Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

ORTUS??? (WHILOM???) THE FIRST, SAINT OF DUTY Wants me dead.

“One,” she said crisply. “The Sleeper can move from its coffin. Two, the Sleeper can pass through necromantic wards. Three, Teacher told us not to wake it. I don’t know what does. Noise doesn’t.” (“Not necessarily, no,” said Pent, who never did truck with unconditional statements.) “Four, it’s carrying a rifle.”

Excuse me! What!

Ortus the First said, “The Heralds will be here in eight months.” “I’m well aware of that, thanks,” said Mercy. “You go flip some planets to give us a firebreak.” Ortus the First said, “Now you’re telling me my own job.” “Oh, I hate you! I’ve always hated you, you dreary, repetitive leg,” said Mercymorn passionately,

“I want that sword,” said Ortus the First. “What?” “Give me her damned sword,” said Ortus the First. “You’ve already got a whole complement of oversized weapons, greedy.”

Dude wtf! You did all that because you want the damn sword

“But why does Ortus the First want me dead?” “Who?” said Mercymorn, indifferently.

And thus, unintentionally, you also confronted him with Anastasia. You could not trip in the Ninth House without falling over an Anastas, an Anastasia, or an Anastasius; or, in later years, bumping into their niche. Anastasia had been the mythic founding tomb-keeper and grandmother of the House, and the subject of at least two Nigenad poems (’Twas deep in Anastasia’s time, I wot). She was namesake of the deep inner monument where lay the sacred bones of tomb-keepers past and those who fell in battle. You were profoundly upset to learn that she had been real; that the rooms you inhabited—the empty, tintless, quiet rooms—had been intended for her.

“Out of all of us, only Anastasia got it wrong. She’d researched it too much. Typical Anastasia. She’d seen some pathways in it that simply didn’t exist. She spoke the Eightfold Word, and it didn’t … work. After we—cleaned up—she asked me if I might end her life. Of course I said no. She had so much more to give. Later I would ask of her a greater and more terrible thing. I had a body and I needed a tomb … you might know of the body, Harrowhark, and you will know far better the Tomb.”

At the time the Body had stood at the curtained plex window that stared out onto the field of slowly spinning asteroids, the mother-of-pearl robe slipping from her supple, naked shoulders, still moist as though just taken from the ice of her grave. You watched a droplet of water trickle down the column of her spine.

From the glare of the plex window, beside some perfectly ordinary white twill curtains, the buried monster turned herself so that she was lit in the light of the undead stars. The curve of her cheek—the thick, black lashes that fringed her golden eyes—the thumbprint divot that lay pressed like a kiss within the bow of her lip—you had not known you were shaking until God himself reached out to still your wrist, so that you mightn’t spill your tea over your knees.

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

Harrowhark suddenly felt something, in her core, though she did not know precisely what it was. Somehow in Canaan House her ability to feel had been blunted, leaving only a sense of dislocated longing, a bizarre yearning as though flipping through the pages of a book for a proverb she remembered but could not find.

Am I to act only on your command, when the Sleeper comes for me?” “Were you planning to do anything other than lie down and die?” she said, waiting for rage; dying for rage; hoping for the simulacrum of rage, if nothing else. “What do you think you can do, Ortus? Did you have a tactic, beyond stopping bullets with your body?” “It would be within the family character, I agree,” said Ortus, meditatively. “My father died, simply because your mother and father asked him to. He took his own life when your parents handed him the rope, though he had a wife at home and, if he acknowledged it, a son.”

Now Ortus’s face changed. It slid a second time into paint-splattered, black-irised, hooded contempt. He looked at her as though she were tedious. He looked at her as though he did not know who she was. His contempt made the doors she heard in her ears slam in an orchestra of unfathomable sound. He looked at her as though she were a squalling infant; as though she had not spoken, but rather opened her mouth and vomited.

What confronted you was Ortus the First, his back bare to you, in a pair of soft flannel sleeping trousers and nothing else, so that you could see the protruding, tumorous knobbles of his spine and the wads of muscle atop his shoulders. Cytherea’s limp corpse was propped upright, her fingers dangling over his forearm, the dead-dove whiteness of her face, half-covered by his own, rosebuds crushed to deep yellow shadows at his feet. His palm supported the exhausted lily stem of her neck; the press of his fingers on that faded skin was so gentle that it left no mark. You, who had been so familiar with his hands in all their violent attitudes, had not thought them capable of that kind of gentleness. It made them seem alien from the rest of the man. And he was …

“I caught the Saint of Duty in the throes of grave lust,” you told Ianthe, about a minute later:

“The classical vice. Oldest sin in the book.” “All flesh magicians,” you said coolly, “should be drowned in boiling blood.” “Don’t tell me the Ninth never—” “We do not.” “Ah, but my beautiful naïf—” “No.”

It was soon after your seventeenth year passed that you acknowledged a truth you had known for some time: Ortus the First had to die. His Ninth House name no longer bothered you, now that you knew about Anastasia. It seemed reasonable that the foundress responsible for establishing many of your House’s naming conventions had chosen to honour her fellow Lyctors, in the days before their names were veiled in holy secrecy.

