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Ortus hulks away to the sacristy, where the oldest and most threadbare of vestments are kept. Presumably he goes to find the Reverend Daughter, as Crux ordered, and forlornly await the service to be held before the shuttle arrives to whisk the Daughter and her cavalier primary away at the Emperor’s behest.
Harrow, in possession of brains that do more than produce thoroughly sodden poetry, leaves the nave and bolts for the library. She is bird-bone sharp and knows the halls of Drearburh as she knows the line of bone that extends from elbow to wrist, from base olecranon to scaphoid; knows every spine-bedecked arch, every dark niche, every shortcut to cut through the gloom without anyone intercepting her.
And, far more importantly, she knows Gideon Nonagesimus will not be in the damned sacristy.
This is her last option. She’s done everything in her power to avoid it: everything. She can and has knelt before Priamhark Noniusvianus in supplicant’s petition, face hot with humiliation beneath her paint, whip-scars aching as the Reverend Father – in a rare moment of pitying consternation – set his hand upon her shoulder and refused her. She swore she would fight Ortus to the death before she would grovel to the Reverend Daughter.
But that’s right out. So she has no other choice.
With the chain of Samael Novenary wrapped taught around bone-white knuckles, Harrow gathers herself and kicks the library door in.
Compared to the rest of Drearburh, some effort has gone in to lighting the library beyond the usual dim levels of phosphorescent powder and gas-discharged lights. This is because the library is the sanctum of the Reverend Daughter and her studies, and Priamhark and Pelleamena spare no expense in the education and training of the first flower of their house. The shelves are wedged full of necromancy tomes, the accumulated apocrypha of a millennia. The thickly-slathered dust on the books is disrupted here and there at random, a visual testament to the Daughter’s spontaneous, serendipitous, happy-go-lucky approach to study. Anyone with eyes to see can tell there is no true connection linking the subject matter that the Daughter has apparently studied over the course of her life; instead, the dustless books form a painstakingly phallic silhouette.
Harrow has long wondered, in her cell, whether the nerve gas that blinded her great-aunts might not have affected her parents as well. That they cannot see the truth of Gideon Nonagesimus is an inexpiable sin, one that Harrow is not sure the House will ever outlive. In fact, given the state of the Ninth’s yearly census, they quite literally won’t outlive it.
It’s not as though Gideon is subtle.
The Daughter herself lays sprawled on the library’s sofa, feet kicked up over the far armrest. No thoroughbred Ninth House pedigree ever spawned such bone structure – there is only Gideon Nonagesimus, singular, all lank muscle and bloodied hair, her eyes a holy eclipse as she glances up from behind her smoked-glass shades to blink, gormless, at Harrow standing in the doorway like a monument.
Those eyes condemned Harrow to cruel disappointment and obscurity before she was even born. Thanks to that, and the necromancy that burns in Gideon like a white-hot, coruscating flame, Harrow Nova is worth less than the bone dust of the floor of the oss compared to the squirted, oil spill black of the Daughter’s sclera and pupils, the ring of gold of her irises luminous even in the darkness of an unlit penitent’s cell. Gideon Nonagesimus is always, horribly, the most alive person in any room she’s in. She is the antithesis of every withered, agèd nun and hermit of the Locked Tomb, the vitality of the House distilled, and they worship her for it. Compared to Harrow, who is merely the pointy, etiolated bones of the Ninth House honed to a rapier’s point, Gideon is built like a brick shithouse. The ornate, bone-studded outer robe lies where she tossed it, fibula unfastened, a shapeless black lump slung across the back of the nearest chair. Without it her sadly notable biceps are exposed by a long, sleeveless waistcoat, chains strung along the fabric in a mockery of a rib cage and pelvis and legs. The only true bone worn by the Daughter of the House is a length of spine down her back, like an afterthought.
The white and charred black sacramental skull painted on Gideon’s face is a simple death’s head, plain and symmetrical. The only paint she ever bothered to learn. Harrow knows, because Harrow was the one who painted it for her the very first time. Because when you drill down to the very core of Gideon, through the enamel and dentin to the very pulp of her, Gideon Nonagesimus does not care. She does not give, Harrow thinks, with simmering disgust, a single solitary fuck.
