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In the depths of Canaan House, Harrow’s feet know where she must be. She finds herself stumbling toward the Response chamber across the ice- and organ-bound facility floor, the coffin hulking and menacing in its place of prominence.
“Don’t go, my lady,” Ortus protests behind her. He has no trouble keeping up with her, his long legs able to make strides twice the length of hers. She doesn’t glance back at him. Ice cracks beneath their feet.
The Sleeper has changed. The face, formerly hidden behind the mask of the haz suit, is now bare. A red curl of hair lies across—presumably—her forehead. Harrow leans closer, attempting to catch every detail: the slope of the nose, the length of the lashes, the twist of the mouth. It’s as though Harrow has seen this face before…but no, she would remember if she had.
Pent skids across a patch of ice, her hair and robes in disarray. “wait, Harrow! There’s something I must tell you.”
“I must know who she is,” Harrow replies shortly. “Why can we now see her face?” She leans closer to the coffin’s lid, her breath misting the glass.
“She must be waking,” Ortus says with more than his typical gloom, as though intoning a dirge.
“Pull her away—” Pent begins.
Harrow’s nose touches the lid, and she passes straight through.
It doesn’t feel like falling. One moment, she’s looking down into a crystal box, where the Sleeper lies on her back. The next moment, she’s standing fully upright in a little gray room, with what, to her uneducated eye, might be the levers and buttons of ship controls at one end, and a narrow bunk at the other. There is no exit. The walls are unbroken metal, gray and oppressive. This should be a coffin; the ceiling ought to be glass. The ceiling is glass. Harrow peers up eagerly, but all she can glimpse is confusion.
“No, none of that. My party, my rules.” The Sleeper appears in front of her, still unmasked. The glass melts and warps and becomes metal once more.
“You came,” she growls close to Harrow’s ear. “Good for you. I wouldn’t have minded a full-on assault, which I would have won, but this adds a nice touch.”
Harrow curls her fingers around a knucklebone she’d drawn from Ortus’s panniers and gives her best imperious glare. “Why are we here?”
The Sleeper gestures broadly with her empty hand. “Welcome to my home away from Hell. It’s a bit small, I suppose, but it suits me. As for why you’re here, I’m in the mood for some fun before I take care of you.”
The Sleeper prowls from one end of the ship to the other, tossing an archaic gun from hand to hand. Harrow observes the sway of her hips and the care with which she takes each step out of the corner of her eye. Something about the Sleeper niggles at the back of her mind, almost painfully.
“What, nothing to say, Harrowhark?” The Sleeper says her name with an emphasis on each syllable, as though she’s never spoken it aloud before. “I’m about to body snatch you, and all you can do is ogle me.” She stalks toward Harrow, gun cradled in the crook of her arm.
“Whatever will you use my body for? You have feet of your own and seem quite capable of skulking.” Harrow edges backward in an attempt to put as much distance between herself and the Sleeper as she can.
“To finish what I started.” The Sleeper follows, matching Harrow step for step. “This isn’t a conversation.”
Harrow runs up against the bulkhead. She palms her knucklebone and makes to unfurl a line of skeletons—
Nothing whatsoever happens. The knucklebone rests in her hand, inert as a chip of stone. She senses nothing from it, not even the barest speck of thanergy. She searches beyond the bone, frantic, but there isn’t any thanergy to be found. In this place, she is powerless. She replaces the knucklebone in her pocket, expressionless.
“Problem?” the Sleeper asks, her smile tight and mean.
“Not in the least,” Harrow snaps. “I find these accommodations unsatisfactory.”
“I like them fine,” the Sleeper says, coming ever closer, hemming Harrow in with her body, raising her gun to press its cold end to the side of Harrow’s head. “You’re no wizard here, and I’m going to blow your fucking brains out.” Harrow hears an ominous click and prepares herself for she knows not what—
Nothing whatsoever happens. “Fuck!” the Sleeper rages, tossing the gun aside. She puts her hand out as if expecting something to appear in it; when nothing does, she grinds her teeth and stamps a foot. “What have you done?”
“I couldn’t possibly know. You led me to believe that this was your party.”
“No, I suppose you don’t know a damned thing. I’d be impressed, if you weren’t the hell spawn you are.” The Sleeper retrieves her weapon. Harrow curls her hands into fists.
