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Gideon twirled heavy shears around the first and second fingers of her left hand, as carelessly as a nun with a knucklebone rosary, and said “Are you sure you want to do this?”
She had a point. After all they had been through in the last few days — if it was even proper to speak of days now that Dominicus no longer burned to mark them, and anyone who might have looked for its rise from the surface of the Nine Houses had been relocated to less lethal climes — it seemed completely ridiculous that Harrow Nonagesimus, Harrowhark the First and Harrowhark the Last, who had helped to murder the King Undying, should be concerning herself with a haircut, of all things.
She was one half of a perfect Lyctor. At the very least, by all the rules of the old Empire, she should have been doing this in some sort of palace. But she didn’t have a palace; she had a military base full of refugees and soldiers that had once belonged to Blood of Eden and now belonged, she supposed, to humanity. Harrowhark sat on a collapsible metal stool in a neat white-tiled shower cubicle, clothed in plain black tactical armor that did not drape nearly enough, peering into a mirror propped against the wall before her. She had a dish towel around her shoulders. One made do with the tools at hand.
Harrow tugged at her hair, which was nearly down to the spines of her scapulae, and said, “I know it’s trivial. But it irritates me.”
“What I meant,” Gideon said, “was, are you sure you want me to do this?”
The mirror was at an odd angle. It foreshortened Gideon’s face, which did nothing to mediate the now-familiar skip-thump of Harrow’s heart, the confounding arrhythmia that startled her every time she looked at it. Warm red hair messily uncombed, lips twitched into a perpetual smirk, eyes like lightless pits. Hideously mismatched and alive.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I do.”
“One time you dangled me off the edge of the drillshaft because I came too close to you with a fork.”
“We were seven,” Harrow pointed out, “and you were trying to stab me.”
“Only a little! Just to see if you’d bleed.”
Wearily Harrow said, “Well, now you’ve answered that riddle. I have a bladed object that needs wielding with precision and care, and a cavalier whose entire purpose is the wielding of bladed objects in pursuit of my goals. Logic dictates that the task be yours. Of course, if you have more important things to do…”
This was a transparent ploy, very nearly a dare. Since Gideon's resurrection and all the fire and chaos surrounding it, they had confessed unutterable depths of tender feeling to each other, and exchanged compliments and praise and frantic, worshipful whispers in the dark, heavy on the tongue with blood and tears; but all that was clumsy and unfamiliar. Enmity and defiance was still their first language.
Gideon flipped a rude gesture in the mirror and took a step forward, so she loomed over Harrow’s shoulder. “All right, my shaggy duchess of night, what’ll it be?”
“Get rid of it,” Harow said promptly. “All of it. It’s hot and it’s itchy.” Instinctively, as she did a thousand times a day (when not engaged in running or fighting for her life or the fate of the human species), she scratched peevishly at the back of her neck. “Ever since Canaan House, I can’t seem to keep it in check.”
“Yeah, probably because it’s all fucky,” Gideon said helpfully.
Harrow blinked, then flushed. “I don’t know what you’re implying —“
"Yeah you do. Wait, you don't?” Gideon sounded genuinely surprised. With the hand not holding the shears she parted Harrow’s lustrous pitch-black locks and tapped a few spots spanning the crown of her head. “Here, and here, and over there. It looks sort of…grungy? But not like actual grunge. Like, it’s also shiny, like in that weird necro-vision kind of way. I thought maybe you did something spooky to spice up your look.”
"I most assuredly did not. I even tried to burn it off once." Distracted, she probed the places Gideon had touched -- four epicenters across coronal suture, a fifth above one ear. The ghostly marks of four fingertips and a thumb, pressed to her scalp.
The culprit was obvious. "It must have been Ianthe. She presumes too much," Harrow sighed, which was like saying water is wet, so banal in its truthfulness that it lacked any emotion.
"Well it looks terrible on you, so Ianthe can stick it up her butt," Gideon said cheerfully. "How come I can see it and you can't?"
“Mirrors don’t reflect thanergy well." There was a nauseating sentiment in there somewhere, about needing one’s cavalier’s eyes to see oneself truly, but she didn’t have the stomach to examine that too closely just now. She trailed her own fingers through her hair, this time with the full focus of her necromancy. There was nothing so crass as thanergetic residue, nor any foreign organic matter. Nothing much out of the ordinary, but then, it wouldn’t take much. Just some evenly-spaced follicles accelerated above Harrow’s own basal metabolic rate… ah.
Well, it would give her some insurance if Griddle made a hash of things. "I'll fix it afterwards. Go ahead."
"As my midnight mistress commands." Gideon hefted the shears, considering. The soldiers here had tried to offer them a small electric device specifically built for cutting hair, but it buzzed in a way that was not totally unlike a Herald, and Harrow had flinched and stiffened with the sensation of needles stabbing up her spinal nerves into her brain before Gideon had even touched her with it. So Gideon had gone searching and come up with a cutting implement that would have done Crux proud: heavy and solid and sharp as doom, and probably harboring a good dose of tetanus. Not that tetanus would be likely to bother a Lyctor.
