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In the ten thousand and first year of our Lord—that wretched bastard! That devious master of lies!—Harrowhark Nonagesimus stood in the icy water of the Locked Tomb and looked at the place where the Body had laid. The chains at each end lay broken across the smooth rock. Something was touching Harrow’s face, and when she reached for it, her hand came away bloody. Her hair was stuck to her lips. She tried to push it away clumsily, moving like a child. The Body had been there, and then she was gone. Ianthe had been there in the water, and then she was gone. Gideon had been there, and then she was gone. The agonizing pain that had woken Harrow was quickly fading. It was very dark.
“Harrow.” Someone was standing beside her. She could not see who it was. She looked at the place where the Body had laid as if through a long tunnel and could not turn away. But, very slowly, she rotated her feet (which did not seem to be working quite right) and her head (working slightly better than the feet) and saw, with great relief, that it was Camilla.
And then she stepped closer, and it wasn’t Camilla at all. Strange eyes were in her face. Not Camilla’s eyes, not Sextus’ eyes. It was someone else. Harrow stumbled backwards as the stranger reached a useless hand towards her. “You moron,” she spat furiously, horror driving her body. “You idiot, you obsessive fool. What have you done?”
The stranger winced. “Harrow, please. Let’s leave this place and then we’ll talk about it. You’ve been injured- you’re going to get hypothermia if we stay here. Please, let’s go.”
Harrow pushed the stranger's hand away. “There’s nothing to talk about,” she said. "You've gone too far. You have undone yourselves." The stranger’s face did something weird then, something Camilla never would have done with it. Harrow pushed past them and struggled through the water towards the bank, past the strange assortment of people standing on the other side. Once she was alone in one of the Ninth’s many narrow corridors, her feet stuttered. She couldn’t go to her cell. That was the first place Aiglamene would look for her.
Instead, she ended up in what passed for a kitchen on the Ninth. It was nothing like the kitchens at Canaan House, or on the Mithraeum. It was tiny, secluded and empty, with a large table taking up most of the floor space. She could hardly get a chair out fast enough before she collapsed into it, her hands disrupting a layer of black dust that coated the table.
Harrow had wanted to come home for so long. She had wanted the dull taste of the snowleek paste she used to eat, and the comforting cool dark of her cell, and the expansive sanctuary of the green-glowing chapel. And here it was, all around her, and yet it was not home. Home included a vague sense of Gideon’s presence at all times, just on the edge of her awareness. This was the Ninth as the others must see it: void and lightless.
She had been staring at the wall for what felt like a very long time when the Saint of Duty opened the door. Harrow stumbled to her feet, called on the bone shards in her pockets and formed a truly pathetic little spear. Her energy reserves were entirely gone, and more blood was dripping down her face. She thought again, Gideon, and prepared to die.
“I’m not him,” said the Saint of Duty. “I’m the cavalier. He’s dead.”
Harrow waited. The cavalier just stood there, looking at her.
“I’m Pyrrha,” said the cavalier. “You’re Harrowhark.”
Harrow huffed angrily. “I am not so lost as to forget my own name.”
“Okay,” said Pyrrha. “Just checking.”
Pyrrha did not seem to intend to move from the doorway. Harrow pushed her hair back from her face and slowly began to inch towards the door, still holding her small bone spear in her hand. It was little more than a sharp stick.
“Wait,” said Pyrrha. “I can help you with your hair, if you want. Until you have a chance to fix it yourself. I’ve had a lot of practice.”
The thought that Pyrrha had been touching her hair while she had been gone felt like a violation of the highest degree. She was instantly jealous of her own body, having been touched by someone else with what must have been gentleness. She wanted to throw up from the whiplash. But here was permission- it had already happened, and could not be undone. There was no reason not to let it happen again. She had already lost all the dignity she had to lose. Perhaps, at least, she could use the opportunity to acquire some new information.
“Fine,” she said. “If it’s really so important to you.”
Pyrrha smiled at that, and Harrow was just about to refuse after all when Pyrrha slowly removed a small backpack from her shoulders and produced from it a hairbrush and two black circles of elastic. The Ninth did not have these things, but Harrow had heard about them sometimes, in the few non-Ninth books she used to read as a child. “Take a seat,” said Pyrrha, gesturing at the table. Harrow picked a chair near the door for easy escape purposes. She held her breath as Pyrrha moved behind her. The first touch of a hand on the lengths of her hair sent a static shock through her scalp. She braced herself to sit in stiff silence for however long this endeavour might take and promptly lost all hope of learning anything from the Saint of Duty’s cavalier.