And yet it does not matter. It will never matter. Harrow rises each morning to paint herself with the most complex sacraments in the roster – the Ninefold Saint, the Chain, the Beatific Kiss – and no one will ever look twice. It is common courtesy in the Ninth House to avert eyes when Harrow approaches.
Gideon raises both eyebrows at Harrow. “Nice loom,” she offers, as if that’s any way to start lethally important, eleventh hour negotiations. “Finally come to say goodbye?”
“I’ve come to negotiate,” Harrow informs her, throat stiff as rigor mortis.
At this, Gideon kicks upright with her usual alarming energy, and sets the ancient tome she’s been annotating open-faced on the desk beside her. She does this on purpose, because she hates Harrow, and wants to flaunt the fact that she has defaced the margins of a treatise on cultivating endosteum with lovingly rendered, anatomically perfect pornography. The Daughter may not have read a single word of any book in this entire library – she may have confessed once to Harrow that she does not remember a single goddamn theorem and simply improvises her way through necromancy via ‘vibes’ alone (a confession which led to Harrow’s third attempt to assassinate her in her sleep at the age of eleven) – but she is, if nothing else, an artist.
Harrow, as usual, gives this all of the attention it deserves – none. Gideon will not provoke a reaction from her so easily. She learned her lesson years ago, after denouncing Gideon at length in front of Ortus. Her flustered fury at this habitual desecration had lasted for a solid fifteen minutes, at which point she’d shouted her throat bloody and run out of curse words, only for Gideon to clap.
Ortus, that lump, had sheepishly looked away. Gideon bribes Ortus regularly with butter smooth human leather with which to bind his brain-desiccating magnum opus.
‘Butt smooth.’ In the Reverend Daughter’s own words. Only the finest derrière will serve for the Noniad.
So Harrow merely curses her internally, with silent, pious vehemence. Her, and her unholy alliance with Ortus, wherein the Daughter and her cavalier primary spend their hours locked in this profaned library, undisturbed by the Reverend Father and Mother, as Ortus sets down the drivel he calls the Noniad to human skin parchment and Gideon doodles frankly abhorrent nudes in the finest and most ancient texts of the Ninth House. Her thrice-cursed marginalia will be the only legacy she leaves behind.
“You have my attention,” the end of the Ninth House tells Harrow, smugly cheerful. Her flippancy should be declared blasphemous. But no one ever asks Harrow her opinion on these matters.
She’s aware that she’s clutching the black steel chain in her off-hand too tightly, splitting the skin of her knuckles on the death’s head links as she trembles with the effort it takes not to throttle the Daughter. “Make me your cavalier primary,” she grits out, holding back the boil of humiliation through sheer force of will.
Gideon blinks again. Harrow hates her. Despises her very marrow. “And what is Ortus, chopped liver?”
“Ortus has the consistency of cold porridge,” Harrow snaps. “He is a shambling wall. You need me, Nonagesimus.”
Gideon laughs. It takes a minute. Gideon laughing is always a production, but this round is worse than usual. Tears of mirth are generated. She slaps a hand against her knee.
They’re on a tight schedule, here. “Are you quite done, Griddle,” Harrow demands, with an icy sneer. Harrow’s icy sneer is very good; she modeled it on her mother, an expert in the craft.
“God, that was a good one,” Gideon wheezes. “But also – hell no, Nova. I don’t need either of you. Why would I need to take you with me to God’s necromantic hot girl summer house party?”
“I delight in violence,” Harrow informs her. As though Gideon is not already perfectly aware of this fact. Harrow never managed to leave permanent scars during their childhood attempts to commit mutual homicide; Gideon always healed them away to nothing, absently, effortlessly, without even a prickle of blood sweat. But Harrow likes to think she made an impression. “More saliently, I am better than Ortus. This is simply a fact, which I am stating for the record. You will not leave me here, Griddle. You will take me with you to the First House to act as cavalier primary of the House of the Ninth.”
She says it with the certainty of prayer.
Gideon snorts. There is an indulgent twist to her smile, the lingering aftertaste of that hideous laughter, as she arches her brow even higher at Harrow. “Yeah, but see, here’s the thing,” the Daughter says. “I completely hate you. I hate you like I hate the texture of eyeball jelly. At least Ortus and I can spend the shuttle ride committing acts of tortured artistry so we don’t waste away from boredom.” She leans in towards Harrow, arms resting on her knees as she leers, flipping the fountain pen between her fingers. A threat. “I’m sure there’s going to be books where we’re going. God and his Saints’ own sacred texts.”