The Sleeper leaps at her, bearing her down to the intemperate floor. Her grip is inexorable. Harrow kicks, her feet flailing uselessly. The Sleeper cracks Harrow across the temple with her gun. Eyes streaming and vision spotting, Harrow sinks her teeth into the Sleeper’s other hand. The Sleeper knees her in the stomach, knocking the breath from her in a huff. “The fucking teeth on you,” the Sleeper says, almost admiring.
Harrow pants beneath her, the taste of blood in her mouth, her pulse thumping in her ears. She can’t remember when she last felt so alive.
She has fought like this before.
“You look like someone I know,” Harrow wheezes, wildly grasping at anything that will make the Sleeper cease her assault. “Have we met?”
“No.” The Sleeper holds her position, her weight pressing Harrow against the hard metallic floor. “I’ve said more than enough already.”
Harrow rakes her nails down the Sleeper’s cheek. The Sleeper curses but remains immovable, not even bothering to wipe away the welling blood. “Cute,” she says. “You’re pathetic without your bones.”
Exhausted and starved for proper breath, Harrow lets her hand drop to her side. “There isn’t a way out, for you or for me,” she tries.
The Sleeper glances around, frowning in concentration. “Hmm,” she says, when no door appears. “I’m sure there will be once I kill you.”
Her breath is hot on Harrow’s cheek. Harrow can see the faintest dusting of freckles across her nose. Harrow feels flushed with something more than mere exertion.
“I am two hundred sons and daughters of my House. I do not die.” She spits in the Sleeper’s face.
And here the Sleeper smiles in a wholly new way, all her teeth showing, her eyes bright. Harrow, despite herself, thinks she’s beautiful. “Poor, poor Harrowhark,” she croons. “You are dying as we speak.”
*
MOMENTS AGO
Harrow glanced down at the blade that had emerged from her front in mild surprise. For a moment, she admired the aesthetic of it. How interesting, to have a sword emerge spontaneously from her abdomen. She dropped to her knees, her head lulling onto her chest, and knew no more.
*
Harrow remembers: a blade, a girl, a rail. But that is not now.
Now is brackish, bloody water, where the dead dare not go. But no, that isn’t right, either.
Now is the Drearburh chapel where Harrow Nova stretches and turns, rapier in one hand, Samael’s chain in the other.
Across from her, Ortus stands, panniers swung over his hunching shoulders. “Harrow,” he says, “you are not a cavalier.”
“I am the cavalier secondary of the House of the Ninth,” she replies, whirling the Chain over her wrist. “How dare you question the scrap I have been granted for my failure.”
“Harrow,” Ortus says again, his tone perhaps more lugubrious than normal. “The Sleeper follows. You cannot linger.”
“You speak nonsense,” she tells him. “I intend to challenge you for the title of cavalier primary, and you make to distract me.”
“I would that it were so, Harrow,” he intones, “but I may only warn you. The Sleeper is close at your heels. You mustn’t let her catch up.” He spots something behind her, and blood leaves his face. “She is already here.”
“If you are lying to me, Nigenad,” she spits through clenched teeth, “I will challenge you to the floor.”
His entire body droops. “As it pleases you.”
With a sigh Harrow turns, and she knows immediately that Ortus speaks true. A woman stands near the back pews, dressed in a fitted black jumpsuit, her red hair in soft, wild curls about her face and shoulders. She’s the brightest thing in this place, the chapel dull and lifeless in comparison with its innumerable black shrouds and draperies. She is out of place, or the chapel itself is out of place because she stands within it.
“Who—?” Harrow whispers. She almost remembers, but then it’s gone.
“This is the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen,” the Sleeper says, looking around with a revolted expression. “Sorry, but wizard church just isn’t for me.”
“Run!” someone implores behind her; —she looks round, it isn’t Ortus—but it’s too late. Her feet draw her step by step toward the woman, who holds out a hand. “That’s my girl,” she purrs, her eyes hungry.
“Wait,” Harrow says, stumbling to a halt—
*
Now they are falling. The Sleeper is clad once more in her haz suit, hood up and mask in place. Harrow clings to her outstretched arm. Beneath them, coming ever closer, stretches the Ninth House’s shuttle field.
“Watch me survive what killed me, wizard,” the Sleeper says, her muffled voice brimming with something akin to pride. “Most people can’t revisit their own deaths. The memory of it drives them mad. I am not most people.”
