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“Harrow!”
Harrow expected everything to darken. Harrow expected, frankly, to die.
The ground was hard beneath her back. The wind blew hot. She saw bright red, too bright to be blood, and then the familiar face, paintless.
“Griddle,” she managed.
“Oh, good,” Gideon said, except that her face didn’t say good, it said some other word, probably one with four letters.
Harrow’s body was one great bloodbeat of pain, and any movement brought on finer, teeth-edged agonies which made it impossible to think of anything but how she hurt. “Be honest, Nav.”
“You look beat to shit. It’s not,” Gideon was shaking, “not your best look, honestly. This much blood’s definitely overkill.” She was cradling her pierced arm to her chest.
“Thank you,” Harrow said.
Gideon didn’t seem to like that either. “No. Shut up.”
Harrow’s vision was fogged, even in the bright, moving sunlight, but behind Gideon she could see broken outlines, regions of grey. Things were beginning to come back, like a clutter of smashed and mismatched bones she was trying to assemble. The ancient and impossible construct, and the black eyes of Colum the Eighth as he killed his adept, and Ianthe reciting the components of the megatheorem as though it was a poem for children, and Gideon gasping, Harrow—Dulcinea’s a Lyctor—
“How did we—”
She had to stop: her nose and throat were full of blood. She coughed, which felt like knives in her rib-cage. Gideon waited for her to finish.
“Well, Cam decided to run straight for the giant construct with the tentacles, which was insane and absolutely amazing—so obviously I helped, because if I hadn’t Palamedes Sextus would have haunted me forever. And you did… something to Cytherea—I mean, you stuck a big bone thing through her chest, and I think her lung went pop. She just keeled over. There was a lot of weird gunge. And then you… looked like you’d died, which was really uncool.”
“Oh,” said Harrow. “How heroic of us.”
“It was,” said Camilla Hect, a grey shape appearing from the amorphous region of grey, “extremely fucking stupid.”
As she approached, the cavalier of the Sixth House was wrapping bandages around herself from clavicle to elbow. Grime and blood were smeared down her robes like a deranged finger-painting, and her dark, blunt-cut hair was pallid with dust.
Harrow nodded to her, and regretted it immediately. She managed a flat, “Camilla.”
“Harrowhark.”
There was a shattered quality to Camilla which made her difficult to look at. The fact of her loss stood between them like a spectre. Harrow almost imagined she could see him in his bedrobe and slippers, holding a marker pen and apologising to the corpse of Abigail Pent for nearly treading on her arm.
“We owe Sextus a blood debt,” she said, which was so inadequate she wished it unsaid.
“He died knowing the truth,” Camilla said. “That would have satisfied him, even if it was terrible. And… he always did like to show off.”
Harrow gave a small, painful smile. Thanergetic fission: it would have been brief, and so violent and bright, like a star gone supernova.
Camilla and Gideon began speaking. The sound broke over Harrow and was lost. It did not seem terribly important.
She concentrated, for a while, on breathing. Her lungs felt thin, as though made of flimsy, and her heart juddered, and there was blood in her mouth. She was very tired, every atom of her hurting and ruptured and spent.
“Harrow!”
“Hm?”
She prised open her eyes. It was difficult.
Gideon glared down. Scrappy rubber bandage had been wadded and tied around her bleeding arm.
“You need to siphon from me.”
“No,” Harrow breathed. “Not after—what happened with the Eighth.”
“Don’t be stupid, Reverend Daughter. This is the worst possible place to be dead, somebody will probably turn you into shitty architecture or force you to make soup until the heat death of the universe—”
“Griddle—“
“You’ve done it before. You know I’m good for it. Just fucking siphon, or I’ll—”
It was a rare day, Harrow reflected, when Gideon ran out of threats.
“I told you—”
“You’re dying, idiot,” Gideon said, as though Harrow was unaware. “And that,” she pulled in a sharp breath and her head sank a bit so that it touched Harrow’s arm, before she shook herself, “that isn’t allowed—that’s not the deal and I won’t allow it. So suck it up and let me do this for you, or I’ll do something extremely dramatic and instantly regrettable.”
