Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  “Owe you—”

  “Why, of course,” said Harrowhark. “It was your shuttle my cavalier ran off in.”

  Gideon’s fist jacked out toward Harrow’s pointy nose. Less by design than accident, the other girl stumbled out of the way, half-tripping, dusting herself off and narrowing her eyes as she circled around the pillar. “If you’re going to start that again,” she said, “here.”

  She reached down and hauled up one of the discarded blades. It was at least mildly hilarious to see Harrow have to heave with all the might of her, like, three muscles. Gideon took it while the necromancer rubbed fretfully at her wrists. “Try that,” she said.

  Gideon unsheathed and examined the sword. Long, black pieces of crooked metal formed a decaying basket hilt. A terrifically worn black pommel seal depicted the Tomb wrapped in chains, the sign of the Ninth. The blade itself was notched and cracked. “Only way this kills someone is with lockjaw,” she said. “How are you going to get Ortus back, anyway?”

  Did Harrow look momentarily troubled? “We’re not.”

  “Aiglamene’s too old for this.”

  “And that is why you, Griddle,” said the Lady, “are to act as cavalier primary of the House of the Ninth. You will accompany me to the First House as I study to become a Lyctor. You’ll be my personal guard and companion, dutiful and loyal, and uphold the sacred name of this House and its people.”

  Once Gideon had stopped laughing, leaning against the icy pillar and beating on it with her fist, she had to breathe long and hard in order to not crack up again. The beleaguered grimace on Aiglamene’s hard-carved face had deepened into an outright sense of siege. “Whoo,” she managed, scrubbing away tears of mirth. “Oh damn. Give me a moment. Okay—like hell I will, Nonagesimus.”

  Harrow ducked out from behind her pillar and she walked toward Gideon, hands still clasped together. Her face held the beatific, fire-white expression she’d had the day she told Gideon she was going off-planet: an unwavering resolve almost like joy. She stopped in front of the other girl and looked up at her, shaking the hood from her dark head, and she closed her eyes into slits. “Come on, Nav,” she said, and her voice was alight. “This is your chance. This is your opportunity to come into glory. Follow me through this, and you can go anywhere. House cavaliers can get any Cohort position they like. Do this for me and I won’t just set you free, I’ll set you free with a fortune, with a commission, with anything you want.”

  This nettled her. “You don’t own me.”

  “Oh, Griddle, but I do,” said Harrowhark. “You’re bound to the Locked Tomb … and at the end of the night, the Locked Tomb is me. The nominated Hands are to enter the First House, Nav; their names will be written in history as the new Imperial saints. Nothing like this has ever happened before, and it may never happen again. Nav, I am going to be a Lyctor.”

  “‘Hello, I’m the woman who helped Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s fascist rise to power,’” said Gideon to nobody in particular. “‘Yes, the universe sucks now. I knew this going in. Also, she betrayed me afterward and now my body has been shot into the sun.’” Harrow came too close, and Gideon did what she had never done in the past: she raised the rusted sword so that its naked point was level with the other girl’s forehead. The necromancer adept did not flinch, just made her black-smeared mouth a mocking moue of shock. “I—will never—trust you. Your promises mean nothing. You’ve got nothing to give me. I know what you’d do, given half a chance.”

  Harrow’s dark eyes were on Gideon’s, past the blade pointed at her skull. “Oh, I have hurt your heart,” she said.

  Gideon kept it absolutely level. “I boohooed for hours.”

  “It won’t be the last time I make you weep.”

  Aiglamene’s voice rattled out: “Put that damn thing down. I can’t bear to see you hold it with that grip.” And, shocking Gideon: “Consider this offer, Nav.”

  Gideon peered around Harrow’s shoulder, letting the blade drop, trashing the miserable thing scabbardless in the nearest niche. “Captain, please don’t be a proponent of this horseshit idea.”

  “It’s the best idea we have. Nav,” said her teacher, “our Lady is going off-planet. That’s the long and short of it. You can stay here—in the House you hate—or go attain your liberty—in service to the House you hate. This is your one chance to leave, and to gain your freedom cleanly.”

