Harrow the Ninth Read online

You hazarded a quick glance to the Cohort necromancer; but the Seventh adept paid you no attention. You noticed that her ward—an expert’s work, and an artist’s, that of genius married to style—was a very familiar one: it was a ghost ward. You tried to wrench your brain back to the words Ianthe had said, and the order she had put them in. This was difficult, as what you knew about the Cohort and the front could fit into a teaspoon. Even that much knowledge had always annoyed you, but something she’d said had rattled your comatose hypothalamus.

  You said, “That makes no sense. The Imperial Guard doesn’t see action.”

  “Oh, my sweet, you don’t know … Well, how could you? It’s not as though anyone’s told you; you were too busy with your binary of throwing up or being murderous. Well, Nonagesimus, they do see action when the Cohort suddenly loses three warships to as many orbital radiation missiles, which is three more warships than we’ve lost in the past thousand years,” said Ianthe. Were it possible for someone to puff more with self-satisfaction, she would be swollen and gouty and dead; but rather than irritated, you found that Ianthe just made you feel tired. “Eighteen thousand dead soldiers will grab the attention … Corona would love it. She’s mad for military funerals.”

  It was difficult for you to muster empathy. You had nobody at the front, or indeed in the Cohort. The last Ninth House chaplains and construct adepts had, as you recalled, been lost in action five years back. The numbers remained numbers, lacking context. You were more interested in the conversation happening outside the shuttle’s docking doors, before the ramp: an unfamiliar voice saying steadily: “Holy Saint, the Erebos is his vessel. I speak for every commanding officer aboard when I tell you how reluctantly we would see the end of his eighty years aboard.”

  “Eighty years!!” was the response, again with that articulated extra exclamation point. It was the result of extreme irascibility: the saint had a high, fluting voice, a young voice for someone who had now accused both you and Ianthe Tridentarius of actionable puberty, and it was piercing now. “Eighty is shameful—you knew the writing was on the wall when the call came for more Lyctors. His seat is elsewhere, and there he must return, and should have returned thirty years ago. You’re now Admiral Sarpedon? Really? It is Sarpedon, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said the admiral, whose title had been suggested by the Lyctor in the same tone of voice as might be said Chief Leper. “And it has been … twenty years since we last met, Most Venerated Saint?”

  “Around that,” agreed the most venerated saint, whose office had been enunciated by the admiral with the faintest and most well-bred suggestion of motherfucker. “In any case, you’ve had him eighty years, and the Mithraeum has lacked him for a hundred.”

  “You are invoking throne silence,” said Sarpedon. “You are removing him from the Empire.”

  “I can’t very well invoke throne speech. We’ll be forty billion light years away.”

  The admiral said, through a thin rime of ice: “He has expressed, in no uncertain terms, his close personal interest in this war.”

  “He can very well maintain a close personal interest in it from forty billion light years away,” said the Saint of Joy, who had just strongly implied the opposite. Her name was sounding increasingly ironic to you. “I do not blush to remove the Emperor from his enemies. I do not blush ensuring the God of the Nine Houses is not molested by those who hate him.”

  “I do not recognise,” said Sarpedon, “any such frailty in the God who became man, nor the man who became God, nor the Necrolord Prime who may resurrect a galaxy with a gesture.”

  The Lyctor’s voice rose further: “The risen star Dominicus gives light and life to the Nine Houses, and yet I don’t think we should crash anything into it!! You just wore out my last nerve, Sarpedon, and I still remember when there were fewer pips on your shirt, so I would ask that you not mistake a Lyctor for someone you can—”

  There was a shout from the other side of the fourteenth cargo hold. It was the voice of the God who became man, and the man who became God. He approached the ramp at a swift clip, making a beeline for the boiling-mad Saint of Joy. Beside you, Ianthe smacked her lips as though in anticipation of a good meal; a sort of mlem, mlem, mlem.

  But the Emperor wrapped his arms around his Lyctor as though she were a precious and runaway child; he pressed her to him, drawing down the hood and tousling that overripe rose-tinted hair, heedless of the curtseying, bowing Cohort officers in the wake of his passage. She froze as though dipped in liquid nitrogen. He said something that you couldn’t catch, and then: “Thank you for your work here. You’ve done well.”

