Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

“But why does Ortus the First want me dead?” “Who?” said Mercymorn, indifferently.

so he is not Ortus??

In the following months the Saint of Duty attempted to kill you, by your count, fourteen times, and you never came to understand the motivation. Often you were saved only by intervention.

The Emperor said, carefully: “He made a pact, with an authority I have no power to gainsay, that he would protect me from all dangers. Now it has been put to him that you are that danger. Harrowhark, forgive me. I need you to face him—each time—knowing your life is in danger…”

Later I would ask of her a greater and more terrible thing. I had a body and I needed a tomb … you might know of the body, Harrowhark, and you will know far better the Tomb.

“God, who did you bury?” Teacher worried his temple with his thumb, and then worried his other temple with his other thumb. He took a biscuit and dipped it into his cooling tea, then ate it, then swirled the tea around in the cup and set it down again. “I buried a monster,” he said.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee. THE EMPEROR OF THE NINE HOUSES, THE PRINCE UNDYING (WHILOM??? JOHN???) Who was A.L.?

“Harrow,” he said curtly, “you are not the only person who can add up two and two, and arrive at four.

you were not ready for the un-Ortuslike tenor of his voice when he said, calmly, back so vulnerably offered to you: “Close the door, and go away.” You closed the door. You went away. “I caught the Saint of Duty in the throes of grave lust,”

“Don’t draw on me with that ridiculous thing. You don’t even know where you got it.” “God gave it to me.” “And you’ve never asked yourself why?”

“So tell me why,” you said evenly. “Can’t,” she snapped. “You ensorcelled my jaw, you fucking psycho shadow vestal! Yes, I worked that one out!

“I have to train with Augustine in less than five hours anyway and I’ve stayed up too late. Death is preferable.” There was no answer to that, naturally, except to sheath your sword, return to your bedroom, and put yourself to bed, defeated.

and you understood what he had done. He took your bloody spurs between his fingers, and the blood fell away into powder as he stripped away the thanergy. He did not absorb it or try to turn it back on you; he simply undid it, with the dismissive ease of upending a jug of water over a drain.

The Saint of Duty could bypass your wards at any time. The Saint of Duty was a thanergy void. The Saint of Duty was the ultimate nemesis of a bone adept. You would never be able to sleep again.

By the evening of the third day after your interrupted bath, you had not slept for eighty-six hours, but you had read a book, and you had made soup three times.

There was no betrayal of any emotion on his face: not the surprise that had dawned over his heavy-lidded eyes earlier, nor anger, nor even dissatisfaction. He caught your gaze. You held his. And the Saint of Duty lifted his lit cigarette to you in an unmistakable salute.

“I already know how I’m going to thank you,” and you were bemused. You absolute idiot baby, you were mystified. You were tired, and you were embarrassed, and you were riding high from the satisfaction of doing one half-perfect thing—of having committed a low miracle of your own devising—of, for a handful of minutes, being Harrowhark Nonagesimus again, the greatest necromancer produced by your dark and sacred Drearburh.

“Silas Octakiseron is not hiding,” she said. “He’s dead.” Both of them looked at her. The Fifth necromancer’s glasses were misting up with the cold, so that her tranquil brown gaze was seen as though through a filmy cataract. “Pardon?” she said. “So is Coronabeth Tridentarius,” Harrow added. “I cannot confirm the fates of the rest of the Third House.”

I WILL REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU KISSED ME—YOU APOLOGISED—YOU SAID, I AM SORRY, DESTROY ME AS I AM, BUT I WANT TO KISS YOU BEFORE I AM KILLED, AND I SAID TO YOU WHY, AND YOU SAID, BECAUSE I HAVE ONLY ONCE MET SOMEONE SO UTTERLY WILLING TO BURN FOR WHAT THEY BELIEVED IN, AND I LOVED HIM ON SIGHT, AND THE FIRST TIME I DIED I ASKED OF HIM WHAT I NOW ASK OF YOU I KISSED YOU AND LATER I WOULD KISS HIM TOO BEFORE I UNDERSTOOD WHAT YOU WERE, AND ALL THREE OF US LIVED TO REGRET IT—BUT WHEN I AM IN HEAVEN I WILL REMEMBER YOUR MOUTH, AND WHEN YOU ROAST DOWN IN HELL I THINK YOU WILL REMEMBER MINE

“I am mad,” she interrupted. “I have always been mad, since I was a child. I hallucinate sounds. I see things that do not exist. Ortus has masked much of it, but as you have identified and exploited, my vulnerability only requires his removal. I did not tell you of Silas Octakiseron’s death because I was not sure I was an accurate reporter. I am insane.”

“Harrowhark Nonagesimus—I really think you should consider the idea that you might also be haunted.”

“I see,” and then, “I see. I see. What’s two plus two?” “Four—” “Smallest bone in the body?” “The auditory ossicles, but—” “What’s the name of the Saint of Duty?” You said, “Ortus the First,” and you were too slow. She reached out and tapped you on the side of the head.

Later you lay together in her lavish bed, far apart enough that if you reached out your hand, you might just brush her with your fingertips. It was, you had admitted, the only place you now felt safe to sleep, what with your wards so eminently destroyable. The mockery you endured for needing her proximity was exquisitely painful, but humiliation was steadily becoming your existence whole and entire.