Indeed, they come to rest without even a jolt in the center of the bare earth. No one is around to bear witness to whatever it is the Sleeper intends, not even the marshal. They are well and truly alone.
“Alas, you are a fool.” Harrow searches for the bright spots of buried bone that she remembers being here, once. “You brought me home again.”
“Nothing is home in the River, stupid girl,” the Sleeper tells her. “Don’t you get it yet? We are adrift because you won’t lie back and let me kill you.”
“I have never surrendered in my life, you know.” Harrow keeps searching. They must be here! She spent all night burying them.
“No?” The Sleeper cocks her hooded head. “You invited me in, Harrowhark. You cradled that sword to your chest, despite your disgust. You bathed that sword in your blood and your love and would have died to keep it safe. What is that, if not surrender?”
“That had nothing to do with you,” Harrow protests, her voice quavering pathetically.
*
MONTHS AGO
Harrow walked down the enshrined halls of the Cohort’s dead, step by stumbling step. The two-handed sword was clutched in her hands, dragging behind her. In the Mithraeum, all slept as soundly as the dead.
Harrow crept into the chapel where the Lyctoral corpse lay in state. The sword warmed in her hand, a comfort in the candle-riven dark. One step more she took, and raised the sword with trembling arms to plunge it into the Lyctoral chest, even to the heart.
Harrow fell forward, the sord carrying her with it. The Lyctor’s eyes opened, wide and dark and filmy, nothing like the electric blue they’d been in life. She smiled and drew Harrow’s face close and kissed her upon the mouth with dead and waxy lips. The sword sprouted up between them, Harrow’s hand blooming blood at the blade’s edge
*
“You see,” the Sleeper says, almost gentle. “I have already won. It’s only a matter of claiming my prize.” There is a smile in her voice, new and terrible. “Death is not the only way to make your body mine.”
Harrow doesn’t reply. Memories return, a veritable flood. The knowledge of the power she ought to have, the Mithraeum, God, Ianthe, her brother and sister Lyctors. And at last, the knowledge of what she has lost.
Now there is no bone to be found. There is no Secundarius Bell ringing its thunderous ring. There is no Nav to shout and rage at her—
There is no Nav. Gideon Nav is dead. She came to the Ninth out of the sky itself all those years ago, but she will never fall here again.
“You’re Nav’s mo—” Harrow begins. The Sleeper slaps a hand over her mouth.
“Do not speak of her,” the Sleeper says, inscrutable. “You did kill her, after all.”
“Oh,” Harrow rasps and falls to her knees. The world falls apart. They flail through rushing water, the Sleeper’s hand grasping hers—
The inside of the not-coffin reforms around them. Harrow remembers herself at last. She is Harrowhark the First, the Ninth Saint to serve the King Undying. She knows what she must do.
The Sleeper kisses her with tongue and teeth, her fingers scratching down Harrow’s sides. Harrow meets her kiss for kiss, thrust for thrust. She tastes alive and fierce, for all that she is merely a ghost.
“I care not for my own life,” Harrow pants as the Sleeper finds that spark at her center and strokes it into a blazing inferno.
“I know. It’s an admirable trait. I really like that in a girl.” The Sleeper plunders with her hands and mouth. Harrow draws her close, as close as it is possible for two bodies to be.
“I care not for my own life if it means she will die,” Harrow says. The knucklebone in her pocket warps, ripples, narrows to a wicked point.
“I would let her be,” the Sleeper assures her. “She’s done her part.”
“But my body is hers now to use as she sees fit,” Harrow finishes, as the bone pierces deep into the Sleeper’s gut. “You cannot have it.”
From above them comes the sound of chanting voices. Harrow recognizes Pent, and even Ortus. “You are a fool, Harrowhark,” the Sleeper croaks, blood gushing from her mortal wound. “You serve a false God.”
“I serve the Body of the Locked Tomb,” Harrow tells her as she falls. “And I serve the House of the Ninth. Take back your wretched soul.”
Harrow kisses the Sleeper one last time, upon her dying mouth. The Sleeper gives one last, furious sigh and lies still.
At her dead throat hangs a thin metal chain, dull and plain. With one finger, Harrow lifts it to reveal a small tag. Upon it, a single word is engraved with great care: AWAKE.
“Still alive down there, Harrow?” calls Magnus Quinn.
“I am,” Harrow replies, and climbs out to rejoin the ghosts of Canaan House.