Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

That’s where we put the Resurrection Beasts. The rubbish bin … with all the other dross.”

timebo?

So I’m shut in here—walled in, really—to prevent the Nine Houses becoming none House, with left grief.” He looked very tired. He looked very rueful. He said, “Once again. You’re not the only one with limitations.

As with many mysteries, this one had turned out to be sad and dull: the Emperor of the Nine Houses had someone, and then, like all his Lyctors, the Emperor of the Nine Houses had lost someone. It was your story. It was Ianthe’s story. It was the story of Augustine, and of Mercymorn, and of Ortus. It was Cytherea’s story, and that of all the Lyctors who had died over that long dark sheaf of years.

You might have told him of the traitor. Instead you said: “I broke into the Locked Tomb.” After a moment God said, “You did not.”

And he said, “Harrow, whatever you thought you did, you didn’t.” “I opened the outer door.” “Okay,” he said. “I went up the passage.” “I’ll accept it, though that thing’s a literal death trap,” he said. “I broke the ward and I rolled away the rock—” “There’s where you’re wrong,” he said.

“I’m not saying that you didn’t do it because you weren’t good enough. Harrowhark, I’m saying that nobody is good enough. There isn’t a bypass. I built that tomb with Anastasia, designed every inch of it, and I did not include a way in. I never wanted that tomb opened, from either end. I made that ward, me alone, and it wouldn’t answer to the greatest of my Lyctors any better than the meanest infant necromancer in all the Nine Houses. Their might would be one and the same.

“It can’t be broken,” he continued. “It can’t be contravened. It can’t even fade; its magic was my magic. The line of Reverend Tomb-keepers has laboured under a misapprehension if they think the rock could be rolled away, except by me. It’s a pure blood ward, Harrowhark. Whatever you thought you did—whatever false chamber has been built around that tomb that you mistakenly stumbled into—there is no possibility that you breached the real thing. I am so sorry. You were party to a tragedy based on a misunderstanding.”

The uncertainty of the insane. The conviction of the mad. Nobody had seen you walk through that door. Nobody had watched you leave. What he saw in your face you had no idea;

Then God’s eyes widened fractionally, and his voice became altogether different when he said: “Harrow, who the hell’s been tampering with your temporal lobe?”

And you found that far beneath your bed—hidden in the darkness where you had once lain, waiting for the Saint of Duty—lay an inert corpse: the missing body of Cytherea.

She said: “I—can’t see anything, Harrowhark.”

Then you went and looked beneath your bed again. Cytherea was gone. There were cuffs of bone glued to the floorboards. You had left it for maybe three minutes. No ward brayed. You searched the rest of the room, but there was no corpse to be found.

“Why do you care if I suffer?” “Because I was the one who failed you,” he said briefly. “I pulled too many punches.” And: “Sorry.”

And you walked to your death like a lover.

Ianthe had that type of personality. And she had a few years on Harrow. “Someday I’ll marry that girl,” she said aloud. “It might be good for her.” And: “Probably not, though.” And then Ianthe the First went to see a man about a queen.

Harrow was electrified by the fact that beneath the hastily brushed crop of red hair those eyes were— “Absolutely not,” said Abigail, from beside her.

“Harrow?” said someone close by—someone familiar; her vision swam. “If I forget you, let my right hand be forgotten,” her mouth was saying. “Add more also, if aught but death part me and thee.” And, unsteadily: “Griddle.”

She dug her hands into the mattress and she cried for Gideon Nav.

She was not, more to the point, the ruptured corpse she and Gideon had found at the bottom of the facility stairs: the body with the slit abdomen, with a key sealed neatly inside her kidney. She seemed alive, and well, and living.

You are a Lyctor now, aren’t you?” “Yes,” said Harrow. Gideon. Blood. A broken rail. “It was not my intention, at the end. But—yes.”

“I took the part of my brain that remembered her … that understood her soul … and I disconnected it. Then I made rather crude systems—so as not to be accidentally reminded … knowing that the pathways might reopen if they were knocked about.

Harrowhark, I am referring to the invasive soul.” “The invasive—?” “You are being haunted,” said Abigail calmly.

“You didn’t remove the memories of your cavalier, Harrowhark. I think that would have been beyond even the powers of a Lyctor. You falsified them. You skinned them over with something that looked good.”

From what I can tell I am stuck in here. I cannot get out. And I am about to die—I may even be dead already—which will render this all somewhat moot.”

