Otherwise, Harrowhark was left completely to her own devices. She would rise well before First Bell and pray in the chapel before they turned on the heating, her fingers much too cold to count her prayer beads, and then she would ensconce herself in one of the libraries with a battery lantern and a blanket and her books. She embarked on her study of necromancy alone: the dead were her mentors and tutors. Harrow had no idea how difficult it was to understand the work of adult necromancers, which meant she did not fear trying to understand it. Her development suffered from neither ego nor apprehension. Her parents would sometimes have her recite her theorems of an evening, or make her conjure ulnar bones from a skeleton ground up to powder; or they would have their elderly marshal, Crux, heave some recent corpse over the top tier to squash right to the bottom, and have her fuse the bones back together blind, through the dermis and meat. Then they would open up the body to see how well or badly she had done, but either way their approval was mostly relief. In her genius, they had received the goods that they had so dearly paid for.
Crux told her that her parents had been different, once. This must have been before they committed a little light child massacre. Harrow had been dimly interested in this factoid; she could never recall her parents being anything but exhausted, their joy all spent. Her mother rarely spoke, or if she did, addressed all her remarks to their hulking cavalier, a man who looked as though he would weep if he could only figure out how. Her most vivid memory of her mother was of her hands guiding Harrow’s over an inexpertly rendered portion of skull, her fingers encircling the fat baby bracelets of Harrow’s wrists, tightening this cuff to indicate correct technique.
Her father had been the more voluble of the two. In the evenings he read to his little family, sometimes sermons and sometimes antique family letters. That was another rare memory: the electric light strung up behind her father’s chair, her sat on a three-legged stool next to her mother, her father’s voice a drone unceasing until a touch from his cavalier indicated that he might stop. Harrow would shrug herself inside her black-hooded church robe and practice moulding tiny motes of bone between her finger and thumb, pressing them into soft fingerprints, mentally chopping her body into two hundred relic pieces.
Then everything changed, abruptly, forever. Harrowhark fell in love.
* * *
“Falling” was not the right term, precisely. It was a long process. She more correctly climbed down into love, picked its locks, opened its gates, and breached its inner chamber.
Her life had been dedicated to the Locked Tomb, and what was interred within had commanded her whole attention since she understood what it was: the comatose corpse that lay in state amid the tatters of the Ninth House. She’d been taught to love the Emperor, who ten thousand years ago had given them all release from a death that none of them had deserved, and to view the Tomb as symbol of his victory and his demise. Her mother and father feared what lay consigned to that locked-up grave. Her tedious great-aunts worshipped it, but in desperation, as though their collective awe might flatter it into sparing God. They had never wanted to open the doors and look upon it. Those doors had opened for the body to be brought in, and they would only open again for the body to come out, in some doom yet to come.
Harrow was forbidden entry in the same way she was forbidden from going up to the top tier of the drillshaft and taking a hammer to the oxygen-sealant machines. It would be the end.
Most of her life was spent in silence; there were many moments when she found living—difficult. Tedious. On the worst days, fatuous. Memory now recalled what had happened very bloodlessly, and the details were unimportant. One very bad day—when it seemed as though everyone hated her, and as though this were a completely correct way to feel—with bloodied fists and a bruised heart, she wrote a note explaining her suicide then went and unlocked the door. Unexpectedly, this did not kill her; and what did not kill her made her curious.
She was much older before she could cross the threshold. It was trapped like all hell. But the traps were Ninth traps, made of bone and grinning skeleton, and she’d been using them herself since she was toddling. In the end, the experience was merely educational. She crossed the cave, which was trapped, and passed the central moat of black water—which was deep, and trapped—and then climbed the island (trapped) to the frozen mausoleum (ridiculously trapped), and when she got there—alive—she could look into the open-faced coffin where lay the reason for her existence.
God’s victory and death was a girl. Maybe a woman. At the time Harrowhark had not known how to tell, and the gender was only a self-interested guess. The corpse lay packed in ice, wearing a white shift, her hands clasping a frost-rimed sword, and she was beautiful. The formation of her muscles was perfect. Each limb was a carved representation of a perfect limb, each bloodless foot the lifeless and high-arched simulacrum of the perfect foot. Each black and frosted lash lay against the cheeks with perfect still blackness, and her nose—it was the pinnacle of what a nose should be. None of this would have broken Harrow’s spirit except that the mouth alone was perfectly imperfect: a little crooked, with a divot in the lower lip as though someone had softly pressed a dent into the bow with the tip of their finger. Harrow, who had been born for the sole privilege of worshipping this corpse, loved it wildly from sight.
So the death of God had been Harrow’s death too. She had been careless with her visits. Her parents had … found out … about what she had done, what manner of sin she had committed, and they reacted just as they might have if she had admitted to smashing up the oxygen-sealant machine with a hammer. Faced with apocalypse, they chose to die by their own hands before another death could claim them. They weren’t even angry. It was with a calm and earnest understanding that her mother and father and their cavalier tied five nooses—one for Mother, one for Father, two for Mortus, one for her. Then they hanged themselves with barely a gasp and barely a kick. It would have been better, really, if Harrow had hanged herself up beside them. It would have been best if she had crawled into the tomb beside the woman she loved and let the freezing temperatures take their course.
But Harrowhark—Harrow, who was two hundred dead children; Harrow, who loved something that had not been alive for ten thousand years—Harrowhark Nonagesimus had always so badly wanted to live. She had cost too much to die.
* * *
Love had broken her life into two separate halves: the half before she had fallen, and the half afterward. Afterward, she hated to sit in the apse during chant and listen to a weird, thuddering beat disrupt the prayers of the faithful, a distant striking at the back of her head that she had taken for someone being out of time. She heard doors open and close in distant halls where no doors were opening or closing; her body would become very frightened, and her brain very frustrated. In her agonies she would have to sit right beside her ageing marshal Crux, usually while being spoon-fed; he was insistent that she had to eat. And all the while she would demand, Is that real? for half of what she heard. And he could say, Yes, my lady, or No, my lady, and she might be content.
It killed all her peace. Even in the long dark days she spent wholly alone—in the libraries, or in her laboratory, fingers burnt from handling fatty ashes—she would hear voices just out of her hearing, or see things in her periphery that were not there. It seemed to her that sometimes her hands would grasp her own throat and press up against her windpipe until she saw spots in her vision. She would see dangling ropes; she would forget where she was and wipe out a whole morning’s scholarship with false memory.