by Tamsyn Muir
The Ninth House elderly became the Ninth House decrepit, and the Ninth House decrepit became the Ninth House dead. Harrowhark was by most of them when they died, except if they had a sudden pulmonary, and even at fourteen she was good enough with a heart arrest to keep them going until she could give them final rites. She’d always disdained flesh magic, but she had a knack for the aorta. Later, when their meat had trickled away, she personally raised their de-fleshed skeletons to work the mangle or quietly rake the snow-leek fields in the upper reaches of Drearburh. Much of her necromancy had been sharpened by the day-to-day busywork of geriatric death, of the niche and the skull, of sitting with osteoporotic bones and filling up their honeycomb so that the constructs did not end up a confusion of ribcages with their legs powdering off. Her parents knew what they had been about, making a genius out of two hundred dead children: it took a genius simply to keep the House from deliquescing into a pile of bones and pneumonia victims.
But even a genius could only maintain the status quo. The House had never had the tech, nor the understanding, nor the on-duty flesh magicians to work a vat womb. The womb-bearing populace was too old to have babies, barring two of their number, one of whom was herself. Harrow could only thank God that duty had never fallen to her. The only viable source of healthy XY had been located in her House’s cavalier primary, a boy seventeen years her elder. Back then she had considered him a walk-around man suit surrounding some quite good calcium carbonate, and she knew he considered her with an awful respect, the same type one might have for a hereditary cancer that one knew was on its way. Thankfully, their marriage would have mingled the Drearburh cavalier and scion lines beyond any hope of repair: Ortus Nigenad was an only child. Harrowhark had her parents quash the idea so enthusiastically that she cracked her father’s molar. The only virgin who could possibly be more relieved was Ortus himself.
So the years passed, unshriven, crusting up and drying as they went. Harrowhark watched Crux get older, and older and older, and tried all the tricks in her box to keep him upright—there was terrible plaque in his arteries, and he pretended that he did not notice her scraping them. She knew that when she finally laid her nursemaid in his niche, it would be the death of the only other person invested in her sanity. And if she went mad again, then what? At any point she could have asked for assistance from her sister Houses. At any point she could have asked for Cohort intervention, and they would have been there the next day with foetal care boxes, and volunteer penitents, and loans, and plant samples—and with incontrovertible suggestions that Harrowhark really ought to marry this son of the Second, or this daughter of the Fifth—and she could have watched coloured banners get strung up next to the black skull of the Black Anchorite. And that would be the end of the Ninth House, even more completely than a hammer to the oxygen-sealant machine.
They needed a resurrection. They needed a miracle. Harrowhark had been studying miracles for years, and then one landed squarely in her lap: the chance to become a Lyctor. The chance to serve the Emperor her God, the chance to become a fist and a gesture, the chance to become an immortal servitor and advocate for Drearburh; to refresh the Ninth House on her terms, with the rock never rolled away and the love of her life and her death quiet and unmolested in her deadly shrine of stone. Another ten thousand years of solitude. Another long and snaking line of Reverend Mothers, Reverend Fathers. Harrow took the unready cavalier from her House, and she snatched the chance with both hands.
But like falling in love the first time, becoming a Lyctor had all gone wrong. Her cavalier had given himself to her with a numb readiness that still burnt her to ash with shame. Even with that readiness, she had committed the indelible sin halfway; she had gathered up the matter of Ortus Nigenad’s soul and not been able to choke him all the way down. She was Harrowhark alone in front of the mirror again: a nonsense, a monster, an alien geometry. A loathsome squawk of a person. She was nine, and she’d made a mistake. She was seventeen, and she’d made a mistake. Time had repeated itself. Harrow would be tripping over herself for her whole existence, a frictionless hoop of totally fucking up.
There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow—but she had died before Harrow was born.
4
YOU STILL PRIDED YOURSELF on three things: firstly, bloody-minded composure; secondly, an inhuman intellect for necromancy; thirdly, being very difficult to kill. You were so immune to murder that you had not even been able to inflict the act upon yourself.
