Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  Afterward, you dropped into a pull-down seat next to Ianthe and clicked the safety belt together while your bare feet kept troth with the bone-enamelled sword, and you watched God’s final test of metal hasps and cinches on the boxes. He brushed his hand very lightly over the secured stone of the coffin, the very briefest of touches, before stopping in front of the ward that had been applied to the wall. He pressed the tip of his little finger to one of the whorls, very gently, as though afraid to hurt it. The foetal fingerbones and leaves crowning his hair kept swaying in some nonexistent breeze. “Brilliantly executed … nearly perfect levels of carbon dioxide in the fixative,” he said, taking a stylus from his pocket. “She was much too good to die for it, Mercy.”

  “I didn’t tell her to die for it,” said Mercymorn snappishly. With a sudden clunk, the open door to the shuttle started descending, groaning into place where the ramp had disappeared. It fell into its housing with a ker-chunk. “Her going full atria was perfectly over-the-top. The crew on your horrible flagships are always trying to martyr themselves whenever you so much as ask for an orange juice.”

  “I’m telling Sarpedon to give her a commendation,” he said, tapping at his tablet. “That will have to do. It’s not exactly an appropriate thank-you for nearly bleeding out.”

  The communicator at the pilot’s chair crackled. The admiral’s voice in question said clearly, “My lord, you’re cleared to leave. We await your word.”

  “Loose the clamps,” said the Emperor.

  “The clamps are set for release,” said Admiral Sarpedon. Then he cleared his throat and began what you now thought of as the common prayer: “Let the King Undying, ransomer of death, scourge of death, vindicator of death, look upon the Nine Houses and hear their thanks—” and from behind him joined in the tinny voices of the entire docking crew: “Let the whole of everywhere entrust themselves to him…”

  You peered over your shoulder at the porthole. The dimmed interior of Docking Bay Fourteen was lightening: they were opening up some outer airlock, and the shuttle itself was travelling on rails as though to be offered to space like a sacrifice. The velvety blackness of the outside world became naked; cold stars burnt in the distance. The Body came to stand next to you all of a sudden, and you had to school yourself not to reach for the hem of her dirty white shift, the pallid dimpled flesh of her calf. You were leaving, for where you did not know, and you did not know how to feel.

  Ianthe kept her eyes downcast, modest and pliant, as though this sickening and poorly acted rôle would convince anyone with a brain. She sat with her rapier belted at her hip beneath her robe, raising bumps beneath the mother-of-pearl cloth, and when you caught her gaze beneath those pallid lashes you could see the hot anticipation in her eyes—one blue, one purple—of someone about to be announced for an award. She was deeply excited. That starry, far-off gaze refocused on you, and she whispered coyly: “Should we hold hands, in girlish solidarity?”

  At your expression, she puffed away a strand of colourless hair and remarked, “You’re the one who investigated my tonsils.”

  Over the prayer still crackling through the speaker grille, Mercy said, “Releasing in thirty,” and the Emperor, “Don’t triangulate. We don’t want to put them in danger. We’ll hold course until the Erebos is out of our radius.”

  He took the lovely rainbow shawl and draped it over the pilot’s chair, and Mercymorn daintily sat down upon it, belting herself in. The Body was gone. Little clusters of bone set over the cockpit window tinkled musically with the displaced air. The Emperor stood behind Mercy, one hand on the chair back, himself a light plex jangle of styluses whenever he moved, and he leant down to press down on the comm button. The prayer stopped as though everyone praying had lost the air from their lungs.

  “Our enemies have once more raised their hands to those who would be at peace with them,” he said. “Again, we are a violated covenant, and again we are struck at with anger, and with fear, by those who cannot reason and those who cannot forgive what we are. You who have served on the Erebos—my soldiers and necromancers of the Nine Houses—if you find yourselves on the battlefield, remember that I will make even the dying echo of your heartbeat a sword. I will make the stilled sound on your tongue a roar. I will recall you when you are a ghost in the water, and by that recollection you will be divine. On your death, I will make the very blood in your body arrows and spears.

