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“I’ll say it again. The procedure could fail. Or it may work, but only temporarily. There could be any number of side effects—physical disorders—if you push your brain too hard, any surgery could simply heal over—and if you’re doing what I have a suspicion you’re doing, it could play merry hell with scar tissue. This is profoundly experimental. More to the point, it is totally fucking demented.”
Their eyes met in the mirror. The ex-Reverend Daughter had set one up in front and one above her head, which was being held by two of the obedient skeletons of the sort she so obviously loved. Ianthe still did not understand the entrancing appeal of the dark aptitude of the bone; it was as though somebody had decided to make flesh magic less flexible, less subtle, and much less interesting to look at. What was the joke again? That the Ninth House knew a thousand shades of off-white?
She looked down at the tray of tools—scalpel, saw, little bottle of water with a spray nozzle—and astonished herself by saying: “Ninth. Maybe this is an eleventh-hour point to make, but I find myself making it. Tell me what you’re doing. Tell me the details of your grim, dark, and shadowy plan. If you don’t, I have no assurance that I am not about to have a front-row seat as you reduce yourself to a gibbering wreck—or lower. A vegetable. A hunk of wood. A Fourth House write-in advice column.”
The nun did not answer. Ianthe made her voice as low and coaxing as it could go, and she pressed: “Make me understand what this is worth to you, Ninth. Think about what you’ve promised. Consider what I am, and what use you might get from me. I am a Lyctor. I am a necromantic princess of Ida. I am the cleverest necromancer of my generation.”
“Like hell you are,” said Harrowhark.
“So impress me,” said Ianthe, unmoved.
In the mirror, that paintless, unfamiliar face tightened. The lips pressed together until they were the pale brown of roses, ashen. Ianthe found herself thinking what the face could have done to it—the top lip was softly curved, as though the painter had not been able to help embellishing where they thought nobody would notice; the arch of that philtrum was close to a poem. The cheek was unreasonably smooth, considering the amount of topological greasepaint those Ninth House pores must have seen; those heavy eyelids, deep-set, thick with black lashes, a vanity that nobody in that shuffling mausoleum had thought to shear. And that was not even considering that the face was taut and stricken with the starvation marks of agony; that she had shaven her head almost fully bald for this, leaving only pinpricks of black stippling her skull.
Then there were the eyes themselves: that solemn and lightless black that, whatever rictus the nun’s face might assume, could not hide the woman; they stared out of Nonagesimus’s face now with mute, flayed appeal, as stark and discomfiting as skinless muscle.
“I will impress upon you this,” the Ninth necromancer said forebodingly, and stopped.
Then she said: “I asked you for a reason. That reason was not your genius, which I admit exists. Nobody who reverse-engineered the Lyctoral process could be anything but a genius. But I haven’t seen anything that makes me believe you are more than—a kind of necromantic gymnast, doing showy tricks without concern for the theory. You’re not of Sextus’s calibre either.”
“No,” said Ianthe lightly, “but Sextus’s head exploded, proving to the world that he hadn’t accounted for everything.”
“I may have been Sextus’s necromantic superior; but he was the better man. You are not even so worthy of that brain as to wipe its bloodied remnants from the wall,” said the Ninth. “You are a murderer, a conwoman, a cheat, a liar, a slitherer, and you embody the worst flaws of your House—as do I … Nonetheless, I did not ask you because you are a Lyctor, Third. I did not even ask you because you know significantly more about your subject than I do.”
“Tell me, because I am hugely bored of hearing all my flaws,” said Ianthe, with lessened patience.
The shadow cultist stared into the mirror. Those great black eyes were empty pools: abyssal holes—an oil spill in the dark—or unfilled sockets.
“I asked you because you know what it is,” she said haltingly, “to be—fractured.”
Of such banality was grief made.
