Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

I don’t care that you can fill your own cavities,

There was a sword strapped to the Body’s back

You were basically naked. The sword weighed you down so much that you were affecting a hump. Your Inglorious Mask was a patchwork of flaking osteology. You looked like an imbecile.

Every body on board felt like the awareness of a meal cooking, a good smell, a pillar of something hot and rich. Their thanergy and thalergy rippled in and around each other like a bloom, or like light playing over metal. And there were more: you could hear on the edge of your senses a deeper, sleeping seethe of life and death, a huge body count, but muffled. You felt the dead in some onboard morgue—ten bundles of discrete dead, of thanergy with the rot of thalergy arrested, snap-frozen. The stillness of this thanergy was profound: not even a body in ice was so still.

I mastered Death, Harrowhark; I wish I’d done the smarter thing and mastered Time.

the antiquated LED gleam of electronics.

You were on a steel-frame balcony overlooking a field of hundreds and hundreds of oblong boxes. Each was a body long and half a body tall, and all were constructed of bone

“My promised gift. Your renewed House,” said the Emperor.

“Oh my God,” you said, forgetting that the deity in question was right there. “The ancient dead. You’ve committed resurrection.” He said, “No. I haven’t truly resurrected anyone in ten thousand years. But at that time … I set many aside, for safety … and I’ve often felt bad about just keeping them as insurance. They’ve been asleep all this myriad,

You unpinned your cloth mask so that you could look with your whole face, only a little ashamed to show it so nakedly to the Emperor. He, after all, had seen it before.

All were draped in the spectrum of House colours, lacking only black—no empty coffins for your House tonight—except for one plain casket to the side. A little household rose sat atop it, shedding milky blush petals on the stone.

some of them were aberrant. You stared with calm vacuity at a six-sided container draped with the Second House’s scarlet and white, which had no human remains inside. The single casket covered in tissue the gorgeous gold of the Third had no one from the Third in residence. Nor could you locate bodies within either of the plain grey-sheeted hexagons intended for the Sixth, though there were pitiable scraps and remains in one: leavings only, much less than a corpse.

Something flickered in your nervous system that was a bit like an emotion, but it struggled and died, much to your relief.

“The cavaliers—” “Have joined their Lyctors,” he said. “It’s not really a lie. It’s simply a flattening of an awesome … and sacramental … truth.”

“We went over Canaan House with a fine-tooth comb when we picked you up. We found nobody alive and no more remains, and whatever end came to those we can’t account for—if an end has come to them—is a mystery I plan on solving. Until then, I have declared them dead.

she made you look instead at the bone-and-skin boxes behind you, at the dead who were only sleeping now and had been privy to the oldest miracle you knew. Part of your promise had been fulfilled.

If you had seen him and not known you would have thought him utterly nondescript; but you could not look at him and not know. Terrible divinity clung to his skin.

“You could resurrect them,” you said, without bothering to filter much between thought and speech. “You alone are capable of it. But you won’t. Why?” “For the same reason that I haven’t for ten thousand years,” he said. “For the same reason that I cannot come back to the Nine Houses. The cost is too great.”

“Teach me, Lord, how to count that cost.”

God helped you up instead. He put his hands beneath your armpits in a perfectly normal way and raised you to stand, and clasped your arms clumsily—a quick, awkward squeeze, as though wanting to comfort and not knowing how

“Harrow, you won’t kneel to me. I won’t let you, not until you know exactly what it means when you do it. It hurts me to see you perform obeisance when—if you knew the full stor...

“My God—” “And you shouldn’t call me God either,” he said. “You don’t comprehend the word, and I don’t want to be God to you yet.

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

the coffin that did not contain Coronabeth Tridentarius,

“What happens to the soul?” “In the case of gradual death—senescence, illness … certain other forms—transition is automatic and straightforward. The soul is pulled into the River by liminal osmosis. In cases of apopneumatic shock, where death is sudden and violent, the energy burst can be sufficient to countermand osmotic pressure and leave the soul temporarily isolated. Whence we gain the ghost, and the revenant.”

The Emperor drummed his fingertips atop the plain coffin, and he said, a little whimsically: “Why have we not an immortal soul? I would give gladly all the hundreds of years that I have to live, to be a human being only for one day.” This threw you utterly. “I— Pardon?”

“Just accept the proposition for now that a planet has an enormous single amount of thalergy. If this thalergy is converted, what might happen during that transition?”

“The Cohort prepares a planet for necromancy every time they have to breach it. Over time, with the introduction of thanergetic decay, the planet converts. Necromancy proceeds as normal afterward. Nothing happens … plant and animal life both change, of course … and eventually the planet flips totally and the population has to be moved, but that’s such a long-term process that it takes generations.

You knew of only one mass dying-off of planets. So you said: “You tell me, Lord. You were there for the Resurrection.” “Yes,” he said. “And I saw the thalergy convert immediately. The difference between dying of illness and dying from murder. An enormous shock, the immediate expulsion of the soul. And just as when a soul is ripped untimely from a human being, when a soul is so rudely taken from a planet—”

“A revenant,” you said. “Always a revenant,” he said. “Every single time, a goddamned revenant.

