AllFreeNovel
Share Us
None of that humiliated her so viscerally as her strangled, bellowing, unchecked shriek now, a child’s cry that whipped every head in that busied room round in her direction: “She died because I let her! You don’t understand!”
Ortus dropped his book. He rose from the chair. He put his arms about her. The dead cavalier held her with a quiet, unassuming firmness; he petted her hair like a brother, and he said, “I am so sorry, Harrowhark. I am sorry for everything … I am sorry for what they did … I am sorry that I was no kind of cavalier to you. I was so much older, and too selfish to take responsibility, and too affrighted by the idea of doing anything difficult or painful. I was weak because weak ness is easy, and because rebuff is hard. I should have known there was really nobody left … I should have seen the cruelty in what Crux and Aiglamene encouraged you to bear. I knew what had happened to my father, and I suspected for so long what had happened to the Reverend Father and Mother. I knew I had been spared, somehow, from the crèche flu, and that my mother had been driven demented by the truth. I should have offered help. I should have died for you. Gideon should still be alive. I was, and am, a grown man, and you both were neglected children.”
She should have loathed what he was saying to the very depths of her soul. She was Harrowhark Nonagesimus. She was the Reverend Daughter. She was beyond pity, beyond the tenderness of a member of her congregation rendering her down into a neglected child. The problem was that she had never been a child; she and Gideon had become women before their time, and watched each other’s childhood crumble away like so much dust. But there was a part of her soul that wanted to hear it—wanted to hear it from Ortus’s lips more, even, than from the lips of God. He had been there. He had witnessed.
Harrowhark found herself saying: “Everything I did, I did for the Ninth House. Everything Gideon did, she did for the Ninth House.”
“You both had more grit at seven years old than I ever had in my entire life,” said Ortus. “You are the most worthy heroes the Ninth House could muster. I truly believe that. And that is why I am staying. I am not a hero, Harrow. I never was. But now that I have died without hope for heroism in life, I will hope better for heroism in death. And therefore I will fight the Sleeper with you.”
It was difficult to know what to do with this type of touch. It made her whole soul flinch, but at the same time opened some primeval infant mechanism within her, as though the embrace were a mirror: having someone hold up an image by which you could see yourself, rather than living with an assumption of your face. It was not like the touch of her father or mother. When she had first sat by the tomb in shivering awe, she had fancied that the Body’s ice-ridden fingers had shifted for hers, minutely. Gideon had touched her in truth; Gideon had floundered toward her in the saltwater with that set, unsheathed expression she wore before a fight, her mouth colourless from the cold. Harrow had welcomed her end, but suffered a different death blow altogether—and she had become, for the second time, herself. She untangled from Ortus, more reluctantly than she’d expected.
Ortus said, “Come down. Hear the plan. I helped craft it—it is not complicated, but it is the only plan we have.”
“I will,” she said.
Harrow bent to retrieve the book he had dropped when he had stood—it fell open at the flyleaf. A message was still readable, written in faded ink, in strong, cramped letters:
ONE FLESH, ONE END.
G. & P.
She and Gideon had looked over the contents of the drawers. Cigarette ash. Buttons. Time-abandoned toothbrushes. An ancient emblem of the House of the Second. Whetstones and guns. She now knew what the P stood for: Pyrrha Dve.
But what about G? What if one had altered one’s temporal bone to affect the tympanic lobe to overwrite a specific word with something different? Her adjustment had been meant to catch a name, but it had ended up catching two. Mercy, and Augustine, and God must have thought her mad. As for the Saint of Duty himself—
“His name isn’t Ortus,” she said, totally bewildered.
She found Ortus looking at her with a helpless and equal bewilderment. He offered, “Pardon?”
“I thought you were named for him—you’re not,” she said, conclusions spooling out in front of her like an unravelled tooth, in hideous naked majesty of enamel and nerve. “My mechanism worked too well. It did not account for context. Ortus doesn’t come from a Lyctoral tradition. But what if hers did? What if we named her, accidentally, for him?”
But what could that mean? Mercymorn had said their names were considered sacred and forgotten, except for Anastasia’s, who had never attained Lyctorhood. Why would a necromantic saint’s name be evoked in such a way?
The page fell over her thumb. On the second page—much fresher—Harrow read:
THE ONLY THING OUR CIVILISATION CAN EVER LEARN FROM YOURS IS THAT WHEN OUR BACKS ARE TO THE WALL AND OUR TOWERS ARE FALLING ALL AROUND US AND WE ARE WATCHING OURSELVES BURN
WE RARELY BECOME HEROES.
She opened her mouth to ask her dead second cavalier a question about her dead first cavalier—a pattern that was starting to look less like tragedy and more like carelessness—but downstairs, Abigail was saying:
“Harrowhark? Ortus? If you are ready, we might want to move. Dulcie’s found some good-quality candles of animal fat—there’s no hope of blood, of course—but ‘fire and words’ were scourging enough with the children…”
Both Fifth adept and cavalier had the happy, quasi-contented faces of people about to embark on a favourite activity, like a hike or a game of chess, and the cavalier of the Second House had two guns slung over her back and the pressed expression of a Cohort soldier about to embark on her least favourite activity. Harrow knew with a sinking bone magician’s heart what everyone was about to do before she asked the question, but asked it anyway.
“What is the plan, Pent?”
“Why, to let ghosts bury ghosts,” she said. “With everyone’s help, I am going to exorcise the Sleeper.”
46
THE NIGHT BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER
LOOK, I HAD THE best of intentions for your body. I was very aware that I was walking around in borrowed clothes, and I did not want to scuff them, mangle them, spindle them, or otherwise do long-lasting damage. All of the moral high ground I got by falling on a spike for you would have been undone immediately if you came back to one arm, half a foot, and a disfigured ass.
But the reality was this: it took me five nightmare bees to learn how to deal with your grip, your core strength, your arm strength, your thigh muscles, and your height, and the operating thing I had to deal with in all cases was lack thereof. Even if you’d ever toned a muscle, you weighed half of me. They tossed me around like one of your skeletons, and I died three times in that buzzing, filthy, hot bedroom.
The only thing that stopped them from coming at you all at once was a lack of space: they moved as one coordinated, buzzing, snapping posse. To win, they only had to swarm us and they knew it. I played for space and position, kept the two-hander low on the hip because I needed whatever cover I could get you—locked three of them at bay with big cross strikes, and then I overcompensated because the weight of my sword pulled you with it, and one of the death bees did a little jiggly skull dance to the right and planted that massive stinger right in my side.
It went in all the way—a hand wide at the base, leaking acid all over your insides. I slammed the guard down and it snapped off in side you, which hadn’t been what I wanted—the creature fell back, and I staggered and slashed blindly, and the stinger worked its way out with a pop. The sword I had to hold overhead in one hand as I used the other to keep everything inside you; stuff was coming out, Harrow, I don’t know precisely what stuff because I’m not a goddamn necromancer. Let’s call it some small intestine. Whatever it was should’ve stayed safely tucked away in your abdomen but was making a pretty serious bid for escape. We should have keeled over and died saying sadly, Oops.
We didn’t. The slippery coils went in when I pressed, and I had to get your hand out of the way of the skin growing back over your fingers. I got us to the bathroom doorway and tried to narrow the field; I shattered the skull of one scuttling toward me and severed its gross black eye stalks—and they were all different; each one had a different skull, and one traded mandible saws for a mouth ringed entirely in poison stingers, which it pumped like darts into every surface, and after a while I didn’t even bother trying to brush them off your arms. We were upright. That was the most important thing.