The Saint of Duty could bypass your wards at any time. The Saint of Duty was a thanergy void. The Saint of Duty was the ultimate nemesis of a bone adept. You would never be able to sleep again.

Aloud, you said through swollen lips: “The Saint of Duty must die.” And on the bed, the Body said, “Yes.”

The Necrolord Prime said, very calmly, “Ten thousand years since I’ve eaten human being, Harrow, and I didn’t really want an encore. Now tell me what you have done.” Your body was unyielding, but your mouth had purchase. You said, “I reconfigured a clump of marrow stem cells into sesamoid bone. From the sesamoid bone, I made a construct.”

“Lord, I am hunted. I perish.” “Harrow—” “I don’t come to you as Harrowhark the First,” your mouth said. “I come to you as a supplicant. I can’t live like this. Lord, do I displease you, that you shield him and not me? I understand that I am a sharpened twig beside your keenest sword, but why do you suffer this twig to live? I can’t live this way. I cannot live this way. I have nowhere to go. I have nobody to turn to. I am a nonsense.”

“Six days. No sleep. She still manages a full skeleton commencement from diluted marrow. What else have you failed to see, Mercymorn—?” You were already at the door when her peevish response came: “But this is insane! She’s only nine years old!”

“I said, lie down,” said Ianthe. “You absolute madwoman,” she added, without any particular emotion. “Can’t believe I ate a whole bowl of nun … I should’ve made myself throw up.”

I WILL REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU KISSED ME—YOU APOLOGISED—YOU SAID, I AM SORRY, DESTROY ME AS I AM, BUT I WANT TO KISS YOU BEFORE I AM KILLED, AND I SAID TO YOU WHY, AND YOU SAID, BECAUSE I HAVE ONLY ONCE MET SOMEONE SO UTTERLY WILLING TO BURN FOR WHAT THEY BELIEVED IN, AND I LOVED HIM ON SIGHT, AND THE FIRST TIME I DIED I ASKED OF HIM WHAT I NOW ASK OF YOU I KISSED YOU AND LATER I WOULD KISS HIM TOO BEFORE I UNDERSTOOD WHAT YOU WERE, AND ALL THREE OF US LIVED TO REGRET IT—BUT WHEN I AM IN HEAVEN I WILL REMEMBER YOUR MOUTH, AND WHEN YOU ROAST DOWN IN HELL I THINK YOU WILL REMEMBER MINE

“Magnus! Haunted,” his wife finished, in triumph. “Harrowhark Nonagesimus—I really think you should consider the idea that you might also be haunted.”

“Relax,” she had said. “I haven’t invited you to an orgy, Harrow.” From this lying-down angle, the painting of the nude and obstreperously beautiful woman was in full sightline. You had murmured, “I believe you … albeit many wouldn’t.” “This is why I cultivate you, Harrowhark,” she had remarked, “the suspicion that you might possess a sense of humour.”

“Didn’t say—but it’s Augustine the First, my child. He’s the first and oldest Lyctor. These three are all the oldest—and the last—that’s why they’re Patience, Joy, and Duty … three virtues. If Augustine is going to distract God, that means he’s going to distract God. He’s very old, and I hate to admit it, but he’s enormously quick … and sophisticated … and devious. Anyway, I’ve taken care of him, and he’ll take care of Teacher, and you’ll take care of Duty.”

You simply said, “I have always slept alone.” “You don’t say.” You heard the primness in your voice when you said, “I am betrothed to the Locked Tomb, Tridentarius. I slept on a cot in my cell.” “I always forget you were an honest-to-God nun … and six years old to boot, if you listen to Mercymorn. How old are you, really, Harry?” “Eighteen, and my tolerance for Harry wears thin.” “Eighteen,” she said, in the tones of the jaded, fagged-out socialite. “I remember being eighteen.” “You are twenty-two.” “It’s a universe away from eighteen.”

“Not even one of the Emperor’s fists and gestures could give Harrowhark Nonagesimus a sexy makeover. Sometimes I think you look like a twig’s funeral. In the right light though— Oh, this might do, it’s even your colour. Come here.”

“Will you take off that grotesque skeleton corset?” “No.” “What about your face paint?” “No.” “I do not know why I ask these questions,” she said.

The Emperor mistook your focus for puzzlement: “It was before you were born, Harrowhark.” (“Long before you were born,” added Mercy owlishly, “because you are three years old.”) “This isn’t really a story that deserves to be told after … three glasses of wine.”

I swear harrow gets younger and younger each time

Augustine said, “To sisters, and the women we’ve left behind.” God’s mouth was cheerful as ever, but his eyes were not when he said, “Do I have to drink to that?” For the first time, you were witness to the Saint of Patience discombobulated. “Apologies, John. Wasn’t meant as a jab.”

“Here’s a better toast.… To the Emperor of the Nine Houses. To the Resurrector. To my God.” “To Emperor John Gaius, the Necrolord Prime!” said Augustine, and he drained his glass.