“Harrowhark,” said Ianthe. “Let me give you a little advice. It is free and smart. I’ll walk this back now—I’ll adopt the sweetest good humour about everything you’ve done for me already—if you admit that you are running away. And running away is for fools and children. You are a Lyctor. You have paid the price. The hardest part is over. Smile to the universe, thank it for its graciousness, and mount your throne. You answer to nobody now.”
“If you think that you and I are not more beholden than ever,” said the girl, “you are an idiot.”
“Who is left? What is left?”
Nonagesimus shut her eyes briefly. When they opened, one was—not correct. She stared at her own heterochromatic, night-and-day gaze, at those celestially mismatched irises. One black. One gold.
Then the Ninth House Lyctor said tightly: “We are wasting time. Open me up.”
“It will be worse for you in the end, Nonagesimus—”
And Harrowhark roared: “Do it, you faithless coward, you swore me an oath! Expose the brain—guide me—and let me handle it from there! There’s still time, and you thieve it from me!”
“All right, sister,” said Ianthe, and she reached for the awl first. The hammer would be second; the hammer for the living hand, the awl for the dead. She rested it high on the frontal bone, squinted, and gauged. “Time to absolutely fuck you up.”
She struck.
* * *
Once Harrowhark was sleeping a sleep she might never even wake from, her face marked with the lines of weary, heart-heavy exhaustion, Ianthe sat and watched. She had not been allowed to watch the entire process; for a stretch she had been forced to sit behind a screen and twiddle her thumbs as those paranoid amateur hands rummaged around in a way that would hopefully mean Harrowhark couldn’t coordinate enough to piss, if life was remotely fair. Now she pressed her fingers over that scalp, trying to work it out, trying to see exactly what had been done.
She gave up within a few minutes—impossible to tell with Lyctor privacy, even this close. No bleeds, certainly. Everything in the right place. Maybe a little reduction in the temporal lobe, a few out-of-order bumps in the temporal gyrus that might have been there already. As a last act of pettiness, Ianthe coaxed a new crop of that lightless black hair out of the scalp, and fidgeted with the follicles so that they would squirt out a little extra, cursing the Ninth House nun to almost ceaseless haircuts. It was the little things that mattered.
She stood at the doorway and watched the breath minutely fill those lungs, in—and out—and in. There were smudges of sweat on the face that in this light looked just like tears. It tickled her fancy to imagine Harrowhark falling asleep crying, like any lovelorn child. What a fool. What a destructive, romantic, ridiculous act. It was always a certain kind of ass who approached love like that—a certain kind of very good, talented ass, who had been overly used to their hands on the reins and never could cope when they were taken off—nor had the personality to put them back on again.
Ianthe had that type of personality. And she had a few years on Harrow.
“Someday I’ll marry that girl,” she said aloud. “It might be good for her.” And: “Probably not, though.”
And then Ianthe the First went to see a man about a queen.
ACT FIVE
40
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HARROW NOVA HELD HER black rapier thrust upward in the direction of the top tiershaft. She laid her offhand arm across her chest, her knuckles against her collarbone, where the black chain of Samael Novenary—true black Drearburh steel, each link a death’s head, the weighted end a carved butterfly of pelvis in lead-filled bone—clinked unmusically against itself. Her nerves were steel; her guts were some lesser material due to a curious admixture of fear and fury. They had assumed the qualities of gruel, or hot porridge. “To the floor,” she said.
“Harrow,” said the cavalier opposite her, “we don’t have to do this.”
“Then withdraw your claim and acknowledge me as the cavalier primary, you weed, you worm, you slime. I’m your superior in every way. I do not possess your size—I do not possess your strength—but I have trained for one singular purpose, and I will not be denied this chance.”
“Yes, Harrow; but my father would kill me,” he said.
Ortus Nigenad hulked before her sadly. Massive in his new robe and boots, with new panniers too, and his grandmother’s rapier—the new boots and rapier she envied, but the panniers she did not. They were freshly crafted of obsidian and the strongest type of canvas, which must have emptied out the treasury. Harrow wondered bitterly if her parents had flogged something.