Pyrrha didn’t share her resolutions, though. She seemed like a talker. Harrow hated talkers. Most of them. “I met your girl, by the way. Your cavalier. It was on the Mithraeum, right after my necromancer died fighting the Resurrection Beast. She popped up in your body confused and offended as hell, and we had the chance to get to know each other for all of five minutes before we got dragged into the river. I liked her, though. I can see how you complement each other. You’re both hard to kill. And now that I’ve seen her proper body- well, I always was a sucker for a redhead. I get it, is all I’m saying.”
Harrow’s cheeks burned. She stared stonily ahead. Pyrrha’s big hands carded through her hair gently, followed by a soft brush. It was nearly unbearable.
“What happened to all the other kids here, anyway? Aiglamene said all the ones we’ve seen are new. As in, just arrived on-planet,” Pyrrha asked.
Harrow committed herself to telling half the truth. Some measure of disclosure was necessary to find out what she wanted to know. “They died when they inhaled a toxic gas that flooded the creche.”
“Huh.”
Pyrrha’s hands tugged her hair gently. It didn’t hurt, exactly. Harrow was surprised at how much it didn’t hurt. She was surprised enough to keep talking when she should have stopped already. Years ago, maybe. “Gideon was in the creche at the time. But she survived.”
Pyrrha ran her brush through the ends of Harrow’s hair, holding it in the middle to keep the hair from tugging on her scalp. “And what did you make of that?” She didn’t sound surprised. Just curious.
Harrow had a theory. “I thought she must have necromantic origins. Lyctoral, or something like it.” Another reason Harrow had never wanted Gideon to leave the Ninth. She was sure someone out there had wanted Gideon. The evidence was all over her. If Gideon ever found that out, she would be insufferable. And maybe, gone. Harrow couldn’t take that risk.
“A fair assumption,” said Pyrrha. She began separating Harrow’s hair into sections. Harrow didn’t know what exactly she was doing, but she seemed to be doing it very confidently. Harrow tried not to think about what that implied.
“Your necromancer. His name was Gideon.” This was not a question, but it probably should have been.
Pyrrha gave a sharp, bitter little laugh. It contrasted strangely with the voice she was using to do it. “Yeah, that’s what John called him. At least it suited him. ‘Destroyer, one who cuts down.’ Poor Mercymorn. I never knew what possessed him to call her that. Mercymorn, can you believe him?”
Harrow could believe him, but she didn’t want to talk about Mercymorn. There was a reason she had agreed to being groomed like a child, after all. “Pyrrha,” she said. “Could your necromancer have… conceived my cavalier?”
“Well, kiddo, I thought we did. I thought she was mine. It’s a good story, right? It’s more logical than the truth.”
“So you know the truth.” So much for that perfectly good theory.
Pyrrha’s hands were now on the back of her scalp. She seemed to be making quick criss-crossing motions with her fingers. “Yeah, yeah, it all came out. The moment Augustine and Mercymorn saw your girl’s eyes in your face it all came out.”
Those inexplicable yellow eyes, like heartwood amber in the dark of the Ninth. “Tell me.”
“Sure, kid. It goes like this: about 500 years ago, Mercy and Augustine decided to kill John. But it took them a while to get a plan into place.”
A horrible, hazy idea was taking shape in Harrow’s brain. It had something to do with blood, maybe. Or a dream, or maybe a party. A party in a dream? A kiss at a dream dinner party?
“So they thought to themselves, what is John afraid of? And of course the answer is the girl he had buried in that tomb of yours. But they can’t get her without getting through the blood ward. You’d know that better than anyone.”
Harrow’s heart stuttered into full-on freefall. “I- I did get through the blood ward,” she croaked out. The white flash of a Cohort uniform. Her Divine Highness.
Pyrrha whistled. “So you’ve seen her before then. Well. That explains a lot.” She was putting on elastic on the end of the section of hair on the left side of Harrow’s head.
