When you were ten years old, the Body was quiet and rigorous, practical and merciful. At fourteen the Body was tender and serene, and sometimes smiled. When you were sixteen the Body was resolute and impassioned. In all these incarnations, she had preserved her vow of silence. Now the sound of her voice meant the madness had returned to you in full.
“I can’t,” you said, as carefully as possible. “I can’t, beloved. It’s gone.”
The Emperor said, “Harrow?” but you’d mostly forgotten he was there.
“You are walking down a long passage,” said the Body. “You need to turn around.”
“I am standing in the dark,” you told her. Each of the Body’s eyelashes was wet with frost. “I lost it. It’s gone. There’s nothing there. I must have misapprehended the process. I am half a Lyctor. I am nothing, I am pointless, I am unmanned.”
Hands fell heavy on your shoulders. You looked from the face you loved to the face of the Resurrecting King.
“Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing,” he said.
As he spoke, his mouth looked strange. A hot whistle of pain ran down your temporal bone. Your body was numb to grief; perhaps you had felt it once, but you did not feel it anymore. “Ortus Nigenad died thinking it was the only gift he was capable of giving,” you said, “and I have wasted it—like—air.”
The Resurrecting King took on the expression of a man working out a very difficult and emotionally taxing anagram. He said, “Ortus,” again, but the bile was sputtering up into your throat, your mouth, before the Body passed her hand over your eyebrows and the bridge of your nose and you slipped from his imperial grip. You fell almost senseless to the floor.
“Ortus Nigenad,” said the Emperor again, almost wondering; but then you knew nothing more, except that you hadn’t thrown up on God, which had to count as consolation.
3
THE REVEREND DAUGHTER Harrowhark Nonagesimus ought to have been the 311th Reverend Mother of her line. She was the eighty-seventh Nona of her House; she was the first Harrowhark. She was named for her father, who was named for his mother, who was named for some unsmiling extramural penitent sworn into the silent marriage bed of the Locked Tomb. This had been common. Drearburh had never practiced Resurrection purity. Their only aim was to keep the necromantic lineage of the tomb-keepers unbroken. Now all its remnant blood was Harrow; she was the last necromancer, and the last of her line left alive.
Her birth had been expensive. Eighteen years ago, in order to wrench a final bud from this terminal axil, her mother and father had slaughtered all the children of their House in order to secure a necromantic heir. Harrow had been created in that hour of pallor mortis, while the souls of her peers were fumbling to escape their bodies, her genesis their ignition of thanergy as they died with a simultaneity her parents had agonised to calculate. None of this had been kept from her. It had been explained to Harrow, year after year, right from the time she knew both when to speak and when to not. This skill came early to Ninth House infants.
As a child, she was allowed to pull down the coverlet and get into bed only after she had worked her way through forty-five minutes of evening prayers, bracketed by her wretched great-aunts Lachrimorta and Aisamorta. They had been strict with her infant catechism, and their presence was a strong motivation for Harrow to get her prayers exactly right and not start over, as they smelled like incense and tooth decay. She had enunciated clearly—no lisping—devotions of their own devising: The Tomb I will serve till the end of my days, and then see me buried in two hundred graves … which they’d thought sweetly whimsical, just right for a little girl.
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