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“Yes,” said Harrow. Gideon. Blood. A broken rail. “It was not my intention, at the end. But—yes.”
Abigail’s eyes grew intent; she leant forward. “That’s one bet won,” she said, with grim satisfaction. “All right. When did you become aware of what was happening to you? When did you realise what was going on with the other soul?”
It was easier to answer questions mechanically. “In the first days. I knew she would be absorbed. I understood that I would inadvertently destroy her soul—the process was already underway. But it hadn’t finished. I had time. I decided to remove my ability to so incorporate her … by removing my ability to comprehend her.”
Easier, now, to recall it. A litany. The same singsong recitation as the Eightfold Word. It could almost live apart from suffering. “I took the part of my brain that remembered her … that understood her soul … and I disconnected it. Then I made rather crude systems—so as not to be accidentally reminded … knowing that the pathways might reopen if they were knocked about. I had an accomplice … someone who knew how to manipulate the fatty tissue of the brain better than I possibly could. I made my skull a construct, programmed to apply pressure to specific lobes. And it worked, Pent. It worked,” she said. “It was stupid. A brute-force solution. But it worked.”
Abigail was looking at her very carefully, with a different expression than before. Harrow knew she sounded a little irascible when she said, “What?”
“I think we are talking over each other,” said the Fifth adept, rubbing her mittened hands together. “I’m not asking about the preserved soul that made you a Lyctor, Reverend Daughter … though that’s also filled in some of the pieces. Harrowhark, I am referring to the invasive soul.”
“The invasive—?”
“You are being haunted,” said Abigail calmly. “I had assumed you had picked this battlefield deliberately, and raised an army to fight alongside you. I didn’t quite know why you’d chosen us. Now I know, but it seems you did not. You are possessed by an angry spirit, Harrow, and you are losing the war.”
Harrow reflexively tried to pad out her fat reserves; it was really shockingly cold. She was stopped when she realized she could not identify where they sat under the skin of her arms, let alone augment them. The limitation was familiar: it was the limitation she had lived with all her life, when she was Ninth, and not First. Her furnace of power was gone.
She reached for the memory of her other self—no; she underserved herself by separating herself into two halves, Harrow First and Harrow Secundarius, as though she were following bells. They were all one Harrowhark, wearing different clothes. And she was no better now that her vestments were black—in a way she was greatly worse. But the memory was there.
Think of how when you blow air into water, you make bubbles …
It was getting chillier. The wind howled against the darkened window. There was no good weather in her brain. She said, “We are in the River.”
“Yes,” said Abigail. “That was my first realisation.”
“This is my creation.”
“Yes. You set the parameters,” said Abigail. “We realized through process of elimination, as we each recalled ourselves in the end. You didn’t. Ortus was convinced it was your creation from the start—I’m sorry that I disbelieved him.”
That was for later mental delectation. “I made a bubble in the River, just like Sextus did. But unconsciously, shoddily…” Sextus must have thought her such a churl. It would have been an enormous relief to have Palamedes Sextus with her then, if only so that she could, perhaps, offer some paltry thanks. But to have him see her so slow on the uptake would be hideous— “Why Canaan House? Why Ortus Nigenad? To fill the hole in my memory.”
Thankfully, Pent was quicker on the uptake. “You didn’t remove the memories of your cavalier, Harrowhark. I think that would have been beyond even the powers of a Lyctor. You falsified them. You skinned them over with something that looked good.” What a waste of a woman, to have ended her life at the bottom of a ladder.
“But why make so many changes? Why is this narrative so different? This isn’t how it happened at all. I understand that … that Gideon had to be—absent, but why…”
“This isn’t a picture you’re drawing, Harrow,” said Pent. “It’s a play you’re directing. You set up a stage in the River, you pulled in ghosts as your actors, and you enforced certain rules to keep your cast on-script. But now another director is trying to hijack the play, and the struggle for control backstage is leaking over into the action out front. You’re being ousted.”
“By whom?”
“I don’t know,” said Abigail candidly. “And there are other discrepancies I’d hoped you could have shed light on. Why did you only pull some of us as ghosts? Why did the others appear as—varyingly ludicrous constructs? Lieutenant Dyas was certain Judith was wrong before she even died, that she was like a confused parody of herself.”
“I never could have called the ghost of Captain Deuteros,” interrupted Harrow. “Deuteros lives.”
Abigail leaned in eagerly. “Tell Dyas that. She’ll want to know. The princesses…?”
“Alive.”
“Their cavalier—”
“Breakfast.” At Abigail’s bewilderment, Harrow qualified: “Ianthe Tridentarius is a Lyctor.”
“Blast. It should have been Coronabeth. Ianthe never was quite the thing. The Sixth—”
“Camilla’s alive. Palamedes … enjoys extenuating circumstances.” At this second round of bewilderment, she qualified: “The Master Warden found the idea of dying inconvenient.”
Abigail brightened. “Say no more.”
The Fifth House necromancer sighed in obvious pleasure, a simple delight that some of them had lived where she herself had not. A deep guilt sparked within Harrow’s ribcage. Pent even murmured, “The King over the River is good,” which filled Harrow with another sensation entirely.
That brought with it a reminder so savagely stupid she was astonished that it had not been her first thought. Her hands flew to her midsection. She closed her eyes. She leant back into the soft curve of her spine—she took the reins of the River in her hands, and she walked out into the waters, and she walked, and she walked.
As her—cavalier—might have put it, absolutely butt-fuck nothing happened. She could not access the River. She was not aware of it. There was no awareness of the anchor of her body; just as with the removal of her Lyctoral magic, there was no exit route. She was trapped within the bubble, writhing like a fish. And somewhere back on the Mithraeum …
“Time,” said Harrow urgently. “How does this track with time?”
“Based on my assumptions about spirit magic and the nature of consciousness,” said Abigail, “this—stage—only exists when you have limited or no conscious awareness. While you sleep, or while you have been knocked out, or otherwise disconnected from outside stimuli. I have not experienced any breaks in time—it’s seamless from this side. I imagine the simulation runs within your sleeping mind’s understanding of time, if somewhat contracted and dilated … How much time has passed in the—er—real world?”
“Nine months.”
“Good Lord.” She was genuinely upset. “I would have put us at about eight weeks. Oh—my family’s probably been told … They’ll be wondering where the living hell my spirit is. My poor brother—Magnus’s parents—my fern collection—”
“Lady Pent,” said Harrowhark forcefully, “forget the ferns. In the real world, I have been fatally stabbed. The place that holds my body is about to be overrun by thanergetic monsters created by a galactic revenant. I am, put bluntly, on the verge of death. My soul is under siege, and I overwrote my real memories with a ghost-filled pocket dimension, which has now apparently been co-opted by some kind of poltergeist. From what I can tell I am stuck in here. I cannot get out. And I am about to die—I may even be dead already—which will render this all somewhat moot.”
The window cracked. At first she assumed it was the howling, killing wind; but as she and Abigail watched, a questing pink tentacle, crackling with ice as it shifted and slithered, made a ropy trail down a broken hole in the glass. A long, pulsing tube. As they watched, a sphincter opened in the end, and from that hole emerged a clattering pile of plex scope slides, the type you would preserve a cell sample between. The door to the bedroom had been flung open: the previously dead Magnus Quinn was there, wearing a huge furry coat, cavern-cheeked from the chill, saying, “They’re breaching the walls, dear.”
“Tell Protesilaus and the lieutenant not to touch them.”
“Too late, and I can’t blame them, these things are vile—”