  “Remember that I am the King Undying.”

  He lifted his hand off the communicator button, cutting short the primal, triumphant howl that had echoed from the docking crew. You were painfully aware of the lamplights of thalergy signifying the Cohort officers in the dock—ten of them in a cluster a mere forty metres away: too close to be doing anything to aid the shuttle, but praying, maybe. There were more of them, farther away. An orderly line, flushed with blood, pattering with gut flora. They were perhaps working the mechanisms. There were muffled booming sounds as the shuttle clamps were loosed.

  The engines behind the blood-daubed wall groaned to life in a huge, dull roar; those thalergy lights fell farther and farther away as you were lowered out the airlock on long struts of plex and steel. Mercy eased a lever upward, nose wrinkling in concentration, and then the thalergy rose away entirely. You dropped through space. The shuttle might as well have been empty for all that you could sense within, except for that single foetal bundle of thanergy lying still inside the coffin. As you looked through the plex window behind you, you saw the Erebos, and for the first time you got a sense of the enormity of the flagship: its scintillating, dark, and rainbow-hued steel, like an oil spill; the interlocking skeletons tessellated over the whole boxy structure, so that the vessel seemed an enormous moving ossuary. The iris of light from the fuel ignition hurt your eyes as it sped away.

  Artificial gravity meant you were perfectly still and stable, but you still felt ill from the idea that you were drifting and tumbling through space like an abandoned piece of cargo.

  God said, “Children, attend.”

  You hardly needed the invitation. The Emperor was drumming his fingers on the back of the pilot’s seat, his curious black-on-black eyes not focused on you. He said, “You are both going to have to listen to me very carefully. The Mithraeum is far away, and our route is not typical. I’m about to teach you the first lesson, and this lesson will be the foundation of the most important lesson you will ever learn as a Lyctor. There will be a time for you to learn through questioning—a time for you to learn through trying and failing—but right now you’ll learn by doing exactly what I ask of you. The only other option is your destruction.”

  This did not give you much pause. You were a daughter of the Locked Tomb. The option of destruction had been your constant companion since you were three years old. Ianthe, whose voice was low with barely suppressed excitement, said: “I thought there might be a stele.”

  “A stele is eight feet tall, covered in the dead languages by special Fifth adepts, and continually bathed in oxygenated blood,” said Mercymorn from the pilot’s seat. “The type of thing where, if there is one on board, you say quite soon, ‘Oh, look, a stele!’”

  “Thank you, elder sister, I so love to be educated,” said Ianthe.

  “Where we are going there are no obelisks for a stele to hook on to,” said the Emperor, whose fingers had ceased drumming on the back of the pilot’s seat (after his Lyctor had told her God, repressively, “That’s quite annoying, thank you,”) and were now restlessly adjusting one shabby shirtsleeve. “I am taking you both through the River.”

  There must have been no small measure of blank incomprehension on your faces. He said, a little abstracted now: “It’s the only way. Faster-than-light travel turned out to be a snare—the way it was originally cracked, anyway. The first method destroyed something to do with time and distance, rendering it unusable for any good purpose…”

  “I’ve always thought it should be correctly managed with wormholes,” said the Saint of Joy, doing something obtuse with t
he controls, “or spatial dilation.”

  God said, “It’s in that wheelhouse. We came up with the stele instead, and the obelisk, which are less to do with travel than they are to do with transmission. But there will be times in your future when you will have to move unfettered by needing an obelisk, and even times yet to come when you will fulfil the sacred Lyctoral duty of setting obelisks, and that means travel through the River. I like to think of it as descending into a well.”

  There was a small noise of upset from the pilot’s seat. “Teacher,” said Mercy, “it is the River. There is a perfectly good water metaphor waiting for you.”

  “Well, I want the idea of two depths, and I don’t want to confuse them with the idea of speed where none—”

  “—it’s the River, which perfectly well lets you say, Imagine the River—”

  “Mercy, either you don’t like my previous, perfectly good river phrasing, or you do. Pick one.”

  “I will not help you to make hyperpotamous travel happen, thank you for the option, my lord,” said Mercy.

