Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  And God said nothing.

  “When do we start?” Ianthe’s voice was clinical, like she was waiting for a tooth extraction.

  “Start?” said Mercymorn. “He began submerging thirty seconds ago.”

  God said, “Timer?”

  “Set at five minutes.”

  “We need a slower pace. Set it to six.”

  “Five minutes thirty,” said Mercymorn, but God said: “I am not negotiating. Call out the increments once we hit waterline.”

  The Saint of Joy said, with unexpected obedience: “Done. Be careful, Teacher.”

  In the depths of space, now the depths of the River, the shuttle was a false gravity cocoon. You did not know which way was up, or down, or in what direction you were going. You were lying on the floor, trying to stop your lungs from expanding too quickly. Slowing your breath was blurring you out. You did not feel at peace, but rather numb and transfixed, heavy eyed, until God said, “Keep conscious,” and you stretched out the muscles of your calves until they strained, down to the tendons above the balls of your feet.

  You lay on your mummified sword, which skulked sullenly beneath its caulk of bone. You stared at the ceiling. You tilted your head and found Ianthe looking through you. She was lying bracketed between her own rapier and her own offhand, and you were close enough for discomfort. Mercy said, “Hoods over your heads. They’re translucent for a reason,” and the Emperor added, “It’s easier when you can perceive light, but not get distracted.”

  You were not sorry to do this. Your vision softened into a jumble of lights, like looking into a headache or white noise. There were no shapes or shadows. Ianthe faded into a mother-of-pearl lump beside you. It was impossible to tell which visual sparks of colour were due to the cloak, and which were your own shimmers of migraine fright.

  Your breath sounded an unlovely peal. Ianthe’s sounded like a bellows. You could not hear that of the Emperor of the Nine Houses—maybe you never had—nor that of the elder Lyctor. The shuttle’s habitation controls had either been turned off or set low even by Ninth House standards: beneath the thin robes and minty smock, your thighs were pimpled with cold. And nothing happened. No thanergetic flush, no thalergetic wane. You’d never been a spirit adept, and you did not feel now any subtleties of transition; it was very cold. That was all.

  You were dead weight in that heavy chill, each breath a ponderous inflation of the lungs, in and out, in and out. You were aware of yourself, of each juncture of energy inside you; you were aware that your feet had blisters, that your throat was stripped by too much upchucking, and that you felt alone in your head. You were embarrassed by your distraction. The physical body had never occurred to you so much in previous meditation. The light from the ceiling above had dulled to a sooty orange glow like that from a lit furnace; you fell into a numb, half-alive, half-dead reverie, your anxiety stifled and calcified, until you heard Ianthe cry out.

  You stared through the minute slit where your hood brushed your cheeks. You made no sound, because you were not sure you were seeing what Ianthe was seeing: for your part, you saw the water.

  7

  THE WATER CAME BUBBLING up through the bolted seams in the floor panels, a filthy, rusty red, with a bloom like sewage upon it. It had already boiled up to the front of the shuttle and was to the top of what you could see of the Emperor’s shoes. It seemed unsure of gravity, running this way and that; then it started coming in high-pressure spurts through the sides of the cockpit’s front window.

  “Thirty seconds,” said Mercymorn, whose voice had gone so utterly from petulant to clinical that it seemed the voice of a different woman. “Five minutes thirty remaining.”

  There was rustling from right next to you. The Emperor said, “Keep flat.”

  Ianthe said urgently, “Lord, I can see them.”

  Them? But the Emperor said, “Focus on them. Don’t be afraid. Take off your hood if you want to. But think about the details of the shuttle too … where you were, where I am, where Mercy is, where Harrowhark is … the details of the shuttle are a projected memory and they are not all real, but they will dissolve further as you leave your body behind, and I don’t want to lose you.”

  To the empty reaches of space, or to Mercy? The Lyctor said, “Four minutes, thirty seconds remaining. Ward has an estimated half a minute left.”

