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The Emperor of the Nine Houses “A.L.”, his guardian Augustine the First Alfred Quinque, his cavalier FIRST SAINT TO SERVE THE KING UNDYING Mercymorn the First Cristabel Oct, her cavalier SECOND SAINT TO SERVE THE KING UNDYING ORTUS the First Pyrrha Dve, his cavalier THIRD SAINT TO SERVE THE KING UNDYING
One for the Emperor, first of us all; One for his Lyctors, who answered the call; One for his Saints, who were chosen of old; One for his Hands, and the swords that they hold.
Two is for discipline, heedless of trial; Three for the gleam of a jewel or a smile; Four for fidelity, facing ahead; Five for tradition and debts to the dead; Six for the truth over solace in lies; Seven for beauty that blossoms and dies; Eight for salvation no matter the cost; Nine for the Tomb, and for all that was lost.
Even if you had wanted it, the imminent death letter would not be yours to read. All you could do was lie gasping in a pool of your own fluids, too powerful to die quickly, too weak to save yourself. You were only half a Lyctor, and half a Lyctor was worse than not a Lyctor at all.
“I need you to hide my infirmity,” said Harrowhark. “You see, I am insane.”
There were many uniformed people in that room, but they were used to these antics. Harrowhark the First, ninth saint to serve the Emperor Undying, might throw up as much as she cared to. You were a walking sacrament, even if your early contributions to Lyctorhood seemed to be finding new and different ways to puke. They only intervened if it looked like you might choke to death on your own vomit, a mercy that you always vaguely thought a shame.
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. Call me premature, but I’d rather the Houses weep now, Harrowhark, with room for later rejoicing.”
The Emperor said gently, “She needs to go home, Harrow.” You did not look. “And will the Seventh House accept her?” “That was never home,” he said. “I am taking Cytherea back to sleep with her brothers and sisters.”
“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.”
I seriously need to know what exactly the cost would be!
“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. You’re an invalid, not a disciple. Listen to me. Can you do that? I hate to push you, Harrowhark, but we have so little time.” This was not to be borne. “I still maintain some of my faculties, Lord.” “Well, that’s all anyone can hope for,” he said.
“Apopneumatism. The spirit is forced from their body. The initial thanergy bloom occurs.”
“Thalergetic decay causes cellular death,” you said carefully, pressing the nail in harder, “which emits thanergy. The massive cell death that follows apopneumatism causes a thanergetic cascade, though the first bloom fades and the thanergy stabilises within thirty to sixty seconds.” “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
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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.”
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—” Sweat came to the centres of your palms totally unbidden. A trickle of blood started down your leg, and you stopped it in midflow, dried it to flakes on your skin, and clotted the breach. Such an act took no effort now. “A revenant,” you said. “Always a revenant,” he said. “Every single time, a goddamned revenant. Pardon the pun.”
“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. “Harrowhark, those revenants move through the
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“The Lyctors have died … fighting these things?” “Fighting them?” said God. “Harrow, I’ve lost half my Lyctors distracting them. They’re hideously complex to destroy. The ones we’ve killed, we killed through luck—they were young, and we were at full power—and then … once our numbers thinned out … by sheer accident, or by suicide mission.”
“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.
“What he is saying,” said the Body distinctly, “is that you have to learn that sword.”
Hands fell heavy on your shoulders. You looked from the face you loved to the face of the Resurrecting King.
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.
She was nine, and she’d made a mistake. She was seventeen, and she’d made a mistake. Time had repeated itself. Harrow would be tripping over herself for her whole existence, a frictionless hoop of totally fucking up.
There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow—but she had died before Harrow was born.
GUIDELINE #4: YOU ARE COMPROMISED. You may already suspect this, if you’re not as big a fool as I take you for. I will confirm your access to the Lyctoral well. This battery is, most likely, the extent of your capability. Make up for your inevitable failings through study. Your understanding of flesh and spirit magic is execrable, so start there.
Look upon me as a Harrowhark who was handed the first genuine choice of our lives; the only choice ever given where we had free will to say, No, and free will to say, Yes. Accept that in this instance I have chosen to say, No.
GUIDELINE #7: EXAMINE IANTHE’S JAW AND TONGUE AFTER YOU READ THIS. Owing to her Lyctoral status this will require physical touch. Under no circumstances can you let her know you are examining them. Do whatever it takes. If you suspect either jaw or tongue has been replaced, DO NOT SWEAR THE OATH. Instead kill her immediately.
Hun I WTF
To open in the event of the Emperor’s death. To open in the event of Ianthe’s death. To open if the Ninth House is in mortal danger. Some of them were opaque to the point of madness. To open if your eyes change. If met, to give to Camilla Hect.
THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME
She gave it to her cavalier. The shuttle seemed totally quiet now. No mechanism ground; no pipe gurgled. The light was very still and white and she no longer felt it moving. He scanned over the piece of flimsy, frontward, then flipped it over to scan it backward. He cleared his throat—Harrowhark found herself flinching, and nearly tore herself to pieces for it—and he said: “It’s blank, my lady.” “Fuck,” said Harrow.
Then fell the final indignity. She hooked her finger into the seam of your hood and tugged it down to your neck, so that she could look at your whole face without permission, bloodied skull and all.
She looked at your face and saw what was so nakedly writ there: disbelief that she could perceive what you’d done. “No, I cannot sense you,” she said, in answer to your unspoken dismay. “But your body is not a mystery to me. I may know it better than you do, you—you Ninth baby.” You were fumbling with the hood with clumsy hands, hiding your face. “How old are you?” she asked abruptly. “How old in years?”