Eventually, she said: “I think I wish Cytherea were here.” “I don’t,” said the saint on the other side. “We would have had to suffer her favourite conversation of Who had the hottest cavalier? And my answer hasn’t changed for anyone’s money. I don’t care that she was ten years my senior, Pyrrha Dve was hotter than the very fires of Hell.” “Agreed,” said God. “John, you dog.” “An absolute bombshell,” said God. He looked deeply into Augustine’s eyes, took another slug of wine, and then said in graveyard tones: “Though maybe not quite such a bombshell as your mother.”

Augustine parted from Mercymorn with a noise vaguely like a vacuum hoovering up mincemeat, and—with no crash of unholy thunder, and without the rent of the universe in twain, and without his skin melting from his unworthy bones—he turned and also kissed the Emperor of the Nine Houses.

Excuse me. What!

You were frozen as Augustine carefully, thoughtfully, and with a great deal of intent, put his mouth on God’s mouth. As though this were not fodder enough for the coming apocalypse, Mercymorn stood, swaying; one thin dress strap was sliding precariously off her shoulder. When Augustine detached from the Emperor’s solemn mouth, Mercy reached up, grabbed great fistfuls of his shirt, and kissed God too.

Holy shit

You looked over your shoulder as she opened the door—God had just picked up the Saint of Joy bodily and sat her at the edge of the table, and the Saint of Patience had his mouth at God’s neck, which was horrible—and Ianthe hustled you through as though escaping from a fire. You had never seen three people get their hands on one another before—you had never seen two people get their hands on each other before. Ianthe closed the door just as Augustine’s fingers reached the buttons of the Emperor’s shirt, and you had never been so grateful to her in your entire life.

I feel like I should have seen this coming

Old people should be shot.”

Most yes definitely

The Saint of Duty said, with a kind of hoarse solemnity: “Fresh blood wards. Every night.” You said, too surprised not to sound like a moron: “What?” He said, “Can’t bleed thalergy … not fresh thalergy. Thanergy, easy. Mixed with thalergy … much harder. No bone wards. Blood wards. Understand? Fresh blood wards. Each night. Can’t break those.”

“I know you’re there,” he rasped. “Kill me all you like. I would know you in the blindness of my eyes … in the deafness of my ears … as a shadow smudged against the wall, annihilated by light … stop. Not here. Not now. Let it go, love. I just want the truth … after all this time.” Ortus dropped his hand and said, with intent: “Just tell me—back then—why you brought along the ba—”

Next to you, the Body said quietly, “The water is risen. So is the sun. We will endure.”

You had said, “Augustine the First has trained me in the River. My necromancy there is nonpareil, and has been since the first. When the Beast comes, I will be ready to meet it, on its turf.” God had looked at you, and he had quirked his mouth in something like a smile, and said: “You’re even stubborner than I am. I thought I’d cornered the market.”

Your voice did not feel like it belonged to you when you said, “I saw your corpse.” “Well,” said Camilla Hect steadily, “don’t tell everyone, or they’ll want to see it too.”

Well shit

A file opened in your mind. Your hands scrabbled within your robes—the exoskeleton gave up one of the twenty-two letters, with a reminder long memorised: If met, to give to Camilla Hect.

“I am Harrowhark Nonagesimus,” you said. “I am the ninth saint to serve the King Undying. I am his fingerbone; I am his fists and gestures … I am a Lyctor, Hect. What hope would you have against me?” “None,” said Camilla. And then she added calmly: “Yet.”

“No, I mean he deliberately fixed his soul to his body, with spirit magic,” said the cavalier. “We planned for it. In the event of his death. I know he did it, because I got the message. I only want to make sure I snagged the right part of the skull. We didn’t account for—pieces. If he’s not in here I have to go find the others.”

“Excuse me,” you said, with sodden asperity. “Oh. Apologies,” said Palamedes Sextus. “Misread the moment. Let’s call it cabin fever. Nonagesimus, is Camilla—” “She sent me,” you said, wringing out your wet hem. “She is alive and well and living.” He whistled a sigh. “Oh, thank God,” he said a little unsteadily. “Thank God for that mad, stubborn, lovely girl. Speaking of. Harrowhark, you are a sight for sore eyes.”

His brows were crisscrossing like swords. “How did you and Cam get separated in the first place?” “I was not aware I owed a debt of care to—” “I mean she wouldn’t have left your side, if you’d given her half a chance—”

“Warden of the Sixth House,” you demanded, “why are you acting as though I should know you? Why are you acting as though your cavalier knows me? I am Harrowhark the First, formerly and in everlasting affections the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh: I am the ninth saint to serve the King Undying, one among his fists and his gestures. I did not know you in this life, and I will not know you in the next one.”

“You became a Lyctor,” he said. “That was always the plan.” “Not for the Harrowhark I knew. Tell me you did it correctly,” he said, and there was a quick, questioning eagerness to his voice, something beneath the confusion. “Tell me you finished the work. You out of everyone could have worked out the end to the beginning I was starting to explicate. Your cavalier, Reverend Daughter—” “Has become the furnace of my Lyctorhood,” you said.