Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  The first thing she did was roll away and reach for her sword. Aiglamene had spent half of training simply convincing Gideon to reach for her rapier hilt rather than her two-hander, to the point where she’d been sleeping with her fingers on the thing to try to get used to it. There was a note crumpled between her hand and the basket—

  Don’t talk to anybody.

  “Guess I won’t talk to … any body,” said Gideon, but then read on:

  I have taken the ring.

  “Harrow,” Gideon bellowed, impotently, and slapped her hands down into her pockets. The ring was gone. There was no mistake greater or stupider than to let Harrowhark Nonagesimus at you when you were in any way vulnerable; she should have booby-trapped the threshold. It wasn’t like she even cared about the ring: it was just the cut, again and again, of Harrow considering all of Gideon’s property her property in common. She tried to cheer herself up with the thought that this at least meant Harrow wasn’t around, a thought that would have cheered up anyone.

  Gideon shrugged off her robe and wrestled out of her trousers and shirt, all of which had hot and damp insides from her sweat. She opened doors until she found the largest bathroom she had ever seen. It was so big she could walk around in it. She stretched out her arms on either side and still couldn’t touch the walls, which were of slippery stone, glowing like coals where they were whole and scored and dull where they weren’t. Maybe this pretending to be a cavalier gig wasn’t so bad after all. The floor was marble tile, sheen marred by only a few spots of black mould. There was a bowl with taps that Gideon knew to be a sink only because she’d read a lot of comics, and an enormous person-sized recess in the ground that she didn’t know what to do with at all. The sonic cleaner was set, gleaming gently, at either side of a rectangular chamber with a weird nozzle.

  Gideon pulled a lever next to the tap. Water gushed from the nozzle, and she yelped and skittered away before she got over the sight and turned it off. Her survey identified a chubby cake of soap next to the sink (but Ninth soap had been made of human fat so no thanks) and a tub of antibac gel. She decided eventually to take a sonic and to use the gel to scrape the blurred paint off her face. Newly clean, with fresh clothes and her robe shaken out in the sonic, she was feeling good about herself until she espied another note stuck tersely on the autodoor:

  Fix your face, idiot.

  There was another note atop the paint box, which some skeletal servant had helpfully placed on one of the less precarious sideboards:

  Do not try to find me. I am working. Keep your head down and stay out of trouble. I reiterate the order that you do not talk to anybody.

  Another note was stuck beneath, belatedly:

  To clarify, anybody is a word that refers to any person alive or dead.

  Inside the box, yet another:

  Paint your face adequately.

  Gideon said aloud, “Your parents must have been so relieved to die.”

  Back in the bathroom, she smeared cold wads of alabaster on her face. The nun’s-paint went on in pale greys and blacks, swabbed over the lips and the hollows of her eyes and cheeks. Gideon comforted herself by recoiling at her reflection in the cracked mirror: a grinning death’s-head with a crop of incongruously red hair and a couple of zits. She pulled her sunglasses out of the pocket of her robe and eased them on, which completed the effect, if the effect you wanted was “horrible.”

  Feeling slightly more at ease with life, rapier bobbing at her hip, it was the cavalier of the Ninth who stalked down the dilapidated corridors of Canaan House. It was pleasantly quiet. She heard the far-off sounds of a lived-in place—footsteps, blurry moans from the autocooler, the unmistakable pitter-pat of foot bones on tattered rugs—and she retraced her steps to the original atrium. From there, she followed her nose.

  Her nose led her to a hot, glass-topped hall, modern conveniences haphazardly pasted atop ancient riches, out of place among the tapestries and gone-black filigree. There was netting spread all over the rafters to keep out the birds, because the glass-topped roof had holes in it that you could jump through. A fountain of fresh water burbled at the wall, ringed in old concrete, with a filtration tank snuggled beside. And there were many long, worn tables—wooden slabs that had been freshened up with antibac and had legs that must have come from eight table sacrifices. The place could have seated fifty. The early light flooded down in electric yellow blasts, green where it touched the living plants and brown where it touched the dead ones, and she was grateful that she’d worn her glasses.

