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Harrow Nova was fourteen years old when she realized what the adopted Reverend Daughter was doing. Harrow normally dogged the older girl like a shadow, like a wraith, and she was embarrassed that she had been led astray for this long. She had been lulled into a false security, assuming – what a moron she was to assume – that Gideon Nonagesimus slept through the night in her cell.
Gideon was not intelligent, not cunning, certainly not worthy of the title of Reverend Daughter, and still she had gotten the best of Harrow. In the nights – it must have taken many nights to do this horrible deed – Gideon had been absconding from her bed and sneaking down to the most sacred space in the House of the Ninth, the most holy location in the Dominicus System, the most venerated land under the watchful gaze of God: the Locked Tomb.
But Gideon had been sloppy. In the middle of the night, Harrow Nova was doing press-ups on the floor of her cell when she heard that terrible whistle that Gideon made through her teeth to amuse herself. She froze at the apex of her exercise, arms fully extended, and listened. Sweat dripped down her pointed nose and plinked onto the cold concrete floor. There it was again. That whistle. No one else in the Ninth House would be so arrogant as to whistle .
Harrow grabbed her sword, her shoes, and the sacred chain of Samael Novenary, and slipped from her cell. She padded down the lightless stairs until she stood before the rooms of the Reverend Daughter. She pressed her ear to the door and made quiet her breath, until she would be able to hear the breathing of the Daughter within. She knew this from experience, having spent many moments listening for any scrap of information she could glean from eavesdropping.
The cell was silent. Harrow dropped to the ground, and pressed her cheek flat against the stone floors so that she could look beneath the door. The light was on – how Gideon wasted the resources of her house – and Harrow had enough light to see that the cell was empty. Instead of rising to stand, Harrow Nova simply swiveled her head so that her other cheek was against the stone, and looked instead at the dust on the floor. Gideon Nonagesimus was a frustratingly adept necromancer and was constantly leaking bone dust from her pockets. It was easy for Harrow to use the light from beneath the door to make out footprints in the fine powder on the floor. She sprang to her feet, and took off quietly after the Reverend Daughter.
Many long, silent moments later, Harrow finally got a glance at that horrible head of red hair. She had followed Gideon down into the depths of Drearburh, down past the church and the snow leek fields. Harrow paused in the shadows and peered around the corner until she could just see into the monument room. The dark stone walls framed niches that housed the bones of her sacred ancestors. In one niche, there was a lift. Gideon was inside it. The bars of the lift were pulled closed and Gideon was fiddling with the controls. Just as Harrow glimpsed her, the lift shuddered to life and began to descend.
Harrow darted forward, gauged the distance, and then dropped down into the shaft. She landed with a light thud on top of the lift, and froze.
Inside the lift, Gideon swore, then sighed. "This thing is a fucking death trap," she muttered.
Harrow stayed silent, perched on top of the wheezing, ancient metal like a spider. She waited there for long minutes as the lift rattled downward, ever downward, into the depths where laid the machines that kept the Ninth House breathing and the tomb that kept their hearts beating. Gideon was whistling. Harrow grit her teeth.
When the lift finally jolted to a stop, Gideon threw open the metal doors and stalked off between the rows of machines that whirred and grunted behind their grates. She did not look back, so she did not see Harrow Nova perched in the shadows, black eyes glinting like a predator in the night. She was a fool.
Harrow waited until Gideon was just out of sight, and then she slid down to the floor and followed.
There was unease growing in the pit of Harrow's gut. Whatever the Reverend Daughter was doing down here was not good. Whatever the Reverend Daughter did anywhere was, by definition, not good, but this place was especially not good. Was she planning on sabotaging the heating system? Was she defacing the sacred bones left standing vigil in the Anastasian? Was she down here to draw lewd drawings on the walls of the crypts? Harrow's mind filled with a myriad of horrible little deeds that Gideon could be doing to deface her house, but she pushed those thoughts away. Instead, she drew her rapier, and left her offhand drift to the chain. She schooled her mind into a blank calm so that she might defend her house in the only way she could: by the sword.
She trailed Gideon into the catacombs. The Reverend Daughter did not stop to pick through the ancient swords and off-hands as Harrow had once done, so many years ago. She did not need to find a blade that had battled a thousand years of rust and maintained an edge. Gideon probably couldn't even tell you the difference between a rapier and an offhand dagger .
But Gideon did not dally in the oblong room of the catacombs. She weaved around the piles of bones and bones that had become dust and bones that had become a powder so fine it hung in the air like mist. Harrow's heart battered against her ribs as Gideon Nonagesimus, undeserving scion of the Ninth house, pulled open a nondescript door at the other end of the room and ducked through.