That was what she was thinking about as Gideon's hands settled purposefully, one on her shoulder to steady her, the other gently separating out a handful of black night to get at its roots. They were a Lyctor. Gideon's hands and arms and chest, Gideon's body that was hardly an inch from her, felt like a black hole -- or like a thundercloud, the huge rolling building storms she had seen since coming to stay on this planet, lit by flickering flashes of awareness where their skin briefly touched. They were a Lyctor, confirmed now in their extant immortality even after the death of the Necrolord Prime.
It was a thought so huge that Harrowhark had not yet sussed out all the implications. Some days she couldn't confront it directly and could only approach it sidelong, as though she were doing a geological survey on a gigantic crushing pile of boulders poised one sneeze away from an avalanche. Some days she could not think about it all. And Gideon…
"You've got to let me give you spikes," Gideon said with total seriousness. "Not now, but in like, a thousand years when you get bored of nun chic."
A thousand years. Harrow's mouth was very dry. Her palms were starting to sweat where she had pressed them to her thighs. She tried to focus exclusively on the still-unfamiliar scratching of the plex fibers in her clothes, but it wasn't enough to stop her heart from recklessly accelerating. The white light filaments that had been reasonable a moment ago began to sear her retinas. She squeezed her eyes shut to keep tears from beading on her lashes. Simultaneously her ribcage was seized by a tightening pressure, as though her aorta had turned traitor and tied a noose around her ventricles.
Gideon's hands vanished from her hair. Instead her voice, low and urgent, broke through the growing paralysis: "Harrow?"
"It's nothing," Harrow said, gathering up every fistful of fleeing breath to force the words to sound halfway normal.
"Don't lie to me. That's such a dick move." Harrow heard the rustle of her cavalier's ridiculously immodest 'uniform' -- a black shirt with the sleeves ripped off and black trousers apparently made out of the hide of some kind of animal -- as she came around and stood in front of her necromancer. She was still cloaked in the thanergetic void of her Lyctorhood, but Harrow felt the heat of her skin, in the ordinary way
"What's wrong? Did I fuck it up already?"
Harrow risked a look and saw Gideon's face creased with a look of concern. With her old eyes -- her own eyes -- it might have looked soft; the blackness of Harrow's cold pit-black irises in that warm expression made it into a pantomime.
Harrow's heart jumped and plummeted into the black well of her stare like a suicide off Drearburh's top tier, and she had to squeeze her eyes shut again before she hit bottom. She hunched her shoulders, bit mercilessly into her tongue and tasted the blood even as the split tissues knit together again. Tried to breathe though it felt like her chest was mortared and her mouth stuffed with cotton. Electrified insects crawled under her skin. She scoured herself frantically for any more foreign necromancy, some curse Griddle might have triggered. She found nothing but a fusillade of cortisol pumped out by her own bleating idiot pituitary gland.
Gideon had backed off a step. Harrow felt her absence doubly, physically and thanergetically. A hole in space. No matter whether she was close or far, the sensation of unending absence.
"What the fuck, Harrow," Gideon said, not a little alarmed.
Harrow gritted her teeth and motioned with one hand: wait . Methodically, mercilessly, she switched off relevant cell clusters in her adrenal cortex, slowed the beat of her heart by main force like wrangling a tidal wave with her bare hands, tweaked her alveolar membranes to flood her system with reassuringly heme-bound oxygen. The stress hormones that she could not break down immediately, she extruded into a fine oil through the tips of her fingers that she wiped on the insides of her sleeves. She spent perhaps a minute sorting through her own brain, doing the biochemical equivalent of smashing the alarm circuits with a machete, and at the end of it she could look up at her anxious cavalier with hardly a flinch.
In a dull, dead voice she said, “You're doing fine. It’s all right.”
“No, it fucking is not! Sex Pal came all the way back from the River to give us that speech about using our words, remember?” Gideon had not moved. She set the shears down on the tile floor with a faint clink and touched the tips of two fingers to Harrow’s kneecap, as a necromancer might touch a scrap of bone at a murder scene to check if it contained a ravenous screaming ghost.
Harrow felt the touch, but with her nervous system still in a stranglehold, it evoked nothing but mild pressure and that irrepressible flash of thanergetic knowledge — epidermis, dermis, capillaries, metacarpals, and nothing further. Carpals and wrist bones were shrouded in the Lyctoral void.
“A momentary aberration. I’m fine, Griddle.”
Gideon said, “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Whatever you did. You were getting all weird and then you — switched it off.” Distress made Gideon's eyes into spearpoints of black glass, that failed to pierce the muffling, soothing fog of Harrow’s brute-force calm.
It was a relief. As Harrow was wondering how long she could keep this up — her neurotransmitters kept surging, her autonomic relays trying to squirm out of her necromantic grip — she thought how nice it might be to stay like this forever. How restful.