  The room was nearly empty, but a couple of the others were there, finishing their meals. Gideon sat down three tables away and spied on them shamelessly. There was a man sitting close to a pair of ghastly teens: younger than Gideon, still in the midst of losing their fight with puberty. The boy wore trim navy robes and the girl had a jewelled scabbard on her back, and when Gideon entered they had looked up at the cultist of the Ninth with unabashed interest close to awe. The man close to this horrible pair had a kind, jovial face and curly hair, with clothes of excellent cut and a gorgeously wrought rapier at his side. Gideon reckoned him well into his thirties. He had the guts to raise his hand to her in a tentative greeting. Before she could do anything in return, a skeleton placed a steaming bowl of sour green soup and a massive hunk of lardy yeast bread on the table, and she got busy eating.

  These were sophisticated skeletons. Hers returned with a cup of hot tea on a tray and waited until she took it to retreat. Gideon had noticed that their fine motor control would have been the envy of any necromancer, that they moved with perfect concert and awareness. She was in a position of some expertise here. You couldn’t spend any time in the Ninth House without coming away with an unwholesome knowledge of skeletons. She could’ve easily filled in for Doctor Skelebone without practising a single theorem. The sheer amount of complex programming each skeleton followed would have taken all of the oldest and most gnarled necromancers of the Locked Tomb months and months to put together. Gideon would have been impressed, but she was too hungry.

  The awful teens were muttering to each other, giving Gideon looks, giving each other looks, then muttering again. The wholesome older man leaned over and gave them some bracing rebuke. They subsided reluctantly, only casting the occasional dark glance her way over their soup and bread, not knowing that she was physically immune. Back in the Ninth she had endured each meal under Crux’s fantastically dismal stare, which had turned gruel into ash in her mouth.

  A waiting white-robed bone servant relieved her of her bowl and her plate almost sooner than she was done. She was quietly sucking tea through her teeth, trying not to drink half a pint of face paint with it, when a hand was stuck out in front of her.

  It was the hand of the kind-faced older man. Up close he had a strong jaw, the expression of the terminally jolly, and nice eyes. Gideon was genuinely surprised to find that she was shy, and more still to find she was relieved by Harrow’s diktat against talking. Gideon Nav, absolutely goddamn starved of any contact with people who didn’t have dark missals and advanced osteoporosis, should’ve yearned to talk. But she found that she couldn’t imagine a single thing to say.

  “Magnus the Fifth,” he said. “Sir Magnus Quinn, cavalier primary and seneschal of Koniortos Court.”

  From three tables over, the loathsome teens greeted his audacity with low moans: they lost all appearance of restrained respectability and instead chorused his name in slow, hurt-animal noises, lowing “Magnus! Maaaaagnus,” which he ignored. Gideon had hesitated too long in taking his hand, and with the very soul of manners he mistook her reluctance for refusal, and rapped his knuckles on the table instead.

  “Do forgive us,” he said. “We’re a bit short on black priests in the Fourth and the Fifth, and my valiant Fourth companions are, er, a bit overcome.”

  (“Nooooo, Magnus, don’t say we’re overcome,” moaned the nasty girl, sotto voce.

  “Don’t mention us, Magnus,” moaned the other.)

  Gideon clatter
ed her chair back to stand. Magnus Quinn, Magnus of the Fifth, was too old and too well schooled to do anything so stupid as flinch, but some reputation of the Ninth House that Gideon had only barely begun to comprehend widened his eyes, just a bit. His clothes were so restrained and so beautifully made; he looked trim and tasteful without being intimidating. She hated herself for hearing Harrow’s voice, low and urgent, in her hindbrain: We are not becoming an appendix of the Third or Fifth Houses!

  She nodded to him, somewhat awkwardly, and he was so relieved that he pumped his chin up and down twice in response before he caught himself. “Health to the Ninth,” he said firmly, and then jerked his head in what was so transparently a Come on! Clear off! motion that even the bad teens couldn’t ignore it. They pushed their bowls away to two waiting, hunched skeletons, and tiptoed out in the older man’s wake, leaving Gideon amused and alone.

