Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  The second twin was as though the first had been taken to pieces and put back together without any genius. She wore a robe of the same cloth and colour, but on her it was a beautiful shroud on a mummy. The cavalier had lots of hair, an aquiline face, and a self-satisfied little jacket.

  “I think,” the bright twin was saying, “that it’s a hell of a lot better than sticking us in a room and playing who’s the best necromancer? Or worse—loading us up with old scrolls and having us translate rituals for hours and hours on end.”

  “Yes, it would have been unfortunate,” agreed her sister placidly, “considering it would have demonstrated within the first five minutes that you’re completely thick.”

  A curl was wound about one finger. “Oh, shut it, Ianthe.”

  “We should be celebrating, if we’re being honest with ourselves,” the pallid girl continued, warming to her subject, “since the already poorly hidden fact of you being a great big bimbo would have come to light so quickly that it would have broken the sound barrier.”

  The curl was let go with a visual sproing. “Ianthe, don’t make me cross.”

  “Please don’t be cross,” said her sister. “You know your brain can only deal with one emotion at a time.”

  Their cavalier’s expression got ugly.

  “You’re sore, Ianthe,” he said sharply. “You can’t show off with books ad infinitum, and so you’re invisible, isn’t that it?”

  Both girls rounded on him at once. The pallid twin simply stared, eyes closed to pale-lashed slits, but the lovely twin took one of his ears between a thumb and forefinger and tweaked it unmercifully. He was not a short young man, but she had half a head on him, and a whole head if you counted her hair. Her sister watched from the side, impassive—though Gideon swore that she was smiling, very slightly.

  “If you talk like that to her again, Babs,” said the golden twin, “I’ll destroy you. Beg her forgiveness.”

  He was shocked and defensive. “C’mon, you know I didn’t—it was for you—I was meeting the insult for you—”

  “She can insult me as she likes. You’re insubordinate. Say you’re sorry.”

  “Princess, I live to serve—”

  “Naberius!” she said, and pulled his ear forward so that he had to come with it, like an animal being led by a bit. Two bright red spots of outrage had formed in his cheeks. The lovely twin waggled his ear gently, so that his head shook with it. “Grovel, Babs. As soon as possible, please.”

  “Leave it, Corona,” said the other girl, suddenly. “This isn’t the time to horse around. Drop him and let’s keep going.”

  The bright twin—Corona—hesitated, but then dropped the ear of the unfortunate cavalier. He rubbed it fretfully. Gideon could only see the back of his head, but he kept looking at the girl who’d basically clouted him like a whipped dog, the arrogant line of his head and shoulders drooping. Suddenly, impetuously, Corona slung one arm around him and perambulated forward, giving his other ear a tweak—he jerked sullenly away—before wheeling him through the doors to the pit room. The pale twin held the door open for them both.

  As they went through, exclaiming at the smell, the pale twin paused. She did not follow them. She looked straight into the darkness instead, the deep shadows around the stairwell. Gideon knew that she was completely hidden—hooded—invisible, but she felt herself pressing backward anyway: away from that pale, washed-out gaze, which was staring with discomfiting accuracy straight at her.

  “This is not a clever path to start down,” she said softly. “I would not attract attention from the necromancer of the Third House.”

  The pale twin stepped through and closed the door behind her. Gideon was left alone.

  10

  HARROWHARK DID NOT APPEAR for a midday meal. Gideon, still unused to the concept of midday meal or honestly midday, appeared a good hour earlier than anyone else would have. Either everyone had an appropriate circadian pattern of hunger or they were being too Housely and well bred not to follow one. Gideon sat in the hot, scrubbed room where she had eaten breakfast, and was given a meal of pallid white meat and a bunch of leaves. It was good that she was alone. She had no clue what to do with it. She ate the meat with a fork—you didn’t need a knife; it was so tender that it flaked away if you touched it—and ate the leaves one by one with her fingers. She realised partway through that it was probably a salad. Raw vegetables in the Ninth came in the form of pitiable cairns of grated snow leek, stained through with as much salty black sauce as it would absorb. She filled up on the bread, which was really very good, and stuck a piece in her robe for later.

