Chapter Text
When Ortus the Ninth was plunged into those sharp, coppery waters, he held his breath as long as possible. In truth, this was not necessary — he no longer had alveoli to crave oxygen with, no platelets for them to feed and flow through his veins to prove him living. The last of his blood was done bleeding, already emptied out onto an unpleasantly thin carpet or cooling in stagnant pools inside of him. Soon, the soffit of his body would turn waxy and purple, branding his body with the circumstances of his death — flat on his back, having failed his sole duty, pleading his cavalier to eat him in some last desperate bid for efficacy.
Realizing he no longer needed to breathe turned out to feel worse than drowning, and Ortus found himself thrashing against his fate. This couldn’t be it! This couldn’t be what waited at the end of a hard, galling life. This couldn’t be the knife that cut the thread of a future just beginning. Or was this Hell? Perhaps in failing his necromancer, he’d damned himself to an eternity of torment, half-drowning forever in a churning vortex of putrid sludge, tearing away at the fragile gauze of his soul with no care for what he was or who he’d wanted to be.
Perhaps the Emperor had sent him here himself as retribution for betraying his doctrine. So be it, he thought. All he’d ever been asked was to serve Harrow with all that he had, and his life was all that he had to give.
He relaxed the memory of his arms and legs, surrendering to the tide. So be it, he thought. Greater cavaliers than he had surely fought the River and lost, so why should he fare any better?
He closed the memory of his eyes and let the wretched course of the River take him. So be it, he thought. He began as a soul like any other, why should he die separate from the rest?
So be it, he thought, and died—
Until a tanned, gloved hand reached into the waters and grabbed him, plucking him from the vortex and onto dry shores.
⬫✶⬫✶⬫✶⬫
Ortus sat up with a start, suddenly burdened with real arms and legs and struggling to become reacquainted with them again. His head spun. He turned to look to his side, shielding his eyes from a searing light he couldn’t quite make out yet, and saw — Colum the Eighth, or at least, most of him.
He was sitting amicably beside Ortus’s body, gray and translucid in inconsistent places. He looked like those old white Drearburh weather flags, left out long past their prime, tattering to nothing in the sharp, nitrogenic winds. He looked like a hologram only half-loaded, but moved with the same reserved grace as his living counterpart — and Ortus knew Colum was dead, of course. He’d known since they’d broken in Silas’s room and found that sarcophagus in the form of Colum’s bed.
Looking closer, Ortus noticed another thing: the Eighth cavalier didn’t have any eyes. That was apparently no hindrance to him. He sat with his legs drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around them as he watched something in the distance.
Following his gaze, Ortus saw a scene. Two stages, melded together like poorly smelted iron. Light streamed from great, supernal windows, each one a mosaic of carefully cut glass soldered in the shape of serene animals, argent swords, and praying infants with ruby-red stigmata, spewing thin fountains of shimmering blood. The white cut stone was barnacled here and there by dark, rougher slate, whole chunks of the scene suddenly the penumbral halls of a castle Ortus knew only too well. There were no stained glass windows or holy light here; only watchful skeletons, supervising a pair of young children playing.
Playing was a strong word, and pair was even stronger. As far as Ortus could tell, the two children didn’t even seem aware of each other. A pale, willowy child, hair so white it formed a halo where the light was caught in his flyaways, poured a handful of glass marbles from a bag and turned them in his hands before returning them to the bag. He reached in — stuck his tongue in his cheek in thought — and pulled out only one of the marbles. He seemed pleased with himself. Then, he performed the ritual all over again, always seeming to pull the exact marble he was looking for. Psychometry, Ortus recalled, thinking of Palamedes gauging the age of a Canaan House relic by touch alone, often overclocking himself and ending up pale and vertiginous with his head in Camilla’s lap.
Closer to the dark stone, a child with a painted face and a shorn head summoned a hand, a foot, a skull from the same wad of cancellous tissue. She did this repeatedly, pleased with her results, never stopping even when her nose began to bleed. The clatter of bones disassembling; the clink of glass marbles being shuffled in a bag. If one weren’t paying attention, it would almost look like the children were playing in each other’s company. Ortus’s heart lurched. They were almost the same age.
“Do you know where you are?” Colum asked, his voice like the sound of a broom sweeping an oss.
