Harrow the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  O corse of the Locked Tomb, she prayed silently to herself, the cold death to anyone who looks at me in pity; the heat death to anyone who looks at me in amusement; the quick death to anyone who looks at me in fear.

  As Ortus finished, the priests of the First smiled, just a little, and only with their mouths. It occurred to Harrow that the First and the Ninth were the only two Houses that understood how to wait for a thing that would never happen. Her cavalier rounded off the prayer, dolefully: “And so hail to the Lord of the Sharpest Edge, and the gossamer thinness of his blade, and the cleanness of his cut.”

  “An ancient epithet!” said the ghastly old man that Harrow would come to curse as Teacher. He looked near death with excitement. He looked close to capering, which filled Harrowhark with a dry and powdery despair. “A classic, unuttered for years even in this House! How may I bless you for that, Ortus the Ninth?”

  “Pray only that my bones be one day interred in the Anastasian monument, where even the ghost of the light does not go,” said Ortus, in front of everybody, like an absolute shit. Even in the shadow the heat slapped down on him, and beneath his veil some idiot had painted him with the Skull of the Anchorite Dying, that idiot probably being Ortus. As he wept from the sunshine the alabaster wounds of the Anchorite turned to big runnels of paint. No First priest’s blessing could get him inside the Anastasian, the tomb reserved for warriors: Ortus was only likely to die with a heretic’s blood still wet on his sword if he found a very slow heretic. “That is the only blessing I desire.”

  The other priests murmured. “Incredible,” said Teacher. “I love it. I bless you that way, twice. Now, won’t somebody fetch me the box?”

  What followed was a long and incomprehensible parade of cavaliers, starting with Marta the Second. After Teacher called out, “Ortus the Ninth,” Ortus went up for his prize and returned to present it to his necromancer, as he ought. He placed within Harrow’s gloved hands a ring with a single key laced upon the iron: a singularly dull and uninteresting key, with two teeth and a triangle head. It sat very heavy in the black leather of her palm.

  The little man eased himself down upon his stool, from the sides of which no small amount of stuffing was emerging, like a sat-on cream-filled roll. He said comfortably: “Now I will tell you something new, something you are not meant to know: about the First House, and about the research facility.

  “The base of Canaan House dates back to before the Resurrection. We first built upward, to get away from the sea; then we built outward, to strive toward beauty … This was meant to be the palace of the Kindly Master, where he might work and hold court and live for always, and oversee all the rebuilding that had to be done. For the Resurrection did not resurrect every broken thing, you understand, and nor did it create anything new. There was hard work ahead—fixing, or designing, and it took a great deal of blood and sweat and bone. Yet those were lovely years, happy ones. And that was the time before Lyctors.”

  He took a sip of his tea, sighed briefly in pleasure, and continued: “They were disciples, to begin with. Ten normal human beings of the Resurrection, though half were blessed already with necromantic gifts. But necromancy alone does not confer eternal life. Our Lord, the First Reborn, kept those ten devotees young and alive through his sheer might, but it was a shadow of living … They had to stay tucked near the Emperor’s feet so as not to strain his powers. They desired to spend their lives in service of him, not the other way around. They realised in the first hundred years how difficult their situation was, even as necromancy spread through the Nine Houses, and even as other disciples joined their number. Some of them took up the sword and became the first cavaliers, in the hope that their strength of arms might prove useful; the adepts honed their master’s craft, trying to break the rigors of deep space. And there was so much still to be done, and new necromancers being born, and ruins to reclaim. What a time to be alive.”

  He sighed again, this time more nostalgically, and then he said: “Necessarily a great research had to begin, into how best to serve alongside our Lord without needing him to confer immortality—this search for what would become Lyctorhood. And it took place here.”