“You wouldn’t,” Harrow says, breathless with hate.
Gideon bares her teeth in a savage smirk.
She would.
Harrow refuses to panic. “You should welcome me as your cavalier,” she argues instead.
“You’re as welcome as a knee to the groin, you evil little stick,” Gideon says.
“Choke on a bone,” Harrow snaps back. Then – mortified, writhing in the insatiably knotted fuckthroes of loathing internally – Harrow slams down to her knees on the cold floor, punching the hand with the chain of Samael Novenary wound around the knuckles against the ground in grim resolution. Blood slips through the chains, coppery and dark. “Give me this, Gideon Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Locked Tomb. You owe me this. You owe me my life.”
Gideon sits up with a jerk, like Harrow’s slapped her.
Gideon is an affliction. She afflicts Harrow, and Harrow hates her for it. Because she knows and Gideon knows exactly what Gideon represents: the mortgaged future of the House of Drearburh, eaten by a toddler. Priamhark and Pelleamena conceived a child with not a single iota of necromancy in her, their legacy slurped up by Gideon even as Gideon inhaled nerve gas for ten minutes in the nursery. They’d recognized her stolen potential the moment they stepped foot in the room after the ventilation system cleared. The foundling that the infant Harrow had been set aside for, long before her utter absence of necromancy was confirmed at age four. Gideon is the first and final flower of the Ninth House, the sucking wound who ate the war crime that should have fueled Harrow, and instead left Harrow with nothing but her life.
(“Harrow. Listen. I am so many babies,” Gideon once said, giddy, manic with despair, her black hole eyes glazed and too wide. She hugged her knees as she sat crammed in an unoccupied burial niche, shoulder-to-knobby-shoulder with Harrow. “Two hundred babies.”
Priamhark and Pelleamena had informed both of them, of course, when they were very young; they had walked Gideon through the theorems and calculations involved with Harrow still in the room, an uncharacteristic generosity, as they explained that both Gideon and Harrow were the products of a single monstrous act of genocide. Of enough generated thanergy to take out the whole planet.
It was the longest the two of them ever sat together in truce, jammed together in that niche like maligned puzzle pieces. What little baby fat Harrow had at the time was the only padding under Gideon’s head as she leaned on Harrow’s shoulder.
It was not comfortable. It was the only comfort they had.)
"I come to you in holy supplication," Harrow continues - "Oh, God," Gideon interjects, in abject horror - "I am the unfulfilled vow, the daughter if not the Daughter of this House, and I beseech you to take me with you."
She raises her head to meet Gideon's eyes. Looking into said eyes is like looking into the heat death of the universe, and Gideon sauntering off to become a Lyctor, one of the Emperor's beloved Hands and Gestures - Gideon meeting God without Harrow - would be the worst thing Gideon has ever done to her.
(Gideon could have eaten Harrow, too. Then there would only have been one abomination in Drearburh, and not two. The Ninth House has always been too small and cramped a coffin to accommodate both of them.)
"You owe me my life," Harrow repeats, haunted and hungry.
And the Daughter, damn her, rakes her hair back from her face with a grimace and a sigh. "Listen, Harrow," she says, equanimous. "I know I live rent-free in your mind -"
Harrow's cheek twitches. She corrects her. "You are a suppurating pilonidal cyst in my life -"
"Harsh," Gideon comments.
Harrow refuses to hear the rest. She ploughs through Gideon's attempt to continue. "- and I hate you. I hope you die. I hope we both die. But first, we will be glorious."
Gideon sits all the way back on the sofa, chains clicking as she stares at Harrow.
"Give this to me, give me this one thing, and then I will be satisfied," Harrow says, too quiet, the voice she reserves for her private prayer before the closed door of the Locked Tomb itself. "Give me this, and we will be done."
And Gideon responds - her face soft with a reverent awe, an adoration of the kind that should be reserved for something more sacred than Harrow bleeding from a fist at her feet, as she gazes at Harrow like she's never seen her before - "That's what she said."
Harrow throws herself at the Daughter with a visceral screech. Gideon howls like a wretch; she bawls with laughter as she springs away from Harrow's strangling hands, drawing her spinal column of a sword from its sheath down her back.