  You were too curious to resist. You wrenched the opaline hood from your face and were startled all the way to your soul. Turbid, filmy water was filling up the shuttle at a rate of knots. The floor had gone entirely, and you were affrighted by its wet and corporeal reality: you were soaked through almost to the ribs by tepid, greasy waves. Ianthe had sat up—she never could follow instructions—but she was staring, glassy-eyed, at some point you could not see, rigid and uncomprehending. You scanned around, but the Body was nowhere to be seen.

  It was just water. It soaked the hems of the Emperor’s trousers—he sat calmly flicking at his tablet as though it were no inconvenience. You could not quite see the other Lyctor, except her arms, bathed in the glow of the cockpit switches. The water seeped around your neck and started trickling into your ear canals. This did not fill you with the rigid terror it apparently produced in Ianthe: as a child you had been plunged into water by your mother and father, so the sensation was old and familiar, if wretched. The waters swirled and rose. They brushed against your cheeks, and you reflexively held your breath.

  “Let that go, Harrow,” said God, tapping on the tablet with his stylus. “You don’t need to breathe.”

  You exhaled, trickling it out of your nose and mouth. Your brain panicked briefly as you took a shy lungful of warm, muddy water. The fluid went down your throat in a peculiar and unreal way: it sat there, seething in your craw, peristalsis not coming into play. You filled up with water like a rubber doll dropped into a well. It was with very little joy that you saw this was distressing Ianthe a great deal more than it was you: she had wrapped one arm around herself, leaving the rightmost to trail abandoned in the water, and was shaking in a kind of convulsive spasm of the soul. It was only the memory of the knife and the palm that prevented you from being moved to pity.

  God was saying, quite encouragingly: “You’re fine, Harrowhark. You’re doing very well,” which put you in a paranoid panic that you were not, in fact, doing well at all. Something brushed past your ankle, and the water closed over your head. You did not float: you stayed stuck to the bottom like a concrete weight, without buoyancy. Something floated in the water quite close to the pilot’s seat where Mercymorn sat. A long skein of abandoned skin, fresh and virgin, as though taken from someone’s flank and carded of its flesh and fat. The water in which it floated felt warm against your eyeballs, and smarted a little going up your nose.

  From the shifting, refracting ripples within this tide, you beheld the ward upon the wall: it was steaming. Its bottom whorls sizzled and sparked like malfunctioning machinery where they touched the water. Showers of blue sparks pattered into the greasy water like rain.

  “The ward has lasted for one minute, forty seconds,” said Mercymorn. “One minute forty-one.”

  God said, “Two commendations for the lieutenant.”

  She called out, “One minute forty-four.… One minute forty-five,” and in the space between forty-four and forty-five, the ward exploded. The dried blood came off the wall in flakes of brown confetti. It left behind a burnt, warped indentation as it slithered away to dissolve in the rising current. Next to you, Ianthe arched her spine so acutely that she folded up in the middle, as though she had been electrocuted. The light from the panels limned her in amber; her hood had come loose and her long pale hair floated about her shoulders like a caul. You propped yourself up on your elbows, distracted by something nudging against the plex viewing panel where Mercy sat piloting the shuttle. The star-pocked blackness of space had retreated entirely: the shuttle looked as though it were sinking down into a murky, obscure ocean.

  Another nudge. Then something slapped two wet and ro
tting hands on the plex.

  “Ick! Bleff!!” said Mercymorn, quite calmly. “Three minutes remaining.”

  “I hate this part,” said God.

  A nude, fish-eaten body thudded down hard atop the plex, leaving a momentary bloom of blood before it bounced off again. Another hit a few seconds later, but this one stayed put; it was a torso with the legs gone and the face eaten away, leaving the shiny skull to bang against the surface. It pressed one hand down, as though beseeching, but was sucked away again into the deep water outside the shuttle. The water inside now sloshed up to the Emperor’s shoulders, washing over Mercymorn’s hands. She did not bother to take her fingers away from the controls.

  Ianthe’s face remained slack and unfocused. You rounded your spine up cautiously and looked around the shuttle, underwater, at the dissipating blooms of brown and red in the liquid, as though someone were bleeding out into it. At the back of the shuttle, you thought—you thought you could perceive a high and keening wail, at the very edge of your hearing—but neither God, nor the elder Lyctor, and certainly not Ianthe reacted to it.