  She stood there until their voices died away (“Really, chaps,” she caught Magnus saying repressively, “anyone would think you’d both been raised in a barn—”) before she twitched her sunglasses up her nose and left, sticking her hands in the pockets of her robes and heading out in the opposite direction from where Magnus and the crap Fourth House youths had gone, down a short flight of stairs. Gideon had nowhere to go and nothing to be, and no orders and no goals: her black robe flapping at her ankles and the light getting stronger all the time, she decided to wander.

  Canaan House was a nest of rooms and corridors, of sudden courtyards and staircases that dripped down into lightless gloom and terminated in big, rusting doors beneath overhangs, ones that looked as though they would go clang no matter how quietly you tried to shut them. More than once Gideon turned a corner and found she was back at some landing she thought she had travelled miles and miles away from. Once she paused on a blasted terrace outside, gazing at the rusting, hulking pillars that stuck up in a ring around the tower. The sea on one side was broken up with flat concrete landings like stepping-stones, set wet and geometric in the water, mummified in seaweed: the sea had covered up more structures long, long ago, and they looked like square heads with long, sticky hair, peering up suspiciously through the waves. Being outside made her feel dizzy, so she headed back inside.

  There were doors—a multiplicity of doors—a veritable warehouse of doors: cupboard doors, metal autodoors, barred doors to dimly lit passageways beyond, doors half her height with no handles, doors half-rotted so you could voyeuristically look through their nakedness to the rooms they didn’t hide. All these doors must have been beautiful, even the ones that led only to broom cupboards. Whoever had lived in the First House had lived in beauty once. The ceilings were still high and gracious, the plaster mouldings still graceful ornaments; but the whole thing creaked and at one point Gideon’s boot went clean through a particularly soft bit of floorboard to empty space below. It was a death trap.

  She went down a short flight of cramped metal stairs. The house often seemed to split its level without letting her travel very far, but this was farther down and darker than any steps had taken her before. They led to a tiled vestibule where the lights fizzed disconsolately and refused to come on all the way; she pushed open two enormous, groaning doors, which led into an echoing chamber that made her nostrils flare. It smelled badly of chemicals, and most of the smell came from the huge, filthy, perfectly rectangular pit that dominated the centre of the room. The pit was lined with dull tile, and it gave the filthiest and oldest parts of the Ninth House a run for their money. There were metal ladders going down into the pit, but why would you though.

  Gideon abandoned the pit and peered through a set of grubby glass double doors. From the other side of the room beyond, a hunched, cloaked figure peered back at her, and she reflexively went for her rapier: the hunched figure swiftly—identically—went for its own.

  Good going, dickhead! thought Gideon, straightening up. It’s a mirror.

  It was a mirror, an enormous one that covered the far wall. She pressed her face closer to the glass door. The room beyond had a flagstone floor, stones worn smooth from years and years of feet. There was a rusting basin and tap, where one love-abandoned towel had sat for God only knew how long, decayed to a waterfall of spiderous threads. Corroded swords were bolted to corroded panels on the wall. Through a window somewhere high up, the sunbeams poured down dust in golden torrents. Gideon would have dearly loved this training room in its prime, but she wouldn’t touch those rusted blades now if you paid her.

  Going back to the vestibule with the spitting lights, she noticed another door, set close to the staircase. She hadn’t seen it before because a tapestry covered it almost entirely, but one of the corners had slipped and hinted at the frame beneath. She pushed the mouldering old tapestry aside to find a dark wooden door; she tried its handle, pulled it open, and stared. A long tiled corridor stared back, windowless, a succession of square lights in the ceiling whirring to life with a clunk … clunk … clunk … and tracing a path to an enormous door at the other end, totally out of place. Bracketed by heavy pillars, set with forbidding stone supports, the overall effect was not exactly welcoming. The door itself was a crossbar of black stone set in a bevelled frame of the same. A weird relief was carved above the lintel, set within a moulded panel. Gideon’s boots echoed down the shiny stone tiles as she came closer to see. The relief was five little circles joined with lines, in no pattern that Gideon recognised. Below this sat a solid stone beam with carved leaves swagged horizontally from one end to the other. At the apex of each swag was carved an animal’s skull with long horns, which curved inward into wicked points that almost met. Slim columns reached up to support this weird stone bunting, and wound around each column was something carved to seem writhing and alive—a fat, slithering thing, bulging and animal. Gideon reached out to touch the intricately carved marble and felt tiny overlapping scales, touched the seam where its ridged underbelly met its back. It was very cold.

