Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

There would be a goddamn reckoning. Nonagesimus, I was going to reck her. I said: “Do you want your ass kicked now, or do you want your ass kicked later, or both?” “Please, let’s address this like gentlewomen,” said Ianthe, without much hope. “Hell, no! I’m going to pull your whole ass off,” I said. “You want that? You want Harrow to grow you a new bone ass where I pulled off the old one? Let’s dance, Tridentarius.”

“Do not fucking ask me for information. I could not be more lost right now.”

Yeaaaa we figured as much

“Stay here,” I said. “Get fucked,” she said thickly. “I absolutely did not become the eighth saint to serve the King Undying so Gideon Nav could play hero for me.” “Why did you ascend to be a Lyctor?” “Ultimate power—and posters of my face.” Fair.

Mercymorn looked at us like we were the picture in the dictionary next to unhappiness. Augustine looked at us like we were the last thing he’d ever see. “John,” he breathed. And: “Joy.” And then—he fucking legged it.

I spent all that time drowning and surfacing in you, over and over and over, and all because in the end you could not bear to do the one thing I asked you to do. I wanted you to use me, you malign, double-crossing, corpse-obsessed bag of bones, you broken, used-up shithead! I wanted you to live and not die, you imaginary-girlfriend-having asshole! Fuck one flesh, one end, Harrow. I already gave my flesh to you, and I already gave you my end. I gave you my sword. I gave you myself. I did it while knowing I’d do it all again, without hesitation, because all I ever wanted you to do was eat me.

Eat you ohhh

“Good God! Try taking Coronabeth’s memories from me … I’d kill you myself. Love—don’t make that face, child, I have loved plenty—true love is acquisitive. You keep anything … strands of hair … an envelope they might’ve licked … a note saying, Good morning, simply because they wrote it to you. Love is a revenant, Gideon Nav, and it accumulates love-stuff to itself, because it is homeless otherwise.

I’m her cavalier, dipshit! I’d kill for her! I’d die for her. I did die for her. I’d do anything she needed, anything at all, before she even knew she needed it. I’m her sword, you pasty-faced Coronabeth-looking knock-off.”

Always your sword, my umbral sovereign; in life, in death, in anything beyond life or death that they want to throw at thee and me. I died knowing you’d hate me for dying; but Nonagesimus, you hating me always meant more than anyone else in this hot and stupid universe loving me. At least I’d had your full attention.

“In the storm, the tree is glad of the root, Not of the branch.”

“This whole thing happened because you wouldn’t face up to Gideon dying,” he said, which was a stab as precise as any Nonius had managed. “I don’t blame you. But where would you be, right now, if you’d said: She is dead? You’re keeping her things like a lover keeping old notes, but with her death, the stuff that made her Gideon was destroyed. That’s how Lyctorhood works, isn’t it? She died. She can’t come back, even if you keep her stuffed away in a drawer you can’t look at. You’re not waiting for her resurrection; you’ve made yourself her mausoleum.”

“You’re a smart girl, Harrowhark. You might turn some of that brain to the toughest lesson: that of grief.”

“If it were me,” Magnus said, “I’d go home, and live, and live for her.”

“Commander Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead,” he said. “All of it.” “I can’t believe you feel like you’re in position to demand things of me.” “All of it, Gaius!” There was the preparatory sound of indrawn breath. “Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity,” he recited, all in one breath. “Correct?”

“How many babies died in the bomb, Gaius?” “All of them,” he said.

Excused the fuck

“Mercymorn the First, Augustine the First, meet Commander Wake Me Up Inside, sincerest apologies if I got that wrong,” said the Emperor. “Wake—Mercy—Augustine.”

“I always see the job through.” Wake sounded bored. “You sent me out there to kill a baby and open those doors. Whose baby didn’t matter on my end. I carried that thing under my heart … threw up every morning that first trimester … felt it kick … had to induce labour and give birth in a shuttle, alone, knowing by then that Gideon was catching up … Do you know, I gave that thing a nickname, my whole pregnancy? I used to call it Bomb.”

