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Sometime in the fourth century of the second myriad of the Resurrector—because, really, who kept count anymore? She could barely remember which decade they were in. The third, maybe.
(Harrow, who kept track of these things, would know that they were in the fifth decade. She would despair of her negligence: Really, Tridentarius, you have half a decent brain and you can’t be bothered to look at a calendar? Ianthe would reply that she needed her brilliant mind for grander, better things; Harry could be the menial timekeeper if she so wished. Harrow would say: It’s the year four hundred fifty-seven. And so it was.)
Thusly: in the year four hundred fifty-seven of the second myriad of the Kindly Prince—that that King of Kings, the Lord of the River, the Prince of Death!—the Eight Saint surfaced back into her body with a jolt.
She was shivering, though not from the cold. Her mind still felt drenched in the phantom waters of the River, her meat-and-bone carcass covered in blood. There were still Heralds surrounding her, horrible to look at even after they’d been hacked to pieces and strewn around like discarded parts. There were chunks of the creatures in her hair. The disgusting sensation clung to her skin and her own soul, oily and dirty and fucking terrifying at once. She wanted to claw off the skin of her face so that it might stop. She wanted to scream; she wanted to bite off her tongue. She needed to be away—
Ianthe fell to her knees on the stone floor of the Mithraeum, cold and sticky with blood that was partly hers and mostly theirs. Just the stench of it made her retch, and she welcomed it—the acidic feeling of vomit at the back of her throat grounded her just long enough to call on her powers. Dead Heralds were nothing. Chunks of blown-up flesh, and flesh was putty in her hands.
Ianthe shuddered. She drew herself up and watched the wretched things around her liquefy and evaporate. Her hair was matted and her skin was covered in filth, but she was alive. Her body was whole, her mind wasn’t there quite yet but she would recover. She had been the one to kick Number Five into hell—it had been a small dark thing, shaped like a skull, and Ianthe had teased Harrow that…
Right. Harrow.
For all that she wanted to run off, there were unfortunately other things to do. By her own account, they’d all emerged unscathed—there was safety in numbers, and all Lyctors had agreed years ago to put aside whatever grievances they had among themselves and with God, whenever it was time to engage one of the Beasts. Five Lyctors against one revenant was better odds than any alternative.
Well, four Lyctors and a half. But that was Harry’s damn fault for being so stubborn.
It was early in the day cycle—whatever passed for the morning on the Mithraeum—and the lamps were burning bright white. Not that it kept her from yawning. The last planet Ianthe had been on had a day cycle that lasted six standard days and she’d gotten used to sleeping when it was light outside.
She stalked through the whole east quadrant, unmaking Heralds as she went. They were all dead, withered the moment their Beast had sunk out of existence like discarded monstrous appendages, but they still filled up the air with the stench of fear. Her eyes rested uneasily over the bloody shapes, all impossible angles and too-many legs, and honestly—fucking yikes.
At one point she crossed paths with Mercymorn, just as bloodied, who turned up her nose in true Mercymorn fashion and looked away pointedly, a twist of her lips that conveyed, You aren’t worthy of my attention, infant.
Like I didn’t save your life, you old hag, Ianthe glared back, eyebrows arching. She didn’t bother to say it out loud; she turned away, leaving the Saint of Joy to her endless sulk and petty treasons. There was only one sister she was interested in bickering with.
In Harrow’s room, she took a bath. There was something to be said about the luxury of a water bath after getting absolutely disgusting, the lazy pleasure of watching the mirror get fogged up with heat. She rinsed herself—it came away red and black and pus-yellow, delightful—and submerged again. She was washing her hair when she heard the sound of a distant door opening, Harrow stomping footsteps promising delightful annoyance.
The door slammed open.
“Why are you here?”
“To lay eyes on you. Alive and unscathed… look at you! A sight for sore eyes.”
Sure enough, Harrow was all of those things. It had been a stroke of genius, all those years ago, to call in the favour of the Chain when she had—genius and pure selflessness, for once. Harrow wouldn’t let herself be locked into the Emperor’s chambers when the heralds came, even after God himself asked her to—he’d begged her even, in that patently insincere humble way of his, but stubborn little Harry wouldn’t baulk.
Well, then. Ianthe’s wishes, on this one thing, came before the orders of the Emperor of the Nine Houses. She had ordered Harrow not to throw away her life for the sake of her stupid pride, and Harrow had spat in her face and cursed her entire line—they’d nearly come to blows; not the sexy kind—but she had done it.