Harrow sprinted across the room after her, jumping over heaps of bones and dodging piles of rusted swords. The heavy door had snapped shut by the time she got there, and she clawed at the handle, cursing the rusted mechanism, before she realized it was locked upon shutting. Harrow made a lowing, gutteral noise before this door of plain iron, this door that led to the most sacred, holy place. She was not supposed to know where this door led. It would have been her birthright, had she not been born devoid of a necromancer's aptitude. But she had found it out anyway, by sneaking and listening and holding her breath as she hid in cupboards and behind dusty, molding curtains to listen to the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father describe its location to the undeserving scum of Gideon. Gideon was not even born of this house, and still, because of her genetic aptitude for necromancy, she had been told the location of the secret door that led to the Locked Tomb.
Harrow spun around. She kicked apart piles of bones and shoved aside old rotten robes until she found a cracked and broken dagger. She took the pieces in her hands, and with practiced dexterity, began to pick the lock. It should have been easier, but Harrow's hands kept slipping in her sweaty, righteous anger.
The latch clicked. Harrow threw open the door and sprinted inside, rapier drawn. She ran down the winding passage of back-and-forth turns until she arrived at another door. She had passed through this door before, back when she was nine and sad and terribly, terribly lonely, and loneliness had driven her to walk to the door of the tomb and pray for death. She pushed open the door.
The room beyond was bathed in the lamplight of the huge glowing bulb. The walls rose up impossibly high, a cathedral of a cave, and there was the rock, and it was rolled away.
Harrow's breath caught in her throat. The rock was rolled away. Not far, only about far enough for a skinny, horrible ginger necromancer to squeeze through, but it was rolled.
In the gap she could barely see beyond it, into the darkness of a tunnel. She thought about screaming. She thought about calling the Reverend Daughter back, to challenge her to a fight to the death, anything to make her undo this horrible deed.
But she could not. Harrow Nova, true daughter of the Ninth House, could not raise her voice in this holiest of holy places. So instead she walked forward, and slipped into the tunnel. Down at the end of the dark tunnel was another rock. Harrow could see it because there was a beam of torchlight dancing over its surface, tracing the curlicues of a blood ward. The source of the light was the source of all of Harrow's contempt.
Gideon Nonagesimus, the Reverend Daughter, stood before the Rock That Must Not Be Rolled Away, and she scratched at her hair, ruffling the soft red down of it. It was the real Rock. The real entrance to the Locked Tomb. And Gideon had not yet defiled it. She would never , as long as Harrow breathed, defile it.
"Griddle," hissed Harrow. Gideon whirled around to look at her, her golden eyes wide in surprise. Harrow charged.
Or, at least, she attempted to charge. Harrow took a full three steps before she felt the tell-tale, soul-wrenching pain of a necromantic ward kick in. Her soul lurched, pulled sideways by some unseen force – the kind of force that Harrow had prayed to God and the Tomb that she would one day be able to sense and fulfill her true role as a necromancer – and she stumbled.
"Moron," said Gideon. Then Gideon was there, waving her hands over Harrow in some necromantic dance, and skeletons sprang up around her. Their sharp fingers grabbed Harrow and pulled her out of the trap. Harrow leaned forward and retched.
"This place had tons of traps. I disabled most of them," said Gideon, as a skeleton pounded Harrow's back, forcing her to cough harder. "I figured that one was so obvious that only an idiot would walk into it, and, well, here we are."
"This place was trapped to keep people like you out," wheezed Harrow.
"What, like it's hard?" said Gideon, smiling and wiping a dot of blood sweat from her brow. "It only took me two years of sneaking away in the night to get through this tunnel. You'll probably tell me you could have done it when you were nine, but that's only in the alternate reality where you weren't as necromantic as my left butt cheek." Gideon turned back towards the end of the tomb, where the giant blood ward shone in the torchlight like it was a day old, not a myriad. "This one, though," said Gideon, "This one is a doozy."
Harrow shoved at the skeleton that was still attempting to pat her on the back, and when she looked up to bash it in with her fist, she seethed.
"You put– you put—" Harrow's face burned with shame. Gideon had taken some disgusting anatomical liberties with the skeleton before her.
"I put big boobs on that one, yeah," said Gideon. She appraised her own handiwork. "I'm getting pretty good at making improvements that they didn't have in life— Fuck!" Gideon scrambled backwards, raising more skeletons in her wake as Harrow lunged at her. Harrow's footwork was perfect. The arc of her rapier was precise to within a millimeter of the arc described in her training manuals. Gideon was tripping over her own feet as she threw bones between them to keep a distance between her flesh and Harrow's blade.