  The Saint of Joy was ramrod straight and still, as though her feet had been fixed to the docking-bay floor with big steel pins. The Emperor of the Nine Houses turned from her to the admiral, who was half into his own genuflection, pressing a hand to his shoulder and immediately embarking on a low conversation you could only catch in bits: “—no hurry going around the belt. If the wind off Dominicus gives you problems, take the same route back … Subluminary speed’s fine. After you do your deliveries, stelitic travel will get you out of the supercluster and back to the second arm of the fleet, but you’re going to have to go a lot slower than you have the past two weeks…”

  “Then you do intend to leave us, Lord,” said Sarpedon. He had moved so that now you could see him properly; your new hood, unlike good Ninth House furze, was transparent enough to let you see quite clearly, albeit through a stippled violence of rainbow light. You beheld a man of middling age in a sober Cohort uniform, perennial white jacket and scarlet neckerchief. The two pips on his collar were ringed around with mother-of-pearl. If you had not heard his rank, you would not have known what they signified. Necromantic vapour rose off him in roiling waves like sweat, unused and impotent in the vacuum of deep space. “I confess that I had not prepared for it.”

  “I hate to, Admiral,” said God. “The Erebos has been my home.”

  The admiral said, a little stiffly: “We are unworthy of such love.”

  “I am unworthy of this pitiful goodbye,” said the King Undying. “What I planned on telling you, I will tell you now, swifter and more gracelessly. Don’t get caught up in the drama of the Cohort command. I know exactly who is behind this terrible blow, and they were fools to show their hand. They have revealed themselves to be as coarse and juvenile and foolish as the act they have just committed. But our retaliation should not be swift. Let them understand the inevitability of the Nine Houses.”

  “As inexorable as death,” said the admiral.

  “And as kind,” said the Emperor. “You have shown your loyalty to me, Sarpedon, and I have never questioned you. You made the Erebos my respite. But—as I imagine you have just been told—” (Did the Saint of Joy writhe at that, or were you imagining it?) “—my station is my seat, and the Erebos is needed elsewhere.”

  “But to go unaccompanied, Lord—with the stele, a transport ship could be out as far as the Hadals in two years.”

  “Eighteen thousand good soldiers,” the Emperor said gently. “Take the Erebos to them. And give her a new name—Seat of the Emperor.”

  “My lord—”

  The Saint of Joy muttered something beneath her breath. The Emperor did not bat an eyelid. “Yes, I know it’s lowly to captain a chair,” he said. “But I won’t have anyone in the Admiralty forget what she was, and what I hope she will be once more. In any case, the name ought to get you to the head of orbital queues, even if I’m not in residence. I’ll miss her like fury, Sarpedon, but she’s got thicker plates than anything else in the fleet, and when she’s refitted she’ll carry two thousand.”

  “Yet, Lord—”

  “As for you, your bones will be hallowed in the Mithraeum, for all that you’ve done in my service. If I don’t see you before then, all I can do is hope you get a chance for retirement.”

  The Emperor of the Nine Houses reached out to clasp Sarpedon’s hand. The Cohort admiral looked as though he were being branded. The Emperor held
this grasp, and the admiral’s gaze, for a long time; then he turned back to the ramp up the dock, followed—a little reluctantly—by his Hand.

  As he drew closer, you could see that he looked as though he had prepared in a hurry; he carried a small bag, hastily packed, slung over his shoulder—the ever-present tablet peeked out of his pocket, along with what seemed to be at least five styluses—and he was dressed simply, as per usual, in a black shirt and trousers. The lack of tint had always pleased you. It was very Ninth, even the collar and the cuffs of his shirt that were scruffy and pilled from too much wearing. But he wore a crown of office that you had not seen before: a wreath of ribbon and pearlescent leaves in his dark hair, rustling prismatically in the windless docking bay. Each leaf was intertwined with a match-sized infant fingerbone. He turned and strode up the ramp toward you, and he said very normally, like you’d never fainted before him in a lather of pre-puke: “Are you all right, Harrowhark?”

  “I am perfectly capable, Teacher,” you said.