  Harrowhark opened her mouth to say something, but surprising Gideon further, Aiglamene silenced her with a gesture. The crappy swords were set aside with care, and the old woman pulled her bockety leg out from underneath her and leant the good one against the catacomb wall, pushing hard to stand with a clank of mail and bone disease. “You care nothing for the Ninth. That’s fine. This is your chance to prove yourself.”

  “I’m not helping Nonagesimus become a Lyctor. She’ll make me into boots.”

  “I have condemned your escapes,” said Aiglamene. “They were graceless and feeble. But.” She turned to the other girl. “With all due respect, you’ve dealt her too ill, my lady. I hate this idea. If I were ten years younger I would beg you to condescend to take me. But you won’t vouchsafe her, and so I must.”

  “Must you?” said Harrow. There was a curious softness in her voice. Her black gaze was searching for something in the captain of her guard, and she did not seem to be finding it.

  “I must,” said Aiglamene. “You’ll be leaving me and Crux in charge of the House. If I vouchsafe the freedom of Gideon Nav and it is not given to her, then—begging pardon for my ingratitude—it is a betrayal of myself, who is your retainer and was your mother’s retainer.”

  Harrowhark said nothing. She wore a thin, pensive expression. Gideon wasn’t fooled: this look usually betokened Harrow’s brain percolating outrageous nastiness. But Gideon couldn’t think straight. A horrible dark-red heat was travelling up her neck and she knew it would go right to her cheeks if she let it, so she pulled the hood up over her head and said not a word, and couldn’t look at her sword-master at all.

  “If she satisfies you, you must let her go,” said Aiglamene firmly.

  “Of course.”

  “With all the gracious promises of the Ninth.”

  “Oh, if she pulls this off she can have whatever she likes,” said Harrowhark easily—way too easily. “She’ll have glory squirting out each orifice. She can do or be anything she pleases, preferably over on the other side of the galaxy from where I am.”

  “Then I thank you for your mercy and your grace, and regard the matter settled,” said Aiglamene.

  “How is it settled. I have patently not agreed to this shit.”

  Both of them ignored Gideon. “Getting back to the original problem,” said the old woman, settling painfully back down among the swords and the knives, “Nav has had none of Ortus’s training—not in manners, nor in general scholarship—and she was trained in the sword of heavy infantry.”

  “Ignore the first; her mental inadequacies can be compensated for. The second’s what I’m interested in. How difficult is it for a normal swordswoman to switch from a double-handed blade to a cavalier rapier?”

  “For a normal swordswoman? To reach the standard of a House cavalier primary? You’d need years. For Nav? Three months—” (here Gideon died briefly of gratification; she revived only due to the rising horror consequent of everything else) “—and she’d be up to the standard of the meanest, most behind-hand cavalier alive.”

  “Oh, nonsense!” said Harrow languorously. “She’s a genius. With the proper motivation, Griddle could wield two swords in each hand and one in her mouth. While we were developing common sense, she studied the blade. Am I right, Griddle?”

  “I haven’t agreed to stone cold dick,” said Gideon. “And I don’t care how bad-ass cavaliers are meant to be, I hate rapiers. All that bouncing around makes me feel tired. Now, a two-hander, that’s a swordsman’s sword.”

  “I don’t disagree,” said her teacher, “but a House cavalier—with all her proper training�
�is a handsomely dangerous thing. I saw the primary cavalier of the House of the Second fight in his youth, and my God! I never forgot it.”

  Harrow was pacing in tiny circles now. “But she could get to the point where she might believably, possibly be mistaken for a trained cavalier of the House of the Ninth?”

  “The reputation of the Ninth cavalier primary has not been what it was since the days of Matthias Nonius,” said Aiglamene. “And that was a thousand years ago. Expectations are very low. Even then, we’d be bloody lucky.”