“A liminal space,” he replied confidently, “straddling the line between life and death, between the material and the River, a ballroom and hunting grounds for ghosts and revenants alike. Such a thing is described in Volume Seven of the historical Ninth epic, the Noniad.”
Colum canted his head ever so slightly. “The one… you wrote, correct?”
“... Yes.”
“Right.” Colum shifted his position so that one leg was extended and only one was bent, his demeanor more relaxed. Or perhaps lethargic was the word.
“What happened to you?” Ortus asked him after a minute of watching their necromancers play. He knew now that these were memories, and their point of view was a familiar one — the watchful vigilance of an infant’s cavalier. His neck prickled knowing that, at the source of this memory, his father had been looming just behind him, a hateful mountain ensconcing him in shadow.
“Nothing you don’t already know about,” replied Colum without a single hint of resentment. He rubbed his jaw, however, as if feeling for an object in his mouth that shouldn’t be there. Even without his eyes and without his color, he was handsome, peering through soot-brown lashes and eyes half lidded. Something hungry prowled in Ortus’s heart, same as it had watching the marble-cut lines of Protesilaus’ neck.
“Silas knew we were coming,” Ortus continued. “You confessed to him.”
As Brother Asht closed his eyes, his brow creasing with perturbation, the scene shifted. They were now in a dance hall divided roughly in half by a curved border, a stray brick stamping the opposite side here and there, black and white. On the white side, silvered clergymen danced in great, looping patterns, never touching each other, but occasionally raising a hand to hover against another’s as they turned in serious circles. This loop occasionally cut into the black side, joining a similar procession of robed penitants, shuffling in an orderly file to the exquisite rhythm of their prayer knuckles. Clickety-clack, clack, clackwent the rites Ortus knew by heart, his fingers itching to rattle the old psalms himself — magically, his prayer knuckles found their way to his hands, making the sound before he even registered them.
The line was all one line, feeding into itself like an assembly belt, like an ouroboros. When an Eighth figure traversed into the Ninth realm, they bent their heads and took on the affect of the Drearburh nuns; when the Ninth figures crossed over to the Eighth, they straightened and began to dance like the gears of a clock, perfectly in time with their opponents. Ortus turned away out of respect, not wanting to witness his esteemed elders in such a jaunty state.
Colum was holding his hand. He led him into the dance, and they joined the endless train of bodies, turning and bowing exactly when they were supposed to. Looking down, Ortus saw that Colum’s legs had almost completely faded out below the knee, but he still moved as if they were solid.
“Yes,” Colum admitted very late. “I realized I’d made a mistake trusting the others. I’d hoped only to warn them; instead, I witnessed a blatant retaliation. I’d been foolish to think they would see Master Octakiseron as anything other than an enemy.”
“So you would have us killed?”
“No.” A pause from Colum. “The echoing ritual became corrupted. Teacher had warned us of the dangers, and the Princess had also warned us with far less tact, but Master Silas proceeded nonetheless. Something…”
The dance hall changed for a terrifying moment into something twisted and vermicular. The endless procession of praying and dancing House denizens became a writhing mass of something , kicking up fat bubbles of oily River water. Then it was gone, the Ninth House rattling and light Eighth tablature returning, deafeningly quiet compared to the screaming void of what Ortus had just witnessed.
“... took me.”
Ortus wasn’t entirely sure he understood, but he remembered the look on Teacher’s face when he’d tried one last time to bar the Princess from the underground laboratory. I’ve not seen any spooky shit, and no one else has reported any spooky shit, so I’m reaching the verdict of Zero Spooky Shit To Worry About,she’d said to him. It had been abundantly clear since the moment the young girl opened the foyer doors that she was vainglorious, overconfident, and worst of all, naive — so sure of the protection her father’s blood afforded her, insistently blind to her other shortcomings. She’d reminded Ortus so badly of Harrowhark that he’d worried they’d be perfect enemies more likely than they’d be decent spouses.
“How is it that you are here, then, and not with your necromancer?” he asked, then spoke urgently before Colum could answer: “Or is this what happens after? Could it be that my lady managed to consume me after all? Is this purgatory a result of the process?”