  A skeleton had brought her food; a skeleton had taken it away, with the same pinpoint accuracy the others had shown. There were no cheap tricks with them, she noticed—nobody had jammed pins through the joints so that they’d stick together easier, or slabbed on big gobs of tendon. No, whoever had raised them had been extraordinarily talented. She suspected it was Teacher. Harrow wouldn’t like that. The House of the Ninth was meant to have cornered the market on perfect reconstruction, and here were a whole bunch of them probably made by a little man who clapped his hands together unironically.

  Just as Gideon had shaken the crumbs off her lap and was rising to leave, two more novitiates entered. When they saw Gideon, both they and she stopped dead.

  One of the pair was a wan, knife-faced kid dressed in antiseptic whites and chain mail you could cut with a fork, it was so delicate. He was draped in it even down to a kilt, which was strange: necromancers didn’t normally wear that type of armour, and he was definitely the necromancer. He had a necromancer build. Pale silk fluttered from his slim shoulders. He gave the impression of being the guy fun sought out for death. He was prim and ascetic-looking, and his companion—who was older, a fair bit older than Gideon herself—had the air of the perpetually disgruntled. He was rather more robust, nuggety, and dressed in chipped bleached leathers that looked as though they’d seen genuine use. At least one finger on his left hand was a gross-looking stump, which she admired.

  The reason why they had stopped dead was unclear. She had stopped dead because the necromancer was staring at her with an expression of naked hostility. He looked at her as though he had finally come face-to-face with the murderer of a beloved family pet.

  Gideon had spent too long in the depths of Drearburh not to know when to, put scientifically, get outie. It was not the first time she had received that look. Sister Lachrimorta had looked at her that way almost exclusively, and Sister Lachrimorta was blind. The only difference in the way that Crux had looked at her was that Crux had managed also to encapsulate a complete lack of surprise, as though she already had managed to disappoint his lowest expectations. And a very long time ago—painfully folded in the back of her amygdala—the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father had also looked at her like that, though in their case, their diffidence had been cut through with a phobic flinch: the way you’d look at an unexpected maggot.

  “Please deal with the shadow cultist,” said the whey-faced boy, who had the deepest, weariest, most repressive voice she had ever heard in her life.

  “Yes, Uncle,” said the bigger man.

  Gideon was raw for a fight. She wanted nothing more than for the cross-faced man in boiled leather to draw on her. He was strong-boned and weathered, deeply creased, yellow-brown and yellow-coarse all over. Next to his almost daintily dressed necromancer in white, he looked dusty and ferocious. He looked tough. Thank God. She wanted to fight bloody. She wanted to fight until bone adepts had to be called to put people’s feet back on. She knew the price—waking up mummified in aggressive notes, or maybe dying—but didn’t care anymore. Gideon was measuring, in her mind’s eye, the length of her rapier to the collarbones of the cavalier opposite.

  He disappointed her viscerally by standing a few steps away, putting his hands together, and bowing over them to her. It was polite, though not apologetic. He had a lighter, rougher voice than his necromancer, somewhat hoarse, like he suffered
from a lifelong cold or a smoker’s cough.

  “My uncle can’t eat with your kind around,” he said. “Please leave.”

  Gideon had a million questions. Like: Your kind? And: Why do you have such a baby uncle, one the colour of mayonnaise? And: Is “your kind” people who aren’t nephews and who have middle fingers? But she said nothing. She stared him down for a few seconds; he stared back—his face did not hold the same brand of hate, but it held a bullish, deadened expression that seemed to go right through her. If it had been Crux she would have given him the finger. As it was, she nodded and pushed past with her mind an indignant whirl.

  Gideon felt awfully suckered by the whole thing. She had longed for the Cohort, in part, due to being heartily sick of her time alone in the dark; she’d wanted to be a part of something bigger than encroaching dementia and snow-leek husbandry. What was she now? An unwelcome spectre roaming the halls without a necro to pursue—the stinging slap in the face that she didn’t even have Harrow—still alone, just in better lighting. She had cherished the tiny delusion that the Lyctor trials would see her being useful for more than spying on conversations and spoiling breakfasts. Even Swords II would have been a sweet reprieve from idleness. It was in this frame of mind, reckless with disappointment, that she pushed her way at random through a collection of dark, empty antechambers and up a flight of damp brick steps; and then suddenly she found herself outside, in a terraced garden.

