Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

“Nonius, wounded…” But he managed no more.

“I certainly hope you’re a fighter,” said Nonius, and raised his dagger-hand. “God knows you’re not a debater.”

If all of her cavaliers were this excited for death, she was definitely the problem.

But with the sword in his hand—a black prayer-wreathed blade of her House—and his offhand knife in the other—the type of simple black blade carried by chaplains, or nuns—he was a poem.

He didn’t even look angry; he looked like an ending given human form.

The Sleeper had the unmistakable face of the portrait in the shuttle, on the planet she had killed. The woman plastered behind Corona and Judith—the familiar woman with the pitiless eyes—had fought to usurp Harrowhark’s soul.

“I have lived so much of my life in fear, my Lady Harrowhark. I will not waste my death in it. I now find that I am no longer afraid of anything … of death … of laws … of monsters. I will advance before I can change my mind and become, again, a coward. Even if I cannot do anything more than watch, let me go.”

She could let herself go, or she could go back to her body, and let her go. Nav had made it her decision, when it came to imminent death either way. The free will to say Harrow dies or Harrow lives. And she had said, albeit fuck her for saying it: Harrow lives, which required its opposite balance: Gideon dies.

As though the universe could withstand more holes; as though the fabric of the universe had not become a series of lacework cut-outs linked by the thin, snappable joins of those who remained. Could the pattern sustain itself, with such absences? Could she, who had once thought herself well-versed in absence, endure alone? The answer was so obviously no; she was not even ready to have the question put to her.

“Someday I’ll die and get buried in the ground and you can take it up with me then,” said Harrow, and found, after all, that she was not really speaking to them. “Until then—I am afraid that I have to live.”

“Commander Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead,”

The Sleeper = whoever was inhabiting Cytherea?

“Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity,”

Lol so we like Eminem i see

“Mercymorn the First, Augustine the First, meet Commander Wake Me Up Inside, sincerest apologies if I got that wrong,”

and we also like Evanesence

There’s an emotion that isn’t fear, and I wish someone would come up with a word for it, Harrow, because right then I sure as hell didn’t have one—it was this sense that started in the balls of your feet and moved right up through your legs to your spine, and I felt it in your hands, I felt it on your tongue. I felt it go chattering up the back of your head. It made your scalp softly fuzz over with electricity. Maybe there is a word: omen.

“I had the baby,” said Wake. “The baby I’d had to incubate myself for nine long fucking months, when the foetal dummies these two gave me died.”

The woman I was pretty sure was actually my mother—wearing the body of a woman I’d had a crush on, who in turn had been wearing the identity of a woman she’d murdered, until I fell on a spike so that my boss could kill her—craned her head around in her bonds.

Gideon, were you aware that, when you let Commander Wake get as far as she did—to the House of the Ninth, to one of our own Houses, our own people—that she was pregnant?” A pause. “I was aware,” said Gideon Classic. “Why the hell did you not tell me?” “Because I thought it was—mine.”

“I’m not fucking dead,” I said, which wasn’t even true, and I was choking up; everything I’d ever done, everything I’d ever been through, and I was choking up. And the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, stood from his chair to look at you—at me; looked at my face, looked at your face, looked at my eyes in your face. It took, maybe, a million myriads. The static in your ears resolved into wordless screaming. His expression was just—gently quizzical; mildly awed. “Hi, Not Fucking Dead,” he said. “I’m Dad.”

You remember how the fuck-off great-aunts always used to say, Suffer and learn? If they were right, Nonagesimus, how much more can we take until you and me achieve omniscience?

Those are A.L.’s eyes, Lord … right there in your genetic code.” “There could be any number of explanations,” said God calmly.

“You didn’t kill Alecto. And she wasn’t just your bodyguard.” Mercymorn said, “Alecto was your cavalier.” The Emperor didn’t move.

Harrow, I was not following all of this, because necromantic theory is a lot of hot bullshit even when I’m not busy having Complex Emotions, but that last bit pinged even me as weird. I’d seen Ianthe wearing Tern’s eyes, like a funeral in her face. I’d looked in the mirror and seen your face with my much more attractive and cooler eyes, and that was—weird. I’d figured out that the eye-change is what happens when two people become one. It’s not what happens when two people swap places.

There was no way a cavalier could end up with a necromancer’s eyes. Unless the cavalier failed to die.