“No,” Colum said bluntly. Then, “You are a whole man, Ortus Nigenad, but I am only an echo. A piece that failed to return. I am what’s left after I fed Silas what remained of me. My oath, my honor, my flesh all belong to him. They always have.” The scene shifted again. “The only thing that’s mine is my memory, and that too is fading fast in the River’s current.”
The creche. No — a nursery, with high ceilings and a perfect white bassinet waiting in the center of a complicated floor mosaic. The walls were decorated with head to toe picture frames, each one sporting a glass square. There was a large window depicting a twisting ladder of DNA with dutiful little kinesin cherubs pulling out random spokes of the ladder and replacing them with something more important looking. This design was wholly Eighth; there wasn’t a single window on Drearburh with that much light shining through it. The only thing Ninth in the room were the slotted iron vents, looming mercilessly from the highest point in the vaulted room, prompting many nervous glances from Ortus.
They both were sitting in a pair of elegant, curved rocking chairs. In both their arms, they held frail, sickly, thanergenic bundles of new life. Infant Harrowhark was deathly quiet, her hair still a dark tuft on her gaunt skull, too young and too fine to sacramentally shave. Ortus hadn’t realized until now how bruised and veiny her eyelids had been, how misshapen and tiny she’d turned out. She was lost in the bulk of his arms. He was worried that if he moved the wrong way, he’d lose her, like a needle in carpet.
Infant Silas, in contrast, was squalling like his life depended on it. Colum bounced and shushed him, crooned and sang in a vain attempt to soothe whatever pain he was in. In the end, the only thing that quieted him was Colum’s coarse, ashen fingers, which he gripped like a lifeline, his tiny hands fitting perfectly in the gap made by his cavalier’s missing finger. Infant Silas was completely bald, but Ortus knew him by the dark eyes he stared up at his nephew with. Colum reflected in those dark eyes like stars reflected on water.
The Eighth cavalier smiled.
Tears began to burn the back of Ortus’s throat. This was too much, revisiting his first days meeting Harrowhark Nonagesimus, nine months after the passing of every peer he had ever known. He’d been so afraid. She’d been so small. He felt the phantom of his father’s gauntlets on his shoulders, squeezing until it hurt, admonishing him for his tears of apprehension. Had Mortus been afraid, too?
But the black-swathed bundle in his arms wiggled and turned, pressing her face into his chest, and he remembered the moment he carried her to her bed for the first time — ten years old, fingers frostbitten, unable to speak from the swelling in her throat. She’d turned into him then, too, and it had been the first time he’d truly understood his duty as her cavalier. It hadn’t made him any less afraid.
“My House slaughtered two hundred children to make her,” he found himself confessing. It hardly mattered anymore. The imaginary threads binding his tongue unraveled as he spoke.
“I’d hazard a guess that it took about two hundred failures to make Silas, too,” said Colum with grim acceptance. Ortus took another horrified look at the framed glass squares and realized that they were all slides, like the kind a necromancer might use for a microscope, and each slide displayed a dyed bloom of cells. Some were just tiny dots of eggs; others were gauzy chunks of tissue. All were unlabeled, unnamed, and dead.
“I’d heard rumors about the Eighth’s genetic mastery, but I hadn’t expected such a…”
“Vulgar waste of life?” said Brother Asht, bearing all the resentment missing from before. Ortus wondered if he’d been an angrier man sixteen years ago. “If an Idan child is born imperfect, the Third House will use any measure of flesh magic to make them perfect. Children don’t get to be born imperfect at all in the Temple of the White Glass. Mistakes are handled long before implantation. You can imagine how little tolerance they offer after the child is born.”
“The Ninth is strict, also,” said Ortus, and felt a poet’s mortification using such a simple, inadequate term. Strictdidn’t even begin to cover it. Strictwould have been a comparable mercy. Desperate to escape his embarrassment, Ortus asked the question he’d been avoiding: “Why did you bring me here?”
Colum seemed to stall.
The scene changed again, ripping infant Harrowhark from her cavalier’s arms like so much smoke. His throat choked on a mournful cry, but as he reached out to try and grab her again, he found his hands holding the grip of a rapier instead.