The idea that Gideon might do anything which wasn’t both dramatic and regrettable was quite funny, but Harrow couldn’t bring herself to laugh because she thought her chest might crack open like a glass window—and because Gideon’s amber eyes were hot and bright with betrayal.
“Gideon…”
“What about all that stuff—restoring the Ninth? What about living forever to see your frozen sword girl? What about me?”
Harrow looked into that awful, beloved face with its many scratches and bruises, and said, “All right.”
It was a terrible effort even to lift her hand to Gideon’s neck—but there was Gideon’s hand under her shoulder, propping her up. The skin was red and sticky. She found the carotid, full of blood, full of life. The problem—which she’d known even before this exploration—was that Gideon wasn’t exactly good for it, having lost quite a lot of blood already. The temptation would be to take and take recklessly, a thought which horrified her.
“This is a bad idea.”
“Of course it is,” Gideon said. “But we’re fresh out of good ideas, or even vaguely underwhelming ideas. And nobody else is going to die here.”
Harrow clamped onto the vein and began to draw.
“Come on, what’re you—“ Gideon stopped, rigid. “Oh, fuck.”
The relief was almost instant. Thalergy was warm and turbulent, and it sparked along Harrow’s veins as though they had become live wires.
The process was parasitic, she knew, but it seemed disturbingly like transference. Gideon had turned pale, so pale that she appeared to be fading—even the alarm red of her hair was diminished. Blood-sweat sprang up on her face and throat, and ran watery pink down her temple.
“It’s great,” Gideon said, thickly. “Really super. Keep going.” Blood slithered out of her nose.
Harrow felt a lightness in her chest. At the same time, the pain was leeching through—rattling, spasmodic pain. Gideon gave a wracking cough.
“No,” Harrow said, “no, I can’t—“
“Shut up—” Gideon bared her bloody teeth like a snarl, panting and spasming. “Keep going, you c—“
The rest of the insult was not forthcoming, because suddenly Gideon pitched right over and part of Harrow’s vision dissolved into sick blackness.
“No!” She let go.
Lying beside her, Gideon was breathing as if she’d sprinted here from the pit, and her face was sallow grey. She shook and shook.
“Gideon—”
Her cavalier gave a loathsome heave and coughed up a gobbet of blood. Then she lolled onto her back and wiped her face with her sleeve, smearing blood and old paint into a ghastly mask. “Just as sexy the third time, right?”
Harrow laughed, wheezingly. It hurt—but it hurt less than before.
Gideon’s punch-drunk, red-toothed grin was beautiful. “Well, that was bracing.”
“Are you—“
“Grand,” Gideon said. “I’m just going to lie here until my intestines stop doing a dance.”
But she reached over and took Harrow’s hand.
Her throat and lungs now clear, Harrow could smell brine. She could hear the slap and wash of the sea. Dead leaves were falling around them, curled like paper in a fire, and strands of grey plant matter. The sun was warm.
“So we—we won.” The wind stirred her bloodied skirts around her ankles.
“Yeah,” Gideon said. “I don’t know. Is this winning? It feels shit.”
“Who’s left?”
“Just me and Cam. Cytherea’s a goner. Ianthe’s... also gone. Not dead, probably—but disappeared. Minus one arm.”
“I didn’t see it coming,” Harrow said. “Either of them. Dulcinea—”
“Yeah. Turns out, she never made it here. Cytherea got to her midspace and wore her like a flimsy nightdress made of blood cancer. So.”
It was almost unthinkable. “All that time, the Emperor’s seventh saint was here—watching us, listening to us—” She had known there was something dangerous about Dulcinea, something too cunning and capable for a withering woman who journeyed to the First House to die.
“Oh god,” said Gideon. “You’re getting all hot and bothered just thinking about it, aren’t you?”
“No,” Harrow said curtly. “She was—an abomination.”
“She was really fucking good, is what she was. Are you sure you aren’t just a teensy bit sad you didn’t punt me down some stairs so you could make gigantic bone monsters come out of the floor?”
