Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

“Harrowhark, we need you in the River, and while you are in the River your necromancy will not work.”

Outside, the hull shuddered as a few hundred more Heralds assembled on its surface.

the intruder did not set off the traps of teeth you’d embedded in its frame,

“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.

“Nonagesimus, nobody is coming to save you. Not God. Not Augustine. Nobody.”

Unless there’s something in one of those letters I don’t know about, you’re out of tricks.”

You were shocked into opening your eyes when you felt the girl opposite cup your chin in her hands—her fingers febrile compared to the chilly shock of her gilded metacarpal—and put her meat thumb at the corner of your jaw.

her stolen eyes looked at you with half-beseeching, half-contemptuous despair:

I know what you’ve done, and I know how to reverse it, if only you’d ask me to. Just ask; it’s that easy. Dying is for suckers.

With you and me at full power, we could rip apart this Resurrection Beast and come away unscathed. We could save the galaxy. Save the Emperor. Let them talk back home of Ianthe and Harrowhark—let them weep to speak of us. The past is dead, and they’re both dead, but you and I are alive.

“What are they? What are they, other than one more corpse we’re ...

This was, as you understood it dimly, the psychological moment. “Go fuck yourself,” you said.

“I didn’t think this was the time for dirty talk, but I can roll with it,” she said. “Choke me, Daddy.”

“You should have killed your sister,” you said. “Your eyes don’t match your face.”

“Well, I tried, and therefore no one should criticize me,”

The heat rose. The station must have been completely smothered: wrapped in a squirming shroud of thorax and wing, mandible and antenna, the dead couriers of a hungry stellar revenant.

You thought about the flimsy envelope addressed to you that read, To open in case of your imminent death.

“They’re breaching,” said the Emperor. “Forgive me … and give it hell, children.”

Throughout the Mithraeum, five pairs of eyes closed in concert, one of them yours. Unlike theirs, yours would not open again. In half an hour, no matter what Teacher might hope, you would be dead.

The Lyctors of the Resurrecting Emperor began their long wade into the River to where the Resurrection Beast squatted—just out of the orbit of the Mithraeum, half-alive, half-dead, a verminous liminal mass—and you waded with them, but your meat you left vulnerably behind.

O corse of the Locked Tomb,” you extemporised wildly. “Beloved dead, hear your handmaiden. I loved you with my whole rotten, contemptible heart—I loved you to the exclusion of aught else—let me live long enough to die at your feet.” Then you went under to make war on Hell. Hell spat you back out. Fair enough.

You did not wake up having passed into the thanergetic space that was the sole province of the dead, and the necromantic saints who fought the dead;

you woke up in the corridor outside your rooms, on your side and broiling, gasping for air, soaked right through with sweat—your own—and blood—your own; the blade of your rapier leered through your stomach, punctured through from behind. The wound was not a ha...

You were only half a Lyctor, and half a Lyctor was worse than not a Lyctor at all.

the stars were blocked by the skittering, buzzing Heralds of the Resurrection Beast, beating their wings furiously to roast everything inside.

You prepared to die with the Locked Tomb on your lips. But your idiot dying mouth rounded out three totally different syllables, and they were three syllables you did not even understand.

paint sacrament

any jawéd skull he affected became a wide white skull with depression.

His hands were big and soft—all of Ortus was big and soft, like a squashy black pillow

Lady, it is only to honour my father that I call myself a cavalier,” said Ortus. “It is for my mother’s pride and my House’s scarcity that I call myself a cavalier. I have none of a cavalier’s virtues.” “I feel as though we have had this conversation before,

The Noniad, his ongoing verse epic devoted to Matthias Nonius.

She had a vile suspicion that the quotation, around which he had somehow contrived to pronounce quotation marks, was from that very same verse epic, which she knew was already on its eighteenth book and showed no signs of slowing down. If anything it seemed to be gaining momentum, like a very boring avalanche.

“Our House has received good service from ‘those who are fit but to hold their blade in the scabbard,’” said Harrowhark, keeping her voice even. “Which is not a line that scans, just so you know.

“It’s enneameter. The traditional form. Those who are fit but to hold their blade in the scabbard—” “That’s not nine feet of anything.” “—never to draw it forth for the battle.”

“This isn’t how it happens,” said the Body. Which gave Harrow a curious strength. “I need you to hide my infirmity,” said Harrowhark. “You see, I am insane.”

IT WAS IN THE CLOSE of the myriadic year of our Lord—that far-off King of Necromancers, that blessed Resurrector of Saints!—that you picked up your sword. This was your first big mistake. The sword hated you to touch it.

You were a walking sacrament, even if your early contributions to Lyctorhood seemed to be finding new and different ways to puke.

The first time the man you called God had delivered you the sword—in what seemed to you his aspect of the Kindly Prince, intending only gentleness—you’d fallen into a deep stupor from which you had never really risen.

in your hot upset and shame, you ripped a sheet to shreds and covered your head with that. This still left most of your forehead nude, discounting the hair. Also, you were wearing a bedsheet. You took the poetic way out and used a black vestal’s last-choice gambit: you opened a vein and, trembling neither from pain nor blood loss, daubed blind upon your skin the sacramental skull of the Inglorious Mask.

the great black throat of space bared itself to you,

heard seven hundred and eight brains, thrumming in their cerebral fluid. You knew without checking that three hundred and four of those straining hearts belonged to necromancers; a necromancer’s heart myocardium flexed differently to your ears, worked worse, squeezed more feebly.

Once you worked out what you were hearing, you became aware of everything immediate to you: the dust settling on the gleaming black plaques of the floor; the roiling of your pulmonaries; the soft marrow of your bones sucking up oxygen.

The Body’s hands were grey with death and they were so soft and familiar on your skin, so much so that you were absolutely sure you could really feel them; that this time around, the dead caress was tangible. And when the Body turned so that you could see her face you were amazed, as ever, by that beauty unblemished by breath.

The fact that the Body had come to you now seemed tremendously important, if only you could stay awake long enough to figure out why.

Your world was a white and sterile box. This box was the hospital quarter on board the Erebos. The Erebos was the Behemoth-class flagship of the Emperor Undying.

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.

Truth be told you would have been happy hurling the thing straight into the hot heart of Dominicus, as it was loathsome to you and you were convinced it wanted to do you harm; but it was very important that it should not be placed in anyone else’s hand.

Your greatest peace you found in that half-asleep, druglike state on the bed, holding your heartbeat low before the cold white stars, sick with a fury you kept forgetting existed and were corrupted by possessing.

You always tried to thrust yourself back into full consciousness for the Emperor of the Nine Houses, who regularly had the grace to knock on the door and wait for entry to be granted, proving by itself his divinity.

“Why does a Lyctor need a sword? Lord, what use can we have of one? I can control bone. I can shape flesh and evoke spirit. I no longer need outside thanergy. Why anything so crude as a sword?”