Colum was armed as well, and he was bearing down hard. Ortus defended himself with a sloppy parry that was, regardless, impressively quick and instinctual. Muscle memory is half of it, Protesilaus had told him. It’s important to think fast. Train your instincts along with your body, Camilla had coached. He corrected his arm the way she would have corrected it, lowered his hips the way Pro would have lowered them. His next parry was a masterpiece, more elegant than even the move he’d made to block Silas’s sword. Colum’s sword.
Here, the Eighth cavalier was only using a pale, latticed rapier. He was no less skilled with it, however, and soon had Ortus backed into a corner. His blows were relentless, his movements economical, no effort wasted that wasn’t used to lay Ortus out like wet laundry. Unlike Gideon Ptolemaia however, the Ninth House cavalier was built like a palette of bricks. When Colum Asht kneed him in the gut, he did not buckle, and instead grabbed the man by the thigh and swung him.
It made him think of a sack of potatoes, the way the Eighth cavalier went flying, and it almost satisfied him when Colum hit the ground in a jangling heap, his chainmail crunching against the stone piste. When he went to check on him, however, he made the mistake of assuming the match was set, and wound up with a pair of muscular legs wrapping around his ankles and toppling him like an old sentry tower. He hit the ground so hard that the River momentarily wobbled into sight through the veil, and Colum jumped atop of him, pinning his arms above his head so he couldn’t easily roll upright. Ortus panted, feeling smothered by his cloak bunching around his neck, or perhaps by the heat rising behind his skull.
The desaturated echo of Colum wasn’t even winded. Ortus wriggled, but the man was wickedly strong, showing an indomitable mastery of disengagement. There was no doubt he knew exactly how to grapple men the size of Ortus, perhaps even larger than him. With shock and great reverence, Ortus became quite certain that even the stouthearted Protesilaus would have struggled against Colum the Eighth. He tried not to think too much about it, for his piety.
But it didn’t seem like Brother Asht to start a fight without cause, or continue a fight imagined by a dream. For minutes, or hours now, the eyeless cavalier had danced his Ninth counterpart through an echelon of poignant reveries, through crooked and imperfect gestalts of similar, but disparate memories. Was he trying to show him something? No — Colum had never seemed like the type of man who needed to prove anything to a stranger. Though, now that Ortus was looking at him straight-on, watching the clench of the ghost’s jaw and the slight pinch in his sagged, beleaguered eyes, he wondered if Colum was actually grappling with Ortusat all.
They were someplace phantasmagoric, so he had to think along those terms. What would make the Eighth dream of the Ninth? Ortus’s gaze sharpened, determined to find out.
He relaxed his body and let it slip through the piste, like a sleeve in a door pulled discreetly free. It was easy once he decided to think of this liminal space as a dream — and, as Colum had pointed out, he’d written extensively on the subject. There were excerpts about River dreams in the old texts, ancient and moth-eaten scraps that talked about brine, and memories, and in-betweens. Tiny catenatable snippets of ancient conversations between Nonius and his allies, or enemies in some cases. He’d picked apart every last detail of what he could find, originally to form the backdrop of the historical (and disputed) battle between Nonius and his opponent Lyctor. Harrowhark had never quite treated him like a historian for his research, but perhaps now she’d be a little impressed to see her bumbling cavalier use his hobby for something more aligned with her interests.
Colum tried to pull back, but the gravity of Ortus’s body pulled him with. Or perhaps he’d held on tightly to avoid losing him. There was no time to figure it out — where once there was a sparring floor, there was now a long, straight aisle cleaving a great black and white temple right down the middle. Bells clanged in time to a discordant harmony of Eighth and Ninth muster, each and every pew filled with ill-defined people — bent old cloisterites, straight-backed templars, and stippled smears in the distance where the River hadn’t cared to properly populate the scene.
Two men walked down this aisle arm-in-arm; Colum in gleaming silver plate, his boots brisk and polished against the fine Eighth running carpet, and Ortus in his father’s armor, clunking and clanking like a bag of broken pottery with each heavy step. At the end of the aisle, people stood waiting atop the chancel, flanking a resplendent altar bearing two blades. On Colum’s side, two armor-clad men stood with impeccable vigilance, looking similar enough to him to be his brothers. They weren’t anywhere near as jaundiced as he was, but then again, Colum himself was too faded to look like his properly yellow self. On Ortus’s side was his mother, sobbing her eyes out. She had her veil bunched in both her hands, obscuring her face as she used it as a handkerchief, but it was just as well — Ortus didn’t want to contend with the idea that he might have forgotten her face in the years following her self-imposed immurement.