"I saved you, idiot!"
"You defile this sacred place," said Harrow, as she whipped the chain of Samael off her shoulder. It smashed through pelvis and ribcage and spine, sending shrapnel of bone in all directions. "You disgrace this house. You poison the name of our house." With each declaration Harrow forced Gideon back with a swing of her blade or a lash of her chain. Gideon's unpainted face was screwed up in concentration as she tried to keep up with Harrow's onslaught.
Gideon's temples were slick with the pink of blood sweat. "Stop," she said, still moving backwards, her torch forgotten on the ground. "Let me– stop it, let me explain . "
But Harrow did not stop. Harrow did not relent. Harrow struck again and again with the anger of a Daughter scorned and disregarded. "You ruin this place," she cried. "You violate this holy land!"
"You sound like Crux," said Gideon, but she was running out of space. Her back was almost against the wall of the rock, and Harrow was relentless. More skeletons sprang up from the bone chips Gideon shook from her sleeves, but she was getting tired, and Harrow was fueled by righteous fury.
An opening. Harrow slashed with her rapier, and Gideon tried to throw a handful of bone chips between them, but her necromantically stereotypical reflexes were too slow. Harrow's old, rusty blade slipped past her defenses, and sliced Gideon across the chest. It was a shallow cut, but it tore through the fabric of Gideon's shirt and drew a red gash against her chest, just above her heart. Gideon stumbled backwards into the rock, and slapped a hand across the wound. Her skeletons redoubled their efforts and a wave of them pushed Harrow back.
"Fuck!" said Gideon. "That stung!" Her skeletons crowded Harrow, not giving her enough room to swing her chain or slice with her rapier.
"I'll cut out your heart and eat it!" cried Harrow as she thrashed against the army of bones.
"Gross," said Gideon. She looked at the blood on her hand, then pressed the hand against the rock so she could push herself back up.
Something terrible happened then. The two girls froze as the room began to rumble, a low sound too deep to hear, that they could feel in their teeth. They both gazed up at the rock as it began to slowly, horribly, roll.
"No," said Harrow, at the same time that Gideon said, "Finally!"
The skeletons, with their inaccurate breasts and vacant expressions, froze to look up at the rock with their creator. Harrow ducked between them, dropped her rapier, and pressed her hands into the rock. "No, no, no!" she cried. "Help me stop it, Griddle!"
Gideon just looked on with awe as the rock continued to roll away, heedless of the girl trying desperately to stop it. When the rock had moved far enough for Gideon to see beyond, she simply whispered, "Holy shit," and stepped inside.
Harrow tried to shield her eyes. She truly did. She huddled there, breathing hard, desperately clinging to her fidelity, to her loyalty to God and to the sanctity of the Tomb and the unrolled rock. Her piety wrestled with her curiosity until she finally, slowly, looked up.
The tomb was open. The rock was rolled away.
The cavern beyond was filled with the smell of salt, more plentiful than it had any right to be in the lonely rock of the Ninth House. The ceiling glowed with a carpet of shifting, winking lights of green, orange, and yellow. It seemed to slither and crawl over itself, and the light of it danced over the smooth surface of the water. There was an island in the middle of the still, glass-like pool. The water was clear and dark, and Harrow could see bones littering the bottom. Harrow marveled in it.
"We should not be here," said Harrow.
"Well," said Gideon. "We are. So let's see what all the fuss is about."
Harrow did not move to stop the Reverend Daughter as she bent to examine the shore, and the water, her gold eyes able to see the necromancy that evaded Harrow.
"Should be fine," said Gideon. "Weirdly enough."
So Harrow walked forward and into the water. She was already dead, since she had come this far. Something was pulling her forward. Her lifetime of prayer to whatever was in here guided her towards the tomb on the island. The salt stung her nose, and the water was like ice on her ankles, then her thighs, then her ribs. She heard the splashing of Gideon behind her, the uttered curses at the cold, but Harrow's focus was only forward.
She climbed out of the water, her trousers clinging to her legs and her palms raw from grasping at the rock. She stood, and she beheld.
Gideon joined her a moment later. The two girls stood there in silence, and regarded a third.
The girl in the ice, bound in chains, with her hands on the hilt of a great sword, could have been sixteen or thirty six. Her face was smooth and ageless, features not quite human but in a beautiful approximation of it.
Harrow leaned forward, holding her breath so that it did not cloud around her and obscure her vision.
"She's beautiful," said Harrow.
"Eh, not my type," said Gideon.