Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  It was in this moment of charged stupidity that Protesilaus turned up, saving her bacon by dint of being very large and ignoring her. He stood with his muddy hair and bleary skin and blocked the shaft of sunlight that was pattering over his adept’s hands, and he said to her in his dreary, rumbling voice: “It’s shut.”

  No time to figure out that one. As Dulcinea’s eyes flickered between her cavalier and the cavalier of the Ninth, Gideon took the opportunity to turn tail and—not run, but slope extremely fast in the direction of anywhere but there. There were cracks in the plex and the wind was coming in hot and salty, rippling her robes and her hood, and she had nearly escaped when Dulcinea called—“Gideon the Ninth!”

  She half-turned her head back to them, dark glasses crooking down over her eyebrows. Protesilaus the Seventh stared at her with the empty eyes of someone who would watch with equal heavy disinterest if part of the wall were kicked out and she were punted down into the sea, but his adept was looking at her—wistfully. Gideon hesitated by the door for that look, in the shadows of the archway, buffeted by the wind from the water.

  Dulcinea said: “I hope we talk again soon.”

  Hell! thought Gideon, taking the stairs blindly two at a time. She didn’t. She had said too much already, and all without speaking a single word.

  11

  THOSE EARLY DAYS AT Canaan House spaced themselves out like beads on a prayer string, dilated. They consisted of big, empty hours, of eating meals in unoccupied rooms, of being alone amid very strange strangers. Gideon couldn’t even rely on the familiarity of the dead. The skeletons of the First were too good, too capable, too watchful—and Gideon didn’t feel truly at her ease anywhere except shut up in the dim rooms that the Ninth had been given, doing drills.

  After nearly giving everything away she spent two days almost entirely cloistered, working with her rapier until the sweat had smeared her face paint to a leering, staved-in mask. She stacked a rusting stool on top of the sagging ebon dresser and did chin-ups into the iron wedge that ran across the rafters. She did press-ups in front of the windows until Dominicus limned her with bloody light, completing its sprint around the watery planet.

  Both nights she went to bed sore and furious with loneliness. Crux always had said that she was at her most unbearable after confinement. She fell into a deep, black sleep and woke up only once, the second night, when—in the very early morning when the night outside seemed more like the lightless Ninth—Harrowhark Nonagesimus shut the door behind herself, very nearly silently. She kept her eyes mostly closed as the Reverend Daughter paused before the makeshift bed, and as she watched the robed black figure drifted over to the bedroom. Then there was no more noise; and Harrow was gone again, in the morning, when Gideon awoke. She didn’t even leave rude notes.

  It was in this abandoned state that the cavalier of the Ninth House ate two breakfasts, starved of both protein and attention, dark glasses slipping on her nose as she drank another bowl of soup. She would have killed to see a couple of haggard nuns tottering around the place, and was therefore 100 percent vulnerable when she looked up to see a Third House twin stride into the room like a lion. It was the lovely one; she had the sleeves of her gauzy robe haphazardly rolled up to each golden shoulder and her hair tied back in a tawny cloud, and she looked at Gideon with an expression like an artillery shell midflight.

  “The Ninth!” she said.

  She sauntered over. Gideon had risen to stand, remembering the pale eyes of her pissed-off twin, but instead found a beringed hand proffered in her direction: “Lady Coronabeth Tridentarius,” she was told, “Princess of Ida, heir of the Third House.”

  Gideon did not know what to do with the hand, which was offered to her fingers out, palm upward. She touched her fingers to it in the hope that she could grip it briefly and get out that way, but Coronabeth Tridentarius, Princess of Ida, took her hand and roguishly kissed the backs of Gideon’s knuckles. Her smile was sparklingly pleased with her own gall; her eyes were a deep, liquid violet, and she spoke with the casual effrontery of someone who expected her every command of jump! to be followed by a rave.

  “I’ve organised sparring matches for the cavaliers of all the Houses,” she said. “It’s my hope that even the Ninth will accept my invitation. Will it?”