They reached the altar at the same moment, and took in the sight of their respective blades before separating arms. The magnificence of the apse loomed over them, even making the Drearburh half look decadent next to the White Glass half. Transparent, glistening spires rose up around the altar with sallow candles nested in tightly carved recesses at the very top, burning refulgent in the dim light. Their flames danced imposingly in the gleam of the weapons they overlooked.
One was unmistakably Colum the Eighth’s greatsword, brand new and significantly less weatherbeaten. The eyeless echo traced the leather of its grip, savoring the lack of imprint where his hand would have eventually slipped without effort. He glanced at his brothers for only a second — an undisciplined glance, Ortus could surmise — before he cut himself unhesitantly on the palm. Then, he turned and presented the bloody sword to the audience, letting crimson rivers run downward, the most colorful part of him. There was a respectable chorus of rattling prayer knuckles and pious hails.
So the Eighth has no tribulations in terms of duty.
The attendees were hard to hear over the sound of Glaurica’s howling. Ortus ignored her as he reached for his blade. It wasn’t his rapier, or even the polymer-amalgam sword he practiced with. It was a knife, tiny and maliciously sharp, curved ever so slightly at the tip for artful convenience. Sweat pricked his neck and poured down his back. His father had planned to scarify him when Harrow came of age, when it was time for Ortus to step up as her full-time cavalier primary. He’d wailed like an infant, despite his grown age, until his father smacked the insolence out of him, promising him that for every moment Ortus complained, he would dig the knife deeper, ensuring even his defleshed corpse bore the marks of his devotion. He’d hanged himself before that threat could ever be actualized.
Ortus looked to Colum, who was watching him expectantly, waiting to see where this dream led them. He looked ethereal in his ceremonial armor, each smooth metal panel etched with looping filigree, and the cloth peeking underneath wasn’t the least bit dingy. The only thing that looked used was its wearer. Ortus could see the legs of one brother through Colum’s side, and the shoulder of his other through his chest. He was almost gone.
His first theory disproven, Ortus held out his hand. The other man looked at it, hovering his own translucent hand carefully, but eventually grasped it. His white leather gloves sighed quietly against Ortus’s black ones. They walked back down the aisle together, and left through the great double doors.
On the other side was the communications room.
It was simultaneously larger and infinitely more cramped than the original. The walls, once serried with books, was now metastasized with radio coms, dials, and speakers. The grating sound of a spoon stirring tea could be heard crackling from all directions as Harrowhark Nonagesimus stood over a hunched Silas Octakiseron.
She looked ruemy-eyed and spent, her Reverend’s cloak hanging off her thin bones like a corpse’s shroud. She held Ortus’s rapier with a thickness that didn’t suit her wiry hands, and constantly adjusted her stance, her feet trying to sit farther apart than they were capable of. Her eyes were no longer the stygian void where no light could ever escape; with a flush of bile, Ortus realized they were a warmer black, the kind he saw each day he slathered on his sacramental skull. Her hair was shaved all the way down to the scalp.
“Rise, Octakiseron,” she demanded, her voice scratchy and stammering, still. Perhaps moreso.
Silas wasn’t paying any attention to her. He had a simulacrum of his cavalier’s tanned face in his hands, fighting against the man’s incredible convulsions. Ortus couldn’t see its face from this angle, but he could see its fingers bend back, its feet twist in ways they shouldn’t, looking like one of the discarded hair-woven dolls Ortus sometimes found in the old school hall.
“I bid you return,” the young Master Templar entreated. “I bid you return, I bid, I bid—”
“Step aw-way from it, Master T-templar,” Harrow said with more force. “Asht is no longer in there.”
“No,” cried Silas, sounding more like a child than he ever had before in that single syllable. It passed quickly. His deep chapel’s voice returned to say, “He’s never failed to return to me before, and he’s not going to fail now. He’s tread the shores of the River a thousand times and found his way home. I just have to— get through to him.”
He turned his head slightly to Harrow, either to watch her blade or emphasize his point, and it was a mistake. A fat, gray tongue lashed out from the not-Colum’s mouth and wrapped once, twice around the young uncle’s throat, pulling his struggling face toward two maws where its eyes used to be.