  He pointed downward. Everyone looked at the floor beneath his feet, seeking out the origins of Lyctorhood in a few square inches of rotting carpet. “Below our feet. The laboratories. The original body of the building—a place steeped in the death of ages—the quietude of the last sacrifice … that is where Lyctorhood was begun, and that is where Lyctorhood was finished. You will see it. You will see where they threw down their tools and left the building like a palimpsest, unknowing, for you; where they left their blueprints to those who may yet have the strength of body and spirit to walk their path. This place was meant to be a palace, and they have left it as a road in the wilderness.”

  Someone spoke up—the Fifth woman—and she said, fearlessly and amiably: “Then the path to Lyctorhood is independent research? Gosh! And it isn’t even my birthday.”

  One of the young people sitting close to the Fifth made a sound like an exhausted balloon squeal.

  “Part of the path is independent research, Lady Abigail,” said Teacher, smiling. “The other part, the greater part, is the silence … is the care. You are not alone in the facility. In its heart lies the Sleeper, and how long that creature has lain there I do not know; but I do know that they are your greatest threat, for although they lie in sleep … in that sleep, they walk.”

  Here he trailed off. He stared into the middle distance, still grasping his cup of tea, as though seeing visions the assembled scions and cavaliers were not privy to. The pause stumbled execrably, fell down the stairs, and lay in a tangle at the bottom in full view of all listeners, who had to watch it bleed out in embarrassment. One of the grotesquely young pair of the Fourth actually tried to fill it in, and bleated: “There’s a—monster in a research laboratory? And we’ve got to—fight it?”

  “No, no!” said Teacher impatiently. “Lord Over the River have mercy! The Sleeper cannot die. I doubt they can be wounded; they certainly cannot be killed. The greatest advantage we have is that the Sleeper sleeps deeply! The second threat to your work is if the Sleeper wakes—it has never happened, though I know the Sleeper yearns to escape its incognizant state and pick up where they left off—for if they wake, none of us will live. If the Sleeper meets you on their unconscious peregrinations, your weapon should be stealth; if through unholy means you wake them, there will be no other weapons left. We are reliant on a communal soundlessness. Travel in groups; tread softly; go where I durst not go: because I love my life, and I love noise, also.”

  There was no pause here, just a perfect babel:

  “—isn’t how it—”

  “How much sound is—”

  “—doesn’t make any—”

  “—what kind of cack-handed—”

  “I do not know the answers to any of these questions,” said Teacher calmly. “Only that, already, you are being too loud.”

  The babel froze, in midair, on everyone’s lips. Harrowhark, who had never spoken, and Ortus, who had only sweated, almost audibly, stilled further. In that anechoic atmosphere one could have heard a hair split from someone’s scalp and twiddle down to the floor. One could have heard their own heart beating—Harrow did, loud and wet and hot. That silence was absent of anything, except those tiny, helpless noises of living.

  “I am making a joke,” said the vigorous little priest, whose cheerful admission did not ease the room. “I josh. I kid. I do that. Believe me when I say that you are safe up here. You see, if you are not, then there is nothing to be done, not really. It is only down through the hatch for which you hold the key that you are in peril, and it is a peril you will bring on both yourself and those around you. Keep your swords sharp and your theorems nimble. I can guide you no further; this place has changed beyond my ken. But I wish you luck,” he added, and the priest with the long salt-and-pepper plait said, very softly, “I wish you luck,” and the tiniest and most
wizened priest added in a wheeze, “God grant you luck to carry out your task.”

  Those gathered were almost too stunned to attend to the constructs who came to get them; eyes that had been bright with excitement, or anticipation, or even in some cases a weird, weary comfort, were now troubled. They were greeted by those limber, reactive skeletons that moved in the manner of kindly in-laws, welcoming strangers to a house they knew was unfamiliar to them but nonetheless wanted to prove comforting. They were led away in twos—barring the Third House trio—and Harrowhark waited next to her cavalier, who was apparently trying his damnedest not to breathe, for a skeleton to cross over to them.