“We called them Resurrection Beasts,” he said. It took him another moment to continue, and when he did, it was with the air of a man telling a very old story. “When the system died … when I was younger, those ten thousand years ago, and I brought us back from that brink—all those revenants scuttled off to the farthest parts of the universe, as the soul runs from its corpse in the blind first fear of transition. I have never seen a planet make another in the same way; I’ve seen lesser monsters—minor Beasts—but nothing, nothing, like that first wave.

those revenants move through the universe, inexorably, without pause … and they feed on thalergenic planets as they go, like vampires … and they won’t stop until I and the Nine Houses are dead. They have had me on the run for a myriad, and they’re nearly impossible to take down.”

“How many revenants are there?” You prepared for an astronomical number. The Body raised its eyebrows when the Emperor Undying said, “Three. “There were nine. We called them by number. Over ten thousand years, we have managed to take out a grand total of five. Number Two fell soon after the Resurrection. Number Eight cost a man’s immortal soul, and—I still see that day in my dreams. Number Six died because one of my Hands—Cyrus—drew it into a ultramassive black hole, and Number Six had better be dead, because Cyrus won’t be coming back.”

his mathematics, which did not hold up even on first acquaintance

“The choice I offered you was always a false one,” he said. “I’m sorry. The Resurrection Beasts always know where I am, and wherever I am they turn themselves to me and start moving … slowly … but never stopping. And they don’t turn to me alone, though they focus on me most strongly. They hunt whoever has committed the—indelible sin.” You stared at him. He dropped his hands. You said, “Which indelible sin?” “The one you committed when you became a Lyctor,” said the Emperor.

“No Lyctor has ever returned home, once we understood the repercussions … no Lyctor except one, who knew I would come to intercept her for that very reason.”

He would not know that in truth the Body of the Locked Tomb had not spoken to you since the night you massaged the purple, swollen clots of blood out of the necks of your dead parents, so that their strangulation might not be so obvious. He would not know that you had only walked with her one tranquil year, and trysted with her afterward only in your dreams. He could not possibly know that in your youth her eyes had often been black, like yours were, but that ever since you had writhed in Lyctoral agony her eyes had turned a yellow that made you dizzy to behold: a bronzed, hot, animal yellow, as amber as the inside of an egg. When you were ten years old, the Body was quiet and rigorous, practical and merciful. At fourteen the Body was tender and serene, and sometimes smiled. When you were sixteen the Body was resolute and impassioned. In all these incarnations, she had preserved her vow of silence. Now the sound of her voice meant the madness had returned to you in full.

“I can’t,” you said, as carefully as possible. “I can’t, beloved. It’s gone.”

“You are walking down a long passage,” said the Body. “You need to turn around.” “I am standing in the dark,” you told her. Each of the Body’s eyelashes was wet with frost. “I lost it. It’s gone. There’s nothing there. I must have misapprehended the process. I am half a Lyctor. I am nothing, I am pointless, I am unmanned.”

“Ortus Nigenad died thinking it was the only gift he was capable of giving,” you said, “and I have wasted it—like—air.”

then you knew nothing more, except that you hadn’t thrown up on God, which had to count as consolation.

THE REVEREND DAUGHTER Harrowhark Nonagesimus ought to have been the 311th Reverend Mother of her line. She was the eighty-seventh Nona of her House; she was the first Harrowhark.

She was named for her father, who was named for his mother, who was named for some unsmiling extramural penitent sworn into the silent marriage bed of the Locked Tomb. This had been common. Drearburh had never practiced Resurrection purity. Their only aim was to keep the necromantic lineage of the tomb-keepers unbroken. Now all its remnant blood was Harrow; she was the last necromancer, and the last of her line left alive.

Her birth had been expensive. Eighteen years ago, in order to wrench a final bud from this terminal axil, her mother and father had slaughtered all the children of their House in order to secure a necromantic heir. Harrow had been created in that hour of pallor mortis, while the souls of her peers were fum...

They had been strict with her infant catechism,

they smelled like incense and tooth decay.

She would rise well before First Bell and pray in the chapel before they turned on the heating, her fingers much too cold to count her prayer beads, and then she would ensconce herself in one of the libraries with a battery lantern and a blanket and her books.

She embarked on her study of necromancy alone: the dead were her mentors and tutors. Harrow had no idea how difficult it was to understand the work of adult necromancers, which meant she did not fear trying to understand it.

their hulking cavalier, a man who looked as though he would weep if he could only figure out how.

Her life had been dedicated to the Locked Tomb, and what was interred within had commanded her whole attention since she understood what it was: the comatose corpse that lay in state amid the tatters of the Ninth House. She’d been taught to love the Emperor, who ten thousand years ago had given them all release from a death that none of them had deserved, and to view the Tomb as symbol of his victory and his demise. Her mother and father feared what lay consigned to that locked-up grave. Her tedious great-aunts worshipped it, but in desperation, as though their collective awe might flatter it into sparing God. They had never wanted to open the doors and look upon it. Those doors had opened for the body to be brought in, and they would only open again for the body to come out, in some doom yet to come.