  The sun blazed down through a canopy of glass or some thick, transparent plex. It was admittedly a garden only in a very sad sense of the word. Wherever the First House grew its food leaves, they didn’t grow them here. The salt was thick on each metal strut. The planters were full of shrubby, stunted green things, with long stems and drooping blossoms, bleached from the thick white light overhead. Weird fragrances rose like heat above them, heavy smells, strange smells. Nothing that grew on the Ninth had a real scent: not the moss and spores in its caves, and not the dried-out vegetables cultivated in its fields. The plex ended in a genuinely open area where the wind ruffled the wrinkled leaves of some wrinkled old trees, and there—under an awning in the undulating sun, looking like a long-stemmed, drooping blossom herself—was Dulcinea.

  She was entirely alone. Her man-hulk was nowhere to be seen. Lying in a chair, she looked flimsy and tired: fine lines marked the corners of the eyes and the mouth, and she was wearing a fashionable and inane hat. She was dressed in something light and clingy that she had not yet hawked blood upon. It looked as though she were sleeping, and Gideon, not for the first time, felt a spike of pity; she tried to backtrack, but it was too late.

  “Don’t go,” said the figure, her eyes fluttering open. “Thought so. Hello, Gideon the Ninth! Can you come and put this chair’s back up straight for me? I’d do it myself, but you know by now that I’m not well and some days I don’t feel entirely up to it. Can I beg you that favour?”

  There was a fine sheen of sweat on the translucent brow under the frivolous hat, and a certain shortness of breath. Gideon went to the chair and fiddled with the fastening, immediately emasculated by the difficulty of working out a simple chair-latch. The Lady Septimus waited passively for Gideon to pull it flush, smiling at her with those big gentian eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said, once she had been propped up. She took the silly hat off her damp, fawn-coloured curls and set it in her lap, and her expression was somewhat conspiratorial. “I know that you’re doing penance and can’t talk, so you don’t have to figure out how to tell me through charades.”

  Gideon’s eyebrows shot up over her sunglasses’ rims before she could stop them. “Oh, yes,” said the girl, dimpling. “You’re not the first Ninth nun I’ve ever met. I’ve often thought it must be so hard being a brother or sister of the Locked Tomb. I actually dreamed of being one … when I was young. It seemed such a romantic way to die. I must have been about thirteen … You see, I knew I was going to die then. I didn’t want anyone to look at me, and the Ninth House was so far away. I thought I could just have some time to myself and then expire very beautifully, alone, in a black robe, with everyone praying over me and being solemn. But then I found out about the face paint you all have to wear,” she added fretfully, “and that wasn’t my aesthetic. You can’t drape yourself over your cell and fade away beautifully in face paint— Does this count as a conversation? Am I breaking your penance? Shake for no and nod for yes.”

  “Good!” she said, when Gideon mutely shook her head no, sucked completely under this mad, bubbling riptide. “I love a captive listener. I know you’re only doing this because you feel bad for me. And you do look like a nice kid. Sorry,” she added hastily, “you’re not a child. But I feel so old right now. Did you see the pair from the Fourth House? Babies. They have contributed to me feeling ancient. Tomorrow I might feel youthful, but today’s a bad day … and I feel like a gimp. Take off your glasses, please, Gideon the Ninth. I’d like to see your eyes.”

  At the juxtaposition of Gideon with obedient many people would have rocked with laughter and gone on chuckling and gurgling for quite some time. But she was helpless now in the face of this extraordinary request; she was helpless at the thin arms and rosebud smile of the woman-girl in front of her; she was utterly helpless at the word gimp. She slid her sunglasses off her nose and obligingly presented her face for inspection.

  And she was inspected, thoroughly and immediately. The eyes narrowed with intent, and for a moment the face was all business. There was something swift and cool in the blueness of those eyes, some deep intelligence, some sheer shameless depth and breadth of looking. It made Gideon’s cheeks flare, despite her mental reproach to Slow down, Nav, slow down.

