Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  God was murmuring to himself: “Please … as though any Admiralty meeting ever ended after twenty minutes.”

  You said, with difficulty: “What is happening to me?”

  “You’ve had a shock,” said the Emperor, which was not an answer, actually.

  “Does this happen to all new Lyctors?”

  “Some of them,” he said vaguely, which did not fill you with relief. His tablet started to softly peep, and after a cursory glance he shoved it in his pocket. “How are you feeling right now?”

  You had no room for personal feeling right then. You were assaulted by the sensory data from seven hundred and eight pulmonary muscles. Every body on board felt like the awareness of a meal cooking, a good smell, a pillar of something hot and rich. Their thanergy and thalergy rippled in and around each other like a bloom, or like light playing over metal. And there were more: you could hear on the edge of your senses a deeper, sleeping seethe of life and death, a huge body count, but muffled. You felt the dead in some onboard morgue—ten bundles of discrete dead, of thanergy with the rot of thalergy arrested, snap-frozen. The stillness of this thanergy was profound: not even a body in ice was so still.

  You realised that the Body had stopped moving, and that the Emperor was waiting quietly for you.

  You said, “I’m very tired of this convalescence, Lord.”

  “If I had it my way it would take months, not weeks,” he said. “I would let you come back, bit by bit, until you felt entirely ready to wake up. I can’t. I mastered Death, Harrowhark; I wish I’d done the smarter thing and mastered Time. I have to ask you to get ready soon, and so I am going to show you something I hope might … trigger your readiness.”

  You were deeply and gravely relieved by his understanding, by his tact. It kept you awake and alive all throughout your trip down the elevator, even though the elevator took full minutes to sail through the enormity of the Erebos. You had never seen anything so fresh and new. You focused on the lovely silver-and-black chasing on the metal boards, the inlaid panels of rainbow colour, the skull above the door that some artistic adept had fashioned into the skull of the First; someone’s bones beautifully moulded into that central sign with the eight answering Houses around it. The skull of your House looked plain and silent next to the others. Soft dark hangings obscured the plex and the metal and the antiquated LED gleam of electronics.

  Then the doors whispered open to a cavernous, echoing space where an overhead speaker was announcing, “Our God the Emperor sees fit to grace the second cargo hold,” and you perceived many people moving away—stray Cohort officers in their white jackets making themselves scarce, bowing quickly, stopping their work to leave their lord in privacy. Their scuttling footsteps sounded like fleeing animals.

  You were on a steel-frame balcony overlooking a field of hundreds and hundreds of oblong boxes. Each was a body long and half a body tall, and all were constructed of bone—their lines and ranks so dizzyingly even that it took you a while to comprehend them, as your eyes kept wavering and crossing. The chill breeze of the recyc air ruffled your smock and goose-pimpled your thighs, but the cold kept you conscious, and you wanted to be conscious. The bone of the boxes gleamed less purely white than the amalgam metal and plasticised panels that made up the sides of the hold, and the bone was topped with a soft transparent skin so taut and fine you could see through it, and through it was—

  “My promised gift. Your renewed House,” said the Emperor.

  When he looked at your face, he cautioned you gently: “It’s a little under five hundred, and only a third will display necromantic aptitude, and the same for their next generation. They’re all between the ages of fifteen and forty, which I thought was easiest.”

  “Oh my God,” you said, forgetting that the deity in question was right there. “The ancient dead. You’ve committed resurrection.”

  He said, “No. I haven’t truly resurrected anyone in ten thousand years. But at that time … I set many aside, for safety … and I’ve often felt bad about just keeping them as insurance. They’ve been asleep all this myriad, Harrow, and it’s frankly a relief to my mind to wake them up. I’ll begin the process of bringing them to the surface before they’re shipped off to the Ninth.”

