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“Why leave me, though?” she demanded. “They murdered the rest of the House, but they left me off the list?” There was a pause. “We didn’t,” said Harrow. “What?” “You were meant to die, Griddle, along with all the others. You inhaled nerve gas for ten full minutes. My great-aunts went blind just from releasing it and you weren’t affected, even though you were just two cots away from the vent. You just didn’t die. My parents were terrified of you for the rest of their lives.”
The Reverend Father and Mother hadn’t found her unnatural because of how she’d been born: they’d found her unnatural because of how she hadn’t died.
“If I became a Lyctor,” she said meditatively, “and renewed my House—and made it great again, and greater than it ever was, and justified its existence in the eyes of God the Emperor—if I made my whole life a monument to those who died to ensure that I would live and live powerfully…”
“Of course I wouldn’t be worth it,” Harrow said scornfully. “I’m an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground. My parents committed a necromantic sin that we ought to have been torpedoed into the centre of Dominicus for. If any of the other Houses knew of what we’d done they would destroy us from orbit without a second’s thought. I am a war crime.”
“But I’d do it again,” said the war crime. “I’d do it again, if I had to. My parents did it because there was no other way, and they didn’t even know. I had to be a necromancer of their bloodline, Nav … because only a necromancer can open the Locked Tomb. Only a powerful necromancer can roll away the stone … I found that only the perfect necromancer can pass through those wards and live, and approach the sarcophagus.”
“What happened to praying that the tomb be shut forever and the rock never be rolled away?”
“Are you telling me that when you were ten years old—ten years old—you busted the lock on the tomb, broke into an ancient grave, and made your way past hideous old magic to look at a dead thing even though your parents told you it’d start the apocalypse?”
“I was tired of being two hundred corpses,” she said simply. “I was old enough to know how monstrous I was. I had decided to go and look at the tomb—and if I didn’t think it was worth it—to go up the stairs … all the flights of the Ninth House … open up an air lock, and walk … and walk.”
You’re not the only one who couldn’t die.”
“Harrow,” said Gideon, and her voice caught. “Harrow, I’m so bloody sorry.”
Harrow’s eyes snapped wide open. The whites blazed like plasma. The black rings were blacker than the bottom of Drearburh. She waded through the water, snatched Gideon’s wet shirt in her fists, and shook her with more violence than Gideon had ever thought her muscularly capable of. Her face was livid in its hate: her loathing was a mortar, it was combustion. “You apologise to me?” she bellowed. “You apologise to me now? You say that you’re sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and
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“I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”
she wrapped her arms around Harrow Nonagesimus and held her long and hard, like a scream. They both went into the water, and the world went dark and salty. The Reverend Daughter fell calm and limp, as was natural for one being ritually drowned, but when she realised that she was being hugged she thrashed as though her fingernails were being ripped from their beds. Gideon did not let go. After more than one mouthful of saline, they ended up huddled together in one corner of the shadowy pool, tangled up in each other’s wet shirtsleeves. Gideon peeled Harrow’s head off her shoulder by the hair
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One flesh, one end, bitch.”
“Say it, loser.” “One flesh—one end,” Harrow repeated fumblingly, and then could say no more.
“In the event of my death—Gideon, if something ever does get the better of me—I need you to outlast me. I need you to go back to the Ninth House and protect the Locked Tomb. If I die, I need your duty not to die with me.”
“That is such a dick move,” said Gideon reproachfully. “I know,” said Harrow. “I know.”
“A girl, you yellow-eyed moron,”
“They packed her in ice—she’s frozen solid—and they laid a sword on her breast. Her hands are wrapped around the blade. There are chains around her wrists, coming out of her grave, and they go down into holes by each side of the tomb, and there are chains on her ankles that do the same, and there are chains around her throat …
“Nav, when I saw her face I decided I wanted to live. I decided to live forever just in case she ever woke up.”
Gideon reached over to take Harrow’s hand.