The woman I was pretty sure was actually my mother—wearing the body of a woman I’d had a crush on, who in turn had been wearing the identity of a woman she’d murdered, until I fell on a spike so that my boss could kill her—craned her head around in her bonds.

Are you embarrassed? Gideon, were you aware that, when you let Commander Wake get as far as she did—to the House of the Ninth, to one of our own Houses, our own people—that she was pregnant?” A pause. “I was aware,” said Gideon Classic. “Why the hell did you not tell me?” “Because I thought it was—mine.”

“I’m not fucking dead,” I said, which wasn’t even true, and I was choking up; everything I’d ever done, everything I’d ever been through, and I was choking up. And the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the Necrolord Prime, stood from his chair to look at you—at me; looked at my face, looked at your face, looked at my eyes in your face. It took, maybe, a million myriads. The static in your ears resolved into wordless screaming. His expression was just—gently quizzical; mildly awed. “Hi, Not Fucking Dead,” he said. “I’m Dad.”

No the fuck this mf did not make a fucking dad joke

You clawed my face so bad that my blood ran down your hands; my face was under your fucking fingernails. When I let you go you couldn’t even stand, you just crawled away and threw up. Were you ten, Harrow? Was I eleven?

Omg

“This has been troubling you for a very long time, then,” God said finally. “A.L. always did bother you two the most … If I’m such a liar, why didn’t I lie to you about her? I told you the truth about Annabel’s resurrection, and in the end you killed her for it.” “My lord,” said Augustine formally, “you told us the truth about Annabel—about Alecto—because she knew the truth about it too, and you never could control her. Even after two centuries, I’m not sure she ever managed to lie. That was what stayed my hand for such a long time. How would you have asked Alecto the First to lie—how would you have persuaded that mad monster into even an unsophisticated con?”

“So eventually you gave way. You killed her, for us. But we never knew how you did it.” “Annabel Lee … was not the dying kind,” said the Emperor. “It might be more accurate to say that I switched her off.” “You came to us and we asked, Is she dead?” said Mercy. “And you said, As dead as I can make her … I remember, Lord, that you wept.”

And he said, “Summarise, please. You both do tend to go overboard on the foreplay.” Augustine said, “You didn’t kill Alecto. And she wasn’t just your bodyguard.” Mercymorn said, “Alecto was your cavalier.” The Emperor didn’t move.

Augustine said, “The eyes have it, John. Those damn golden eyes she always had, like a cat’s. When I saw young Harrowhark over there—” He jerked his thumb in our direction, which still somehow had the ability to startle me, I guess because I thought he’d forgotten we were even in the room. “—sporting those exact same lights, I freely admit my first thought was Fuck me backward, she woke up.

“All that effort to break open the Locked Tomb,” said Augustine, “only to have the answer we wanted wander up in the form of one dead teenager flaunting your genes. They were never Alecto’s eyes at all. They were yours, John. Alecto had your eyes from the moment any of us first saw her. And those extraordinary black eyes you’ve always worn … they were always hers.”

Holy fuck!

There was no way a cavalier could end up with a necromancer’s eyes. Unless the cavalier failed to die.

“You lied to us, John,” she said. And, with a sob in her voice: “There is a perfect Lyctorhood … a perfect Lyctor process that preserves the cavalier, and you let us think there wasn’t. You let us think we’d cracked it … You let us think it had to be a one-way energy transfer … but nobody had to die. Alfred, Pyrrha, Titania, Valancy, Nigella, Samael, Loveday, Cristabel … You watched us kill our cavaliers in cold blood, and none of them had to die. You had already done it yourself. But you had done it perfectly!!”

“You might have said you forgave me,” said the Emperor. He was staring at his hands now. “But I think it would have rankled … I know it would have rankled. There is no such thing as forgiveness, Mercy. There’s only bloody truth, and blessed ignorance.” She said, “Alfred, Pyrrha, Titania, Valancy, Nigella, Samael, Loveday, Cristabel.” “They were my friends,” he said, simply. “I loved them too.”

