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Aiglamene does not remember her mother.
She remembers the walls of the creche, faded mint green - the dusty smell of oss, the feeling of milk teeth in her small fist. The giggle of Neaera as sparks of thanergy flowed out from Neaera's chubby fingers, petalling teeth into the shape of an uneven star. She remembers the cool hands of the wet nurses, humming in the dark as she stared at the uneven ceiling, dreaming of communion in the morning.
She asked for her mother, once; Aisamorta, some years her senior, had tittered across the sacristy, where they'd been mending. The nun watching her clumsy needlework had slapped her, quick and sharp.
"You are a child of the Tomb," and her voice had been hot near her neck, tensed in fear. "The Reverend Father and Mother are your keepers, as they are mine; and so it shall be, until we are but constructs in the catacombs, until we have been ground to powder in service of the Ninth."
She remembers watching her fingers, one already thrice broken from correction, tremble once, twice. She felt the lead settle around the fragile nest of her ribcage, and steadied her hand. The Secundarius Bell tolled out, once, twice, a third time, the rustle of so many padded feet making their way to the transept - the House was small, even then. She thought, briefly, of the quiet distance of bone, the way she would never hear it sing to her, the mystery of whatever niche in the catacombs contained the remnants of her flesh and blood.
Knees bruised, she dipped her head to the lip of stone at muster, and prayed.
---
When the devils came, her fingers shook once, twice. Steadied by fear or perhaps resignation, she thought of the hot dusty air outside of Trentham. The battlegrounds where a ghost had passed through her left arm, albeit briefly; the scream of a spirit magician from the Fifth. What luck she had then, when the worst of her imagination was some petty spirit from the River.
Seneschal that he was, Crux had wailed, and clasped a blade, and pressed his mouth to the bitter ground of the sanctuary. Lips in some constant mutter of beseechment to the Emperor. Aiglamene had watched as hot, writhing clusters of rot and flesh had torn into the fresh bodies of the resurrected, had watched them moan at the slide of her blade through their pulsing approximation of muscle, black blood leaking out. Would it not be the end, now, she thought feverishly, my pike rustier than the day I drug it from the armory to take to the Cohort, and she remembered the weight of knuckle knives in her right fist, the brush of warm calloused fingers against her papery skin.
The hours of haunting stretched beyond her comprehension, descending deeper and deeper into her House until she could not remember the exact steps she took to the catacombs, to the landing pad, to the cells of the penitents, or even the cell of prisoners; the air was hot and damp from so many panting mouths huddled in fear. Squinted her eyes until all she could see was the blur of white and gray and black, a sea of skeletal faces frozen in fear. The pinch of Sister Berta's face in her peripheral, despite the softness of baby fat around her jowls. A near twenty years since she remembers touching dimpled baby cheeks, imagined the possibility of such vivid thalergy.
She doesn't sleep. When she closes her eyes she sees Neaera's bloodied mouth, sees a flash of red, a broadsword.
Such that when Seneschal Crux comes choking and gurgling against the cage of bone, she makes a mistake more sinful than surrender in the Cohort; she does not see the sum of strange bodies, eyes not catching the familiar and unfamiliar. Such that when she squints against the lantern light, she does not see her; she sees a toothy smile of milk teeth, the round hands that caught at her cloak, once, and begged to be taught the sword.
When the light settles, her arm moves without thinking. Gideon Nav's cheek is bitterly cold. The sort of cold she remembers rushing in from an airlock; the cold of punishment in the cells, the cold of tears when she could not shake her awake. She does not smell of oss or sweat or even blood; she smells of rot, of corpses left in a battlefield. A ghost of peppermint.
Aiglamene recoils.
"You always said I'd come back in a box, Aiglamene," the corpse prince said, her voice an ache in Aiglamene's gut. A memory, unbidden, of a toddler laughing in the kitchens, snow leek soup smeared on her mouth.
"They killed you."
"Crime of opportunity." She thinks, unbidden, of small hands cloaked in black fabric, cocooned by bone like armor. "Don't tell Crux - I absolutely, positively cannot give him the fucking satisfaction."
She shoves her. Her hand comes up, hits unevenly on the gaping wound in Gideon Nav's chest, the white spikes - bone - teeth - sending shockwaves of pain through her gloves. Something thuds inside her.
"Don't - that's where my heart used to be -"
It's too late, now - her Cohort sin of not peering into the shadows to assess the danger has obscured a small, pathetic body: limbs limp and trembling, hair shorn close to the scalp. Black eyes and even blacker stare. Aiglamene resolutely does not think of the last time she touched Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and her hand goes to her hip, palm meeting familiar pommel of metal. She steps forward.
Gideon - dead, or perhaps something worse - steps between them. A cavalier then, even still. Filmy eyes dart over to her necromancer, stuck in her gravitational pull.
"It's not her, Captain - it's only her body."