  “Oh, singular,” said Dulcinea quietly, more to herself than to Gideon. “Lipochrome … recessive. I like looking at people’s eyes,” she explained suddenly, smiling now. “They tell you such a lot. I couldn’t tell you much about your Reverend Daughter … but you have eyes like gold coins. Am I embarrassing you? Am I being a creep?”

  At the head-shake no, she settled back more into her chair, tilting her head to the seat back and fanning herself with the frivolous hat. “Good,” she said, with satisfaction. “It’s bad enough that we’re stuck in this burnt-out old hovel without me scaring you. Isn’t it fantastically abandoned? Imagine all the ghosts of everyone who must have lived here … worked here … still waiting to be called, if we could figure out how. The Seventh doesn’t do well with ghosts, you know. We offend them. We’re worrisome. The old division between body and spirit. We deal too much with the body … crystallising it in time … trapping it unnaturally. The opposite of your House, don’t you think, Gideon the Ninth? You take empty things and build with them … We press down the hand of a clock, to try to stop it from ticking the last second.”

  This was all so far over Gideon’s head that it sat somewhere out in space, but there was something soothing about it anyway. Gideon had only ever been clotheslined this way with Harrowhark, who explained herself seldom and as you would only to a very stupid child. Dulcinea had the dreamy, confiding manner of someone who, despite spouting grade-A horseshit, was confident you would understand everything she was saying. Also, as she talked she smiled widely and prettily, and moved her lashes up and down.

  Thus hypnotised, Gideon could only watch with a mouth full of teeth as the blue-eyed necromancer laid one slight, narrow hand on her arm; her skin stretched thin over very marked metacarpals, and wrist bones like knots in a rope. “Stand up for me,” said Dulcinea. “Indulge me. Lots of people do … but I want you to.”

  Gideon pulled away and stood. The sunlight dappled over the hem of her robe in rusty splotches. Dulcinea said, “Draw your sword, Gideon of the Ninth.”

  Grasping the smooth black grip beneath the black nest of the knuckle bow, Gideon drew. It seemed as though she had drawn this damn thing a thousand times—that Aiglamene’s voice had taken permanent residence in her head now, just to keep up the charade. Draw. Lean on the right foot. Arm bent, not coll
apsed, naked blade angled at your opponent’s face or chest. You’re guarding the outer side of your body, Nav, you’re on your right foot, and you’re not weighting forward like a goddamned piece of freight—you’re centred, you can move backward or forward at will. The rapier blade, away from its black home in Drearburh, burned a lightless, opaque metal colour, a long slender absence of hue. Gideon acknowledged its beauty, grudgingly—how it looked like a needle, an ebon ribbon. Offhand up and high. She relaxed into position, triumphant in the new body memory that her teacher had beaten into her, and wanted to fight again.

  “Oh, very good!” said Dulcinea, and she clapped like a child seeing a firework. “Perfect … just like a picture of Nonius. People say that all Ninth cavaliers are good for is pulling around baskets of bones. Before I met you I imagined that you might be some wizened thing with a yoke and panniers of cartilage … half skeleton already.”

  This was bigoted, assumptive, and completely true. Gideon relaxed her sword and her stance, at her ease—and saw that the fragile girl engulfed by her chair had stopped playing with her frivolous hat. Her mouth was quirked in a quizzical little smile, and her eyes said that she had calculated two plus two and ended up with a very final four.

  “Gideon the Ninth,” said Dulcinea, slowly, “are you used to a heavier sword?”

  Gideon looked down. She looked at her rapier, pointed skyward like a black arrow, her off hand cupped and supporting what should have been more grip but now was the long knob of pommel, the way you’d hold—a fucking longsword.

  She sheathed it immediately, sliding it home to its scabbard in a tight iron whisper. A cold sweat had broken out beneath her clothes. The expression on Dulcinea’s face was simply bright-eyed, mischievous interest, but to Gideon it was the Secundarius Bell chiding a child already ten minutes late for prayer. For a moment a lot of stupid stuff felt very ready to happen. She nearly confessed everything to Dulcinea’s mild and denim-coloured gaze: she nearly opened her mouth and begged wholeheartedly for the woman’s mercy.