It had been four centuries and five of those engagements, two very successful and one nearly a disaster, and during all of them Harrow had been with them in soul only, her body cloistered away in God’s own inner sanctum. Four centuries, and Harrow had never forgiven her for not letting her go to her death.
Here and now, Ianthe splayed herself in Harrow’s bath, laying her arms on the edges of the tub—flesh and gilt, both outstretched. The water came up to her chest, and she noticed with some satisfaction that Harrow was looking. Her eyes were dark coal, and Ianthe quite liked the look of them even if she hated the vulnerability they indicated. Harrow was so breakable that Ianthe couldn’t stand to look at her some days. She’d already lost one sister to the ravages of mortality.
“Did you come to join me?”
“In your dreams,” Harrow said, proving once again that she was a fucking tease. She did, however, deign to come to sit on the edge of the tub, still clad head to toe in black and bones, her fingers skimming the surface of the water.
“How like you to bathe in soup,” said Harrow, who never washed in water that was any less than freezing. She flicked some water up Ianthe’s nose.
They’d had this conversation many times. Ianthe would say: Warm water feels amazing on sore muscles, you should try it; and Harrow would feel mocked because her muscles weren’t nearly as sore, having spent the past few hours safely cocooned in Teacher’s nest while he played with his tablet or whatever was that he did while the soul of his Saints descended into the realm of the dead to fight in his name. Harrow would sulk and Ianthe would say that the warmth was good for relieving tension, too, with a sly smile that suggested they fuck. Harrow would call her a pervert and stride away and then, inevitably, come back later.
Ianthe decided to cut through all of it. She looked up at Harrow through wet eyelashes and said, “Will you wash my hair?”
“Like hell I will, Tridentarius.”
“You’re no fun.”
She let herself sink into the water with enough force to splash some of it out of the tub and into Harrow’s clothes. It was such hard work to get her naked, every damn time. Harrow kept that bone armour of hers even in bed, more often than not; it had been nearly three centuries since the Saint of Duty had last tried to kill her—the man Harrow still stubbornly called Ortus—but Harrow never forgot and she could hold a fucking grudge. She was rather like God that way, though significantly more of a challenge.
Ianthe kicked her legs under the water, holding her breath just long enough that her lungs began to feel starved for air she didn’t need. When she resurfaced, tossing her head back, she was pleased to catch Harrow looking at her.
“So, are you just going to sit there and watch?” A shrug. “Suit yourself. You need better shampoo, by the way, Harry, this is going to dry my scalp…”
It was an effort to carry out a conversation with Harrow, but Ianthe the First had always loved a challenge. She liked keeping up a stream of inane chatter and perusing Harrow’s face for the minimal twitches and frowns that said what her words wouldn’t.
Harrow barely bothered with her skull paints these days; she wasn’t wearing it now, and Ianthe got to catch all her little tells: the small half-smile at the corner of her mouth that meant Harrow was fondly exasperated, the twitch of her nose that signalled distaste, the arc of the eyebrow that warned that she was plotting bloody murder. It was rewarding. It was, God help her, even cute.
Eventually, the water got cold. Ianthe jutted her chin to the towel she’d left on a counter—it was one of her own towels, mint-green and fluffy, nothing like those drab scratchy rags Harrow favoured. “Pass me that?”
Harrow watched her dry up with something like fascination. Ianthe always wondered how much it was her naked body that did it—frail and muscled, the very epitome of necromancer chic!—and how much it was just that Harry got off on watching the arm she’d made skim over Ianthe’s bare skin.
She wasn’t about to complain either way; intrigued was a good look on Harrow, always promising all sorts of wickedly innovative things, some of them deliciously perverted. But Ianthe was—pardon the pun—bone-tired; she’d been yawning since she’d emerged from the River and the warm water had only made her drowsier.
“We should go to bed,” she suggested. And then, because Harrow was still looking, she stretched—luxuriously and at length, a half-twist of the torso that put her spine on display, the shape of her shoulder blades. It was a bit of a performance, but the pleasure of the stretch felt good; Ianthe closed her eyes and bit back another yawn.
“You didn’t throw away my nightgowns, didn’t you?”
“I should have,” said Harrow, darkly. “But no, they’re in the cupboard. The one where I put the cleaning rags.”