Only a body. Aiglamene thinks of two hundred small corpses, littered across a sea of green. She thinks of Neaera, the blood on her mouth and thighs. She thinks of Pelleamena and Priamhark, swaying simply next to their cavalier. She thinks of the devils, lapping hungrily at the mass of new flesh on the Ninth.
For the first - or maybe second - time, Aiglamene steps back.
---
When Aiglamene was sixteen, she stood broad-chested with ten other denizens of the Ninth on the shuttle field. A ship had just landed - standard Cohort, unremarkable in appearance but the largest she had seen in her short youth. Nycteus knocked her ankle with the tip of his rapier, and she shuffled it into line.
Burning in her pocket was a neatly folded pack of letters, ink on flimsy; pike strapped to her back, rapier at her hip and buckler on the other. The faint breeze in the soupy atmosphere ruffled the hairs cropped close to her scalp, and her skin tingled under a heavy coat of paint. Each Cohort recruit wore the same mask, that of the Penitent at Dawn Orison. It burned near her left lacrimal bone, the ghost of lips pressed there but an hour before.
Soldiers descended, neat, clad in blood red. They loaded up, rocketing through the atmosphere, past the bulbous jut of the prison, into a cloud of darkness spotted only by the occasional glint of a star. Her fingers came to her pocket, twitching. In retrospect, this was the final reprieve before the end of everything she thought she knew: stillness, such absence of necromancy in the vastness of space, the sound only of bodies breathing heavily.
After was only excruciation.
Trentham was dry, punishing. Days blurred into each other, the burn of muscle and the ease of routine. Her voice became thin with disuse. Training camp paled in comparison to her first battle, where rebels ripped a four inch stripe into her cheek, a necromancer no older than fourteen screaming as fire overtook his spindly body. She grit her teeth. Obeyed when her commanding officer demanded she pierce the boy's heart. An act of mercy, the captain told her.
She knew it was so the ghosts don't flood in.
Every day, she approximated when orison would be, bending, pliant, on the ground near her cot. Hands running over knuckle bones, mouth shaping worship to the Tomb. To the Emperor. Sometimes, Neaera. It was no matter of privacy: her brothers and sisters of the Ninth had been eaten already, some gutted by rebels, other writhing until their mouths were contorted into screams of horror as hungry ghosts licked up their thalergy. She kept them with her, even when a desperate Fourth House necromancer was scrabbling for matter in the bloodsoaked clay, or the flick of a rapier bit at her ankles in reproach. Aziza's fragment of femur, Xerxes' knucklebone, half a rib ripped from Ursa's flaming corpse. Tucked into a knapsack in her cell, until her return.
None of the other Houses ever really understood bone, anyway.
It was a very long time, and somehow no time at all, when she returned to the Ninth. Watched the shuttle descend quickly and then as slow as molasses. Her skin, brutalized and tight over her skull; prosthetic leg fashioned out of a Third House necromancer's poor approximation of bone magic. When she exited the ship, she dropped to her knees. Felt Pelleamena's dry hand brush her shoulder, her vestments smelling of oil and flimsy. Home.
Neaera dies in spring. A month after she returns from the Cohort, Aiglamene holds her head, shaven down to the skull, against her scarred cheeks. The swollen curve of her stomach is misshapen, legs and mouth wet with blood. Nuns wail and she thinks desperately of flesh magic, presses her calloused hands to the curve of her chest, hoping against hope that the weak stutter of Neaera's heart will begin to sing to her in the language of necromancers. Neaera's mouth shapes one final plea. "Save her - please - Ophelia -"
When they peel her daughter out of her body, she takes her into her arms. Wet with blood, cold. Small fists clenched in perpetual confusion. A kiss, against where her left lacrimal bone would be. Three hundred bones. A myriad left ahead of service.
When they entomb their bodies in the catacombs, she takes care not to forget their niche.
---
Aiglamene ought not to be surprised, really, when the Reverend Daughter disappears as quickly as she returns.
When the Tomb opens - when her purpose becomes at once adrift - she falls to her knees, despite the creak and grind of bones, mouth hovering over salty rock. The Body is a monstrous hunger, biting her sovereign on the mouth until she can smell the tang of blood in the air. Divinity is near blinding; she finds, for the first time in decades, that her cheeks, scarred as they are, are wet with tears. Something sure and right in her body knows the devils disappear, as if this cold lonely planet let out a shuddering sigh of relief.
She hears screaming, a hollow ringing of grief. Her hand comes up to her throat, briefly, to check; the howl near identical to one ripped from her throat in the infirmary. When her eyes, tired from a lifetime of use, flicker up, she sees the prince - or, or Nav, or Gideon - with her hands buckled in the gaping wound of her stomach, pulsing, rotting, refusing to heal or deteriorate. The name ripped from her throat, irreverent and desperate.
"Harrow!"
