AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Teacher worried his temple with his thumb, and then worried his other temple with his other thumb. He took a biscuit and dipped it into his cooling tea, then ate it, then swirled the tea around in the cup and set it down again. “I buried a monster,” he said.
From the glare of the plex window, beside some perfectly ordinary white twill curtains, the buried monster turned herself so that she was lit in the light of the undead stars. The curve of her cheek—the thick, black lashes that fringed her golden eyes—the thumbprint divot that lay pressed like a kiss within the bow of her lip—you had not known you were shaking until God himself reached out to still your wrist, so that you mightn’t spill your tea over your knees. He unhelpfully passed you another biscuit.
“Eat up, there’s nothing to you,” he said gently. “Have two, get some fat reserves. Do you like poetry, Harrowhark?”
“I have never been a fan,” you said fervently.
“Poetry is one of the most beautiful shadows a civilisation can cast across time,” he said. “Go on … eat up, they’re good for you. Here, I’m going to pretend to read this one off my tablet, when in fact it’s been with me for over ten thousand years. Here’s my favourite part…”
That night, the Body consented to embrace you. You so nearly felt those long arms wrap around your neck, your middle. You were so close to feeling that press of graceful forehead to yours, the long, lean, dead body chilling yours to the shivering point, as you all but perceived one cool corpse thigh touching yours from hip to knee. You had been nearly eight weeks in the Mithraeum. The sword that you bathed in your own arterial blood was sheathed in bone and heavy on your back. You no longer knew what it was like not to be afraid.
You—with your unfortunate memory for poetry—could still hear Teacher’s verse, in his low, soothing, ordinary voice, chase itself round and round your head:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
* * *
THE EMPEROR OF THE NINE HOUSES, THE PRINCE UNDYING (WHILOM??? JOHN???)
Who was A.L.?
21
RAIN STARTED FALLING ON Canaan House early one morning, and it never stopped again. For the first few hours it was the normal, leaden fall of water Harrowhark had become used to in her time at Canaan House. She found it merely unnerving now, not a killer of peace and sleep. Around midday a fog began to boil off the saw-toothed waters at the bottom of the tower. It rose up to the lower levels of Canaan, and kept rising. The fog was bitterly cold, and the rain stank like engine lubricant and blood; it tasted indescribable. Teacher and the other priests unearthed great spiny patchwork compasses of oilcloth and metal struts, which unfolded at the press of a button, and Harrowhark and the others were obliged to walk around with them over their heads even inside the main atrium, where the water leaked through the walls and ceilings.
At first, she trusted her hood and veil and let the rain wet her where it would. She was soon forced to acknowledge how difficult it had become to dry clothes. Ortus spent half his life wringing out tents of black fabric into the bathroom tub. Harrow was forced in bad grace to consent to him standing over her with one of these umbrella constructions, and listen to the hateful, arrhythmic PLUT … PLUT … PLUT-PLUT-PLUT of water on its waterproof skin. This incidental noise was very difficult for her: it was fertile ground for the false symphony inside her head, and those banging doors and murmurous half-heard ghosts were now joined by a thin background wail, which sounded for all the world like the mewling of a newborn baby.
“This has never happened before,” Teacher complained at meals, fretfully, as though they were not Lyctors-in-waiting but instead sympathetic building inspectors. “The rainy season won’t be on us for months. It ought to be ten degrees warmer than it is. I have had to bring in all the herbs and put them under a lamp. And this fog … I guess I might as well die,” he concluded, something he now suggested hopefully at least three times a day.
Harrow found this a suggestion that lacked grace or tact, especially after they found the second round of bodies.
There were no witnesses to question, when they found the grey-wrappered figures of Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus laid on the stained, brushed-steel slabs in the mortuary. They had been arranged as though whomever found them had wished to present them scientifically. That they were Sextus and Hect was at first only educated conjecture: they were wearing their librarian greys, and one had the battered old rapier that had seemed to be all the Sixth House could proffer for this trial, and the other had ink stains on his fingers. Their faces had been obliterated by point-blank gunshots.
It was grim. Harrowhark was surprised by her own tranquillity, but concluded she was grateful for it. A strange, tomblike calm had fallen over her when Abigail had first taken her to see the bodies, walking briskly past the Sleeper’s silent coffin with a lantern held high. Harrow admired her for that, for her lack of tiptoe or hush. Harrow had never seen Sextus or Hect except from afar, and had formed an impression that was all abbreviations: grey clothes, hushed voices, angles. It was Ortus who mourned for them, but Ortus was one of the Emperor’s natural mourners. His mother had been the same. They’d both loved a funeral, which had been lucky for them, as funerals were one of her House’s natural resources. When they brought both facially obliterated corpses upstairs under the direction of Lady Pent, she watched Ortus weep stolid, stony-faced tears, which once again turned his sacramental paint into an underwater skull.
To properly identify them, Abigail’s husband-cavalier scared up the only flesh magician he could find. Finding other magicians at all was becoming difficult: the day-jewel and night-rock Tridentarius twins were so elusive that Harrow grew confused even trying to remember when she had last seen them. There was not enough room in the chilly morgue upstairs, and the dropping temperature was not immediately compromising, so they put the faceless bodies out on rubberized sheets in the dining room. It was there the Seventh cavalier brought his adept.
She must have seen them both on that first day—that muggy, sun-struck first day, when Teacher had given them the rings and the keys, and told them about the monstrous hypersomniac in the basement—but Harrow found she was startled when they arrived. It would have been difficult not to have been. The cavalier was bronzed and vigorous, an enormous, musclebound man in green, with a seafoam-coloured kilt and tooled leathers. This well-muscled individual was guiding a wheeled chair down the wide aisles between tables, and in the chair was what appeared to be a dead body, holding a little lacy umbrella of her own to keep off the drips. It was gowned appropriately in spindrift white skirts, and inappropriately in a little crocheted scarf of pilling white wool.
Harrowhark had known Ortus too long not to register the slight curl to his lip and the lack of maudlin suicide in his eyes: he was almost rigid with contempt. She had thought Ortus would find contempt too exhausting an emotion to bother with. The ghost holding the umbrella had her pale, sugar-brown hair cropped short, its curls gathered into a cap of silky ringlets. There was a gracile delicacy to her—a starved, wasted, childlike mien—and when she gave her umbrella to her cavalier, she actually rose to stand. A fine length of tubing emerged from her nose and was discreetly taped into the collar of her dress. Harrowhark had never seen its like before; it was a thin, stiffened cylinder of mucous epithelial tissue.
“It’s great, isn’t it?” she said to Harrow, by way of hello. She had a sweet, modulated voice, only a trifle breathy. “It’s a pulmonary drain. It goes all the way down to my lungs.”
“I have never seen such a thing before,” admitted Harrow.
“You wouldn’t have,” said the Seventh necromancer rapturously. “He came up with it, when he was fifteen.”
It seemed too stupid for Harrowhark to believe, but there could be no ambiguity in that woman’s gesture. Her paper-skinned hand pointed to one of the faceless corpses, the one without a rapier. It oughtn’t to have surprised her anymore that the relationships between every other scion of the Nine Houses seemed intimate, or incestuous, or familiar, or antipathic. She did not feel left out. She merely felt dislocated as Abigail said, “Are you sure it’s him, Dulcie?”
“Give me a minute,” said Dulcie, apparently, though who would have let themselves be called Dulcie unless faced with water torture was a question Harrow did not want the universe to answer. “I took a swab from the doorknob—I’ve got two prints, so if they correlate, that will tell us something…”