  She realised that Ortus was very frightened. This was not unexpected. “Lady, I cannot do this,” he breathed. “I cannot protect you in this way. Monsters are beyond me.”

  “The rock has been rolled,” Harrowhark said, and she was relieved by how much she believed it. She was not fearful. She felt dry inside, as though the liquid had all been wrung out. Monsters were never beyond her. There was no abomination she could not give a run for its money in foulness. “You are my cavalier primary. Your job is to stand, to face our foes, and to die when the panniers are empty, but not before.”

  This did not comfort him, strangely enough. “You need a blade, and someone with the will to wield it,” he hissed.

  “How strange! I have never needed such a person in the past.”

  “I would that you had chosen differently.”

  Harrowhark was unsettled now, and she had been at peace, so she was cruel: “The choice is beyond me now, Nigenad—unless you can conjure me the spirit of Matthias Nonius, in which case I’ll take on his services if he promises to not speechify.”

  Their own First House skeleton, ridiculously girdled in that pure white, had come over to make them both a very respectful bow. A thrill of suspicion was growing in Harrowhark regarding the fluidity of its reactions. Its movement was too free, and when she angled her body in its direction it mirrored her in unconscious response, which was beyond her and therefore beyond any skeleton-raiser of the Nine Houses. But her cavalier primary did not seem to notice. He had fallen into a reverie of his own devising, and when the construct gestured—gestured, who wasted time on ossein instructions for gesture—he turned instead to her, his dark eyes earnest, his painted skull deliquescing.

  He cleared his throat—

  “No,” said Harrowhark immediately, but it was too late.

  “Baleful the black blade struck at the shimmering stuff of the spectral beast, biting deep in its false flesh;

  “Shrieking, it flailed with its claws at the pauldrons and casque of the Ninth, yet his heart never faltered or failed him …

  “Harrowhark—I don’t understand why you chose me.”

  Harrow said, “There was nobody else.”

  His mask slipped, and not the mask made of alabaster and black paint. Ortus looked at her with his steady dark gaze, and his heavy face flickered; she realised with electrified astonishment that he was exasperated. “You never did possess an imagination,” he said, and, obviously upset with himself, his mask reappeared as swiftly as if slapped back on with both hands. He did not know that she was far more interested than angry. But he added in a hurry, “Forgive me, my lady. I am overset and afraid. I do not yet know how to die. The Locked Tomb is far from here, as are its graces, and so I forget myself.”

  “You do, I agree,” said Harrowhark, shortly, and became exasperated herself, though more with herself than him. Ortus could not be blamed for simply being Ortus. “Forget dying, Nigenad, and let’s go. It is obviously my fault if I have failed to impress upon you who I am, necromantically. We serve the great corpse that lies dead and unwaking, and should not let our hearts falter or fail regarding some fiendish somnambulist. In the worst-case scenario you can simply declaim to it, which ought to cure anyone’s insomnia.”

  “You are very humourous,” said her cavalier with perfect solemnity. “I understand. I will follow, Lady—and let duty be my pauldrons and casque, and loyalty my sword.”

  The skeleton construct gestured to them both as they made the initial step to follow, and Harrow was struck when it opened its yellow-molared mouth.

  “Is this how it happens?” it said.

  9

  YOU COULD NOT SAY with perfect accuracy that you woke up. Having achieved a grotesque mollience and dripped and resolved into a bad-smelling puddle of yourself, you did piece yourself back together again: your eyes opened—you were lying flat on your back—and, slowly, carefully, with great effort of soul, you congealed. A weird, hard wad was present in your lungs, pairing each breath with a hideous trachea whistle. Otherwise you were fine, though dishevelled. Your robes were askew. Your chest was heavy, but not with water, with—the shadow of a memory, or the last remembrance of a dream. For a moment you shivered all over. After your lungs, your eyes were the second thing to connect, and they perceived a room both big and dark, with spatters of quiet yellow light. This light resolved the shadowed angles of a high and vaulted ceiling. You recalled the wetness—you recalled the corpses—but then that recollection slithered away. The only thing you could hold on to was where you had been sat. You would know if all your sensation was removed; you would know if your brain had burnt away. You were the Reverend Daughter, and you had been placed in a pew.