  The wail was coming from within the shuttle. It had a hard, pained edge to it, like frustration. You cast around trying to figure out from where. There was another big wet thump as a fourth body slammed itself on the plex, and this one managed to hold on, scrabbling gruesomely; but you focused on the thin cry of violence. You found yourself saying, “Someone’s crying, Lord,” but he just made a nonsense sound beneath his breath, a mumbled word that you didn’t recognise.

  “Two minutes, thirty seconds remaining,” said Mercymorn, and her voice took on a hard edge of caution.

  The Emperor said, “They’re not as numerous as I’d have expected.”

  “I do not like this,” said his Lyctor.

  Your eyes slid back up to the ceiling. The water, oleaginous and warming, was thick now with the flotsam and jetsam of bits of corpse. When something bumped your foot, you flinched and grasped a fine fleck of bone from your tibia, tried to work it through your skin to ice over your feet. It didn’t precisely succeed. Instead of a fine outer needle of matter, you pulled a wet plug from just above the epiphyseal line, and your shinbone opened like a flower; your blood and cellular matter opened up on your rainbow robe and floated upward, and God turned around, and his face was indistinct in the murk but his voice was not—

  “Oh—” He used a word you did not understand. “Harrowhark, no theorems!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. She can’t be using theorems,” said Mercy. “She’d be barely awake and it’s totally beyond her at this poi—John, stop her, she’s using theorems!!”

  The pain did not matter. The shuttle had shivered, somehow, around you: synaptogenesis had erupted in your braincase, and your eyes were opening. You were lying in a sea of bodies. They had bumped up against you before you had realised it, before you could flinch away from their nearness: perhaps the blood conjured them into being, so suddenly were they there. You stood up without thinking, and more bumped gently into your elbows, your arms. They carpeted the bottom of the shuttle. They bobbed in an unseen current low to the ground, lacking the air to drift to the top. Through a thin curtain of your blood you could see the dizzying array of slippery corpses, their faces painted in black and alabaster greys. Dead girls in their teens, their half-exposed bones still caught in the act of fusing at the caps; dead boys still shedding their milk teeth; ungendered infants, mostly skull, their nails like tiny chips of stone. A rubber-bodied toddler with a painted face and very red hair lay dead beside your knee and for some reason it was this that destroyed you, it was this that kindled within you something you had no hope of defending against. You howled in a purity of fright.

  The Emperor was wading toward you through this bobbing array of dead. He was saying something you paid no particular attention to: “Harrow, it’s not real. Only you can see what you’re seeing, and everything inside the shuttle is illusion. It’s the River. The River is a predator—the dead are in your brain. It’s trying harder with you because you’re fundamentally deeper in it than Ianthe. I didn’t think you’d be able to go this deep, first time in, but you have. Walk back toward me.”

  “Two minutes remaining,” said Mercy. And: “They are coming for the source of the noise. I stood on the bank and watched Cassiopeia die, Teacher—”

  “—do not rev that engine, Mercymorn—”

  “She led them away from the brain; I was there in projection, and I saw when they seized her legs and arms … I was laying stakes for the Beast, and I was there, and I thought to myself, Lord, But what will we do with your ceramics collection? There is so much of it.”

  You pressed your hands to your face and were startled all over again that you could not close your eyes. When you pressed the lids down, the light changed, and—you recalled this, as though you had done it before—you lost visual complexity. The shuttle was gone, but the water was not, and the bodies were everywhere. You were lost in a deep aperture. Hot bloody blisters bubbled up from your skin, and you were aware of yourself, not as a structure, but as a sickly radiance: one sickly radiance among other sickly radiances, one, two, three, four, five, all around you, one beneath. The distant scream coalesced. You realised it was coming from you.

  Your eyes opened. You looked at the blanketing bodies of the dead children of the Ninth House, were aware of yourself as an ova cluster of two hundred pinpricks of light. You were a sigil: you were an intermingled fire. The fluid was sucked from your sinus cavities, and with it your brain, soon disassembled. You were made small. You were a throat, you were an oven. The water was boiling hot and your skin was sloughing off you in reddened, shrinking frills; those pinpricks boiled within you, and the bodies boiled without—you were a hunger without a stomach. You felt the thanergetic pit inside the coffin, the curve of a childlike jaw, the pallid bow of a dead mouth. You did not understand yourself as standing, nor understood yourself as walking, but you were doing both. You were dying in that hot water; whatever wanted your meat suit could have it.