  There was no handle, no knocker, no knob: just a dark keyhole, for teeth that would have been as long as Gideon’s thumb. She peered through the keyhole and saw—jack shit. Suffice to say, all pushing, gripping, finger-inserting and pressing was in vain. It was locked as damn.

  Curious, thought Gideon.

  She went back to the claustrophobic little vestibule and, out of a complete sense of perversity, tacked the tapestry back up so that the door was totally covered. In the shadows, the effect was very good. Nobody’d be finding that one any time soon. It was a stupid, secretive Ninth thing to do, done out of habit, and Gideon hated how comforting it felt.

  Voices were fading into the edge of her hearing from the top of the landing that led to the stairs. Another Ninth instinct had Gideon flatten herself back into the bottom of the stairwell: done a million times before to avoid the Marshal of Drearburh, or Harrowhark, or one of the godawful great-aunts or members of the Locked Tomb cloister. Gideon had no idea whom she was avoiding, but she avoided them anyway because it was such an easy thing to do. A conversation, conducted in low, rich, peevish tones, drifted down.

  “—mystical, oblique claptrap,” someone was saying, “and I have half a mind to write to your father and complain—”

  “—what,” drawled another, “that the First House isn’t treating us fairly—”

  “—a lateral puzzle isn’t a trial, and, now that I think about it, the idea that the old fogey doesn’t know a thing about it is beyond belief! Some geriatric playing mind games, or worse, and this is my theory, wanting to see who breaks—”

  “Ever the conspiracy theorist,” said the second voice.

  The first voice was aggrieved. “Why’re the shuttles gone? Why is this place such a tip? Why the secrecy? Why is the food so bad? QED, it’s a conspiracy.”

  There was a thoughtful pause.

  “I didn’t think the food was that bad,” said a third voice.

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” continued the first voice. “It’s a cheap, Cohort-style enlisted man’s hazing. They’re waiting to see who�
��s stupid enough to take the bait. Who falls for it, you see. Well, I shan’t.”

  “Unless,” said the second voice—which now that Gideon was hearing it, was very like the third voice in pitch and tone, differentiated only by affect—“the challenge is one of protocol: we have to provide a valid response to a necessarily vague question in order to authenticate ourselves. Making meaning from the meaningless. Et cetera.”

  The first voice had taken on a tinge of whine when it said, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

  Scuffle. Movement. The stairs echoed with footsteps: they were coming down.

  “I do wonder where that funny old man hid the shuttles,” mused the third voice.

  The second: “Dropped them off the side of the dock, I expect.”

  “Don’t be mad,” said the first, “those things cost a fortune.”

  At the bottom of the stairs, deep in the shadows, Gideon got her first good glimpse of the speakers. The strange twin-scions of the Third House were looking around, attended to by their sulky, slightly bouffant cavalier. Up close, Gideon was more impressed than ever. The golden Third twin was probably the best-looking person she’d ever seen in her life. She was tall and regal, with some radiant, butterfly quality—her shirt was haphazardly tucked into her trousers, which were haphazardly tucked into her boots, but she was all topaz and shine and lustre. Necromancers affected robes in the same way cavaliers affected swords, but she hadn’t tucked her arms into hers, and it was a gauzy, gold-shot, transparent thing floating out around her like wings. There were about five rings on each hand and her earrings would’ve put chandeliers to shame, but she had an air of wild and innocent overdecoration, of having put on the prettiest things in her jewellery box and then forgotten to take them off. Her buttery hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat, and she kept tangling a curl of it in one finger and artlessly letting it go.