  Gideon pushed herself up from the pillar and cracked her knuckles, stretching her chill-stiff muscles out before her. She rolled her neck, testing her shoulders, and unwrapped her robe from around herself. “I live for those days when everyone stands around talking about how bad I am at what I do, but it also gives me hurt feelings,” she said, and took the sword she had abandoned for trash. She tested its weight in her hand, feeling what was to her an absurd lightness, and struck what she thought was a sensible stance. “How’s this, Captain?”

  Her teacher made a noise in her throat somewhere between disgust and desolation. “What are you doing with your other hand?” Gideon compensated. “No! Oh, Lord. Put that down until I formally show you how.”

  “The sword and the powder,” said Harrowhark eagerly.

  “The sword and the knuckle, my lady,” said Aiglamene. “I’m dropping my expectations substantially.”

  Gideon said, “I still have absolutely not agreed to any of this.”

  The Reverend Daughter picked her way toward her over discarded swords, and stopped once she was level with the pillar that Gideon had reflexively flattened her back against. They regarded each other for long moments until the absolute chill of the monument made Gideon’s teeth involuntarily chatter, and then Harrow’s mouth twisted, fleetingly, indulgently. “I would have thought you would be happy that I needed you,” she admitted. “That I showed you my girlish and vulnerable heart.”

  “Your heart is a party for five thousand nails,” said Gideon.

  “That’s not a ‘no.’ Help Aiglamene find you a sword, Griddle. I’ll leave the door unlocked.” With that languid and imperious command, she left, leaving Gideon lolling her head back against the frigid stone of the pillar and chewing the inside of her cheek.

  It was almost worse getting left alone with the sword-master. An awkward, chilly silence spread between them as the old woman grumpily picked through the pile, holding each rapier up to the light, pulling rancid strips of leather away from the grip.

  “It’s a bad idea, but it’s a chance, you know,” said Aiglamene abruptly. “Take it or leave it.”

  “I thought you said it was the best idea we have.”

  “It is—for Lady Harrowhark. You’re the best swordsman that the Ninth House has produced—maybe ever. Can’t say. I never saw Nonius fight.”

  “Yeah, you would have only been what, just born,” said Gideon, whose heart was hurting keenly.

  “Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you.”

  Swords rattled into a leather case as Aiglamene selected a couple at hand, shaking a few of the knuckle-knives in to boot. The case creaked and she creaked as she had to tip herself forward, painful with dignity, getting on her one half-good knee in order to pull herself up to stand. Gideon moved forward automatically, but one look from the woman’s working eye was enough to make her pretend she’d just been getting back into her robes. Aiglamene hauled the case over her shoulder, kicking unwanted swords back into a niche, yanking the useless sword from Gideon’s nerveless hand.

  She paused as her fingers closed over the hilt, her haggard face caught up in her consideration, a titanic battle apparently going on somewhere deep inside her head. One side gained the upper hand, and she said gruffly: “Nav. A word of warning.”

  “What?”

  There was something urgent in her voice: something worried, something new.

  “Things are changing. I used to think we were waiting for something … and now I think we’re just waiting to die.”

  Gideon’s heart sagged.

  “You really want me to say yes.”

  “Go on and say no,” said her captain. “It’s your choice … If she doesn’t take you, I’ll go with her and gladly. But she knows … and I know … and I think you damn well know … that if you don’t get out now, you won’t even get out in a box.”

  “So what happens if I agree?”

  Breaking the spell, Aiglamene roughly shouldered the leather case into Gideon’s arms, slapping it there before stalking back the way that Harrow had left them. “Then you hurry up. If I’m to turn you into the Ninth’s cavalier, I needed to start six years ago.”

  5

  THE SECOND LETTER THAT they received care of the Resurrecting King, the gentle Emperor, was somewhat less prolix than the first.

  They were lurking in the personal Nonagesimus library, a stone-arched room packed tight with shelves of the musty and neglected books Harrowhark didn’t study and the musty, less neglected books that she did. Gideon sat at a broad, sagging desk piled high with pages covered in necromantic marginalia, most of them in Harrow’s cramped, impatient writing. She held the letter before her with one hand; with the other, she wearily painted her face with a piece of fibre wadding and a pot of alabaster paint, feeling absurdly young. The paint smelled acid and cold, and working the damn stuff into the creases next to her nose meant sucking globs of paint up her nostrils all day. Harrow was sprawled on a sofa spread with tattered brocade, robes abandoned, scrawny black-clad legs crossed at the ankles. In Gideon’s mind she looked like an evil stick.