  If Gideon had not been so lonely; if Gideon had not been so used to having a fighting partner, even one more used these days to battling rheumatism; if Coronabeth Tridentarius had not been so astonishingly hot. All these ifs she contemplated wearily, led by the Third House necromancer down the poky, confined little staircase immediately familiar to her as the one she’d explored before; down to the dark, tiled vestibule with the flickering lights, and through to the room with the foul-smelling chemical pit.

  This room was now alive with activity. There were three skeletons down in the pit with hairy mops and buckets, cleaning the slime out of it; a fourth was wiping down the streaked glass double doors through to the mirror room beyond. The fug of rot was overlaid with the equally pervasive fug of surfactants and wood polish. Old age still had the place in a chokehold, but in the hot light of the early morning, two figures danced around each other on the outspread flagstone dais of the mirror room. The urgent metal scrape of sword on sword filled the space up to the rafters.

  A skeleton in the corner wound a long pole into a network of cobwebs, displacing showers of dust; a couple of others sat about, watching the fight. The cavalier of the Third she recognised even without his smug little jacket, which he had hung over a peg as he struck a fatigued attitude to clean his sword. She could not mistake the cavalier of the Second in her intense Cohort officer whites, contrasted with a jacket of blazing red. She was watching the two in the centre: facing each other on the flagstones, swords and long knives throwing up bevelled yellow reflections on the walls, were Magnus and the abominable girl teen, stripped down to their shirtsleeves. Everyone looked up as the Princess of Ida glowed into sight, because you couldn’t do anything else.

  “Sir Magnus, behold my coup!” she said, and she gestured to Gideon.

  This did not produce a susurrus of respectful murmurs, as she had obviously hoped. The dress-uniform cavalier stood to attention, but her gaze was blank and cool. The Fourth girl dropped form and rocked backward on her heels, whistling noisily in fascinated horror. The cavalier of the Third raised his eyebrows and took on an expression of dismay, as though his necromancer had just presented them with a leper. Only Magnus gave her a genial, if slightly bewildered, smile.

  “Princess Corona, trust you to nab Gideon the Ninth!” he said, and to his dreadful teen: “See, now you can have a duel with someone else, and not bore everyone by how soundly Jeannemary the Fourth can thrash me.”

  (“Nooooo, Magnus, don’t mention me,” hissed that dreadful teen.)

  “I’d be ashamed to admit to that,” said the Third cavalier significantly.

  The unfortunate Jeannemary the Fourth was going red in the face. She drew herself up to say something obviously unwise, but her sparring partner clapped her on the back with an unsinkable smile.

  “Ashamed, Prince Naberius? To lose to a Chatur?” he said heartily. “Goodness me, no. Cavalier family since the time of the Resurrection. Should feel ashamed if she lost to me. I’ve known her since she was a child—she knows I’m absolutely no good. You should have seen her when she was five—”

  (“Magnus, do not talk about me being five.”)

  “Now, let me tell you this story—”

  (“Magnus, do not tell anyone this story.”)

  “Challenged me to a duel during a reception, said I’d insulted her—think it was a matter of propping her up with cushions, and to be honest, she would’ve had me if she hadn’t been using a bread knife as her offhand—”

  Disgusted beyond all tolerance, the much-tried Jeannemary let out a primal yell and escaped to the benches on the other side of the room, far away from them. Now that she wasn’t looking, Magnus gave Naberius a look of frank reproof. The Third�
�s cavalier coloured and looked away.

  “I want to see a match,” said Princess Corona. “Come—Gideon the Ninth, right?—why don’t you try Sir Magnus instead? Don’t believe him when he says he’s rubbish. The Fifth House is meant to turn out very fine cavaliers.”

  Magnus inclined his head.

  “Of course I’m willing, and the princess is gracious,” he said, “but I didn’t get to be cavalier primary due to being the best with a rapier. I’m cavalier primary only because my adept is also my wife. I suppose you could say that I—ha, ha—cavalier primarried!”

  From the other side of the room, Jeannemary let out a long noise like a death rattle. Princess Corona laughed outright; Magnus looked extremely pleased with himself. The faces of the other two were patiently blank. Gideon made a mental note to write down the joke so that she could use it herself later.

  Corona inclined her bright head in toward Gideon. She smelled nice, like how Gideon imagined soap was meant to smell.