Before Harrow can draw her rapier and gut the Reverend Daughter as many times as it takes to stick, however, Drearburh lurches. It jolts. It is a castle buried at the bottom of a planetary shaft, and it positively thumps out from under Harrow's feet, so sudden and explosive a heart attack that Harrow falls in a stupid sprawl and Gideon catches herself in a net of skeletal hands as her shades fly halfway across the room. The hands set the Daughter down in a smooth motion, but when Harrow looks up Gideon's face is stricken, brow furrowed with a dawning, distant blankness.
"Ortus," Gideon says, apropos of nothing.
Harrow knows the far-off expression. She knows every expression that has ever graced Gideon's awful face. It just doesn't make sense in this context. The Daughter only looks like this when one of the eldest adepts of the Locked Tomb passes somewhere out of sight; she always knows, with a preternatural awareness, a keenness of death that surpasses even Priamhark and Pelleamena's.
Gideon's stare jerks back down to Harrow.
"Ortus - what about Ortus?" Harrow says. She feels off-balance as she gathers herself, a hand still resting on her half-drawn rapier as she watches Gideon warily.
Gideon shakes her head, mutely, seizes Harrow by the wrist of her off-hand, and runs.
Harrow follows.
The sacristy is not far. But everything is wrong: smoke curls along the floors of Drearburh, a new layer of gloom in an already dim hall. The scent of charred flesh and blood hangs rank in the stagnant air, and Harrow realizes what has happened as they round the corner to the sacristy and see what's left of Ortus Nigenad in the wake of the bomb.
There's too much and too little left, simultaneously. In a House of old age and artery blockages and silent strokes, this is violent death. Gideon's hand locks around Harrow's wrist like a band of steel.
It doesn't make sense, until, cruelly, it makes too much sense. Ortus went straight to the sacristy, Harrow thinks, numb, as Marshal Crux stiffly lumbers through the smoke from the corridor opposite, his breath a familiar, rusty gurgle.
Ortus went to the sacristy to attend to Gideon, who should have been here preparing for service long before now. Before Harrow delayed her further still.
Ortus came when Crux ordered him to.
All of the flesh beneath Harrow's skin appears to have been spontaneously replaced with spiders. She yanks at Gideon's hand, even as Gideon pivots on the spot to face Crux instead. "Getting slow, Crux," Gideon says, distractedly, because she does not realize -
But the decision to blow up not just the cavalier primary of the Ninth House but also - also - the Reverend Daughter herself is not one that would’ve been made lightly, without a thought to the cost and consequences. Crux could never bear anything less than absolutes, and somehow Harrow missed the moment he must have chosen to burn the House clean of what he has always seen as a stain sullying them all. The disgrace. He was never going to let flotsam and jetsam stand before the Emperor to represent the Ninth House; if the Reverend Father and Mother could not see it, he would take it into his own hands and bend his head after to die a martyr of the old tradition.
Harrow thinks all this, and cannot say it in time. Shock locks her in place as easily as Gideon's iron grip. And so when Crux hobbles to a stop, head crooked to the side at the sight of Gideon Nonagesimus, alive and well - and picks up the pace with solemn, fervent acceptance, Harrow knows what is coming. She can see it with perfect precision, already turning in her mind's eye.
Crux's hand goes to the long knife kept over his shoulder, and draws it. He does not stop, even as Gideon frowns. He is the terminal force of the Ninth House, and before he can stab Gideon, Harrow slips in, a neat, inevitable pivot that places her between the Daughter and the marshal, and slides her rapier under the edge of his moldering leathers, into the soft of his heart.
Harrow does not have Ortus's muscle or height or strength of arm. She has nothing but herself, and her speed and her technique. A perfect anatomical knowledge of where to strike, how much force to apply.
"Why would you draw on her?" Harrow asks, too small, the words drawn out of her gut with a bloody fishhook.
Crux sighs. The long knife drops to the floor with a clatter; already, too much of his weight leans on her through her sword, sagging. He raises a hand to rest it on Harrow's shoulder for a moment; then it falls away, and he is gone.
-
"So, Nova," Gideon says, too lightly.
There's a rueful new edge to the corona of her eclipsed eyes. A guardedness in her stance, as though Harrow may be another a bomb walking.
Harrow has never needed or wanted Gideon's trust, anyway.
"About that whole cavalier thing."