  Gideon reread the letter, then again, twice, before checking her face in a little cracked mirror. Gorgeous. Hot. “I know you said ‘First House’ like three times,” she said, “but I thought you were being metaphorical.”

  “I thought it would fill you with a sense of adventure.”

  “It damn well doesn’t,” said Gideon, rewetting the wadding, “you’re taking me to the planet where nobody lives. I thought we’d end up on the Third or the Fifth, or a sweet space station, or something. Not just another cave filled with old religious nut jobs.”

  “Why would there be a necromantic gathering on a space station?”

  This was a good point. If there was one thing Gideon knew about necromancers, it was that they needed power. Thanergy—death juice—was abundant wherever things had died or were dying. Deep space was a necro’s nightmare, because nothing had ever been alive out there, so there were no big puddles of death lying around for Harrow and her ilk to suck up with a straw. The brave men and women of the Cohort looked on this limitation with compassionate amusement: never send an adept to do a soldier’s job.

  “Behold the last paragraph,” Harrow said from the sofa, “turning your benighted eyes to lines five and six.” Unwillingly, Gideon turned her benighted eyes to lines five and six. “Tell me the implications.”

  Gideon stopped painting and leant back in her chair before thinking better of it, easing it back down to the chill tiles of the floor. There was something a little soggy about one of the legs. “‘No retainers. No attendants, no domestics.’ Well, you’d be shitted all to hell otherwise, you’d have to bring along Crux. Look—are you really saying that nobody’s going to be there but us and some crumbly old hierophants?”

  “That,” said the Reverend Daughter, “is the implication.”

  “For crying out loud! Then let me dress how I want and give me back my longsword.”

  “Ten thousand years of tradition, Griddle.”

  “I don’t have ten thousand years of tradition, bitch,” said Gideon, “I have ten years of two-hander training and a minor allergy to face paint. I’m worth so much less to you with pizza face and a toothpick.”

  The Reverend Daughter’s fingers locked together, thumbs rotating in languid circles. She did not disagree. “Ten thousand years of tradition,” she said slowly, “dictates that the Ninth House should have been at its leisure to produce,
at the very least, a cavalier with the correct sword, the correct training, and the correct attitude. Any implication that the Ninth House did not have the leisure to meet even that expectation is as good as giving up. I’d be better off by myself than taking you qua you. But I know how to fake this; I can provide the sword. I can provide a smattering of training. I cannot even slightly provide your attitude. Two out of three is still not three. The con depends on your shut mouth and your adoption of the minimal requirements, Griddle.”

  “So nobody realises that we’re broke and nearly extinct, and that your parents topped themselves.”

  “So nobody takes advantage of the fact that we lack conventional resources,” said Harrow, shooting Gideon a look that skipped warning and went straight to barrage. “So nobody realises that the House is under threat. So nobody realises that—my parents are no longer able to take care of its interests.”

  Gideon folded the paper in half, in half again, and made it into corners. She rubbed it between her fingers for the rare joy of feeling paper crinkle, and then she dropped it on the desk and cleaned paint off her fingernails. She did not need to say or do anything except let the quiet roll out between them.

  “We are not becoming an appendix of the Third or Fifth Houses,” continued the necromancer opposite. “Do you hear me, Griddle? If you do anything that suggests we’re out of order—if I even think you’re about to…” Here Harrow shrugged, quite calmly. “I’ll kill you.”

  “Naturally. But you can’t keep this a secret forever.”

  “When I am a Lyctor everything will be different,” said Harrowhark. “I’ll be in a position to fix things without fear of reprisal. As it is, our leverage now is that nobody knows anything about anything. I’ve had three separate communiques already from other Houses, asking if I’m coming, and they don’t even know my name.”