  A heavy weight pressed on your hips and legs. You strained to see, chin tucked hard against the top of your chest, and beheld with relief your double-handed sword. Your relationship with it was becoming increasingly complex: you hated its presence, but the world without it would be unimaginable. You smelled blood. You smelled something else more distantly; above the blood hung the crisp, faecal sweetness of a rose. You struggled to sit up: the breath seized in your lungs, and you worried yourself out of a thrusting cough just as a hand touched your shoulder, lightly, in warning. You nearly flinched off your seat.

  “Quiet,” said Ianthe, beneath her breath.

  She was sitting next to you, an incandescent pillar of white, staring straight ahead. The look on her face was typical of her, a recollection; an icy, exhausted tedium, with top notes of intrigued disgust. You were dazed. You hated her to touch you. You glued the sword to the back of the pew with a push, the bone lifting it and muffling the noise, sticking in hot gobs to the genuine wood as you swung your legs over to press your toes to the floor. And you saw where you were, and you were immediately stricken with horror.

  You had been laid in a pew halfway down a small, exquisite chapel. Now that you could look, you recognised the tender and yellow light as that which came from hundreds of candles. They lit an interior of shining charcoal-coloured stone, layered with whorls of bone—bone everywhere, bone enough for a hundred Ninth House tomb chapels: the chancel formed of long carved runnels of bone, fretworked into human lace; the black check tiles polished granite beneath your feet, their white counterparts soft worn squares of femur, orange in that lenient candle light; and the seats of wood—wood like you’d first seen in Canaan House, real, brown, glimmering wood, polished to the particular sheen that neither stone nor bone could take. You stared up at a plex cruciform window: cold stars outside, gleaming with a weird and unearthly light. You stared up at skulls: an ossuary of skulls, a multitude of skulls, set into the wall, overlapping in empty-eyed rows, set cheek-by-jowl to await infinity. Thin sheets of metal had been worked over this lovely mass of faceless dead, in shadowed tints: deep red crimsons, smoky amethysts, lightless navy. House colours. House heroes brought here to rest. Slender columns of white tapers bathed those bones in forgiving lights that made them beautiful in the way only bones could be for you; the candles were wrapped in different colours, which made them look like the dressed-up throats of flowers, or rings on long slender fingers. And great clusters of these candles shone down on a central altar, and on the central altar was a body.

  You were at a funeral. You knew its bride; you’d killed her.

  You sat in a pew in the chapel where had been laid th
e time-apprehended body of Cytherea the First. In order to survive the gaucherie of your presence, you sent your brain voyaging elsewhere. You tucked your hands deep inside the veil of your nacreous sleeves and slumped so that the snowy rainbow gauze hid your face. Even the vague pressure of the blade at your back caused the gorge to rise up in your chest and your heart to hammer wildly as though trying to construct a barricade, but at least the threat of coyly spewing kept you present and sane; you weren’t that far gone. It was only the fourth funeral you had ever been to where you had been responsible for the corpse.

  The corpse on the altar was covered in little blush rosebuds, scattered thickly over her, a roseate white like seconds-old bone. They lay in sheaves in her arms; they were tucked in her pallid brown curls and pressed to her feet. On her sweet dead mouth there hovered a rueful frown. Once upon a time you might have fallen to position on the kneeler—soft and supple human leather, buttery, lovely—and thanked the Tomb that you had lived to see the death of a Lyctor, enshrined so, in such a place. You would have pressed your prayer beads to your mouth with one knuckle caught between your lips, the knuckle of your great-grandmother that represented the Rock, and the Universe, and God. Now you considered whether or not you could pass out again.