“I wouldn’t have done that to you.”
Gideon clicked her tongue. “I know that, moron.”
The wind picked up, and the waves. Harrow could feel the warm air move on her skin; all her paint had come off. Gideon’s thumb rubbed across the backs of her fingers in a slow and steady circle. She slept.
When she woke, the sun had set. The light was dwindling, the sky a wash from palest to darkest blue.
Gideon was up and kneeling beside her, in an odd imitation of a fealty pledge.
“I’m going to move you,” Gideon said. “So don’t—stop breathing or something, that would be really ungrateful.”
“Nav—”
With Gideon’s good arm, she was hefted up and over Gideon’s shoulder like a sack. Harrow clamped her teeth and didn’t scream, even when Gideon jostled her and a claggy, ferric taste rose up her throat.
“You—clumsy oaf—”
The clumsy oaf gave her a pat on the back which might have been apologetic, and carried her over the threshold of the First House with shambling steps.
“Nav, your knee—”
“My sword is heavier than you,” Gideon said stridently, but she stopped to lean against the buckled wall before going on.
The atrium of Canaan House was a shadow of a shadow of its former self. Beams and pillars lay half-collapsed, the walls were smashed outward in heaps of rubble, and the floor was cracked and pitted and sunken. Water ran out of the fountain and through the fissures. The air was full of plaster dust, like a fog, and the hot salt wind blew in.
They passed into a corridor. Sometimes Gideon waited, slumped against a wall while Camilla, ahead, kicked open a door or pushed aside some debris.
“We decided to stick together,” Gideon said. “Not that it’ll make much difference if Princess Ianthe decides to come back and finish us off. Then again, maybe she’s ‘armless.” A big grin.
Harrow wondered if her soul could depart her body out of sheer dismay. “Nav—”
Camilla brute-forced another door. Boots sounding on the wood floor, Gideon carried Harrow into one of Canaan House’s many dilapidated sitting-rooms. Portraits crowded on the walls, frames growing brown and green moss. The glass windows were covered in algae.
She was laid down on a couch which, at least, did not squelch and smelled only slightly of damp.
“I’m not a corpse in a sack, Griddle—”
“Listen, dread marchioness, I’ve got one good arm and one good leg—”
“I’ll… go and look for food,” Camilla said, and was gone so quickly she might have turned into a spectre.
Harrow pushed herself up, wincing at the aches in her joints. “Well,” Gideon said. “You’re not sicking up blood from all your face holes.”
“Thank you for that percipient professional assessment,” Harrow said. As she did, she thought of Sextus and a weight dropped into her stomach. She shivered.
“Cold?”
“I did leave most of my blood on the floor outside, Nav.”
Gideon gave a sloppy salute. “Right you are, gloom mistress.”
She staggered off, and returned with a heap of dowdy, mouldering blankets Harrow recognised from the Ninth House quarters. She proceeded to pile them on top of Harrow, apparently with the intention of burying her alive.
Camilla chose that moment to reappear, bearing an enormous platter of food with remarkable dexterity given her injury. She set it onto an uneven table with a cracked glass top and hefted the table one-handed over to the couch where Harrow lay.
“Bread, nuts, fruit. Other things.” She held up the dusty wine bottle which had been tucked awkwardly under her arm. “And booze.”
Between them, the two cavaliers devoured (what appeared to be) all the food remaining in Canaan House. Camilla pried the cork out of the bottle with a dagger, and they passed it back and forth. Leaning on one arm, Harrow picked mistrustfully at the small red fruits.
“There was meat,” Camilla said, “but I didn’t recognise it.”
Gideon chewed and swallowed an enormous mouthful of bread. “Magnus probably would’ve known what to do with it.”
“The only thing he was good at,” Harrow said. She didn’t understand Gideon’s fondness for the hapless cavalier of the Fifth.
“So what? That dinner party was ace.”
“It was a distraction.”
“It was the last time some of them ever had fun in their lives,” Gideon said, and Harrow knew that mutinous expression like her own hand—Gideon girding herself for a fight.
