Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

“I have never been murdered before, and I truly don’t intend to start now.”

Also, you are trying to start a fight with me to get out of the fight I am trying to have with you, which is a painfully domestic tactic.”

“Can we get back to this blasted funeral,” said Mercy. “Sitting through six of these is worse than dying myself. I will let you know now that the plan for my funeral is in my top drawer, and I’ve got it down to a minute-by-minute framework, and it’s only twenty-four minutes, and it’s just lovely.”

once you turn your back on something, you have no more right to act as though you own it.”

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

“I accept your help. I am forced to admit that I cannot do this alone.” “I live for your forced admissions,” said Ianthe. “It would have been a pain if you’d said no. I’ve already organised everything.”

Augustine: “You’re I. N., of course. Harrow’s H … Yes, Harrow’s H.” “H. O., calling in,” you said instantly, and you ignored Ianthe’s audible sniggers.

“I hate you all,” said Mercymorn passionately. “I have hated you for millennia … except you, my lord.” “Thanks,” said God. “I merely want to put you in a jail,” said his Lyctor, now meditative, “and fill up the jail with acid once for every time you made a frivolous remark, or ate peanuts in a Cohort Admiralty meeting, or said, ‘What would I know, I’m only God.’ Then at the end of a thousand years, you would say, ‘Mercy, I have learned not to do any of these things, because I hated the acid you put on me.’ And I would say, ‘That is why I did it, Lord. I did it for you, and for your empire.’ I often think about this,” she finished. The Emperor of the Nine Houses said, “I ate peanuts, discreetly, the once.”

Ten minutes later you were eating leftover stew in the kitchen with something close to animation, choking down your last lunch before the apocalypse. And you were angry. You were always such a little bitch when you were angry.

“If I die my final death here,” he said, “I will die knowing the only happiness that I have ever known.” “Oh, shut up and move,” she said desperately. If all of her cavaliers were this excited for death, she was definitely the problem.

Gideon. It had bewildered her, back at Canaan House, how the whole of her always seemed to come back to Gideon. For one brief and beautiful space of time, she had welcomed it: that microcosm of eternity between forgiveness and the slow, uncomprehending agony of the fall. Gideon rolling up her shirt sleeves. Gideon dappled in shadow, breaking promises. One idiot with a sword and an asymmetrical smile had proved to be Harrow’s end: her apocalypse swifter than the death of the Emperor and the sun with him.

You remember how the fuck-off great-aunts always used to say, Suffer and learn? If they were right, Nonagesimus, how much more can we take until you and me achieve omniscience?