  You unpinned your cloth mask so that you could look with your whole face, only a little ashamed to show it so nakedly to the Emperor. He, after all, had seen it before. A sick hope rose in you like nitrogen bubbles in a diver, and you forgot yourself: “Let me go with them,” you said. “Not long. Just enough to introduce them to my House—my seneschal—enough time to tell them—”

  “Slow down, Harrowhark,” he said. “We must talk, you and I, before you ask me for that. I only wish I had more time to explain.”

  You took the chilly metal stairs two at a time, feeling your heart ram against serous pericardium, feeling the slim covers of the steps chafing your bare feet. Sharpened by the pain, you wandered between the rows of your silent, sleeping people. You paused over their cradles and stared through the blurry films of skin, with their little radiating burses of veins and cells, at each face in turn. You tried to commit each one to memory, but their features blended together in one amalgam, one sea of strangers newly Ninth. You drifted a little, overawed and dizzy. The Body followed, exactly one half step behind, hand dead calm on the small of your back.

  The Emperor kept a respectful distance between himself and his handiwork as you and the Body peered into each casket. Eventually the ranks of bone-and-skin boxes terminated in a clearing of their smaller, more colourful siblings. These were formed of white stone, not osseous matter, and were so freshly carved that the powder of their planing still clung to the sides. They were all of different shapes: some the six-sided funerary box of the deep burial, some the compact hexagon of the ossuary. All were draped in the spectrum of House colours, lacking only black—no empty coffins for your House tonight—except for one plain casket to the side. A little household rose sat atop it, shedding milky blush petals on the stone.

  These were the corpses you were aware of before: each a crisp, silent slice of thanergy, without even a flicker of bacterial thalergy pattering over their skins. They were statuesque and incorruptible. The Emperor’s doing, maybe. But some of them were aberrant. You stared with calm vacuity at a six-sided container draped with the Second House’s scarlet and white, which had no human remains inside. The single casket covered in tissue the gorgeous gold of the Third had no one from the Third in residence. Nor could you locate bodies within either of the plain grey-sheeted hexagons intended for the Sixth, though there were pitiable scraps and remains in one: leavings only, much less than a corpse. Something flickered in your nervous system that was a bit like an emotion, but it struggled and died, much to your relief.

  You were aware of the Body standing a little way behind you, quite close beside the Emperor. You said: “How will you explain the missing corpses?”

  “Among the dubious privileges of the First House,” said God, “is that one is rarely forced to explain.”

  “The cavaliers—”

  “Have joined their Lyctors,” he said. “It’s not really a lie. It’s simply a flattening of an awesome … and sacramental … truth.”

  You said nothing. He said, “We went over Canaan House with a fine-tooth comb when we picked you up. We found nobody alive and no more remains, and whatever end came to those we can’t account for—if an end has come to them—is a mystery I plan on solving. Until then, I have declared them dead. Call me premature, but I’d rather the Houses weep now, Harrowhark, with room for later rejoicing.”

  It was the plain, uncovered coffin you stared at, the one with the waxy little rose; you suddenly understood which ancient cancerous corpse was frozen within. Your nervous system tried to process many emotions at once and then shut down entirely. The Body came and turned your face away, but she could not turn back the sudden access of patchwork memory.

  The Emperor said gently, “She needs to go home, Harrow.”


  You did not look. “And will the Seventh House accept her?”

  “That was never home,” he said. “I am taking Cytherea back to sleep with her brothers and sisters.”

  You ached. You burnt. The Body’s fingernails ran a smooth, cool rill down your hot cheek, and she made you look instead at the bone-and-skin boxes behind you, at the dead who were only sleeping now and had been privy to the oldest miracle you knew. Part of your promise had been fulfilled. You wanted to be relieved, but no longer recalled how that worked, glandularly speaking.

  Now you and God stood facing each other. You could study him without shyness: the shining iridescence of his irises, the unyielding black of the cornea and pupil, the long, square, urbane face. God had very deep lines at his forehead and beneath his eyes. His brows were somewhat sorrowful, but the rest of his face was humourous and mobile, plain and normal. The cool white lights of the docking bay picked out all the parts on his shirt that were shiny with wear, and cast the warm browns of his hands and face into an everyday ochre. If you had seen him and not known you would have thought him utterly nondescript; but you could not look at him and not know. Terrible divinity clung to his skin.