“And an hour later the Fifth and his necromancer were dead at the bottom of the access hatch.”
“Which could’ve been anyone. Which could’ve easily been us.”
“Nearly was,” said Camilla. There was no answer to that.
Harrow turned back to Gideon, who gave her a look. It was far worse than the skin-shrivelling glares Griddle used to give her; it was patient and knowing and a little sad. Harrow hated it, because it worked.
“Give that here,” she said, motioning for the bottle, and Gideon shrugged and handed it to her. She brought it to her lips and tipped it up. It was the same wine served at the dinner party—very red, and too sweet.
They carried on drinking until the bottle was empty.
“This stuff’s all right,” Gideon said, leaning her head in her hand. Her amber eyes were soft, and slightly unfocused.
“There was another bottle in the pantries,” Camilla said.
“No,” Harrow said sharply. “We are not going to appear before the Emperor drunk or hungover.”
She lay down in her cocoon of blankets. Even without seeing it, she knew Gideon was shrugging at Camilla—and probably rolling her eyes.
The pain wasn’t so bad now. Her eyelids felt heavy, and she tried vainly to keep them open, then gave up. The last thing she saw was Gideon sitting in a sunken armchair, looking steadily back.
Harrow sat up, heart hammering against her ribs, before she realised there was no immediate danger. Canaan House was quiet, creaking to itself in the wind. It was still dark.
She said to the darkness:
“Stop lurking, Griddle.”
The darkness said, “Not lurking.” But it shuffled its feet.
“Come here.”
Gideon limped over. With an obedience Harrow would have found suspicious under any other circumstance, she sat on the couch, facing Harrow.
“Show me your arm.”
“You can barely sit up.”
“I am the greatest bone-witch of my generation, Gideon,” she said, which was explanation enough. “I can do it.”
She touched Gideon’s bandaged forearm and breathed deeply, in and out. Bone was harder to perceive through wrappings of skin and muscle and cloth, but she didn’t have to feel around for long: Cytherea’s sword had gouged into the humerus, grinding part of it into splinters. Mending it was delicate work, like a puzzle with hundreds of maddeningly tiny osteal pieces she could only nudge into place with the edge of a spoon.
With a gasp, Gideon flinched a bit. “What are you doing?”
“Stop fidgeting, Griddle.”
The pieces in place, she wove the bone tissue back into a long smooth edge, and managed to pull the gaping flesh back together a little. As she did, she felt a pull through all the meat of her body. The effort made her shake, and when it was done her face was clammy and sweat ran down her ribs.
She said, “That is the best I can do with it. Were I—”
“S’fine,” Gideon said. “Feels loads better.”
“Now your knee.”
A sigh, and this too was offered. The patella was broken—a thin vertical fracture which split it cleanly in half. Harrow imagined taking the two pieces in her hands and pressing them neatly together. The jagged edges of mealy, honeycomb-like tissue fused. Her hands trembled, and she saw black spots shimmer up in front of Gideon’s worried face.
“Ow,” said Gideon. “Thanks.”
Harrow nodded. As she lowered her hands, it felt like an internal string had been cut. She wobbled, nearly slumping forward, and then got a faceful of dusty shirt as Gideon’s arms folded around her.
She went stiff. Gideon snorted. “Come on, you chilly bitch, don’t be weird.”
“When did you last bathe?” Harrow said, which she could admit was a cheap and rather transparent jab.
Ignoring it, Gideon laid her down and stretched out behind her, tugging the blankets over them both.
“Take off your boots,” Harrow snapped.
This Gideon ignored as well. She shuffled up as close as her wound would permit and draped her good arm over Harrow’s side. She was very warm and solid at Harrow’s back, and she smelled of bone and blood and damp.
Harrow had to remind herself to breathe all the way in; she was tensed, holding air at the top of her lungs. The silence was very full.
Gideon stirred, nudging Harrow’s leg with her knee, and huffed a breath beside Harrow’s ear. “What’re you going to say to His Imperial Undeadness when he gets here?”
