* * *
You came to on your bare, bierlike cot all at once, hyperventilating.
The pillow behind your head was perfectly dry. You held your left hand up before your face, before the light, the even white light with its hot tungsten filaments. The thumbnail was whole and even. Too even? Were you wont to chew your fingernails still, that unattractive tic of your girlhood? The great two-hander lay next to you like an undisturbed baby, and across the wall of your quarters—
Nothing. No nail fragments. No scarring on the wall. Just a neat stack of crates. And in a chair dragged close to your bedside—the little chair that usually sat by the door, the one you had only ever seen the Emperor occupy—was Ianthe Tridentarius.
Your gazes met. The other nascent Lyctor—the Third House saint, the Emperor’s bones and the Emperor’s joints, the Emperor’s fists and gestures—was clothed in a beautiful nacreous robe that glimmered all the colours of the rainbow: gauzy, iridescent white stuff that changed violently in the light. The mother-of-pearl made Ianthe’s hair a lurid yellow and threw up all the mustard tints of her skin; her face was blotchy, and her eyes were sleepless pits. She looked like shit. You noticed that the eyes were a curious muddle of colours: washed-out purple jostled for space with a milky blue, freckled here and there with a lightish, hazy brown. Ianthe was sitting significantly too near to you, and she had arranged herself in the chair in a strangely lopsided, tilt-shouldered fashion. She also possessed two arms, which was one more than you’d last seen her sporting. None of that particularly bothered you.
What bothered you was that now the Princess of Ida—pale haired, all height and elbows, twilight shadows beneath her eyes—was looking at you with an expression you struggled to remember ever seeing on her face. Ianthe was fond of languid attitudes and postures; she affected a heavy, artificial tedium, or a faint and glittering malice, sometimes even a self-deprecating and idle humourousness; but she looked at you now with a soft and thoroughly uncharacteristic hunger. She smiled down at you with a frank, overfamiliar indulgence that frightened you. Ianthe looked lit from within.
“Good morning, my comrade,” she said. “My colleague, my ally. I do like your eyes, Harrowhark—like flower petals in a darkened room. And even I can admit that your eyelashes are delicious. Stop wearing that pillowcase any time you like—I’ve seen your face before, and I know it looks like both of your parents were right-angled triangles. We must work with what we’ve got, as the flesh magician said to the leper.”
Your whole soul flinched. A livid heat rose up your neck. With a titanic struggle, you managed not to shield your face with your hands, to be sure of your bedsheet mask. Lyctoral perception had made you complacent. Ianthe Tridentarius was a black hole where no heart could be sensed beating and no brain could be seen sparking. The brain, you knew grudgingly, existed. The heart was an open question. She looked at your face—saw, most likely, her own death reflected in your expression—and reached inside her robe. The palm of your hand slapped to her forehead with a ringing thwack. You could not sense her: she was a locked door in a dark room to you; but with a touch you could feel the orbital bones you might remove from her face.
“Before you do anything I am quick to reassure you that you will regret,” said the other Lyctor, who had not moved—who had not recoiled at your palm’s promise, except, perhaps, a quick shuttering of those mixed-up eyes—“I have a message for you.”
The hand slowly withdrew from the robe. None of this would have been enough, except (the blood howled in your ears; you thought you heard footsteps, but then they slurred into voices, then back into footsteps again) that caught between Ianthe’s fingers was a piece of flimsy with the name Harrowhark clearly upon it. The name Harrowhark was lettered in your hand. Underneath, in smaller lettering, and still your hand: To be given to Harrowhark immediately upon coherence.
You looked at the letter. You looked at Ianthe. Even in that short interval, the battlefield of her eyes had changed. From beneath your palm, you could see that one iris was now wholly a washed-out purple, like a fading bruise or a dying flower; the other one was blue and brown commingled. This glittering mess of heterochromatics focused on you, totally calm, utterly sure of itself.
“I wish you’d explained to me what coherence meant,” she complained. “Did you mean coherent as in, I recognise objects and their names? Did you mean coherent as in, I am no longer remotely out to lunch, which means you’re still not eligible? I wasn’t going anywhere near you in the first instance of you opening your eyes. Your only settings were power-vomit and murder.”
“Tell me how you came to have what you are holding,” you croaked.
“You put it in my own hands, you skull-faced fruitcake,” she said soothingly. “Go on. Take it. It’s yours.”
You withdrew your hand from her forehead, and you took it. You were desperately afraid that your fingers were shaking, and that you would not know to make them stop. In your lap, under the strong white light of the hospital quarter, you could see no error or artifice in the writing: it was yours, not an exceptional copy. It was written in your blood. When you touched the smooth, plex-rendered surface, you could see in your mind’s eye the pen nib, the soft bite of the metal into the inside of your lip.
Unfolding the flimsy and spreading it across your knees was the final gobbet boiling off the skeleton. The letter was written in Ninth House crypt-script; your own cipher, based off that of your parents and developed when you were seven years old. It was unbreakable to anyone who lacked your rosary, Marshal Crux, and a hundred or so years to spare.
You read:
ADDRESSING THE REVEREND LADY HARROWHARK NONAGESIMUS, KNOWN AS THE REVEREND DAUGHTER BY HER OWN DESIRE, NOW HARROWHARK THE FIRST, WRITING AS THE SAME, NOW DEAD.
“I’ll give you a moment,” said Ianthe, and she stood and crossed over to the window, standing bathed in the light of the nearest star.
* * *
ADDRESSING THE REVEREND LADY HARROWHARK NONAGESIMUS, KNOWN AS THE REVEREND DAUGHTER BY HER OWN DESIRE, NOW HARROWHARK THE FIRST, WRITING AS THE SAME, NOW DEAD.
LETTER #2 OF #24. TO BE READ IMMEDIATELY ON COHERENCE.
Harrowhark—
As I write, it has been forty-eight hours since you became a Lyctor at Canaan House. By the time you read this you will not recall the writing thereof, as the Harrowhark of the writing will be dead and gone. Her resurrection constitutes a fail state and must be avoided at all costs.
This letter cannot answer questions. What I have done I will refer to as the work, and its character is actively harmful for you to know. I will instead provide guidelines on how to live the rest of your life. As your life may hopefully now extend into the myriads, it is of enormous import that you are not tempted to deviate from them. You are the living surety of promises I have made. Break troth with me, and from beyond my destruction I will brand you Tomb heretic, cut off utterly from that which lies on the frozen altar, asleep and dead; removed from the adoration thereof, and any promise of part in her resurrection.
GUIDELINE #1: STAY ALIVE.
You may not end your own life through suicide. You may not end your own life through carelessness. Accidental death must be avoided at all costs and never accepted as an outcome. The work relies upon your continuance.