“I’m so sorry. I loved you all—I adored you all—I thought I was doing the right thing.” She was a crumple of misery. “Tell me that you’re sorry you lied, you bastard!” “I lied to you,” he said. “They’re dead because of me—I let them die because I thought that was easier … and I have regretted it for nearly ten thousand years. I love you so much, Mercy; I will love you three until the end of time, until there is nothing left of me but the remnant atoms of the God and man who loved you.”

The Emperor of the Nine Houses—the King Undying—the Prince of Death—the Necrolord Prime—stood behind Mercymorn.

And he looked at us. I said, “You told that bastard to beat up Harrow?” That was my job, after all. God said, “I was trying to save her.” Also my job. “Go to hell, Pops.” “This isn’t a question for you,” he said patiently.

“My name is Pyrrha Dve,” said the ghost in question. “Commander of the Second House, head of Trentham Special Intelligence, cavalier to a dead Lyctor. We compartmentalized from the Eightfold Word, just like you and your girl—though I’m an accident, and he took more from me than got taken from you. I was able to go underground, even from him. Two years before you were born, my necromancer started an affair with your mother … not knowing I’d also been doing the same thing, using his body.” I said, “What the fuck.” “She was the most dangerous woman I’d ever met who wasn’t me,” said Pyrrha Dve. “You’re right, though. She was a real dick.”

I’d had this choice before. The different deaths. The death of waiting; the death of optimism. Harrow, the last time I chose to die, I died with your face the last thing I ever looked at. Let me tell you a secret: it was easy to die thinking I wouldn’t have to see you go. It was so easy to check out before you did. Now here I was, alone, holding your body hostage, in a space station at the bottom of the River and getting sucked into some kind of heinous underworld that only opened for the undead souls of monstrous planets. I had the choice of shooting myself, being crushed by the water, or waiting to get squashed by tonnes of falling metal. Or I had the choice of living to get pulled down into Hell.

I watched Ianthe dart down, rip the tongues from the Emperor of the Nine Houses, and wrestle him clear. The tongues entwined in a bower to bear Augustine silently down to that ravenous mouth, to the Hell where only demons went. Which was Tridentarius all over. She got one choice, and not only did she blow it, but she blew it in such a huge fucking spectacular way that you would’ve been impressed had you not hated her for it. Ianthe, throwing in her lot with the guy who had lied to everyone about everything. Ianthe, backstabbing her own cavalier all over again. Ianthe, with the world in the balance, reaching her hand out and pressing down on the weight marked BAD. She surged out of sight, covered and hidden by a blast of water. The tongues retracted and the teeth folded up, to close that chewing great void.

“There’s a difference between keeping a shred of dance card,” said Harrow Nonagesimus, “and saving the last dance.”

“Frontline Titties of the Fifth,” she read, and found she was smiling helplessly to herself. She murmured: “Nav, you ass, that’s not even a real publication.”

Then there was a huge, side-to-side rocking, in the manner of an explosion, or a cradle. Her eyes closed. Lying in the tomb that had claimed her heart, faraway in a land she had never travelled, Harrowhark Nonagesimus fell asleep, or dropped dead, or both.

On nights like this, in the dark, turning her face to press hot cheeks into the cool ceramic bump of the tiles below, she would look into the face of the person who looked after her. It was a comforting face to look into; it was a resolute, keen, utterly unmoved face, which did not flinch at the angry carillon of vehicle honks, nor at the sound of someone shouting from the rooms close by through the thin walls. It felt as though she had always been fond of the face, and of the dark, sharply bobbed hair; and she loved without reserve the eyes—those great lambent eyes, the iris so skilfully and gently blent that it seemed there was no tint or shade in that clear and beautiful grey. And she would say, idly, more as prayer than demand: “Have you worked out who I am?” “Not yet,” said Camilla.

apopneumatism—the process of a soul separating from its body at the moment of death. When a mortal being dies, their body’s remaining thalergy (“life energy”) converts into thanergy (“death energy”), and is released along with the soul. This is a relatively gentle transition when the death is caused by old age or prolonged illness; when the death is sudden and/or violent, “apopneumatic shock” causes the soul to release much more forcefully in a burst of surplus energy.

Blood of Eden—an anti–Nine Houses and anti-necromancy organization, operating at the fringes of the Empire in a network of clandestine cells.