But as puberty changed her yet again, with hormones or time or both, she was able to regain some semblance of control over her maggot-eaten mind. She prayed often. Her brain took refuge in rituals. Sometimes she fasted, or ate the same thing for every meal, arranged in a specific pattern on her plate, consumed in the same order, for months on end. She wore her paint far beyond the strictures of any nun, wore it in private, sometimes slept in it. She found the sight of her own unpainted face in the mirror impossibly wearisome, monstrous, and nonsensical, somehow faraway and yet heinously attached to herself. Harrow did not often weep, but at times she sat within the shroud of her cot and rocked back and forth with hard, fast motions, often for hours.

The scholarship grew difficult once she realised belatedly that it was difficult; but that was cured by working harder. She spent sometimes half a month on the same theorem. She moved her mother and father through the House like chess pieces, trying every year to correct their stiff and unnatural gait, sitting them in chapel as her people asked them for guidance she had little idea how to give. But the penitents and devoted of the Locked Tomb were getting old, and she learned that they all wanted to be told the same thing. More often than not she would stand between her parents’ corpses at some death bed, watching one more of her penitents rattle their last as she repeated the words of their final service. They died happy. They loved it. She had a real talent. Harrowhark had attended so many deathbeds, and given so many solemn takes about death and duty, that in the end she started to believe them.

The Ninth House elderly became the Ninth House decrepit, and the Ninth House decrepit became the Ninth House dead. Harrow hark was by most of them when they died, except if they had a sudden pulmonary, and even at fourteen she was good enough with a heart arrest to keep them going until she could give them final rites. She’d always disdained flesh magic, but she had a knack for the aorta. Later, when their meat had trickled away, she personally raised their de-fleshed skeletons to work the mangle or quietly rake the snow-leek fields in the upper reaches of Drearburh. Much of her necromancy had been sharpened by the day-to-day busywork of geriatric death, of the niche and the skull, of sitting with osteoporotic bones and filling up their honeycomb so that the constructs did not end up a confusion of ribcages with their legs powdering off. Her parents knew what they had been about, making a genius out of two hundred dead children: it took a genius simply to keep the House from deliquescing into a pile of bones and pneumonia victims.

But even a genius could only maintain the status quo. The House had never had the tech, nor the understanding, nor the on-duty flesh magicians to work a vat womb. The womb-bearing populace was too old to have babies, barring two of their number, one of whom was herself. Harrow could only thank God that duty had never fallen to her. The only viable source of healthy XY had been located in her House’s cavalier primary, a boy seventeen years her elder. Back then she had considered him a walk-around man suit surrounding some quite good calcium carbonate, and she knew he considered her with an awful respect, the same type one might have for a hereditary cancer that one knew was on its way. Thankfully, their marriage would have mingled the Drearburh cavalier and scion lines beyond any hope of repair: Ortus Nigenad was an only child. Harrowhark had her parents quash the idea so enthusiastically that she cracked her father’s molar. The only virgin who could possibly be more relieved was Ortus himself.

So the years passed, unshriven, crusting up and drying as they went. Harrowhark watched Crux get older, and older and older, and tried all the tricks in her box to keep him upright—there was terrible plaque in his arteries, and he pretended that he did not notice her scraping them. She knew that when she finally laid her nursemaid in his niche, it would be the death of the only other person invested in her sanity. And if she went mad again, then what? At any point she could have asked for assistance from her sister Houses. At any point she could have asked for Cohort intervention, and they would have been there the next day with foetal care boxes, and volunteer penitents, and loans, and plant samples—and with incontrovertible suggestions that Harrowhark really ought to marry this son of the Second, or this daughter of the Fifth—and she could have watched coloured banners get strung up next to the black skull of the 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 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.