Not restful for Gideon, apparently. “I’m serious, Harrow! You look like some space amoeba ate your brain. I fucking hate it.” When no objection came to her hand on Harrow’s knee, she took one of Harrow’s hands in hers. “What happened? Just tell me. I was kidding about the spikes, I know you're weird about your look, I'd never fuck it up on purpose. Okay, I would," she admitted, "but I didn't this time! I promise.”
“No,” Harrow said, hearing how mechanical she sounded, how flat. “No, it wasn’t your fuck-up. I should never have asked you to do this.”
“What? Cut your hair?”
“It’s the act of a servitor.”
"So you want to have a skeleton do it?"
With the veils of fear ripped down and trampled underfoot, certain things became abundantly clear. One of them was that Harrow didn't want to look at the black eyes of the Reverend line in Gideon's imbecilic freckled face anymore. She clenched two fistfuls of Gideon's shirt and leaned forward, pressing her forehead to Gideon's shoulder.
Contact illuminated the blade of Gideon's clavicle, the brachial plexus, a hint of subclavian. "You should go," Harrow said matter-of-factly into the hollow of her sternocleidomastoid. "Get away from me. The other side of the galaxy might be far enough."
"I know it's hard," Gideon said, almost gently, "but I'm gonna need you to concentrate for a minute, okay, and try making some goddamn sense. I'm hearing 'Gideon, please give me a haircut', and 'Gideon, please go to the other side of the galaxy', and when I add them together what I get is a big pile of what the fuck."
With difficulty, Harrow said, "We are a Lyctor now, Nav. Do you understand what that means?"
"Yeah, it means you get my extremely hot eyes, so you're welcome. By the way, I should warn you, sexy babes are probably going to start swooning when you look at them, which I know is gonna be a new experience for you. Hey." She peeled Harrow's head off her shoulder by a handful of uncut hair and examined her suspiciously. "Are you using our Lyctor powers for something weird?"
"Only a prolongation of my cardinal sin." It was so much easier to say without the hammering, howling chorus of emotions constricting her throat. "Have you realized that you are chained to me more securely now than you ever were in Drearburh, when all I owned was your body and your labor? John Gaius lived for a myriad with his -- cavalier entombed, and never suffered for it. Now I've entombed you, and you cannot escape even in death."
Gideon's expression had turned to pity, which would have been horrifically embarrassing to someone with a working limbic system. "I mean, I think dear ol' Dad suffered when we ripped his atoms apart. But -- Harrow…”
She stopped. Somewhere far distant, alarms wailed. Much closer and more irritatingly, water dripped on tile.
Gideon went down on her knees before Harrow’s chair, heedless of the damp. Before Harrow could read any undue subservience into this, Gideon pulled Harrow forward into a supremely awkward embrace.
The shock of it (sternum; ribcage; swell of expanding pleura) broke Harrow’s concentration. Cortisol slipped from her grip, then adrenaline and norepinephrine in an escalating failure cascade.
Gideon said, “Dying was never going to get me out of this deal. Before Canaan I fully expected you were going to make my skeleton clean out the sacristy toilets or something the second I croaked. This is way better than that." She paused. "As long as you don't put me in an ice coffin and drop a literal boulder on my face."
Harrow watched as though from beyond the grave as heartbeat and respiration increased. Her throat burned and her stomach twisted. With her last drop of control she rasped, “I make no promises,” then dissolved into breathless tears.
“Necromancers,” Gideon muttered, in that way she’d learned from Camilla Hect. But she didn’t let go. She crushed her pathetic blubbering necromancer tighter against her, bringing her weight and strength to bear, like the rock before the Tomb. It was grounding; like being buried alive.
Eventually they ended up in one of the shower stalls, Gideon propped in a corner with Harrow more or less in her lap. The cold hard surfaces and odd echoes were comforting; if Harrow kept her eyes closed she could imagine she was back in one of the cells of Drearburh’s cloister, that had never seen the light of Dominicus.
The cloister and the sacristy were dust now. The prison made to withstand eternity had not lasted. Harrow, too, was empty and dispersed, nothing now but skin and muscle wrapped around an aching void.
Wrung out from both the attempt at repressing her own biological functions and their inevitable vengeance, Harrow allowed herself the indulgence of laying with her head on Gideon’s chest, listening to the oblivious thundering of her heart. “I’m sorry,” she said at last.
Gideon kissed the top of her head. “You’re allowed to have a panic attack, your boneheaded majesty.”
“I don’t think I am, actually. Such petty trifles are below the dignity of a Lyctor.”
“Fuck dignity,” Gideon said sagely.
“Well, it’s good to know that your outlook on life hasn’t been altered by ascension to godhood.”
Gideon grinned and rubbed her cheek delightedly on Harrow’s still-untrimmed crop of coal-black frizz. “Didn’t think of that, did you? I’m not locked in with you for ten thousand years; you’re locked in with me. Still want me to trim this? That’s what she said.”
“Later,” Harrow sighed. After all, the one thing they had plenty of was time.