She had almost forgotten. “I don’t know.”
“I’ve got some things in mind,” Gideon muttered. “Seeing as how a lot of cavaliers have got ate, and the glorious Necrolord is surprisingly okay with that. He helped come up with it, Ianthe said.”
It was funny, Harrow thought, that Gideon couldn’t abide the consuming of one soul, but forgave Harrow for having consumed two hundred.
She said, “Now I know what becoming a Lyctor entails... I can’t contemplate it.“
“Yeah. Turns out, God’s a bit fucked up. He probably won’t want us because we’re two whole entire people instead of a grisly soul porridge slopping around in one body. One flesh, one end—he really meant it.”
“We’re the most capable adept-cavalier pair the Ninth House has ever produced. We’re also the last pair left, of any House, and the fact that I’m not willing to sacrifice you—”
“But that’s it, isn’t it? It’s all about sacrifice, with a big side-helping of drama. Two hundred regular kids for one baby adept. Ten billion people for an Emperor. One cavalier for immortality and the universe’s biggest, juiciest necro-battery. All that Locked Tomb nun stuff, puppeting your parents around—everything you’ve done leads to this.”
“I know, Gideon.” She lowered her voice. “I know.”
“Quick question: am I allowed to dropkick the Emperor into the sea? You can’t say he doesn’t deserve it.”
“No,” Harrow said. “I can’t.” She had been trying not to think of it, but a dark thing in the corner of her mind was whispering about lies and anathema, and it showed her Cytherea the First’s bright, ferocious face. That was what it meant to serve the Emperor.
Then something else occurred to her, which swept all of that away. Her stomach tightened as though she was plunging from a great height. Their agreement.
She said, “I expect you’ll ask him to send you to Trentham.” Her voice was as flat and disinterested as she could manage. “You’ve got the signed purchase of commission. You can—”
She stopped, swallowing the rest. Gideon gave a small, low chuckle. “You dumb idiot.”
“Excuse me?”
“You poor numbskull. You sorry dullard.”
Harrow, wanting the blow to fall clean and quick, said, “Gideon.”
“It’s never been clearer to me that I’m the brains of this outfit. What are you carrying around in there?” She tapped Harrow’s head. “Wet cheese?”
“Gideon.”
“I’m not going to enlist,” said Gideon. “I’m not going to Trentham.”
“What?”
“Like it or not, I’m your bloody cavalier primary. You and me—we’re it, forever.”
Harrow felt a fizzy lightness in her chest, and thought it might be elation. “You’ll stay with me?”
“Obviously.”
“Oh.”
“Besides, something really fucked up is going on. There’s all kinds of unholy, heinous shit in this place, and a million secrets, and at least one of the Emperor’s Lyctors hated him so much that she wanted to kill him, and all the Houses too. I am the vengeance of the ten billion—what the hell does that mean? So, like, there’s also no way I’m going to miss that.”
“What did Teacher say?” Harrow murmured. “You draw him back to the place he must not return to.”
“Okay, for one thing I’m really looking forward to the day when everyone stops speaking in fucking riddles.”
“Just wait.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard that before.”
Harrow found that she was smiling. “I’m glad,” she said, quietly. “That you’ll be with me.”
“’Course you are. Without me, you’d just be bludgeoning stuff with huge skeletons. Someone’s got to do the cogitating round here.” She felt Gideon’s grin, like its own warmth.
She drifted. Gideon was a constant presence at her back, snoring lightly beside her ear.
There was light in the room, seeping watery green through the algae, when she felt Gideon jolt awake.
Camilla was in the doorway. “His ship’s about to land.”
His ship. The Emperor. Harrow could almost hear Gideon’s unspoken oh shit. For herself, she was suddenly and piercingly conscious of her bloody, filthy clothes and bare face.
She sat up, feeling so very tired. “Gideon,” she said. “Fetch my paint.”
“You still—”
“We are still the Ninth House, are we not?”
Gideon rolled off the bed and disappeared into the corridor, only a slight lagging hobble in her gait.