“I thought I had just… figured it out. Or that it let me through because I’m descended from Anastasia’s line. But I was such a dullard! It was her- I had Gideon’s blood on my hands. I had her blood on my hands.” She’d been in the middle of scratching the skin off Gideon’s face, when she’d decided to open the Tomb. How could she have been so blind?
“Lover’s quarrel?” said Pyrrha, with what sounded like a smirk.
Harrow considered getting up and leaving, just for that. But as always, her curiosity bid her stay. “We were kids,” she said shortly.
“Ah.”
Another half-formed horrible idea was bouncing around Harrow’s brain like a hyperactive insect. “What about her mother? Did Mercy….?”
Pyrrha’s hands slowed for a moment. “That was the plan, sort of. But Mercy had recruited Commander Wake from Blood of Eden- you must have seen photos of her? Red hair, looks like your Gideon?”
“Oh,” said Harrow, relieved. “The one who was haunting me.”
“Yeah, her. What a woman. She was the love of my life. And my necromancer’s too, I suppose.”
Harrow didn’t ask about this. Harrow hoped fervently that this particular topic would never come up again. “Your necromancer didn’t know about you,” she said instead.
“No,” Pyrrha said. Her hands were slowly making their way down the right side of Harrow’s scalp, smoothing out each section of hair carefully before she wove it together with the others.
“You let him think he was insane,” she accused.
“I’d only come to the surface more recently. Sometime in the last hundred years, I’d say. I didn’t want to give myself away before I knew what John would do about it.”
A valid concern, Harrow thought. “So she- what about Mercy?”
“I guess Mercy’s biological matter didn’t last the journey, so Wake took it upon herself to move forward with the mission. She never was capable of tactical retreat. She carried and delivered that baby all on her own, on a ship hovering above the Ninth. She was supposed to blow the baby up in front of the door to the Tomb, but John had decided he wanted her gone years before, and Mercy and Augustine made sure Gideon got to her first. By accident, but they did. Gideon was like an animal that way. He’d do anything John asked, just for scraps. Some people are born like that, desperate for someone to devote themselves to. Task-driven. Really just need a job. Dog people, I call them. How did your cavalier get the name Gideon, anyway?”
Harrow knew this story. It had always been mysterious, but back then she’d never been interested in trying to learn anything more, for fear of what she might find out. “I was told that when they attempted to communicate with the woman’s ghost, she screamed that name three times. She would say nothing else.”
“God,” said Pyrrha. “God!” Her fingers stopped moving entirely. Harrow sat frozen under her hands, hardly breathing.
There was silence for a moment. Then, as if she’d never been distressed at all, Pyrrha resumed her movements and said, “Tell me something about your Gideon.”
Harrow’s thoughts staggered. The concept of Gideon was so infinite that it defied description. There was no one little fun fact that could possibly represent her. She said, lamely, “She can sing very well, but she thinks choir is detestably dull and only uses her talents to compose disgusting rhymes of a very childish nature.”
Pyrrha said, smiling, “A girl after my own heart.”
The sound of that smile engulfed Harrow’s resolve. “Gideon is the only good thing I’ve ever had. The only good thing,” she said fiercely, and then hated herself for it.
“Well, little nun,” said Pyrrha. Harrow glowered uselessly at the opposite wall. “I think you need to find your girl and tell her that to her face.”
Harrow faltered. “I haven’t been good to her.” I have punished her and tortured her at every turn. I lost her.
“And you think John has?” Pyrrha’s voice was wry, overflowing with irony.
Harrow considered this. The hands that had almost destroyed her casually snapped an elastic onto the section of hair behind Harrow’s right ear. Static ran through her intercostal muscles. “No.”
Pyrrha drew back, allowing Harrow room to stand up and face her. Harrow ran her hands over her head, feeling two woven lines running down either side of her scalp. She was forced to admit that her hair was satisfactorily contained. As was her part in the social contract, she said, “It is good.” Not quite thank you. That was too much.
The Saint of Duty’s chapped face was wearing an uncharacteristic half-smile. “Go get your cavalier, Nonagesimus. You’ve got one of those dog people on your hands, and she needs her job back.”
“I’m going to set her free,” Harrow corrected. “I don’t expect her to serve me any longer.”
Pyrrha just looked amused again. “You can certainly try,” she said. “Now go. Talk to the Sixth.”
Harrow went.