“Of course I want something from you. But it’s not personal,” Ianthe had said. “Understand me, Harry. I always take the smartest option first … burn any bridges that need to be burned … try to get in before anyone else can. It was the first thing I ever admired about you, back at—well, I promised not to talk about that … I’m very good at seeing the big picture. And your being alive is, right now, part of my big picture.”

“Eighteen,” she said, in the tones of the jaded, fagged-out socialite. “I remember being eighteen.” “You are twenty-two.” “It’s a universe away from eighteen.”

You were so afraid she might touch you. You were so afraid anyone might touch you. You had always been afraid of anyone touching you, and had not known your longing flinch was so obvious to those who tried it.

You were lucky that the memory of your own cavalier did not hurt you—except sometimes in the form of a sick headache in your temples, or in words stuck on repeat in your head. Some of those words were eating at you now, and you recited them to yourself in the quietude of your brain: Warrior proud of the Third House! Ride forth now as my sister! Ride we to death, and the proving! Ride we with heads held high; we shall bloody our blades in the foe’s heart; death shall we bring to the foul ones— Death shall we win for ourselves, as the prize for our high deeds done on the ash-choked plains of the ravens!

You sipped. You did not have any absent friends.

yes you do!!!

In the protected plex booth stood Cytherea, spotlit by the strong white light from the panels above her, leaning heavily upon some handle within; a dead woman staring at you through dark and filmy eyes, her face freckled with drying blood, petals in her limp ringlets.

The Saint of Duty said, with a kind of hoarse solemnity: “Fresh blood wards. Every night.”

He said, “Can’t bleed thalergy … not fresh thalergy. Thanergy, easy. Mixed with thalergy … much harder. No bone wards. Blood wards. Understand? Fresh blood wards. Each night. Can’t break those.”

“You’ll be safe from us.”

“I know you’re there,” he rasped. “Kill me all you like. I would know you in the blindness of my eyes … in the deafness of my ears … as a shadow smudged against the wall, annihilated by light … stop. Not here. Not now. Let it go, love. I just want the truth … after all this time.”

“Just tell me—back then—why you brought along the ba—”

Ortus said, “I don’t know.” “You were conscious. You spoke to me.” He said, “I don’t know.”

He looked at you, and he said in a voice you had known since you were eight years old: “I sometimes—forget.” It was the tone—clinical, enamelled, half-defensive, half-endangered—the tone of someone admitting a final frailty. It was familiar because you had used it yourself. Understand I am insane.

Next to you, the Body said quietly, “The water is risen. So is the sun. We will endure.”

The total absence of appropriate shame made you suspect that this had happened between them before, a thought that made you want to give yourself a lobotomy.

You saw all the signs of your undoing. You had few months to live. It could be quite easily counted in weeks now. God had been correct: you had not changed—you were not fixed. You were the last, lone, assailable Lyctor.

“Warden of the Sixth House,” you demanded, “why are you acting as though I should know you? Why are you acting as though your cavalier knows me? I am Harrowhark the First, formerly and in everlasting affections the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh: I am the ninth saint to serve the King Undying, one among his fists and his gestures. I did not know you in this life, and I will not know you in the next one.” He stopped dead. “You became a Lyctor,”

Your cavalier, Reverend Daughter—” “Has become the furnace of my Lyctorhood,” you said. The dead Warden stopped. He looked at your face as though his eyes could peel through dermis, fascia, and bone. And he said, quietly: “How God takes—and takes—and takes.”

But you were always too quick to mourn your own ignorance. You never could have guessed that he had seen me.

Gideon!!!

A head-and-shoulders photograph of an unsmiling, adamant person, in all assumption a woman, stared fixedly at you as though calculating how much effort it would take to snap your neck. She was dressed in black to the chin, and her red hair curled thickly about her neck and shoulders. Thick, itchy streams of blood began to ooze down your sinuses.

Gideon!!! ❤️❤️❤️

“Who took you away from Canaan House? Who are you with, Hect?” “You call them Blood of Eden,” she said.

“It’s coming for you, Reverend Daughter!” said Teacher. “Oh, it’s coming for you—and once it’s got you, once that rock’s rolled away, once that tomb’s levered open, the Emperor of the Nine Houses will never know peace ever again! The King is dead! Long live the King!”

But then why had their coffins on the Erebos been empty? And why now was one of your letters missing, and another two freshly opened?

You said, “Beloved?” She said, “It’s coming,” with the most anticipatory astonishment you had ever heard in her low, many-personed voice

The fear of death had remade your worship into desperation, or maybe desire. You reached one hand out for that frozen tangle of hair at the back of the skull; you closed the gap between you, and you kissed that lovely corpse mouth. Of course, you could not. There was nothing there.

the Body said: “I have to go away for a while,” and you regretted everything. “I have done wrong,” you said.

Why did you pray for Ianthe’s innocence, when it was so dubious? It was not the way of the Ninth House to pray with such wilful credulousness; yet you prayed all the while knowing Ianthe’s facility for tergiversation would have given the whole universe pause.

Anyone who has entered a stoma has never returned. It is a portal to the place I cannot touch—somewhere I don’t fully comprehend, where my power and my authority are utterly meaningless.