Gideon the Ninth

The world revolved as Harrow floated closer. Memory took Pelleamena’s steady gaze, and refocused the way it slid through and over Gideon from contempt to dread. It took the stentorious, short-changed breath when Priamhark saw her and breathed it again in horror, not in repugnance. One small kid who, to two adults, was a walking reminder of the day they had chosen to mortgage the future of their House. No wonder she had hated the huge dark doors of Drearburh: beyond that portal lurked the used-up, emptied-out shades of a bunch of kids whose main sin in life was that they’d be good batteries. “And do you think you’re worth it?” she asked bluntly.

Next to her, Harrow didn’t flinch. “If I became a Lyctor,” she said meditatively, “and renewed my House—and made it great again, and greater than it ever was, and justified its existence in the eyes of God the Emperor—if I made my whole life a monument to those who died to ensure that I would live and live powerfully…”

Gideon waited.

“Of course I wouldn’t be worth it,” Harrow said scornfully. “I’m an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground. My parents committed a necromantic sin that we ought to have been torpedoed into the centre of Dominicus for. If any of the other Houses knew of what we’d done they would destroy us from orbit without a second’s thought. I am a war crime.”

She stood up. Gideon watched as sheets of seawater slicked down her shoulders, her hair a wet black cap on her skull, her skin sheening grey and green from the waves. All the paint had rubbed off, and Harrowhark looked thin and haggard and no older than Jeannemary Chatur.

“But I’d do it again,” said the war crime. “I’d do it again, if I had to. My parents did it because there was no other way, and they didn’t even know. I had to be a necromancer of their bloodline, Nav … because only a necromancer can open the Locked Tomb. Only a powerful necromancer can roll away the stone … I found that only the perfect necromancer can pass through those wards and live, and approach the sarcophagus.”

Gideon’s toes found purchase and she stood, chest deep in water, goose-bumped all over from the cold. “What happened to praying that the tomb be shut forever and the rock never be rolled away?”

“My parents didn’t understand either, and that’s why they died,” said Harrowhark. “That’s why, when they knew I’d done it—that I’d rolled away the stone and that I’d gone through the monument and that I had seen the place where the body was buried—they thought I’d betrayed God. The Locked Tomb’s meant to house the one true enemy of the King Undying, Nav, something older than time, the cost of the Resurrection; the beast that he defeated once but can’t defeat twice. The abyss of the First. The death of the Lord. He left the grave with us for our safekeeping, and he trusted the ones who built the tomb a myriad ago to wall themselves up with the corpse and die there. But we didn’t. And that’s how the Ninth House was made.”

Gideon remembered Silas Octakiseron: The Eighth never forgot that the Ninth was never meant to be.

“Are you telling me that when you were ten years old—ten years old—you busted the lock on the tomb, broke into an ancient grave, and made your way past hideous old magic to look at a dead thing even though your parents told you it’d start the apocalypse?”

“Yes,” said Harrowhark.

“Why?”

There was another pause, and Harrow looked down into the water. Limned by electric light, her pupils and her irises appeared the same colour.

“I was tired of being two hundred corpses,” she said simply. “I was old enough to know how monstrous I was. I had decided to go and look at the tomb—and if I didn’t think it was worth it—to go up the stairs … all the flights of the Ninth House … open up an air lock, and walk … and walk.”

She lifted her gaze. She held Gideon’s.

“But you came back instead,” said Gideon. “I’d told the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father what I’d seen you do. I killed your parents.”

“What? My parents killed my parents. I should know.”

“But I told them—”

“My parents killed themselves because they were frightened and ashamed,” said Harrow tightly. “They thought it was the only honourable thing to do.”

“I think your parents must’ve been frightened and ashamed for a hell of a long time.”

“I’m not saying I didn’t blame you. I did … it was much easier. I pretended for a long time that I could have saved them by talking to them. Them and Mortus the Ninth. When you walked in, when you saw what you saw … when you saw what I had failed to do. I hated you because you saw what I didn’t do. My mother and father weren’t angry, Nav. They were very kind to me. They tied their own nooses, and then they helped me tie mine. I watched them help Mortus onto the chair. Mortus didn’t even question it, he never did …