“If you were dead on the other side, we’d all be gone by now. If you die in here, your soul is gone forever. Right now, in this moment, you are alive—let us ensure that if your body survives, you will remain at the helm.”

And you’d gone and left me behind.

You weren’t around to be furious, but if you had been, I would’ve told you not to bother; I planned on making them sorrier than they had ever been in all their fucking life.

I don’t care how much of a hot badass I’m meant to be, I was in the wrong body clutching a sword I’d never used, and you didn’t have any muscles, and I absolutely did not feel well.

Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it. Actually, scratch that, the main thing I should have said was, SQUATS ARE A START, OR A COUPLE OF STAR JUMPS, THEY’RE NOT DIFFICULT.

You could always leave everything else behind, but you never got rid of being so absolutely fucking goddamn sad.

The expression wasn’t right either—my what the fuck? face was very different from your what the fuck? face. It was like watching a shell of you walk around;

“I am so sorry, Harrowhark. I am sorry for everything … I am sorry for what they did … I am sorry that I was no kind of cavalier to you. I was so much older, and too selfish to take responsibility, and too affrighted by the idea of doing anything difficult or painful. I was weak because weakness is easy, and because rebuff is hard.

ONE FLESH, ONE END. G. & P.

As for the Saint of Duty himself— “His name isn’t Ortus,” she said, totally bewildered.

Ortus doesn’t come from a Lyctoral tradition. But what if hers did? What if we named her, accidentally, for him?”

THE ONLY THING OUR CIVILISATION CAN EVER LEARN FROM YOURS IS THAT WHEN OUR BACKS ARE TO THE WALL AND OUR TOWERS ARE FALLING ALL AROUND US AND WE ARE WATCHING OURSELVES BURN WE RARELY BECOME HEROES.

At the end, we were left in a sea of dead space bees, and you were impossibly okay.

lol what the heck?! hahaha

You didn’t have your original thumb and I’d touched your intestines, which is usually what, fourth date, but you were fine.

When they showed me your corpse I didn’t think to check the eyes. Stupid, Mercy.

This could have been over eighteen years ago. But now it’s messy … now I have to take the River all the way home and fight my way through Anastasia’s horrid tomb cult just because the commander always thought she was so smart. Don’t know why Gideon was so obsessed with her …

You are the evidence. He lied to us …

The fuck was I going to do, regrow your thumbs at her?

I breathed, “Dulcinea,” because I was a chump, and then—“Cytherea.”

and sometimes a cute older girl shows you a lot of attention, because she’s bored or whatever, and you sort of have this maybe-flirting maybe-not thing going on, right, and then it turns out she’s an ancient warrior who’s killed all your friends and she’s coming for you, and then you both die and she turns up ages later in the broiling heat on a sacred space station and like, it’s complicated. Just saying that it happens all the time.

lol I missed heeeerrrr

But I almost knew what you’d written already, so I don’t know why I was surprised. ONE FLESH, ONE END. Which did not make me happy, Harrow. It did not fill my heart with soft and sentimental yearning.

I wanted you to use me, you malign, double-crossing, corpse-obsessed bag of bones, you broken, used-up shithead! I wanted you to live and not die, you imaginary-girlfriend-having asshole! Fuck one flesh, one end, Harrow. I already gave my flesh to you, and I already gave you my end. I gave you my sword. I gave you myself. I did it while knowing I’d do it all again, without hesitation, because all I ever wanted you to do was eat me. Which is, coincidentally, what your mother said to me last night.

Love is a revenant, Gideon Nav, and it accumulates love-stuff to itself, because it is homeless otherwise. I’m not saying she didn’t care about you. One does care about one’s cavalier, it can’t be helped … but I watched Harry rearrange her brain so that she could empty herself of you.”

“Like I said before. She’s just not into you. She’s into bones. She gave her heart to a corpse when she was ten years old,” I said. “She’s in love with the refrigerated museum piece in the Locked Tomb. You should’ve seen the look she had on when she told me about this ice-lolly bimbo. I knew the moment I saw it. I never made her look like that … She can’t love me, even if I’d wanted her to. She can’t love you. She can’t even try.”

“Really a corpse?” she said, with not totally believable carelessness. “She wants the D,” I said. And: “The D stands for dead.” And: “Sorry.” “I think I need a drink,” said Ianthe, and she murmured to herself: “All that fuss about the Saint of Duty. What a little hypocrite.”