She closed the gap between them a little, until she could see tiny droplets run down the column of Harrow’s neck and slide beneath her sodden collar. She smelled like ash, even smothered under litres and litres of saline. As she approached Harrow grew very still, and her throat worked, and her eyes opened black and wide: she looked at Gideon without breathing in, her mouth frozen, her hands unmoving, a perfect bone carving of a person.
“Do you really have the hots for some chilly weirdo in a coffin?” One of the skeletons punted her back into the water.
So it was Crux’s mean, blackened revenge on his own House—his own zealous desire to burn it clear of any hint of insurrection—that had forced Glaurica’s ghost back to her home planet.
“What a dope,” she said instead. “I was never loyal a day in my life and I still saw you in the raw.” “Go to sleep, Gideon.” She fell asleep, and for once didn’t dream of anything at all.
“I can take Colum,” said Camilla. “Pretty sure I can also take Colum,” added Gideon.
“It—I mean, it looked like a key,” he said. “It had a long shaft and some teeth. I don’t—I can’t just describe a molecular structure like it’s someone’s outfit.”
“Sextus, this was bad enough when I did it to my own cavalier. You’re going to have to focus on that key incredibly hard. If you get distracted—” “He doesn’t get distracted,” said Camilla, as if this had caused difficulties in the past.
Gideon was honestly impressed. In all the time Harrow had tormented her back on Drearburh, she had only ever used bones as seeds and starters—stitching them together into trip wires, grasping arms, kicking legs, biting skulls. This was something new. She was using bone like clay—a medium she could shape not just into one of a bunch of predetermined forms, but into something that had never existed before. It looked like it was giving her trouble too: her brow was furrowed, and the first faint traces of blood sweat gleamed on her slim throat.
“This won’t work,” she said. “I’ve never had to work with something so small before.” “That’s what she said,” murmured Gideon, sotto voce.
Gideon did not know how to handle this new, overprotective Harrowhark, this girl with the hunted expression.
She kept looking at Gideon with the screwed-up eyes of someone who had been handed an egg for safekeeping and was surrounded by egg-hunting snakes.
The Sixth and the Ninth Houses knew that a fire was absolutely no joke, and moved like people who had learned that a fire alarm could be the last thing any of them heard, the last thing their whole House heard.
Harrow said, “Let’s not waste time. Get to Septimus,” and Gideon could have kissed her.
“He didn’t lie. There was no way to reach the Houses … I got through to the Imperial flagship, Sixth. The Emperor is coming … the King Undying.”
“You draw him back—to the place—he must not return to,”
“Oh, Lord—Lord—Lord, one of them has come back—”
nobody should ever have to watch their cavalier die.”
Griddle, at the first sign of trouble—” “Run like hell,” said Gideon. “I was going to say, Hit it with your sword,” said Harrow.
“Use your words, Sextus.”
YOU LIED TO US
Someone was crying in the slow, dull way of a person who had been crying for hours already and didn’t know how to stop.
She had taken up position on an ancient and sagging cushion, reclining on it like a queen.
She was trembling so hard that she was vibrating, and her pupils were so dilated you could have flown a shuttle through
But Ianthe gave a sudden shrill trill of a laugh—a laugh with too many edges.
“This is not how I had envisioned this,” she said afterward, teeth chattering. “I am merely telling you. I won.”
“Princess. None of us here speaks crazy lady.”
“A very hurtful name,” said Ianthe, and yawned. Her teeth started chattering again halfway through, and she bit her tongue, yowled, and spat on the floor. A thin wisp of smoke arose from...
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“I admit it, this smarts,” she said, broodingly. “I had my speech all planned out—I was going to brag somewhat, you understand. Because I didn’t need any of your keys, and I didn’t need any of your secrets. I was always better than all of you—and none of you noticed—nobody ever notices, which is both my virtue and my downfall. How I hate being ...
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The horrible little Ninth goblin stared at her with tight-pressed lips. She had inched away from Gideon toward the theorem plate, and with n...
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