She clambers to her feet. The tall, limpid Lyctor is ankle deep in viscous water, cornsilk hair tangled in her hands, poshly cursing; the half-Lyctor is bending her bulky body over the empty Tomb, face wet with salt. Paul, scars a near mirror of her own, pets her shoulder, eyebrows creased in thought.
Nav is shaking, whether from rage or grief or relief, Aiglamene does not know. Her hand comes up, hovering over the silver and gold brocade on her shoulder. Nav shudders.
"Don't - fucking - touch me."
"Nav."
"Did you know?" The girl whirls upon her. Not for the first time, Aiglamene is afraid. The once vibrant tone of her skin is flattened, matched with milky eyes brimming with unwept tears. Miniscule bones, the ones from infant fingers, are woven into her lifeless hair. She can see the shuddering gasp of air flood in and out of the holes at her gut, neck, heart - nothing leaking from her but the smell of decay. "Did you know that we were being marched off to - to be eaten?"
Suddenly, she's back on a distant planet, leg jiggling before they were deployed. A dark planet, dry and little light. Teaming with ghosts. Can barely see, when she whips around her pike as the pulse of a theorem sends shivers down her spine. The excruciating pain of someone - something - ripping off her leg, the smell of blood leaking all over sand. A necromancer, not hers, never hers, gulping down the death energy zipping through her body.
"I thought the Emperor would grant you the Cohort."
Nav runs a shaky hand over her neck. "Bullshit."
Insubordination burns along her gut. She remembers the first time she beat a child, Nav's gold eyes screwed up in rage as the whip kissed the back of her knees after stealing the tabernacle before mass. Nav had been unable to control the twitches of her fingers all through the service, tongue poking at her cheek in eager delight. Such blatantly flippant regard for the Ninth. Her hand grips the heel of her sword.
"You gonna kick my ass now? What else do you want from me? Huh?" Nav's eyes are wild. "I thought this is what you taught me, Aiglamene, or don't you remember? All good cavaliers are one half step behind their necromancer. You don't want me dead, you don't want me to follow Ha - the Reverend Daughter back to Drearburh, but that's pretty much the only thing you ever fucking taught me."
The lie stretches between them, brimming with half truths.
"It doesn't even matter," Nav mumbles. "I'm a fucking corpse, and she has her ice lolly bimbo, and Dad has his cavalier back -"
She juts a finger out to Aiglamene, accusing. "And I don't need you. Or her. I have a real parent now," her voice trembles, for a moment. "And he would kill all of you, if I asked. If he knew how you - how you all treated me."
The silence stretches between them. Her brain reverberates with the memory of laughter, tinkling out from the creche. The cobwebs and incense in the library, the taste of communion on her lips. Cold fingers pressed to the scars roping over her body.
"Nav."
The corpse prince turns, face cast in shadows.
"If I had known...I would have gone in your stead."
Something unknowable flashes across Nav's pallid face. She's reminded, begrudgingly, of the first time Gideon held a sword.
She swallows, remembers broken and bloodied knuckles. The relief of submission. "It would have been - an honor, to serve the Ninth. To protect the Tomb."
Gideon's face shutters. For a moment, caught between memory and a wish, she blazes as brightly as Dominicus. She turns away, perhaps for the final time.
Aiglamene's fingers twitch. Lead settles into her ribcage, like snow on a distant, near dead planet. One solitary heart beating between them.
Across the belly of the Ninth, tunnels made from stone and oss, in a belfry made useless by the death of the Emperor, the Secundarius Bell chimes sweetly.
---
A few weeks before Aiglamene turns sixty (though birthdays are an atrocious blight of individuality frowned upon on the Ninth), she holds Gideon Nav for the first and last time.
Extracting the infant from the bio-container was no small feat. Nuns tittered and fussed over the body that had tumbled into their atmosphere, her hair a flame against the putrid gray of Drearburh. Aiglamene was careful, precise. The small baby body was damp, a tuft of ginger curling over her wrinkled face. She smelled faintly of milk and something sweet, like a flower from a planet she visited in another lifetime; her sharp fingernails clutched at her gloved hands, scrabbling. Pink mouth opening in a wail.
Aiglamene pinched her then, in admonishment; no infant of the Ninth was permitted to cry. This only made the baby's face screw up in defiance, cries shrill and hungry. Against her better judgment, she collected her small head against her bicep, rocked once, twice. She thought of hunger; briefly, of Ophelia, of her hair wet and curled with blood. The baby's eyes were startling, the color of hot brewed tea in the cafeterias in Koniortos Court, from a lifetime ago; not the muted navy blue of most infants. Her body so small but pulsing with life. Aiglamene thought of the 300 small bones in her body, how Aisamorta might contort them into tools of the Ninth. Her grip tightened.
Mere meters away, the ghost of a mother took her last rattling breaths. In the sulfuric air, muted by the cold pinch of space, Aiglamene listens.
"Gideon, Gideon, Gideon!"