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Ianthe was chewing pettishly on a lock of that bone-yellow hair. I added, “I need you to lay off. I was already the worst thing that ever happened to her, and she doesn’t need you trying to one-up that, like, Bet I can make this double shit.”
I watched her recross her legs slowly at the knee. She was no longer examining her nails. She looked at me with a searching, almost studious expression, pale lashes down over her dead-man’s eyes. Her biceps weren’t bad, actually, there was definite muscle in her remaining skim-milk arm. Nothing to write home about, but she didn’t have to be completely ashamed. Unlike you.
“You’re wrong, you know,” she said calmly. “It’s an interesting rev elation. Perhaps it even gives some context. But my … attachment … to Harry isn’t remotely what you think it is. I’m not her cavalier, her servant or thrall. I am a Lyctor … Harrow is a Lyctor … and the centuries will entangle us whether she wants them to or— Nav, if you persist in making jack-off motions when I am talking, I will show you what Harrow’s kidneys look like.”
“That! That’s what I’m talking about,” I said. “Don’t show me her kidneys. Don’t think about her kidneys. Don’t do anything with her goddamn kidneys. Get a grip. Don’t look at her blood, or lick her bones, or do any of the shit necromancers lie and say they don’t do the moment two of them get nasty.”
She shrugged that gold-skinned shoulder.
“What can I say,” she said. “I love a little gall on gall.”
“Reverse everything I just told you,” I said. “Let’s get married.”
“Ah, the romance I have been awaiting all my life,” she said pleasantly. “Babs always said it would come along … or at least, he once said I would go to hell and get fucked, which I took as a roundabout way of expressing the same thing. That’s all I had to give you, Gideon: now we are going to get out of my bedroom, and I am going to take you to Teacher.”
The Emperor of the Nine Houses. The Necrolord Prime.
I said, “No, thanks. I’m good.”
“He needs to know. He can help you.”
“I might lie down and see if this fixes itself,” I suggested.
“Do you want Harrowhark to reclaim rightful ownership of her body, or not?” she asked reasonably.
She knew I couldn’t argue with that, and when she looked at my face, she added: “This is your chance, Gideon. If you want to help her, this is the only way.” And, for the third stab: “I will remind you that a Resurrection Beast is descending on us, on her, as we speak.”
If you’d come back, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up following Ianthe Tridentarius to see God. But you didn’t; you were gone. Might’ve been a good thing in this instance, honestly. I still didn’t know if you were going to kick my ass for that conversation, or if you would be sorry for me. I knew which one would have been worse.
49
“I am the Emperor’s Hand; do not thou persist in this combat; matchless am I with the long blade—”
Ortus Nigenad’s voice reverberated around that ice-rimed, organ-swagged facility like one of the Sleeper’s gunshots. The great body, the one that Harrowhark had in her crueller youth assumed would look best once the man was dead and his bones settled in the family monument, proved to possess a pair of lungs that could declaim to wake the dead.
Abigail’s voice rose with his, though hers was desperate and somewhat wild: “Nigenad, you think too much of me!”
“Never, lady!—Matchless alike in my magecraft. Fall to your knees and be glad that I spare thee; thy courage is mighty:”
Book Five. Harrowhark’s least favourite.
“Oh, God,” she heard Abigail say. “God, please help me.”
Heavy, booted steps approached the coffin. Harrow dared not poke her head around its bulk, and anyway she knew what she would see. Instead, she scattered a fistful of crushed ash in a wide half-circle around herself and Ortus and raised it into a jagged wall of calvarial bone, six feet high and an inch thick: the toughest and thickest posterior parietal she could manage in her pre-Lyctoral state. The shell absorbed some of the force of Ortus’s declamation, rendering it flatter and less thunderous, but it was still impressively resonant as he continued: “‘Mightier yet is thy folly if thou think’st yet to oppose me.’ The Lyctor spoke, and was silent—”
The bone fence shattered. It was impossible. Harrow now clearly remembered the wall of bone she had summoned up around herself, Gideon, and Camilla Hect, in those dreadful final moments on the garden terrace. She had been almost spent, and yet her barrier had held off a determined onslaught by one of the Emperor’s fists and gestures for at least a minute. Cytherea had been ten thousand years old and heir to limitless necromantic power. The Sleeper had a baggy orange suit and a gun collection. Yet now she shouldered her way through Harrow’s wall with irritable, disgusted motions, as if it were an unexpected curtain of cobweb in a catacomb archway. The bone barely even seemed to break; it simply flaked away in chunks, like old plaster from a ceiling. The Sleeper forced her upper body through the crumbling wreckage, gun thrust out before her, and shot Ortus in the belly.
Ortus reflexively clutched at the wound, and everything went very still. He took his bloody hand away and stared at it as though awed. Harrow looked from the hole in his abdomen—small and neat, as though drilled there—to his face, and then to the Sleeper, still wedged halfway through that absurd torn rift in what should have been solid bone. The gun sent up a curl of smoke, and that haz-covered face revealed nothing.
Her cavalier cleared his throat again, and said, faltering, working that huge resonant bellow: “Nonius, woun…” He had to swallow. “Nonius, wounded…” But he managed no more.
Harrowhark’s heart crumpled like foil. She latched on to the ripped edges of her wall and drove outward, hard, hurling the Sleeper backward off her feet and through the air. The shattered lumps of debris she spun upward into constructs—so easy even now, easy since she’d been a child—one, two, three, four clattering skeletons flinging themselves onto the attacker to rip and wrench with fleshless hands. The Sleeper was on her feet to meet them. She shot the first through the skull and the whole body resolved into ash, which was not how it worked—did the same to the second—the third managed to lay hold of her free arm before it got a bullet through its spinal column and crumbled into garbage. Harrow’s ears pounded and her head throbbed and her skin felt wet, and she dragged up four more to follow them. She did not know why Ortus had to go mad now, but when the Ninth House advanced, its Reverend Daughter would advance with it.
She roared, her voice not so much a ringing trumpet as it was a howling alarm:
“Nonius, wounded full sore, spat blood and gave him a grim smile; nor did the sword in his hand shake–”
From behind her, Ortus said weakly, “Harrow—”
“Boldly he answered the saint: ‘’Tis true that—’” and there she hesitated. Nonius’s responses were generally where she began to think about anything else in the whole universe.
She became aware that Abigail was chanting: her voice did not betray any fear, nor sense of desperation. The words melted together like wax beading on an edge of a candle, sublimating into pale liquid, resolving into beads that stuck midway down the taper. Harrow caught her plea, distracted: “—when I come into my homeland, my family will sacrifice in their halls for you: the best of all our blood, the freshest; the best of all our blood, the oldest—”
As Harrow floundered, Ortus whispered—
“‘Your power is great…’”
She continued hastily, “—‘your power is great, o servant of masterful Canaan; nor may I hope to be counted your equal in skill, nor in craft, nor even in bodily vigour…’”
The Sleeper smashed a last skeleton into powder with a blow from her gloved fist that looked almost dismissive. “It’s over,” she said, and aimed the gun at Harrow’s head.
The candles burst forth in chrysanthemum flames of blue, fully six feet high. Time seemed to gel, and Harrow, hands outflung, watched the bones she had scattered pause in midair, like falling white stars. The fire wailed upward. She swept her gaze across the room—there lay Magnus and Dyas and Protesilaus, still where they had been felled; there was Dulcie Septimus, propping herself up in a doorway with wide and violent eyes; and there was—