To Camilla, Harrow said, “Are you sure it is the imperial flagship?”
“Too big to be anything else,” Camilla said flatly. “And no one else is coming.”
Which was true, of course. Harrow pushed aside the blankets and swung her legs over the edge of the couch. She brushed bone matter from her skirt and straightened her bodice and smoothed her hair, trying not to notice that her hands were shaking. Camilla stood by the window, looking out through a gap in the clouds of algae. A low droning sound was coming down from the sky.
“I’ve realised,” said Gideon, stepping back in, “how many teeth on the floor is too many teeth on the floor. And this place is now way over the limit.” She was holding the familiar jar of white paint and stick of char, and a cloth and Harrow’s cracked piece of mirror.
Harrow nodded. “Wait outside,” she told Camilla. Gideon coughed very pointedly. “Please.” Camilla gave a jerk of her head and left.
“You could be just a teeny bit less unfriendly,” Gideon said. “She only saved our lives, that’s all.”
“She is not one of us, Nav. Remember that.” She began to take the paint pot and char from Gideon. Then she took stock of herself, and her unsteady hands, and she said, “You do it.”
“You want me to—” Gideon’s mouth stretched, as it did when she had a perfectly horrible notion. “Okay, so, how would you feel about a radical reinterpretation of ‘weirdo cultist death mask’?”
“Don’t get any ideas.”
Sitting knee-to-knee with her, Gideon dipped the fibre wadding into the pot of white paint and began to daub it onto her forehead. The thick coldness of the paint and its bitter smell were so familiar that Harrow could almost imagine she was back in her room in the gloomy bowels of Drearburh.
With the stick of char, Gideon drew around her eyes, pushing chalky, gritty black into the sockets. Another stroke around her nose, a daub across her lips, and a thick slash across each side of her jaw.
“Now you,” Harrow said, and watched her repeat the same with the mirror held up.
“Have I mentioned that I hate this stuff?”
“Only a few thousand times, Griddle.”
“Then why?”
“Because we are of the Ninth House—as much as you detest it, and I detest it, as much as we should leave that place to crumble into silence and rot and obscurity—that is what we are.”
Gideon stopped helping her pull on her robe to stare at her as though she’d grown a second head and perhaps a third arm too. “You—hate the Ninth.”
“More than anything.”
“Well, shit, Nonagesimus. How long’ve you been sitting on that bombshell?”
“It has taken everything from us. It deserves to be forgotten. Except for—”
“Except for your Locked Tomb girl.”
“Yes,” said Harrow. “But that’s a conversation for later, when the Emperor isn’t waiting for us.”
She tried to rise. Her legs trembled, threatening to fold beneath her. Abruptly she sat back down.
“Help me up,” she said, and her cavalier bent herself, and pulled Harrow’s arm across her shoulders, and brought her to her feet.
On their way down the hall, she pointed Gideon into a tiny wash-room with a long mirror on the wall. Side-by-side, they looked battered and grey. Her dark hair was matted, stuck down on one side with blood, while Gideon’s was ashy with dust. But the robes and paint did their work: the general effect was dreadful and formidable. “It will do,” she said.
With an unsteady exhale, she turned away. Gideon pulled her back, and took her face in both gloved hands, and kissed her, black mouth to black mouth. Harrow felt as though she might burst, her heart molten inside her.
There was something shy in Gideon’s expression, and something gleeful. “Just in case, you know, his Eternal Crepuscularity eviscerates us on the spot.” Harrow leaned up to kiss her again.
Side-by-side, they picked their way across the atrium and out onto the dock.
“Last chance,” said Gideon. “You’ve still got time to eat me and attain sublime Lyctorhood.”
The Imperial flagship was, indeed, too big to be anything else—it cast a great shadow. Looking up at it, Harrow resolved that she wasn’t afraid. She was exhausted, and angry, and—most importantly—she wasn’t alone.
“Just a little chew?”
“Gideon.”
Her cavalier grinned. “Come on, umbrageous supreme. Let’s go and say hello to God.”