdrawn. The stormy eyes widened, just fractionally. An emotion was playing out over her face that was—not unfamiliar to you—but nonsensical; you discarded it.

  “You oughtn’t to have done that,” she said. “You might have blown out your dorsal nerve and asphyxiated.”

  She looked at your face and saw what was so nakedly writ there: disbelief that she could perceive what you’d done. “No, I cannot sense you,” she said, in answer to your unspoken dismay. “But your body is not a mystery to me. I may know it better than you do, you—you Ninth baby.” You were fumbling with the hood with clumsy hands, hiding your face. “How old are you?” she asked abruptly. “How old in years?”

  You held your flopping idiot’s head up, to look at her face again. For some reason—and you never needed a reason; you were very good at producing a reaction to no stimulus whatsoever—you became afraid. It was then that the Body emerged from behind the Lyctor’s shoulder, squatting somewhere close to the doors. Her sweet dead face floated a little behind the Lyctor’s. She looked at you with her heavy-lidded, yellow-gold eyes, and she said, quite clearly, with the voice of Aiglamene and your mother commingled:

  “Lie, Harrow. Now.”

  “Fifteen,” you said immediately, hoping your own meat would not betray you.

  She pressed, “Counting from conception, or from birth?”

  “Birth.”

  That emotion played out over the face again, like the ripple of darkness across a briefly disturbed body of water. The whole body clenched and unclenched. It didn’t matter that she was a black hole to you, without thanergy or thalergy to speak of; it was just a matter of seeing her shoulders. It was relief. It was unalloyed, full-bore relief.

  “Yuck,” she said.

  The elevator came to a thudding halt. The doors behind the Lyctor opened; she stood, then looked down at you. The relief was gone; the distance remained.

  “I have asked the Emperor multiple times why he has allowed himself to sit, exposed, for this long on the edge of the place he must not come back to,” she said. “And the reason turns out to be you. Some lost Ninth scrap who never had anything to do with anything … a nobody. But he acted so surprised … I said, Put an age requirement in the letter! I said, Everyone will be pubescent if you don’t! And now we reap what he sowed. Hiss.” (For a moment you thought you’d had an aural hallucination, that nobody who had lived ten thousand years—that nobody who had lived—would verbalise the word hiss.) “Well, you have three options: you can walk with me now to the shuttle, I can wheel you, or I can drag you. Which do you pick, you half-grown juvenile? I will tell you: the other one walked.”

  You stood up. It cost you.

  “Good,” she said, looking at you critically. “You look like a bat stuck in a birthday cake and you need at least two haircuts, but you are—you will be—you were—God’s breath, and God’s bones.”

  The Lyctor rearranged your hood a little bit and smoothed out the shoulders of your robe—for this you vowed to one day take her dorsal nerve—then looked at the sword webbed into your arm, bent nearly double beneath its weight and your weariness. Her expression said quite clearly what she thought of it, but she had seen your naked face and perhaps seen something there. Perhaps your plans for her dorsal nerve.

  “You’re not as pretty as Anastasia” was all she said.

  Now the Reverend Daughter followed more like a cavalier of her House than a necromancer of it. You creaked like a pack skeleton beneath the weight of a burden, following in the Lyctor’s wake. Thankfully, you no longer felt shame. Pride was swiftly becoming a planet you had travelled to once but no longer remembered in detail. The docking bay she led you into was a hive of activity. A speaker gave a belated parp of “Our lady the Saint of Joy is gracing Docking Bay Fourteen,” yet this did not seem to encourage everyone to scurry into the gleaming steel-and-bone culverts of the ship, but rather to take whatever they were doing into double time.

  Whatever they were doing involved, primarily, a shuttle. It was not large. It was of a size, in fact, with the type that had used to bring the Ninth House lightbulb filaments and vitamin supplements, manned by a single pilot who always looked as though he had gained the job by losing a bet. There were boxes being carried up into it. You were distracted by the beating hearts and muscles straining all around you, weeping lactic acid as they slid and locked containers and crates into position. At the top of the ramp, sitting on an upturned container in a whisper of opaline skirts and distinct peevishness, was Ianthe; her focus was on the back of the shuttle, not on you. She sat within the sea of heaving stacks and bundles like a pillar.

  “All right,” said the Saint of Joy. “Chop-chop. Get in there and don’t move an inch. Don’t get in anybody’s way. Just go in, and sit, and be good.”

  The Cohort officers saluted Ianthe as they passed her up and down the ramp. You noticed the ones who reeked of thanergy kiss their thumbs in a gesture you did not recognise. As you dragged your numb idiot body across the bay and staggered up the ramp, you were grateful that nobody did the same for you; you were once again given the wide berth accorded to a Ninth House necromancer.

  The inside was as cramped as you’d suspected, and sordidly simple. What arrested yo
u immediately was the source of Ianthe’s fascination and open admiration. Before the back wall of the shuttle, a necromancer of the Cohort squatted; necromantic miasma shone upon her as brightly to you as a torch. There was no fuel here for her to use to commit necromancy. She was in deep space, and she was not a Lyctor. What she could do was put the final touches on an exquisite nullification ward—wet and red with her own blood, which was being pumped out from a long syringe. It would have been difficult and arduous work even had she access to her aptitude. The arms of her robes were rolled all the way up to her shoulders so that the cloth would not touch and blur the pattern as she worked; you noted rucked-up House ribbons of pale seafoam green.

  Ianthe saw you, and she startled. Before you could be relieved that there existed one Lyctor who might still startle for you, she made room for you on the upturned crate on which she was perched. You did not like to, but you sat primly on the corner proffered, trying to press your knees together to stop your bodies from touching. Today—and how much time had passed?—her eyes were that washed-out blue, with amethyst lights in them.

  “You’ve met our respected elder sister, I see,” Ianthe said. “She accused me of being twelve, called me one of those animaphiliacs, then told me I wasn’t as good looking as someone called Cyrus. It was like being back with Mummy,” she added, with a touch of fond nostalgia.

  Your palm remembered the knife, and you resisted the chumminess. You said, “Where is the Emperor?”

  “I don’t know, and nobody will tell me anything,” she said, more peevishly. “Everyone has been acting frankly mulish … which I suppose I can’t blame them for, as I might act the same if I were peremptorily dropped from the Emperor’s personal attaché and shipped off to the front … but what is the good of being Ianthe the First, if I can’t even leverage it?”