  “Will the Ninth honour us?” she murmured prettily.

  Stronger women than Gideon could not have said no to an up-close-and-personal Corona Tridentarius. She stepped up to the dais, her boots ringing out on the stone: the older man opposite’s eyes widened when he saw that she was not going to take off her robe, nor her hood, nor her glasses. The air in the room thrilled, all except for the dreary scrape, scrape, scrape of the skeleton removing cobwebs. Even Jeannemary sat up from her posture of premature death to watch. There was a low murmur of amazement from Corona when Gideon twitched open her robe to reveal the knuckles latched to her belt; they glittered blackly in the sunlight as she slipped them onto her hand.

  “Knuckle-knives?” said the Third’s cavalier in outright disbelief. “The Ninth uses knuckle-knives?”

  “Not traditionally.”

  That was the cavalier in the Cohort uniform, who had a voice as crisp as her collar. Naberius said with forced languor: “I simply can’t remember ever thinking knuckle-knives were a viable option.”

  “They’re tremendously nasty.” (Gideon admitted to herself that the way Corona said it was kind of hot.)

  Naberius sniffed.

  “They’re a brawler’s weapon.”

  The Cohort cav said, “Well. We’ll see.”

  That was the strange thing about keeping mute, thought Gideon. Everyone seemed to talk at you, rather than to you. Only her erstwhile sparring partner was looking her dead in the eye—as much as he could through dark glasses, anyway.

  “Does the Ninth, er—” Magnus was gesturing in a rather general way to Gideon’s robes, her glasses, her hood, which she translated to Are you going to take those off? When she shook her head no he shrugged in wonder: “All right!” and added the slightly bewildering, “Well done.”

  Corona said, “I’ll arbitrate,” and they moved into position. Once again Gideon was back down in the half-lit depths of Drearburh, in the cement-poured tomb of a soldier’s hall. Cavalier duels worked the same way Aiglamene had taught her they would, which was very much the same way they did back home, just with more folderol. You stood in front of each other and laid your offhand arm across your chest, showing which main-gauche weapon you intended to use: her knuckle-knives were laid, fat and black, against her collarbone. Magnus’s sword—a beautiful dagger of ivory-coloured steel, the handle a twist of creamy leather—touched his.

  “To the first touch,” said their arbiter, badly hiding her rising excitement. “Clavicle to sacrum, arms exception. Call.”

  First touch? In Drearburh it was to the floor, but there was no time to contemplate that one: Magnus was smiling at her with the boyish, teacherly enthusiasm of a man about to play a ball game with a younger sibling. But beneath that excellent mask there was a note of doubt about his eyes, a tugging of his mouth, and something in Gideon rose as well: he was a little afraid of her.

  “Magnus the Fifth!” he said, and: “Er—go easy!”

  Gideon looked over at Corona and shook her head. The necromancer-princess of Ida was too well bred to query and too quick to mistake, and simply said: “I call for Gideon the Ninth. Seven paces back—turn—begin…”

  There were four pairs of hungry eyes watching that fight, but they all blurred into the background of a dream: the lines one’s brain filled in to abbreviate a place, a time, a memory. Gideon Nav knew in the first half second that Magnus was going to lose: after that she stopped thinking with her brain and started thinking with her arms, which were frankly where the best of her cerebral matter lay.

  What happened next was like closing your eyes in a warm and stuffy room. The first feint from the Fifth House was the heavy drowsiness that filled the back of her head, all the way down to her toes; the second the weightless loll of the skull to the chest. Gideon tucked her offhand behind her back, said to herself: Stop blocking every blow! and did not even bother to parry. She pivoted away each syrup-slow thrust without meeting it, bent back from the follow-up with the dagger like they had agreed beforehand where it would fall: he pressed his quarter, trying to force her, and she very gently folded his sword to the side with hers, contraparried. The point of her black rapier flickered like paper touched with a flame and came to rest, a quarter-inch away from his heart, making him stutter to a halt. She bumped the tip of her sword into his chest, very gently.

