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Then Harrow was back drowning in salt water. Gideon’s arms were around her. They were in the pool of Canaan House, and she had just been ducked by her cavalier. She had held her breath instinctively, though she had been serene at the time; to drown, she thought, was softer death than she deserved, and back then to die in Gideon’s arms had seemed entirely correct. She could feel Gideon’s fingers digging into the small of her back, could feel her shirt billowing in the pool as they sank to the bottom in a tangle.
Harrow’s head broke the water. A thin skin of ice shivered apart as she emerged, panting for air, her skin burning with the cold. Her flailing sent ripples along those black, disturbed waters, but did not interrupt their gentle tidal lapping along the jagged shore. Above her head the rocky cathedral of the cave shone with a dismal heaven of luminescent worms, blinking softly on and off. They were all undead: revenant creatures and watchers, shifting restlessly forever on the rock of the Locked Tomb. Harrow was home.
Harrow floundered, not toward the shore, but to the island in the centre—to the black mausoleum of glass and ice, sitting silently and reflectively beneath that sea of dead worms. She hauled herself to shore and lay there, skin crawling, frozen half-solid, shivering and numb in that strange heat presaging hypothermic death. And yet Harrow felt no pain; she felt nothing, in fact, but a welcome sense of homecoming—the strange, tiny, pleased familiarity of finding an old book once beloved, or some other antique of childhood.
Eager now, she hauled her freezing meat to stand. She passed beneath those pillars as she had as a child, followed the pathway she still traced in dreams. She was exhausted more than cold; her head filled with the soft, heavy tiredness of too much waking and not enough sleep, of a long day on the job without rest or break. She walked into the mausoleum, and she approached the Tomb itself.
The chains in their great holes were snapped and broken. The ice crawled up the sides of the empty altar. Within that bed of ice and glass, on the stone-shaped pillow to prop the head, that final resting place of Harrowhark’s one true love, lay a sword.
It was the two-handed sword that had lain at the bottom of the Sleeper’s coffin, just as Dyas had seen it.
Harrowhark had come home, and she was not afraid. She did not know why she did it, but she climbed inside that empty coffin, and she took the sword within her arms. She was filled with a drowsy, comfortable certainty, as though rather than an icy tomb she had been tucked into a bed with a pillow fluffed beneath her. Her eyelids felt as heavy as the chains that lay broken around the outside of the bier. The sword she embraced shamelessly; those six feet of steel held no fear for her now.
Something rustled at her side. She had not seen it when she climbed in; it had been tucked to one side of the coffin. When she reached out to hold it in front of her face, she found a shiny mass of magazine flimsy. The crumpled front page showed a woman in a Cohort uniform that was so far from official it did not merely strain credulity, but snapped it in two pieces: a white jacket at least three sizes too small, boots, and nothing else.
The ice felt kind and warm; the stone gave as though it were cotton. Harrow lay where the Body had lain, perfectly at her ease, perfectly comfortable, and she peered blearily at the header.
“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.
EPILOGUE
SIX MONTHS AFTER THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
THE THICK FUG OF a summer evening. The curfews stalling the traffic outside to a funeral crawl, with the hot sun blistering the road into sodden clags of concrete and tar. What she liked best was the way the haze of combustion from the vehicles colonized the dying rays of the sun into deep pinks and oranges, oranges into scarlets, scarlets into purples, purples into the sweet deathly navy of the night. The antisniper striping frosted over the windowpane turned everything into feeble shapes, but the colours were just as intense even if the shapes were a mush. And the murmurous honks from the traffic below—the occasional low, lamenting blart of a cargo carrier—were transformed by the tall buildings into an orchestral echo. The crack of the open window let the outside air, redolent of sun-warmed plastic and fumes, ruffle the drying sweat in her hair.
This time of day was a crossbar. It blocked off the afternoon, when black cloths would be tacked up over windows and she would sit in that tight, squeezing, claustrophobic heat, and she would be given the bones by the people who lived with her. She lived with three people: the person who went to work for her, the person who taught her, and the person who looked after her. The person who taught her often gave her these bones to arrange (“just whatever feels normal”), sometimes to just hold, in the hand or in the hollow of her cheek. Then the bones could be packed away in secret—the blackout curtains could come down, and the window cracked—and once the temperature dropped a few degrees, she would be at the chin-up bar, or doing press-ups, or the sword would be put in her hand by the person who looked after her—“whatever feels normal,” again.
And then when it was very late, they’d climb down thirty flights of stairs to street level, picking their way through abandoned sacks of clothes, or laminate takeaway boxes, the press of other people, smelling like the day-to-day sweat of working in a sultry office, or the day-to-day sweat of being outside in the heat, or the day-to-day sweat of fear. She would be taken to the little corner store with its great barricades of snacks and pills and pamphlets and thin cheap shirts, and sit on the should-be-white chairs and smell the deep fryer going, and then pick over crispy chunks of potato, or pan-blasted sweet fruit, or sausage meat in batter, with time enough after to lick her burnt and salty fingers. She and the person who looked after her had used to go to a different haunt, where the food was cheaper and the sausages more juicy—but there the man who fried the food had once said warningly, “It’s hot,” only to find that she had already stuffed her mouth full of lacy fried things anyway. The man had said, laughing, “Her lips should be burnt off, eh?” But her lips had not been burnt off. It had barely hurt. For some reason, because of that, they no longer patronized that sausage man.
Out there in the outskirts, soldiers walked the city, with their guns out and their riot shields slung over their shoulders, looking grimy and cross in the heat under their helmets and great reflective visors. Some nights they heard the pop—pop—pop—rattle of a gunfight, and on these nights they would shut the windows and lie with most of their clothes off on the floor of the bathroom.
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.
The tomb will open in
ALECTO THE NINTH
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to again express my very great appreciation for my agent, Jennifer Jackson, who is as indefatigable as she is kind and as funny as she is indefatigable. Jennifer is a truly remarkable being and I have not managed to stump her yet. A year on I still haven’t found the right words to thank Carl Engle-Laird, editor and hero, and if I did he would just remove all the parataxis. Carl, I know this universe has meant so much to both of us. Thank you for being with me on this wild ride.
The team at Tor.com are angelic beings—Ruoxi Chen, Christine Foltzer, Irene Gallo, Giselle Gonzalez, Mordicai Knode, Caroline Perny, Renata Sweeney, Natalie Zutter, as well as Matt Johnson over at Macmillan Sales, to name but a few of the host—all of them rad goth angels with leather jackets. I know there has been even more work done on my behalf than I quite understand, and their support, enthusiasm, and kindness throughout has been incredible. I am also grateful to Tommy Arnold, for incredible cover work, and Jamie Stafford-Hill for equally incredible layouts and design.