“Oh, so you didn’t sleep with my pillowcase while I was gone?”
Harrow, more than any of them, loved the Mithraeum. She liked the asteroid field and the thanergenic light, and the quiet, or so she claimed—but Ianthe suspected all the bones didn’t hurt, either. Whatever the reason, Harrow spent much more time in their orbiting palace than any of them did. She had rearranged every book in the library, much to Augustine’s displeasure; she’d spent the past ten years in permanent residence working on a treatise on something that was incredibly clever and unbearably boring. And, Ianthe was quite sure, Harrow had been the one to bring half of Ianthe’s things over to her room, even though Ianthe had the most comfortable bed and she could’ve just slept there.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Harrow was saying now, as if Ianthe had been the one to smear her own pillowcases with nun paint. “I didn’t—I had no need of your pillowcases. You’re presuming overmuch.”
“My fatal flaw,” she agreed. “It’s working though, isn’t it?” And she turned on her bare heels and left before Harrow could throw one of her bone bracelets at her.
Her nightgown was in Harrow’s drawer, her brush was on the bedside. She ran it through her drying hair as Harrow changed for sleep—which, for Harrow, meant taking off her layers of black skirts and bone corset and putting on a slightly shorter dress and the same bone corset, now slightly smaller. Sometimes, Ianthe wondered why she even bothered.
Later, in bed with the lamp out, she pressed her cheek against the smooth ribcage that encircled Harrow’s waist.
“One day I’ll get you to try a warm bath,” she promised. “You will like it. It’ll melt away all that ice around your heart.”
“Is this what passes for poetry on the Third?” Ianthe hadn’t been Third in a long time and had no idea what passed for anything on Ida these days, but she appreciated it.
“That wasn’t a no,” she pointed out. Harrow’s hair was longer than her own these days, it fell all around them like a black funeral shroud. “Do you want to go somewhere, after today? I think we’ve earned some rest.”
“My research—”
“Oh, don’t be dull, Harry. Your research can wait.”
“If you’d let me finish,” Harrow said. “I’ll need to do some field work for it, all around the Hadals. If you’re not going to be a complete distraction, you may come with me.”
Ianthe scoffed. “There’s nothing in the Hadals that’s worth visiting.”
“That wasn’t a no,” Harrow retorted, turning Ianthe’s words against her. How cute.
“I am tired. I wrestled a Beast into hell. I think I should get out of doing the dishes for a week, at the very least. I want to sleep for twelve hours and then I want to spend three days in bed and then,” Ianthe said, “we can go wherever is that you need to go for your research, I suppose. If you make it worth my while.”
There was silence. The bones encircling Harrow’s chest rose and fell with the rhythm of her slow breaths, and Ianthe closed her eyes. Then Harrow said, “You’re being very agreeable.”
“I live to be agreeable.”
Harrow made a soft noise in the dark, something like a snort. Well, fair enough.
“Maybe I just missed you. Maybe I’m growing sentimental in my old age, and I’ve decided the boredom of your tedious ward work is worth the pleasure of your company.”
Harrow didn’t answer. Ianthe imagined how her face might look right now, flustered and confused like she always got when someone paid her a compliment—that someone being Ianthe—which always resulted in adorable anger.
“Stop thinking, Ninth” Ianthe said. “Don’t worry about it. You’re alive—I’m alive. There’s nothing to be worried about.” And then, because she wasn’t that much of a liar, “Not for tonight, at least.”
“Not for tonight,” Harrow agreed. She almost sounded relieved at the thoughts of the horrors to come. How fatalistic, Ianthe thought, feeling fond; and then she let her mind stretch towards the future.
Seven down, one still on the chase. Ianthe wasn’t stupid; she knew they each had their plans—God had his own bloody plans and Augustine had his own little plot, which matched Mercymorn’s except where it was crucially different, and matched with God’s not at all. Ianthe had been of the First for centuries, but she’d grown up on the Third; she could smell blood in the water. Hell would break loose.
Let it, Ianthe thought. She had her plans too, and she had the galaxy’s nastiest bone witch on her side. Mostly on her side, she amended to herself. But there was time.
“Goodnight, Harry,” she said, for all that it was morning, as Harrow undoubtedly would love to point out. But if she did, Ianthe was too tired to pay attention; she drifted off right away, sinking like a stone in the depths of the River. Her dreams were hazy and familiarly fond, and she was home.