The real Colum dashed past Ortus’s shoulder and lopped the tongue clean from the creature’s mouth, right at the thickest hank of it, and it melted into a puddle of black ichor. The eyes continued to gape like hungry baby birds, but Colum separated the head from its body with an economical flick of his wrists, incapacitating the creature so that Silas could crawl away.
This was the part where Ortus expected the man to walk away, but he stood a moment over the writhing corpse, the warped radio walls tinking and crackling around him without a wink of notice. Then, he raised his sword and stabbed the creature — and he stabbed it again, and again, and again, each movement more desperate and frenzied than the one before it, the beauty of his ceremonial armor rotting away as the bloody pitch splattered over it. Ortus wrapped his arms under Colum’s armpits and dragged him away when he realized he wouldn’t stop.
“Get out of me,” the Eighth cavalier bellowed. “Get out of me, Get out of me, God Help Me Please—”
“It’s gone,” shouted Ortus over him. He hadn’t realized that husky voice could get so loud. “Asht— ASHT— Colum the Eighth, remember yourself! They have not taken you.”
He let the man who lived his life as a child’s battery go. The man plunged his sword down one more time, but there was nothing left to stab. There was only darkness, and a ruddy light streaming through a thinning bubble, flashes of the great and putrid River showing through the film. Disembodied skeletons, half-rotten torsos, and swimming fetal heads floated languidly in the fleshy light above — like an aquarium, or a light shone through an egg. Colum stared up at it all with horrified reverence, his thinspun face cast in a dim spotlight, with Ortus still embracing him from behind, his painted face pressed consolingly into the other man’s shoulder. Half the echo was completely faded, and the remaining half was phantasmal, each one of the bones on Ortus’s armor showing through.
Tears flowed freely from those eyeless sockets.
“I’m disappearing,” he said. His voice was low and quiet as the River’s distant thrum, like a heartbeat in utero. Ortus liked the way his voice sounded with his ear pressed to his back. “I’m not a soul for the River to take. I’m a piece, a— a scrap! A memory of a memory, too tainted to even feed to Silas… those beasts ravaged me, took things I can never get back. I didn’t have all of me to give him. Ortus… ”
“What do you need me to do?” whispered Ortus the Ninth.
“Teach me how to accept oblivion.”
“I’m not a psychopomp. I can’t lead you toward something even I haven’t grasped. Oblivion isn’t the domain of the Ninth House.”
“Then…” The echo who was a man who was a ghost swallowed hard. “Then what is the domain of the Ninth House?”
Ortus thought for a moment. “Memory,” he answered at last.
Colum nodded. He sank, and Ortus sank with him, the two of them sitting in a heap on the immaterial floor, watching the leaks trickle in. There was almost nothing left of the Eighth cavalier to rest his head on the Ninth’s lap. “Then remember me. Can I ask you to do that?”
Ortus wasn’t sure if he could. He’d only just been fished from the merciless tide of the River, its salt-soaked depths threatening to strip even the knowledge of his own self. He was afraid to return to it, despite hiding it.
But the River had also shown its illusive side to him. A realm of life stories, albeit twisted, nightmarish and nostalgic in equal measure. Had it really tried to erase him, or had it been Ortus doing the erasing? Had the River really been drowning him, or had it been his own self loathing?
Ortus Nigenad, poet and historian, cavalier and brother, had an eternity to find out. It wasn’t the worst he could have asked for, in terms of retirement.
“I’ll write of you, Colum the Eighth,” he promised.
At his words, the ephemeral man closed his eyes for the last time, his body going lax in sublime relief. It wasn’t peace, but it was something close enough. The crease in his brows smoothed, and he suddenly looked no older than Ortus himself, his lashes long and soft against his scarred cheeks. His lips parted slightly as he sighed, and Ortus realized for the first time that the man had freckles — light and bronzy, some of them flirting with the corner of his lips.
Then they were gone, as quickly as he had noticed them. The last gossamer threads of the echo’s body fell apart with such suddenness that it became apparent how hard he’d been holding on. They blew gently through Ortus’s fingers, feeling soft as the wings of a dove, fluttering past his face to a horizon he couldn’t follow.