  “Harrowhark,” said God. “Over here—over here, kid. I daren’t touch you. Come toward me. Toward me—Mercy, as you love me, do not push that button.”

  “Thirty seconds,” said Mercymorn, and quietly: “Lord, you doom your Houses.”

  You could see everything. The shuttle was a tawdry nest of fuselage and metal sheeting, wiped over with plex and antifriction gels; breakable, startlingly so. You could see in a multiplicity of directions. You could see the dead blood ward churning beneath the water, the metal where it had etched itself curling and seizing beneath superheated steam. You could see your live blood, rising up in bright red plumes before you, leaving streaks of red on your robe.

  Mercy said, “Twenty-five. The shuttle is becoming porous. I’m starting to feel drag.”

  “Hold it.”

  Something hit the shuttle like a closed fist: it spun from side to side, going nearly all the way around like a top, and you fell off and away from that needle. You fell to your knees on a soft dead pile of children and stared over your shoulder where Ianthe lay propped up on the floor, shrieking shamelessly in fright.

  Mercy did not pay attention. “Twenty seconds.”

  “I’ll grab Harrow. Gun it.”

  “Oh, thank God, finally–what do you mean, grab—”

  “I’m going to have to touch her. Hit the acceleration.”

  “Wait, Lord, if she pulls you away—”

  “The throttle, Mercy, in Cristabel’s name!” God roared.

  She slammed a lever. Five points of light. Ianthe was staring and insubstantial, shuddering out of her lineation as though vibrating straight out of reality. Everything was borne away into this mad and boiling riptide, and when you followed Ianthe’s line of sight, the plex screen of the shuttle was a mass of dead hands, and trailing guts, and water, and blood. From your kneeling point, someone grabbed you from beneath your armpits and dragged you backward; there was a huge and overwhelming sound like some vast machine b
ackfiring, and you kept thinking, Five? but then there was nothing left of you.

  8

  THE TEA WAS OVERWHELMING, and tasted too much. By choice Harrowhark had only ever drunk water. When she had been younger, or ill, the marshal had made her sugar-water with a drop of preserved lemon in it, as a treat; even then she’d had to take her time over each sip. Each bright citric burst had been half pleasure, half pain on her tongue; the sweetness so acute as to almost hurt her teeth. This new hot stuff tasted like a forest fire. It was with seriously burnt taste buds and no saliva in her mouth that she froze when the dire little man said, smiling: “And perhaps the Locked Tomb will favour us with their intercession?”

  What seemed like a thousand eyes turned upon her. With a great internal fury, Harrowhark blanked. It was her cavalier who opened his mouth in the vast, corpsified atrium of Canaan House, and began: “I pray the tomb is shut forever. I pray the rock is never rolled away…”

  She did not join him. If one did not begin a prayer in perfect unison, better not to pray belatedly. She listened as Ortus said words she suddenly doubted he even believed, full of a very weary resentment at herself and at people, everywhere. In that rotting hall there were people of all different sizes and postures; apart from the three priests they were all young, or young enough to eyes accustomed to her grey congregation, and they were dressed in a nightmare spectrum of colours and fripperies and materials. Classic constructs stood by dressed in white. She hated it when people dressed constructs; it smacked of whimsy, like making one’s hammer wear a hat. They had provided escort into the hall, dropping big handfuls of something green and white for people to gingerly crush beneath their feet as they walked under the cracked marble arches of the First House dock. She had realised with a thrill of frugal, exotic horror that it was plant matter. Some of those assembled had given fleeting, backward-shoulder glances to her, and to Ortus; and she was aware that she was not imposing—was acutely aware that she might be mistaken for younger, was aware of the optics of Ortus, whose bigness and sadness filled rooms she was already minute within—and their gazes held flickers her eyes were too sore to translate. Fine. That was manageable; that was their mistake to make, whole and entire.