It was then that the Body emerged from behind the Lyctor’s shoulder, squatting somewhere close to the doors. Her sweet dead face floated a little behind the Lyctor’s. She looked at you with her heavy-lidded, yellow-gold eyes, and she said, quite clearly, with the voice of Aiglamene and your mother commingled: “Lie, Harrow. Now.” “Fifteen,” you said immediately, hoping your own meat would not betray you. She pressed, “Counting from conception, or from birth?” “Birth.”
“You’re not as pretty as Anastasia” was all she said. Now the Reverend Daughter followed more like a cavalier of her House than a necromancer of it.
“I will not help you to make hyperpotamous travel happen, thank you for the option, my lord,” said Mercy.
“In that case, despite hyperpotamous being a perfectly good word that both catches the ear and does what it says on the tin, let’s deviate,” said the Lord of the Nine Houses, who apparently existed within a complex power dynamic. “I’ll use Cassiopeia’s.” (“Oh, no, the lava,” said Mercy.) “Girls, imagine a rocky planet with a magma core beneath the mantle.
If I drop us into it we can emerge almost immediately across the universe, home. The station, our refuge. We call it the Mithraeum.”
“What happens to a Lyctoral body without a soul?” God hesitated. “Being separated from your soul won’t kill you,” he said. “Not immediately. But—” “But we’ll kill you,” said his saint. “Immediately. A Lyctor’s body, empty, with its battery intact but nobody in the driver’s seat? Do you know what could take up residence? Anything could get inside you—any horrible or evil or lonely thing, any miserable revenant, or worse—and you, you Ninth House child, are not remotely qualified to fight an outside predator. You are like a little baby. Listen to this: if we get to the other side and find you’ve
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The light from the ceiling above had dulled to a sooty orange glow like that from a lit furnace; you fell into a numb, half-alive, half-dead reverie, your anxiety stifled and calcified, until you heard Ianthe cry out. You stared through the minute slit where your hood brushed your cheeks. You made no sound, because you were not sure you were seeing what Ianthe was seeing: for your part, you saw the water.
“Oh—” He used a word you did not understand. “Harrowhark, no theorems!” “Don’t be ridiculous. She can’t be using theorems,” said Mercy. “She’d be barely awake and it’s totally beyond her at this poi—John, stop her, she’s using theorems!!”
A rubber-bodied toddler with a painted face and very red hair lay dead beside your knee and for some reason it was this that destroyed you, it was this that kindled within you something you had no hope of defending against. You howled in a purity of fright.
“It’s Number Seven,” said the stranger. “Run, or fight?”
“No thinking,” said the stranger, cutting Augustine off without hesitation. “Run? Two of us take the Emperor and hike to the nearest stele. The one left stays as a distraction, then leads it away. Or fight: we all make a stand. John, I am your servant. Tell me to stay and die, and I’ll stay.”
There was a ghastly moment now when you realised that he had looked at the Resurrecting Prince when he said John; that God had responded to so banal and cursory a word as John;
I'm utterly flabbergasted that his name is something as boring as John... Just no
“We’ll fight,” he said. “We made the choice years ago to increase our numbers and fight these things. Five years, ten months … in the end, perhaps it is the same.” “Stay?” said the stranger. “Yes,” said God. “Stay, I do think.” And, lowly: “Thank you for making it home, Ortus the First.”
Excuse me say what!
THE EGGS YOU GAVE ME ALL DIED AND YOU LIED TO ME SO I DID THE IMPLANTATION MYSELF YOU SELF-SERVING ZOMBIE AND YOU STILL SENT HIM AFTER ME AND I WOULD HAVE HAD HIM IF I HADN’T BEEN COMPROMISED AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE TOOK PITY ON ME! HE SAW ME AND HE TOOK PITY ON ME AND FOR THAT I’LL MAKE YOU BOTH SUFFER UNTIL YOU NO LONGER UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF THAT GODDAMNED WORD
This was the secret of the Lyctoral process. When a normal Lyctor’s soul went to the River, the dead, blank energy that had once been their cavalier kept the lights on in their body. A normal Lyctor’s dormant shell responded with mechanical precision to threats mundane or fantastic. It could normalise its own temperature; it could filter poisons and toxins; it could repair damage with preternatural speed; and, of course, it could fight like a highly disciplined tiger. A Lyctor’s limbs remembered all the training of her stolen second self, and would use it, ruthlessly and perfectly, until the
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HERE IS THE GRAVEYARD AND WE ARE THE GRAVES.
“I will shepherd your dead two hundred. I will take on their burden to mourn and cherish in more ways than you’ll understand right now. And I’ll remember your parents, who did such a godawful thing to my people and theirs. I will remember it until the universe contracts in on itself and wipes clean what they did, and makes blank such an indelible stain. I acknowledge to you and to infinity that I am the Emperor of the Nine Houses—the Necrolord Prime—and that their stain must be regarded as my stain. Consider it my crime, Harrowhark. I pledge myself to making it right.”
“What does BOE stand for?” “Blood of Eden,” he’d said, slowly. “Who is Eden?” “Someone they left to die,” said God wearily. “How sharper than the serpent’s tooth, et cetera … Harrow, if you bother to remember anything from my ramblings, please remember this:
once you turn your back on something, you have no more right to act as though you own it.”
“Tonight I am afraid to die.” “That is the same fear as failure,” she said once. “You don’t fear dying. You can tolerate pain. You are afraid that your life has incurred a debt that your death will not pay. You see death as a mistake.”