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  Ianthe said, with a close approximation of winsomeness: “Put her under my care, Teacher,” and you were disgusted to hear God reply, “I will. Keep an eye on her. Now—”

  He turned to find the beautiful ward completed on the wall, and the Seventh adept quietly dying on the floor. There was a whorl of blood down her front; at some point she had levered her syringe deep into her subclavian artery. After finishing the final touches on the perfect nightmare spiral, which betrayed no trembling from myocardial trauma, she had sprayed fixative across it, then silently collapsed. She lay with her eyes rigid on the ceiling, hands clasped over the growing stain on the front of her robes, which were turning Second House scarlet with blood.

  The Emperor mumbled something that, you would swear on the rock before the Tomb, sounded like For fuck’s sake. After a moment’s consideration, he pressed his hand to his mouth, as though in thought. The bloom that followed blinded you beyond unpicking, or even comprehending.

  The stain crumbled to dust. The blood ceased flowing. The Seventh adept’s hands clutched clean robes. Her expression changed from glassy-eyed expectation to resignation; she rolled over to kiss the dusty floor of the shuttle. You and Ianthe were left blinking, eyes and noses streaming, as though you had just eaten something slightly too spicy.

  “Most Holy Lord,” she said, but there was half a question in it.

  “Not today, First Lieutenant,” said God. “We need necromancers like you now more than ever.”

  She kissed her fingers at him, a little mechanically—and then to the Saint of Joy, and then to Ianthe, and then, after a pause, to you—half a dozen times, and then curtseyed to the point where she nearly folded herself right in half. She rose and escaped down the ramp, booted footsteps bouncing in her wake, the only sign she had been there the enormous whorl of the ward. The Saint of Joy watched her go with an unreadable expression on her placid portrait of a face.

  With two more aboard, you could see how small the shuttle really was. To your left, there was a partitioned area that might have been for bodily functions—or going to the toilet, as everyone else in the known universe would have put it—but otherwise the space was bare. There were no beds. There were no real seats for passengers, except for a few pull-downs at the side. The boxes brought on were quite small; the biggest was a stone square strapped down with lengths of steel rope. Displaced from its fellows, the tiny rosebud gone, it took you a moment to realise that it was a coffin, and another moment to recognise whose.

  To your right was a cockpit with empty seating for one pilot, spread with a wide and beautiful wrap of embroidered pearly material—and with a lurch in the back of your brain you saw it wasn’t empty at all: the Body had taken up residence on that rainbow shawl, sitting there with her hands prim in her lap and the chain of welts clearly visible. The gorgeous and severe angles of her face were softened as though in recognition, and her lips were a little parted, enough to show her dead black tongue. When you followed her line of sight, she was looking at the entryway, and the Emperor.

  The Emperor pressed a button next to the door and the ramp sucked up into the shuttle with a great mechanical slarp. Then he turned to his Lyctor and said, in a tone of thinly sprinkled sugar upon infinite salt: “Well, this looks a great deal like forcing my hand.”

  “Lord, I would never dare—”

  “My flagship, to my admiral, among my people. Is the Erebos really the best place to publicly gainsay your Emperor, Mercy?”

  She rounded on him. The canvas of her portrait face was now scrunched up in passionate fury. You had expected that ten thousand years would be enough to school a face whenever one wanted it schooled; apparently not, or Mercy had never bothered with schooling.

  “The only one who forced your hand is coming home with us in a box,” she cried out. “And it’s ugly of you to use my name in front of the infants. We agreed our names were sacred—we let them all be forgotten—”

  “Mercymorn,” said the Emperor, “you know as well as I do that keeping your name from your rightful sisters is ridiculous. Also, you are trying to start a fight with me to get out of the fight I am trying to have with you, which is a painfully domestic tactic.”

  “You are nearly in Dominicus’s halo—it looks suicidal—”

  “You know why I came, and my reasons for waiting are out of—”

  “Some would call it madness, or ego, or both—”

  “Who’s some in this instance, and does their name rhyme with Nercynorn—”

  “It rhymes with Naugustine,” said the Saint of Joy, with no small amount of hauteur.

  The Emperor of the Nine Houses’ face suddenly lit up like the sunrise of an inner-circle planet. “Then you and Augustine the First are talking again?”