“You lied to us, John,” she said. And, with a sob in her voice: “There is a perfect Lyctorhood … a perfect Lyctor process that preserves the cavalier, and you let us think there wasn’t. You let us think we’d cracked it … You let us think it had to be a one-way energy transfer … but nobody had to die. Alfred, Pyrrha, Titania, Valancy, Nigella, Samael, Loveday, Cristabel … You watched us kill our cavaliers in cold blood, and none of them had to die. You had already done it yourself. But you had done it perfectly!!”

“I’m so sorry. I loved you all—I adored you all—I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“I forgive you everything, Lord,” she whispered. And she slid her hands inside him. The Emperor of the Nine Houses came apart, layer by layer.

“It’s going to form a black hole that nobody in that system will escape. The Nine Houses are over.”

White light. It bleached the insides of your nose and the back of your throat. It hurt coming out your ears. It bled out your eyeballs. It wasn’t a flash of light, more … a suddenness; when it was gone—as though it hadn’t even existed, but had been a luminous hallucination—time stopped.

“Okay. You’re a necromancer. Are you going to do something, or what?” “My necromancer is dead,” said Gideon. He took my sunglasses off his craggy, blasted face, and he looked down at me with eyes that would’ve surprised me first thing if I’d bothered to look at your memory files. They were a deep brown, with a kind of red spark to them; the brown of fractured rock glass, all mixed in with dark pupil, eyes that gave very little away. They suited the face better than the scintillating green ones you’d last seen.

“My name is Pyrrha Dve,” said the ghost in question. “Commander of the Second House, head of Trentham Special Intelligence, cavalier to a dead Lyctor. We compartmentalized from the Eightfold Word, just like you and your girl—though I’m an accident, and he took more from me than got taken from you. I was able to go underground, even from him. Two years before you were born, my necromancer started an affair with your mother … not knowing I’d also been doing the same thing, using his body.” I said, “What the fuck.”

“The stoma’s opened for John,” said Pyrrha, and she sounded—detached, rather than triumphant, rather than grief-stricken. “It must think he’s a Resurrection Beast.”

“I have been trapped in the back of a brain for ten thousand years, and my necromancer is dead,” said the other cavalier. “Emotions are difficult right now. I do have a loaded revolver.” “So what—we each swallow a bullet?” “It’s an option,” said Pyrrha. And: “Joke.” And: “Mostly.”

“Bullets—water—or waiting?” I’d had this choice before. The different deaths. The death of waiting; the death of optimism.

I had the choice of shooting myself, being crushed by the water, or waiting to get squashed by tonnes of falling metal. Or I had the choice of living to get pulled down into Hell.

But my whole life and death had come crashing down around me. It turned out I was the child of God—hey, suck it, Marshal—but also nothing more than a stick of dynamite. I was nothing but a chess move in a thousand-year game.

Which was Tridentarius all over. She got one choice, and not only did she blow it, but she blew it in such a huge fucking spectacular way that you would’ve been impressed had you not hated her for it. Ianthe, throwing in her lot with the guy who had lied to everyone about everything. Ianthe, backstabbing her own cavalier all over again. Ianthe, with the world in the balance, reaching her hand out and pressing down on the weight marked BAD.

I realised with exhausted indignation that, at the end of everything—after all I had been through—after the last word, the last strike, the last drop of blood in the water—your bullshit dead girlfriend had come to claim you. And she said in the wrong voice twice removed: “Chest compressions. I know her sternum’s shattered; ignore it. We need that heart pumping. On my mark.” Hands pressed. We died.

Harrowhark had come home, and she was not afraid. She did not know why she did it, but she climbed inside that empty coffin, and she took the sword within her arms. She was filled with a drowsy, comfortable certainty, as though rather than an icy tomb she had been tucked into a bed with a pillow fluffed beneath her. Her eyelids felt as heavy as the chains that lay broken around the outside of the bier. The sword she embraced shamelessly; those six feet of steel held no fear for her now.

“Frontline Titties of the Fifth,” she read, and found she was smiling helplessly to herself. She murmured: “Nav, you ass, that’s not even a real publication.”

Her eyes closed. Lying in the tomb that had claimed her heart, faraway in a land she had never travelled, Harrowhark Nonagesimus fell asleep, or dropped dead, or both.