  It was over in three moves. A mental haptic jolt bunted Gideon awake, and there she was: rapier held still to Magnus’s chest; Magnus with the good-natured but poleaxed expression of a man caught mid–practical joke; four sets of staring, equally blank expressions. Their very good-looking arbiter’s mouth was even hanging very slightly open, lips parting over white teeth, gaping dumbly until she caught up—

  “Match to the Ninth!”

  “Goodness me,” said Magnus.

  The room let out a collective breath. Jeannemary said: “Oh my days,” and the Cohort cav of the Second sat up at least two inches taller than before, thumb pressed furiously hard into the soft part under her chin in thought. Gideon was busy sheathing her sword a heartbeat after Magnus had sheathed his, jerky with lag time in returning his bow, turning away. Her sweat had turned to adrenaline; her adrenaline was singing through her as fine, hot fuel, but her brain and heart had not caught up with the result. The only emotion she was feeling was a slow-to-saturate relief. She had won. She had won even though moving in a robe and dark glasses was so stupid. Aiglamene’s honour could go another day intact, and Gideon’s ass could go spiritually unkicked.

  Conversations were happening around her, not to her:

  A bit plaintively: “I’m not quite that out of form, am I?—”

  (“Magnus! Maaaaagnus. Three moves, Magnus.”)

  “—Am I getting old? Should Abigail and I divorce?—”

  “I didn’t even see her move.” Corona was breathing hard. “God, she’s fast.”

  Because they were in closest proximity, her first gaze after the fight fell on the overgroomed cavalier of the Third, Naberius: his eyes were taut, and his smile was unnerved. His eyes were blue, but this close she could see that they were stained through in places with a light, insipid brown that made Gideon think of oily water.

  “Next match to me,” said Naberius.

  “Don’t be greedy,” said his princess, good-naturedly and a trifle distractedly. “The Ninth just fought. Why don’t you go toe-to-toe with Jeannemary?”

  But it was clear that he did not want to go toe-to-toe with Jeannemary, and judging by the look on her face she was no keener on the idea. Naberius shrugged his shoulders back, rolling up the sleeves of his fine cotton shirt to each elbow. He did not drop his gaze from Gideon. “You didn’t even break a sweat, did you?” he said. “No, you’re ready to go again. Try me.”

  “Oh, Babs.”

  “Come on.” His voice was much softer, more coaxing and appealing, when he was speaking to Corona. “Let the Third show what it can do, my lady. I know you’d rather watch your own.” There was a peculiarly nasal lilt to his voice, a sort of posh elongat
ed vowel that made it rathah. “Put me in. Dyas can get another look at me.” (Next to him, the Cohort cavalier who was obviously hight Dyas raised her eyebrows the exact one-eighth of an inch to indicate how much she wanted to get another look at him.)

  “The Ninth?”

  Gideon’s heart was still ricocheting around her chest. She raised her shoulders in an expression that the brethren of the Locked Tomb would have recognised immediately as the precursor of Gideon about to do something particularly daft, but Corona took it as acceptance, and said mock-indulgently to her cav: “Well, then, my dear, go off and make yourself happy.”

  He beamed as though he had just been bought a new pair of shoes. Gideon thought: Shit.

  The Cohort cavalier, Dyas, was saying: “Your Highness. The adept shouldn’t officiate for their cavalier.”

  “Oh, pff! Surely just this once can’t harm, Lieutenant.”

  “You can’t call yourself a disinterested arbitrator, Princess,” Magnus was saying.

  “Nonsense: I’m harder on him than anyone else. To the touch; call!”

  In a very short space of time she was standing face to face with another cavalier, and there was a juddering in her ears that she recognised as the beating of her own heart. The glass of her knuckle-knives felt black and cold and silky all the way through a layer of robe and her shirt, and her tongue felt thick in her mouth. She hadn’t been this overstimulated since that one time when training had consisted of Crux, a repeating crossbow, and two skeletons with machetes. The Third’s main-gauche dagger was as gorgeously wrought as his hair: chased silver and Imperial violet, the arms of the hilt curved and hugging inward in a way that tugged on her memory but did not grasp the right file. The blade was thin and bright and flared at the top. She was so busy looking at it that she barely heard Naberius say:

  “Naberius the Third.”

  And very, very quietly, just for her: