Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

“I would rather have my tendons peeled from my body, one by one, and flossed to shreds over my broken bones,” you said. “I would rather be flayed alive and wrapped in salt. I would rather have my own digestive acid dripped into my eyes.” “So what I’m hearing is … maybe,” said Ianthe.

They had tried to remove your sword, once—they had tried to take it away on some pretext you could not exactly remember—and you were perturbed in some distant way by that memory, which was red, and wet, and ill defined.

“A Lyctor’s order is the order of God and should be carried out with the same grace you would have honoured me with,” he said. “Except for right now. Station the last person to graduate Trentham on the stele and tell them to make static noises if she keeps it up.” “Lord?” “Air blown through the teeth, tongue high, hand flaps up and down over the mouth. Sounds suspect, I know, but she’s never caught on when I’ve done it.”

You said, with difficulty: “What is happening to me?” “You’ve had a shock,” said the Emperor, which was not an answer, actually.

“Oh my God,” you said, forgetting that the deity in question was right there.

“I still maintain some of my faculties, Lord.” “Well, that’s all anyone can hope for,” he said.

“Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing,” he said. As he spoke, his mouth looked strange.

The Resurrecting King took on the expression of a man working out a very difficult and emotionally taxing anagram.

But Harrowhark—Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years—Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.

There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow—but she had died before Harrow was born.

This, at least, she hadn’t expected—how could she, what the fuck—

“I think ‘bone frenzy’ might be a term open to coarse misinterpretation, personally.”

“Nigenad, what would be the tragedy in living for a myriad?

The Ninth House character, she was forced to admit, had always been low on wild and confident fucks.

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.

It was only the fourth funeral you had ever been to where you had been responsible for the corpse.

But when she was scared, she was a child again, and she was more afraid of being a child again than anything else in her life. Almost.

To all intents and purposes, your mother and father committed a type of resurrection,” he said. “They did something nigh-on impossible. I know, because I have committed the same act, and I know the price I had to pay.

“Burial implements. Grave goods. Any possession that they kept over time, that was exposed to their thalergy and thanergy. If they were murdered, the murder weapon.” “Bang on,” said Augustine. “Even things that touched the murder weapon, though the connection’s fairly weak there and the revenant would have to be particularly bloody-minded.”

Harrow regretted not making him take a solemn pledge of silence, to walk the place as the mute and intimidating bulk his father had been; but only a very obedient idiot of a cavalier would have stuck to that.

A less critical party might’ve pointed out that you’d had a surprise gift of twelve inches of steel through the chest and made your pecs sproing the blade back out with your own ribcage, but you had never been party to excuses.

The Saint of Duty said stonily, “I do things face-to-face.” “I am not trying to be cruel,” she said cruelly, “but that is what got you into trouble nineteen years ago.”

“The Sleeper, who sleepeth not. Perhaps a better name would have been.… the Waker.”

“It differs mildly, then,” said Harrow, and Abigail admitted, “Somewhat, yes.”

“There are very complex power dynamics on this station,” said your sister Lyctor, with whom you had a very complex power dynamic.

Just believe me when I say that when I want Ortus to go, he’ll be giddy-gone.” (This did not make much sense to you, as a joke.)

Even Mercy doesn’t have a bad thing to say about her.” (“Why am I constantly painted as a critical person,” came the inevitable critique.)

For a moment, you wondered wildly if you had hit your head quite hard entering the shuttle out of Drearburh, and had hallucinated everything subsequent.

“My affections lie buried in the Locked Tomb.” “And let them lie,” she said, laughingly, and not very kindly. “Somebody might even exhume them for you.

and this fluid you turned into liquid ash a micrometre thick, a very—weeny—construct.

You said, and your voice sounded strange to yourself, as though you had heard the word only in dreams and never articulated by waking tongues: “The Sleeper.”

Sextus was rubbing his temple and looking at you, awestruck, as though he had seen some stupefying glimpse of the beyond; you did not remotely understand the sharp smile that suddenly crossed his face. “Kill us twice, shame on God,” he said, and he leaned forward, and much to your intense distress he swiftly kissed your brow. Then he said: “Harrowhark, for pity’s sake, go!”

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

“I AM SORRY, NINTH,” Abigail said, in the same hesitantly kind and careful tones you might use to tell someone that their cat would never grow up into a tiger:

Now she said briskly, “I’m glad you’re here, Harrow. I wanted to talk to you about what happens next.”

“I hate you all,” said Mercymorn passionately. “I have hated you for millennia … except you, my lord.” “Thanks,” said God. “I merely want to put you in a jail,” said his Lyctor, now meditative, “and fill up the jail with acid once for every time you made a frivolous remark, or ate peanuts in a Cohort Admiralty meeting, or said, ‘What would I know, I’m only God.’ Then at the end of a thousand years, you would say, ‘Mercy, I have learned not to do any of these things, because I hated the acid you put on me.’ And I would say, ‘That is why I did it, Lord. I did it for you, and for your empire.’ I often think about this,” she finished. The Emperor of the Nine Houses said, “I ate peanuts, discreetly, the once.”

It’s a pure blood ward, Harrowhark.

“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, most horribly of all: “This wasn’t my idea.”

In a way, it helped. Nothing added to your resolution to live so much as someone else suggesting that you die. Ten minutes later you were eating leftover stew in the kitchen with something close to animation, choking down your last lunch before the apocalypse. And you were angry. You were always such a little bitch when you were angry.

“A blood ward is for those without imagination,”

“As I cannot reasonably expect not to bleed for the next myriad, I cannot rely upon a blood ward, and neither should you.

I am a Lyctor. I am a necromantic princess of Ida. I am the cleverest necromancer of my generation.” “Like hell you are,” said Harrowhark. “So impress me,” said Ianthe, unmoved.

“Someday I’ll marry that girl,” she said aloud. “It might be good for her.” And: “Probably not, though.”