Black Anchorite. And that would be the end of the Ninth House, even more completely than a hammer to the oxygen-sealant machine.
They needed a resurrection. They needed a miracle. Harrowhark had been studying miracles for years, and then one landed squarely in her lap: the chance to become a Lyctor. The chance to serve the Emperor her God, the chance to become a fist and a gesture, the chance to become an immortal servitor and advocate for Drearburh; to refresh the Ninth House on her terms, with the rock never rolled away and the love of her life and her death quiet and unmolested in her deadly shrine of stone. Another ten thousand years of solitude. Another long and snaking line of Reverend Mothers, Reverend Fathers. Harrow took the unready cavalier from her House, and she snatched the chance with both hands.
But like falling in love the first time, becoming a Lyctor had all gone wrong. Her cavalier had given himself to her with a numb readiness that still burnt her to ash with shame. Even with that readiness, she had committed the indelible sin halfway; she had gathered up the matter of Ortus Nigenad’s soul and not been able to choke him all the way down. She was Harrowhark alone in front of the mirror again: a nonsense, a monster, an alien geometry. A loathsome squawk of a person. She was nine, and she’d made a mistake. She was seventeen, and she’d made a mistake. Time had repeated itself. Harrow would be tripping over herself for her whole existence, a frictionless hoop of totally fucking up.
There had been another girl who grew up alongside Harrow—but she had died before Harrow was born.
4
YOU STILL PRIDED YOURSELF on three things: firstly, bloody-minded composure; secondly, an inhuman intellect for necromancy; thirdly, being very difficult to kill. You were so immune to murder that you had not even been able to inflict the act upon yourself.
When you woke up midway through the first attempt on your life, your mind startled itself out of its thick fug and shook itself awake. There was a soft, all-encompassing warmth pressing over your face that could only have been your pillow, the thin cloth cover damp with your spit and breath. Someone was standing to the right of your cot and holding the pillow down. As you reflexively bucked, one hand moved to put hard pressure on your throat, and your hyoid would have cracked had you not reinforced it with a thick rime of cartilage.
They were a damned fool for not getting atop you. You found your fingers and plucked the thumbnail from your left hand, screaming into that asphyxiating white darkness, and separated your bloody disc of keratin and flesh into a thousand racine fragments, then expanded those into a multitude of jagged, splintering fléchettes. Blind, airless, you swung these stiff and hairy missiles into your assailant like so much shrapnel; you heard them thud into flesh and ping off the wall and bury themselves in steel. Good. Good. The weight on the pillow lightened, and—
* * *
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