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“I am not trying to be cruel,” she said cruelly, “but that is what got you into trouble nineteen years ago.”
There were heavy footsteps on the tiles. You were rolled onto your back, where the scabbard made you roll backward and forward, like a tortoise with a knobble on its shell. You were filled with a great sense of calm as the world rolled back into focus. It had been psychologically dreadful to see Mercymorn tapping your chest and your midsection, mouth screwed up as though she were cleaning your vomit, but you were wrapped in a beautiful fug of oxytocin and did not care about other Lyctors, your assassination attempt, or anything much. It meant you could look up fearlessly, and nervelessly, into the eyes of Ortus.
Ortus’s face, stretched too tightly over its frame and locked into a long, lugubrious expression, had no reasonable relationship with his luminous green eyes: a soft, buttery green, less startling or harsh than the green of a shoot or the green of a leaf, but instead liquid and fluvial.
The Lyctor leaning over you said warningly, “Don’t you do a thing. I’ll have to fight you, and I cannot begin to tell you how much I don’t want to do that. Oh, why did I stop?” she wailed. “I should have kept walking. I hate reasonable culpability.”
“I want that sword,” said Ortus the First.
“What?”
“Give me her damned sword,” said Ortus the First.
“You’ve already got a whole complement of oversized weapons, greedy.”
Even an overexcited pituitary gland could not mask the sharp shank of fear that sliced down the length of your heart. You tried to raise yourself up on your elbows before you wobbled weakly back down. You said hoarsely, “No. No. It’s mine.”
Mercymorn lost her patience on an almost professional basis. “Oh, just get out of it,” she said peevishly to Ortus. “Leave the baby alone.” Before you could feel indebted to her, she added: “Next time, try this at night! When I’m sleeping! If I see you hurt her I have to intervene, or Teacher will lose his nana.”
The Saint of Duty looked down at you, sprawled so awkwardly in a pool of blood, free of the two new punctures he had given you in such a short space of time. He took his spear and shook it like a bedsheet, and the bone haft folded in on itself until it was no longer or thicker than a mace handle. This short, fat handle and spearhead he shoved into his belt, then he sheathed his rapier, turned around, and left.
His sister-saint bawled after him: “I mean it! You clean this place up!” but he was already gone. She stood and smoothed out the front of her beautiful mother-of-pearl robe—the blood came off it in great gouts of reddish powder, dwindling to nothing—and she said, her placid face creased in complaint: “This place has gone to the dogs … What did you say, to make him try to kill you?”
“Nothing.” The hormones were beginning to cease their pleasant flow, but you were still preternaturally calm when you said: “I came in to get some food. I did not perceive his entrance. The first thing I knew of him was when he stabbed me.”
“Oh. Then he just wants you dead,” she said, with perfect unconcern. “Good luck! Not!! That man is Teacher’s attack dog … If he thinks you’re a threat then I would advise you to settle your affairs.”
You stared up at the ceiling and noted the bone-strewn scrollwork between the frames of the panelling, all about the long planks of electric light. And you said: “But why does Ortus the First want me dead?”
“Who?” said Mercymorn, indifferently.
20
YOU HAD NOT LEFT behind any notes about what you wanted done at your funeral. This was not due to a surfeit of optimism, though you were determined that your end would not come at the end of Ortus the First’s sword or spear: it was because you found the idea of a funeral for you too pitiful—what would be said, and what would be done? What fitting epitaph for your fragile bones? (Perhaps: Here lies the world’s most insufferable witch.)
In the following months the Saint of Duty attempted to kill you, by your count, fourteen times, and you never came to understand the motivation. Often you were saved only by intervention. Sometimes this came from one of the other two Lyctors. Once, vilely, from Ianthe; she had ensconced you in fat and rolled you down the hallway out of danger, and still laughed whenever she thought about it. Once it even came from God. He had walked in as your pelvis was run through by your elder brother’s razor-sharp, scarlet-hilted rapier—so sharp you could never comprehend it—and God had laid you down on the big broad dining table of brown wood, and the world had whited out for you and reverberated up your nostrils and sinus cavities, then arced down the bottoms of your feet, as your skin and flesh closed over whole and perfect. Even your back ache had disappeared. Your body had hissed all over as it sealed, reborn in the hot white light of the Necrolord Prime.
And he had said: “Ortus, have pity.”
“This is my pity, Lord,” said the Saint of Duty.
“She’s your responsibility, not your punching bag.”
“I find the responsibility a hard one.”
You’d lain dazed and stunned on the tabletop, and you heard the Emperor of the Nine Houses say: “I don’t want to argue with you. This is ham-fisted. Get out.”
If you had thought God’s intervention might be final, might enforce some terms of peace, it had not. It had seemed—difficult—to raise the subject, when God did not want to bring it up himself. What would you say? (One of your fingers and gestures is trying to kill me on the reg. Is this … fine with you?) When you finally approached him about it, his wince made you wish that you had not.
The Emperor said, carefully: “He made a pact, with an authority I have no power to gainsay, that he would protect me from all dangers. Now it has been put to him that you are that danger. Harrowhark, forgive me. I need you to face him—each time—knowing your life is in danger…”
Here he broke off, and just said: “Will you wear a rapier, if I give you one?”
“For what purpose, Teacher? I could not use it, having misapprehended the Lyctoral process.”
“Just in case,” he said, and it was the first time you had seen him wretched.
“You say you misapprehended the process,” said your Teacher, leaning forward and crossing his shabby-sleeved arms over his knees. “I don’t believe you did, Harrowhark. I really don’t believe you did. I’ve only seen one person get it … fundamentally wrong … and I hope I never see what happened to Anastasia and Samael again.”
And thus, unintentionally, you also confronted him with Anastasia. You could not trip in the Ninth House without falling over an Anastas, an Anastasia, or an Anastasius; or, in later years, bumping into their niche. Anastasia had been the mythic founding tomb-keeper and grandmother of the House, and the subject of at least two Nigenad poems (’Twas deep in Anastasia’s time, I wot). She was namesake of the deep inner monument where lay the sacred bones of tomb-keepers past and those who fell in battle. You were profoundly upset to learn that she had been real; that the rooms you inhabited—the empty, tintless, quiet rooms—had been intended for her.
As you often sat, mute and still, a statue of yourself, opposite the Emperor of the Nine Resurrections, caught between pleasure and pain at listening to him speak, he did not wait for you to ask. He said, “Out of all of us, only Anastasia got it wrong. She’d researched it too much. Typical Anastasia. She’d seen some pathways in it that simply didn’t exist. She spoke the Eightfold Word, and it didn’t … work. After we—cleaned up—she asked me if I might end her life. Of course I said no. She had so much more to give. Later I would ask of her a greater and more terrible thing. I had a body and I needed a tomb … you might know of the body, Harrowhark, and you will know far better the Tomb.”
At the time the Body had stood at the curtained plex window that stared out onto the field of slowly spinning asteroids, the mother-of-pearl robe slipping from her supple, naked shoulders, still moist as though just taken from the ice of her grave. You watched a droplet of water trickle down the column of her spine.
“The tomb that was to be shut forever,” you said, and found the words so strange. “The rock that was never to be rolled away. That what was within should remain buried, insensate, with closed eye and stilled brain. Every day I prayed for it to live, I prayed for it to sleep.”
Your voice dredged up from your brain, which dredged up from your heart, which dredged up from the oily, filth-stricken depths of your soul, and you said: “God, who did you bury?”