  Mercy threw her hands in the air, milking an invisible and gigantic cow in order to assuage her feelings, and flung herself to sit down on another secured crate. She put her chin in her hands; her rapier clattered beneath her rainbow-white cloak with the movement. “We were talking,” she said, chilly and measured, “as little as nineteen years ago, if you’d recall. If we talk again now, it doesn’t actually signify, being as speaking is so different from talking. And I am not on speaking terms with—the person you refer to. Nonetheless, your actions moved me to talk to that silly man-shaped worm, and I came here to take matters into my own hands.” Before he could say another word, she said: “Nobody’s answering calls on the Mithraeum. Come home, please!”

  “But that’s—”

  “Three of us remain,” said the Lyctor simply. “I can’t even confirm the third is alive.”

  “He was keeping tabs on—” began the Emperor, and seemed as though he were about to elucidate those tabs; but he caught sight of you and Ianthe sitting quietly, waiting for this dreadful conversation to end (you) or nakedly desperate for more (Ianthe). He set his little shoulder bag down in what appeared to you, wild with panic, to be the Body’s lap. She looked up at him, impassive, and then at the bag, nonplussed. Then he dropped down on his haunches in front of his sullen Lyctor.

  What followed was a conversation entirely in shorthand: at one point it was simply conducted in shrugs. He would say a word; she would retort with a totally different word, and the Emperor would grimace or give her sharp rejoinder. On occasion, that sharp rejoinder was simply a quirk of his mouth, and the Lyctor would turn her head, loser of that bout. You were watching two people who had outgrown conversation half a myriad back. It was more a dialogue between arm and elbow; heart and brain, shared via electrical impulse. At no prearranged point, they suddenly returned to normal speech, and God said:

  “I was going to wait on the Erebos until we had heard definitively whether or not the launch—”

  “I don’t care if it was them or not,” sniffed the Saint of Joy—Mercymorn—whom you now knew possessed two utterly inapt names. “They’re remnants. They can’t do anything. Their leader has been gone for nearly twenty years. You’v
e got to prioritise.”

  “But this is so obviously—”

  “I beg you to recall the stakes, Lord!!” said the Lyctor.

  “The Mithraeum is a destination we can reach by only one means,” said God, with the air of a man pulling a final brick out of a wobbling tower. “I cannot yet in good conscience take either of them on that journey.”

  You were terribly afraid that either of them had been a hasty replacement for Harrowhark. The elder Lyctor did not assuage your fears when she looked up at him with those unfathomable tempest eyes and said, “If you are that unsure of—either of them—then put them down now! They won’t thank you for keeping them alive! It’s the only test that matters! Thanks!”

  The Emperor of the Nine Houses stood up. His Lyctor stood also. Her hand had twitched aside the nacreous folds of her robe to rest on the end of a simple and unpretentious rapier, the mesh nest that formed around the handle unadorned and uncomplicated, no decoration other than a white knob at the very end of the—you didn’t know the exact technical word. It was a pommel though. He said: “Prepare to launch. I’ll make the call,” and you knew that, somehow, Mercy had won the war.

  It was with a strange admixture of relief and hard, resentful shame that Mercy stood and leaned over the pilot’s chair, flicking switches, avoiding the Body by a hair’s breadth. The switches made nice haptic clanks within their plex housings, and more lights came on overhead, bathing you all in an unpleasantly orange glow.

  Though there was no change in God’s pitch or cadence, his voice had taken on a different cast. It was as though a steel tool had been taken from its housing. He said, “Double-check those boxes. Get them in the straps—make sure that one’s nice and tight—Ianthe, there are belt chairs by that window—Harrow, I want that sword out of your hands and fixed to the floor. Use marrow in the bone; I don’t want it to crack or bend.”

  You and Ianthe knelt to fix the containers at his instruction. You reluctantly melted the comb of bone attaching your sword to your straining arm. As an afterthought, you did what you had been told to in the letter from your past self: you iced the whole blade over with a casing of bone, and found the result significantly more pleasing to the eye and brain. You could never castrate its anger, but thus sheathed, the sword—that object of your resentment, and hate, and protective panic—could be dimmed somewhat, like a lampshade dimmed a lamp.