  “You could resurrect them,” you said, without bothering to filter much between thought and speech. “You alone are capable of it. But you won’t. Why?”

  “For the same reason that I haven’t for ten thousand years,” he said. “For the same reason that I cannot come back to the Nine Houses. The cost is too great.”

  You swayed a little. Maybe you fell. The metal grille was beneath your knees, making red sore marks in your flesh, the air through the grate reeking of antistatic pastes. You said into the panels, “Teach me, Lord, how to count that cost.”

  God helped you up instead. He put his hands beneath your armpits in a perfectly normal way and raised you to stand, and clasped your arms clumsily—a quick, awkward squeeze, as though wanting to comfort and not knowing how—before he took his hands away. He said, “Harrow, you won’t kneel to me. I won’t let you, not until you know exactly what it means when you do it. It hurts me to see you perform obeisance when—if you knew the full story—you might strike me full in the face instead.”

  You coloured at that, and protested, “My God—”

  “And you shouldn’t call me God either,” he said. “You don’t comprehend the word, and I don’t want to be God to you yet. You’re an invalid, not a disciple. Listen to me. Can you do that? I hate to push you, Harrowhark, but we have so little time.”

  This was not to be borne. “I still maintain some of my faculties, Lord.”

  “Well, that’s all anyone can hope for,” he said.

  You propped yourself up against the coffin that did not contain Coronabeth Tridentarius, as it was a heavy slab that couldn’t be hurt by your leaning on it. The sword was making your back ache. The Kindly Prince watched you try to stand, your shoulders bowing beneath the steel, and then he said: “Harrow, we’re still just outside the Dominicus system. Once you’re better, we will send the Erebos to the Ninth House, and it will deliver what I said to you it would deliver. Then it will go from House to House to give them back their dead—but I won’t be on it. You can choose to part ways with me. Or you can come with me as my Hand. In a real sense, it’s up to you.”

  You tried to remember what you had said when you had first woken up aboard the Erebos; what you had said when first faced with your Resurrector. But you couldn’t. “I chose—”

  “In ignorance,” he said. “It was no choice. Listen.”

  He went to half-lean against the bulkhead closest to the plain coffin, put his tablet atop it, and let his hand rest upon the unadorned surface quite close to the little rose. The Emperor said, “Harrowhark, what happens when somebody dies?”

  It was a crèche question. You ought to have been able to answer it in the same way other people walked or breathed, which was why you found it difficult. The simplicity seemed a trap. You dug your thumbnail into the top of your thigh until it squelched all the capillaries beneath the skin, and you said: “Apopneumatism. The spirit is forced from their body. The initial thanergy bloom occurs.”

  “Why?”

  “Thalergetic decay causes cellular death,” you said carefully, pressing the nail in harder, “which emits thanergy. The massive cell death that follows apopneumatism causes a thanergetic cascade, though the first bloom fades and the thanergy stabilises within thirty to sixty seconds.”

  “What happens to the soul?”

  “In the case of gradual death—senescence, illness … certain other forms—transition is automatic and straightforward. The soul is pulled into the River by liminal osmosis. In cases of apopneumatic shock, where death is sudden and violent, the energy burst can be sufficient to countermand osmotic pressure and leave the soul temporarily isolated. Whence we gain the ghost, and the revenant.”

  “And what has a soul?”

  You weren’t going to last the distance. The questions were beginning to sound stupid, or sophistic. The Body watched you with careful, filmy eyes. “Anything with a thalergetic complexity significant enough to … have a soul. So, humanity.”

  The Emperor drummed his fingertips atop the plain coffin, and he said, a little whimsically: “Why have we not an immortal soul? I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human being only for one day.”

  This threw you utterly. “I— Pardon?”

  “Harrowhark, think,” he said, which reminded you very unwelcomely of someone. You gave your thumbnail a better edge, sharpened the dead keratin to a point, and finally drew blood. “What else has an enormously complex mass of thalergy? What’s the role of a Cohort necromancer?”

  Your brain bowed out disgracefully, but something of the old Harrowhark remained, enough to stand there and ask questions. You were grateful for your impertinent ghost-self to ask: What was the role of a Cohort necromancer? Better to ask the purpose of a Cohort swordswoman: to support the necromancer, to provide the death and the thanergy to begin the cycle for necromantic magic to work. Foreign planets were never thanergy planets; they possessed dilute thanergy, of course, but fundamentally they were thalergenic in character. Send a necromancer down there and she would be largely useless. Thanergy really came from—

  More to the Body than to him, you said: “A planet’s a ball of dust. Its thalergy comes from the accumulation of microbial life. You can’t consider it one coherent system.”

  “Call it a communal soul,” said her Emperor. “What’s a human being, other than a sack of microbial life? You’re a bone adept, aren’t you? Flesh magicians are exposed to this idea of a system earlier than in your school.” This was kindly, even humourously said, but you still found that you immediately wanted to be tossed out the airlock at the idea that your aptitude made you less than a flesh magician: someone whose entire education was in the carnal. Experts in things that were yellow, and wobbled. People who thought there was something really interesting to be found in meat.

  He mistook your deeply bigoted hate for disbelief, and said: “Just accept the proposition for now that a planet has an enormous single amount of thalergy. If this thalergy is converted, what might happen during that transition?”

  “We already know what happens,” you said. Your tongue was growing thick in your mouth, and your eyelids were sore and swollen from wanting to close. The first rush of adrenaline had run its course. The Body came and took your wrist in her hand and ringed her fingers around your bones, quite tightly. This let you say: “The Cohort prepares a planet for necromancy every time they have to breach it. Over time, with the introduction of thanergetic decay, the planet converts. Necromancy proceeds as normal afterward. Nothing happens … plant and animal life both change, of course … and eventually the planet flips totally and the population has to be moved, but that’s such a long-term process that it takes generations. You can’t quantify it as something happening.”

  “Now kill the planet all at once,” said her Emperor.
“What then?”

  You looked at him. The Emperor of the Nine Houses raised his hands, palms up, as though offering a helpless prayer to the roof of the cargo hold. His alien eyes were cool and calm. You knew of only one mass dying-off of planets.

  So you said: “You tell me, Lord. You were there for the Resurrection.”

  “Yes,” he said. “And I saw the thalergy convert immediately. The difference between dying of illness and dying from murder. An enormous shock, the immediate expulsion of the soul. And just as when a soul is ripped untimely from a human being, when a soul is so rudely taken from a planet—”

  Sweat came to the centres of your palms totally unbidden. A trickle of blood started down your leg, and you stopped it in midflow, dried it to flakes on your skin, and clotted the breach. Such an act took no effort now.

  “A revenant,” you said.

  “Always a revenant,” he said. “Every single time, a goddamned revenant. Pardon the pun.”

  You fancied you could see the Body breathing, her chest rising very slightly, in and out. The Emperor crossed his arms and stared across the cargo hold, his face lit from beneath by electric lighting, the gleam in his eyes black and wet. You caught him moistening his lips with the tip of his tongue.

  “We called them Resurrection Beasts,” he said.

  It took him another moment to continue, and when he did, it was with the air of a man telling a very old story. “When the system died … when I was younger, those ten thousand years ago, and I brought us back from that brink—all those revenants scuttled off to the farthest parts of the universe, as the soul runs from its corpse in the blind first fear of transition. I have never seen a planet make another in the same way; I’ve seen lesser monsters—minor Beasts—but nothing, nothing, like that first wave.

  “Harrowhark, those revenants move through the universe, inexorably, without pause … and they feed on thalergenic planets as they go, like vampires … and they won’t stop until I and the Nine Houses are dead. They have had me on the run for a myriad, and they’re nearly impossible to take down.”