When you woke up midway through the first attempt on your life, your mind startled itself out of its thick fug and shook itself awake. There was a soft, all-encompassing warmth pressing over your face that could only have been your pillow, the thin cloth cover damp with your spit and breath. Someone was standing to the right of your cot and holding the pillow down. As you reflexively bucked, one hand moved to put hard pressure on your throat, and your hyoid would have cracked had you not reinforced it with a thick rime of cartilage.
They were a damned fool for not getting atop you. You found your fingers and plucked the thumbnail from your left hand, screaming into that asphyxiating white darkness, and separated your bloody disc of keratin and flesh into a thousand racine fragments, then expanded those into a multitude of jagged, splintering fléchettes. Blind, airless, you swung these stiff and hairy missiles into your assailant like so much shrapnel; you heard them thud into flesh and ping off the wall and bury themselves in steel. Good. Good. The weight on the pillow lightened, and—
* * *
You came to on your bare, bierlike cot all at once, hyperventilating.
The pillow behind your head was perfectly dry. You held your left hand up before your face, before the light, the even white light with its hot tungsten filaments. The thumbnail was whole and even. Too even? Were you wont to chew your fingernails still, that unattractive tic of your girlhood? The great two-hander lay next to you like an undisturbed baby, and across the wall of your quarters—
Nothing. No nail fragments. No scarring on the wall. Just a neat stack of crates. And in a chair dragged close to your bedside—the little chair that usually sat by the door, the one you had only ever seen the Emperor occupy—was Ianthe Tridentarius.
Your gazes met. The other nascent Lyctor—the Third House saint, the Emperor’s bones and the Emperor’s joints, the Emperor’s fists and gestures—was clothed in a beautiful nacreous robe that glimmered all the colours of the rainbow: gauzy, iridescent white stuff that changed violently in the light. The mother-of-pearl made Ianthe’s hair a lurid yellow and threw up all the mustard tints of her skin; her face was blotchy, and her eyes were sleepless pits. She looked like shit. You noticed that the eyes were a curious muddle of colours: washed-out purple jostled for space with a milky blue, freckled here and there with a lightish, hazy brown. Ianthe was sitting significantly too near to you, and she had arranged herself in the chair in a strangely lopsided, tilt-shouldered fashion. She also possessed two arms, which was one more than you’d last seen her sporting. None of that particularly bothered you.
What bothered you was that now the Princess of Ida—pale haired, all height and elbows, twilight shadows beneath her eyes—was looking at you with an expression you struggled to remember ever seeing on her face. Ianthe was fond of languid attitudes and postures; she affected a heavy, artificial tedium, or a faint and glittering malice, sometimes even a self-deprecating and idle humourousness; but she looked at you now with a soft and thoroughly uncharacteristic hunger. She smiled down at you with a frank, overfamiliar indulgence that frightened you. Ianthe looked lit from within.
“Good morning, my comrade,” she said. “My colleague, my ally. I do like your eyes, Harrowhark—like flower petals in a darkened room. And even I can admit that your eyelashes are delicious. Stop wearing that pillowcase any time you like—I’ve seen your face before, and I know it looks like both of your parents were right-angled triangles. We must work with what we’ve got, as the flesh magician said to the leper.”
&nbs
p; Your whole soul flinched. A livid heat rose up your neck. With a titanic struggle, you managed not to shield your face with your hands, to be sure of your bedsheet mask. Lyctoral perception had made you complacent. Ianthe Tridentarius was a black hole where no heart could be sensed beating and no brain could be seen sparking. The brain, you knew grudgingly, existed. The heart was an open question. She looked at your face—saw, most likely, her own death reflected in your expression—and reached inside her robe. The palm of your hand slapped to her forehead with a ringing thwack. You could not sense her: she was a locked door in a dark room to you; but with a touch you could feel the orbital bones you might remove from her face.
“Before you do anything I am quick to reassure you that you will regret,” said the other Lyctor, who had not moved—who had not recoiled at your palm’s promise, except, perhaps, a quick shuttering of those mixed-up eyes—“I have a message for you.”
The hand slowly withdrew from the robe. None of this would have been enough, except (the blood howled in your ears; you thought you heard footsteps, but then they slurred into voices, then back into footsteps again) that caught between Ianthe’s fingers was a piece of flimsy with the name Harrowhark clearly upon it. The name Harrowhark was lettered in your hand. Underneath, in smaller lettering, and still your hand: To be given to Harrowhark immediately upon coherence.
You looked at the letter. You looked at Ianthe. Even in that short interval, the battlefield of her eyes had changed. From beneath your palm, you could see that one iris was now wholly a washed-out purple, like a fading bruise or a dying flower; the other one was blue and brown commingled. This glittering mess of heterochromatics focused on you, totally calm, utterly sure of itself.
“I wish you’d explained to me what coherence meant,” she complained. “Did you mean coherent as in, I recognise objects and their names? Did you mean coherent as in, I am no longer remotely out to lunch, which means you’re still not eligible? I wasn’t going anywhere near you in the first instance of you opening your eyes. Your only settings were power-vomit and murder.”
“Tell me how you came to have what you are holding,” you croaked.
“You put it in my own hands, you skull-faced fruitcake,” she said soothingly. “Go on. Take it. It’s yours.”
You withdrew your hand from her forehead, and you took it. You were desperately afraid that your fingers were shaking, and that you would not know to make them stop. In your lap, under the strong white light of the hospital quarter, you could see no error or artifice in the writing: it was yours, not an exceptional copy. It was written in your blood. When you touched the smooth, plex-rendered surface, you could see in your mind’s eye the pen nib, the soft bite of the metal into the inside of your lip.
Unfolding the flimsy and spreading it across your knees was the final gobbet boiling off the skeleton. The letter was written in Ninth House crypt-script; your own cipher, based off that of your parents and developed when you were seven years old. It was unbreakable to anyone who lacked your rosary, Marshal Crux, and a hundred or so years to spare.
You read:
ADDRESSING THE REVEREND LADY HARROWHARK NONAGESIMUS, KNOWN AS THE REVEREND DAUGHTER BY HER OWN DESIRE, NOW HARROWHARK THE FIRST, WRITING AS THE SAME, NOW DEAD.
“I’ll give you a moment,” said Ianthe, and she stood and crossed over to the window, standing bathed in the light of the nearest star.
* * *
ADDRESSING THE REVEREND LADY HARROWHARK NONAGESIMUS, KNOWN AS THE REVEREND DAUGHTER BY HER OWN DESIRE, NOW HARROWHARK THE FIRST, WRITING AS THE SAME, NOW DEAD.
LETTER #2 OF #24. TO BE READ IMMEDIATELY ON COHERENCE.
Harrowhark—
As I write, it has been forty-eight hours since you became a Lyctor at Canaan House. By the time you read this you will not recall the writing thereof, as the Harrowhark of the writing will be dead and gone. Her resurrection constitutes a fail state and must be avoided at all costs.
This letter cannot answer questions. What I have done I will refer to as the work, and its character is actively harmful for you to know. I will instead provide guidelines on how to live the rest of your life. As your life may hopefully now extend into the myriads, it is of enormous import that you are not tempted to deviate from them. You are the living surety of promises I have made. Break troth with me, and from beyond my destruction I will brand you Tomb heretic, cut off utterly from that which lies on the frozen altar, asleep and dead; removed from the adoration thereof, and any promise of part in her resurrection.
GUIDELINE #1: STAY ALIVE.
You may not end your own life through suicide. You may not end your own life through carelessness. Accidental death must be avoided at all costs and never accepted as an outcome. The work relies upon your continuance.
GUIDELINE #2: YOU CAN NEVER RETURN TO THE NINTH HOUSE.
The way home is closed to you. Do not set foot within the House again. Do not allow yourself to be taken there by force.
GUIDELINE #3: THE SWORD WILL REMAIN ON YOU AT ALL TIMES.
Wipe it down with your arterial blood nightly. Coat the blade in the ash which regrows. Do not cut flesh with the naked blade. Do not cut bone with the naked blade. Even this may not prove enough. Treat the sword as your promised death, and act according to the first guideline.
GUIDELINE #4: YOU ARE COMPROMISED.
You may already suspect this, if you’re not as big a fool as I take you for. I will confirm your access to the Lyctoral well. This battery is, most likely, the extent of your capability. Make up for your inevitable failings through study. Your understanding of flesh and spirit magic is execrable, so start there. Do not aim to only build upon what you already know. It pains me to admit this, but you know piss-all. I refuse to let you build your house on such shiftless & ureal sand.
GUIDELINE #5: YOU OWE IANTHE TRIDENTARIUS THE FAVOUR OF THE CHAIN.
This will be difficult to justify. I will therefore not justify it. Tridentarius has made what has come to pass possible. I owe her a debt that you will undoubtedly be paying for the rest of your life. The agreement does end on your death. The agreement does extend into the House, but NOT into the Tomb. The agreement is singular but does take precedence over and above any debt you have sworn to anyone lesser than the Holy Corpse, over and above the Emperor of the Nine Houses. In order to avoid philosophical quandaries she will expect you to re-swear immediately on receipt of the letter, and any failure to do so undoes the whole business. Do not be tardy here.
It goes without saying that Ianthe will destroy you if she can. She has helped me ably, but it has cost her nothing and you everything. I have guarded from her full understanding of the work so that she cannot undo it on a whim or by accident. You are in her power. I am in no doubt of her misusing it. You yourself never had power over anyone else but you misused it violently.
GUIDELINE #6: READ THE OTHER MISSIVES ONLY IF AND WHEN YOU MEET THEIR REQUIREMENTS.
I have left other instructions in case of new circumstances. Ianthe holds twenty-four of these letters and will give you twenty-two, including this one. They are numbered accordingly. Memorise the requirements and carry the letters on you at all times, ready to act the moment you are required to read them. Follow their instructions without hesitation. I repeat: do not read them otherwise.
To myself: a brief break in guidelines follows, before the last. You will think at this point that I have given you a terrible hand to play the game with. I am not unsympathetic. Nonetheless, understand that I envy you more than I have ever envied anyone, and that I look upon your birth as a blessing. Look upon me as a Harrowhark who was handed the first genuine choice of our lives; the only choice ever given where we had free will to say, No, and free will to say, Yes.
Accept that in this instance I have chosen to say, No.
GUIDELINE #7: EXAMINE IANTHE’S JAW AND TONGUE AFTER YOU READ THIS.
Owing to her Lyctoral status this will require physical touch. Under no circumstances can you let her know you are examining them
. Do whatever it takes. If you suspect either jaw or tongue has been replaced, DO NOT SWEAR THE OATH. Instead kill her immediately.
In the hope of a future forgiveness, I remained,
HARROWHARK NONAGESIMUS
* * *
“Come here,” you said, less steadily than you would have liked.
Ianthe—still dreamily doused in starlight—obliged you instantly, still smiling that same secret, conspiratorial smile, like a spider tucked inside a shoe. She arranged herself in the chair by the bed, and you noticed again her favouring the left arm, as though the right was too heavy a burden.
You swung your legs off the hospital cot, and you took the sheeting away from your face, despising your nakedness. Her mismatched eyes widened, just briefly, as you stood before her, considering—the sword was six feet of abandoned steel tangled in the thin blankets, but you thought that for now, a small distance would have to do—and you reached out to cup Ianthe’s face in your hands. Your thumbs pressed up against the warm flesh that skinned her ramus and your other fingers butterflied over her cheeks. Your metacarpus nudged up against the body of the mandible. When you tilted her jaw up to you your skin was discoloured against her skin; her skin was discoloured against your skin. There was the faintest suggestion of dried blood beneath your fingernails.
You found your mouth and eyes screwing up, as though against the light, or a sour taste; you could not help it. But the vile course of action was obvious. You leant down and—holy shit—kissed her squarely on the mouth.
This, at least, she hadn’t expected—how could she, what the fuck—and her mouth froze against yours, which gave you time to work. Ianthe was a black hole to you, a null, an empty, overradiant space, unreadable; but close physical proximity could echolocate that darkness. It was osteoids your fingers searched for. New bone always gave itself away, its fresh collagen spongy and bright with thalergy. The lining of her cells was in keeping with old bone. When you pressed the tip of your tongue to her tongue she made a small, tight, half-wounded sound—she was probably trying to call for help—but although the lingual muscle was not your area of specialty, you could probe through flesh the signs that her foramen bone was whole, unscarred by a fresh rip of the tongue from the mouth. You were safe.
