Harrow the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #2)

by Tamsyn Muir

“I didn’t think this was the time for dirty talk, but I can roll with it,” she said. “Choke me, Daddy.”

You prepared to die with the Locked Tomb on your lips. But your idiot dying mouth rounded out three totally different syllables, and they were three syllables you did not even understand.

“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.” You swayed a little. Maybe you fell. The metal grille was beneath your knees, making red sore marks in your flesh, the air through the grate reeking of antistatic pastes. You said into the panels, “Teach me, Lord, how to count that cost.”

There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow—but she had died before Harrow was born.

If it had simply been bonework, you would have been able to identify the mischief immediately, and unfuck accordingly.

“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 was only the fourth funeral you had ever been to where you had been responsible for the corpse.

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.” At the time, that had made perfect sense to you.

“It is a drawing of the letter S,” said the deep, solemn voice from over her shoulder, and she realized she had stopped midstride. “The letter in question is constructed from six short marks stacked vertically three by three. There are two triangles on the top and bottom, which, along with some diagonal strokes, form a calligraphic S.”

Ianthe looked at you; her blue-and-brown eyes were beatific. “Harry,” she said, and she said it tenderly, “have you never read a trashy novel in which the hero gets a life-affirming change of clothes and some makeup, and then goes to the party and everyone says things like, ‘By the Emperor’s bones! But you’re beautiful,’ or, ‘This is the first time I have ever truly seen you,’ and if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral,’ et cetera, et cetera, the word mewled fifteen pages later, the word nipple one page after that?” You said emphatically: “No.”

“You look just good enough that I’m proud of my handiwork, but not so good that I’ll be consumed with lust and ravish you over the nut bowl,” she said. “I walked a fine line, and I walked it admirably.

“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—”

“I mean she wouldn’t have left your side, if you’d given her half a chance—”

But you were always too quick to mourn your own ignorance. You never could have guessed that he had seen me.

“And miss out on the chance to die? I’ve been wandering these halls at three o’clock in the morning, saying at the top of my voice, ‘It would be terrible to be shot,’ and the Sleeper still does not come … It is dreadful to be shown a monster’s pity.”

And you were angry. You were always such a little bitch when you were angry.

“I asked you because you know what it is,” she said haltingly, “to be—fractured.” Of such banality was grief made.

“Someday I’ll marry that girl,” she said aloud. “It might be good for her.” And: “Probably not, though.”

“Harrow?” said someone close by—someone familiar; her vision swam. “If I forget you, let my right hand be forgotten,” her mouth was saying. “Add more also, if aught but death part me and thee.” And, unsteadily: “Griddle.”

But some ancient engine had revved to life for me in a way it never had done for you, probably because I am a good girl and you are an evil nun,

“Oooooh, Palamedes. I am measurably less intelligent than you. Put your tongue in my mouth, and I’ll flop my tongue against it.” Nothing. “I think bones are mediocre.” Maybe you were dead. “Ohhhhhrr, Gideon, I was so dumb to think a tub of ancient freezer meat was my girlfriend. Please show me how to do a press-up. Also, I’m very obviously attracted to y—no, damn it, this is just sad. This is garbage.”

“Whenever you’re ready,” I said. “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll keep the home fires burning.”

I’d touched your intestines, which is usually what, fourth date, but you were fine.

“The only thing that ever stopped me being exactly who I wanted,” she said, “was the worry that I would soon be dead … and now I am dead, Reverend Daughter, and I am sick of roses, and I am horny for revenge.”

“She’s not even into you, okay? It’s just the bones. She’s into bones.”

“Why did you ascend to be a Lyctor?” “Ultimate power—and posters of my face.”

“You’ve got two short minutes left before I punch you right in the butthole,” I said. “Follow me. We haven’t got much time—quite apart from your hurtful threats of sexual violence,” she said. “Why, your fist is so big, and my butthole is so small.” “Just move, Tridentarius! I’m not ready to laugh at your goddamn jokes!”

You’d touched that letter, and I—you know it was killing me twice that you weren’t there, right? You must know it was destroying me to be there in your body, trying to keep your thumbs on, and I couldn’t even hear your damn voice?

The letter was wrapped around a black, folded-up bunch of angles: smoked glass, thin black frames, mirrored lenses. A little bend in one arm, but otherwise—you’d kept my sunglasses.

In a way, I would’ve killed for one of your lists of rules about exactly how to treat your body, how I was going to have to take showers with all your clothes on, which, by the way, I’d already planned on doing. But I almost knew what you’d written already, so I don’t know why I was surprised. ONE FLESH, ONE END.

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. Which is, coincidentally, what your mother said to me last night.

“Don’t start the I was toying with her, mwah ha ha noise, because I won’t believe it. Your plan backfired, Tridentarius. You’ve got the sickness. I know the signs of Nonagesimitis. You were all lined up for a big hot injection of Vitamin H.”

“She wants the D,” I said. And: “The D stands for dead.” And: “Sorry.”

“Someday I’ll die and get buried in the ground and you can take it up with me then,” said Harrow, and found, after all, that she was not really speaking to them. “Until then—I am afraid that I have to live.”

“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.”

“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.”