  “In that case, despite hyperpotamous being a perfectly good word that both catches the ear and does what it says on the tin, let’s deviate,” said the Lord of the Nine Houses, who apparently existed within a complex power dynamic. “I’ll use Cassiopeia’s.” (“Oh, no, the lava,” said Mercy.) “Girls, imagine a rocky planet with a magma core beneath the mantle.

  “Travelling overland from point to point might take a year. If you understood your journey and the relative spaces well enough, you could instead drop into the magma, which would carry you to your destination in an hour.”

  He paused. The inside of the shuttle seemed very silent to you; there was no sound from its internal apparatus, excepting an occasional huge creak from its rudder mechanism. Ianthe’s voice broke this mechanical, cold-steel silence by saying, quite carefully for Ianthe: “Teacher, the River is an enormous liminal space formed from spirit magic, populated with ghosts gone mad from hunger.”

  “The magma metaphor falls apart from here,” said Mercy, eyes still on the pilot’s switches.

  The Emperor responded with perfect gravitas: “Let us imagine the magma is full of unkillable man-eating magma fish. Two problems arise. The first is that beings made of flesh and blood immediately die in magma. The second is our vulnerability to man-eating fish.”

  Your tolerance for man-eating magma fish would have been tested sorely by anyone who was not God. His divinity earned God, you thought, about sixty more seconds. But then he said, more quietly: “We are about to travel forty billion light years, to where we first ran … myself, and my remaining six. One of our number was dead already, and another had been removed from play. We needed somewhere to lick our wounds, somewhere far away from anything we loved, to wait—to disperse—without fear that the eyes turning upon us would plough straight through the Nine Houses as they went. It’s a dark and cold and unlovely part of space, and the stars there are old and were nearly dead then. We nuked them with thanergy and now they’ll shine forever, but the light is not the same … It would take us years to get there if we went from stele to stele. How far away from the system was Number Seven at last reckoning, Mercy?”

  “Counting down, five years,” said Mercymorn, whose hands had at last stilled on the board of buttons and switches and enamelled bone. “Five years, six months, one week, two days.”

  “The merest blink of an eye,” said the Emperor, beneath his breath. He pushed himself away from the pilot’s chair and said, “We worked out a while ago—I say we, but I had little to nothing to do with it—that distance is different down there. The River doesn’t flow through the time and space we’re experiencing right now; the River is—well, it’s a current below us, as in the magma analogy. Distance in the River doesn’t map to distance above. If I drop us into it we can emerge almost immediately across the universe, home. The station, our refuge. We call it the Mithraeum.”

  He spread his hands wide: ordinary hands, ordinary fingers, ink-smudged nails. “Look at the ward. What is it?”

  You were beginning to note the register of his Teacher voice. This was familiar ground, untouched by magma. The ward undulated in the shadows a little, which was a trick of the light and the blood. You said, “It’s just a ghost ward,” and after a second regretted speaking like a provincial bone witch.

  Thankfully Ianthe was even more petulant, and a dyed-in-the-wool flesh magician, as she added: “It’s not even a sophisticated ghost ward. I mean, it’s exquisite, impeccable right down to the coagulation. But I was doing those when I was five.”

  “That ghost repellent will keep our ship from shaking apart,” said the Emperor. “That ghost repellent will have every lonesome spirit for kilometres screaming away. For a time.”

  “One minute, thirty-three seconds,” said Mercy.

  He said, “Give or take.”

  The Emperor came to drop on his haunches in front of you and Ianthe, as he had squatted before Mercymorn earlier. It still hurt you in an undefinable way, to see him lowered so: as though he offered a compliance test where you ought to flatten yourself in front of him as low as you could go. The white ring around his pupil was so white. “Your job is simple in the way most very tough things are. I will push us into the River, and I’ll push the ship with us. You’ll have to keep your minds—I can take your physical bodies, but your souls won’t go with them, not without you holding them steady.”

  “Physical transference past the liminal boundaries,” you said, and were surprised by the knowledge coming out of you, as though it weren’t your own. “This is deep Fifth spirit magic.”

  “And I bless the Fifth House and I bless their long memory,” said the Emperor. “They only go far enough to tempt lost ghosts to them. They stand on the sidelines and wave around bits of meat and anchoring material. But they don’t even approach the shore.”

  Ianthe sounded much more like her twin sister when she said, wonderingly: “But if applied universally, this would revolutionise the fleet. We could expend no fuel or effort, travelling instantly. We would be truly unstoppable.”

  Mercy laughed a nasty trill of laughter. “A powerful necromancer at the peak of their game could last ten seconds in the River,” said God, pushing himself up to stand. “Soul magic is the great leveller. In the first few seconds their thanergy would all be stripped away … then their thalergy, and then their soul. They wouldn’t have time for the ghosts to get to them. They cannot, returning to our analogy, live in magma.”

  “We can live in magma,” said Mercymorn, then pressed one elbow into the pilot’s deck and pressed her head into that elbow, and complained: “Now I’m doing it.”

  “A Lyctor has a metaphorical sitting temperature of over a thousand degrees,” said the Emperor. He had gone to check the boxes again, and the clasps. Space rotated slowly past the windows, inordinately black and dizzying. “We have this incomparably done ward, exquisitely created by an expert who gave her heart’s blood for it—it may last for around a minute and a half. I’m hoping for upward of a minute forty, with work like that—and we’re on our own from there … No Lyctor has lasted longer than seven minutes in full physical submersion. And that was a titanic effort on the part of Cassiopeia the First, who was brilliant and sensible and careful—she thought she could bait physical portions of the Resurrection Beast into the current. She was right. It followed her.”

  You said, “And?”

  Mercy said lowly: “It turned out that being sensible and brilliant and careful doesn’t keep you from getting ripped to shreds by ten thousand feral ghosts.”

  Ianthe said, “But the Beast—?”

  “Emerged unscathed twenty minutes later,” the Emperor said. And: “Life’s a bitch.”

  He looked out the window to the stars, and to the jewelled gleam of a planetoid in the distance, which looked a sooty red from your position. “Unbuckle your belts,” he said. You both did so. “Lie down on the floor.”

  You and Ianthe said as one, your
voice a parched whisper, hers low and cool: “Yes, Teacher.”

  Self-conscious of your limbs, you lay down on the floor. The Kindly Prince said very evenly: “Start slowing your breath. I want it at two per minute. If you need to flush yourself with oxygen, do it now. It has been a long time since I have thought about teaching this trick, and I barely know where to begin.”

  “You should start with Pyrrha’s trial,” called out the other Lyctor immediately.

  “Right,” said the Emperor. Then: “I mean, I was being more or less facetious, Mercy, but yes, I’ll probably begin there— Do you both recall the projection trial, back at Canaan House? It would have been in Lab Three.”

  You recalled the enormous construction of regrowing bone, your hands encased in it so that you could not wrench yourself free, your mind voyaging nauseously into the chamber of another person’s brain. God said, “You’ll need that skillset now. Your mind and body won’t couple automatically in the River. You have to hold them together, and any wrong move will see your consciousness stuck on the outskirts of Dominicus, wondering how the hell to get home. Most of the time you won’t even bother taking your body into the waters—it’s too dangerous—but for physical travel, we’ll need mind and body both.”

  Your mind was racing, and you cursed yourself, not for the first time, for not continuing your advanced studies into spirit magic. You said, “What happens to a Lyctoral body without a soul?”

  God hesitated. “Being separated from your soul won’t kill you,” he said. “Not immediately. But—”

  “But we’ll kill you,” said his saint. “Immediately. A Lyctor’s body, empty, with its battery intact but nobody in the driver’s seat? Do you know what could take up residence? Anything could get inside you—any horrible or evil or lonely thing, any miserable revenant, or worse—and you, you Ninth House child, are not remotely qualified to fight an outside predator. You are like a little baby. Listen to this: if we get to the other side and find you’ve gone and left your soul behind—I will separate your brain from your skull without waiting for you to catch up.”