Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  Gideon had stopped paying attention somewhere around wet and was now bracing both feet to pull: she was pressing down the frame with a foot, distantly taking in every fifth word. Blood. Skeletonised. Osseo. The necro called out, “Camilla, any sign she left while—”

  Camilla was on the stairs.

  “No, Warden.”

  He said to Gideon, gruffly: “Odds are she’s still down there.”

  “Then get off your ass and help me,” said Gideon Nav.

  This did not surprise or alarm him. In fact, his tightly-wound shoulders relaxed a fraction from black-hole stress fracture to pressure at the bottom of the ocean. He sounded almost relieved when he said, “Sure.”

  A jangling object sailed through the air, visible more as sound and movement than as thing. The necromancer failed to catch it: it banged him hard on his long, scrabbling hands. Gideon recognised it as the iron loop that she had been given on the very first day in Canaan House. As he squatted beside her, smelling like dust and mould, she could see that a long key had been put through the loop and was clanking there untidily. There was another, smaller key dangling off to one side, gleaming golden, with an elaborately carved shank and deep pockmarks instead of cuts in the shaft. A key ring? They’d all been given key rings?

  Inserted into the keyhole, the first key opened the trap door with a low, hard snap, and together the boy and Gideon threw it open. It revealed a ladder of metal staples down a long, unbelievably dark hole: light shaded in at the bottom, throwing into relief the fact that one slip meant a broken neck along with your broken ass-bones.

  A pointing finger appeared in front of her like a spear tip: Camilla’s. The Sixth cavalier had reclaimed the flashlight, and by its glow she could see that Camilla’s eyes were much darker than her necromancer’s: his were like clear stone or water, and hers were the unreflective, fathomless colour of overturned Ninth House sod, neither grey nor brown. “You go first, Ninth,” she said. “Palamedes follows. I bring up the rear.”

  It took a full minute to descend that long, claustrophobic tube, staring at the rungs of the ladder with her robes tucked between her knees, sword clanking on metal all the way down—and at the bottom, Gideon was utterly nonplussed.

  What lay beneath the trapdoor was a retro installation. A six-sided tunnel lined with dusty, perforated panels stretched out before them. The ceiling was merely a grille that air coolers pumped through and the floor a grille with visible pressure pumps beneath, and the lights were electric bulbs beneath luminous white plastic. There were exposed pipes. The supporting archways contained bulky, square autodoor sidings. This rhapsody of greys and sterile blacks was interrupted over the nearest arch, where, twisting in the dry breeze of the climate cooler, hung a bundle of old bones. Ancient prayer wrappers were ringed around it, and it was the only human, normal touch.

  “Follow me,” said the young man called Palamedes.

  He strode forward, filthy hem whispering on the dusty-ass tiles. This place ate sound. There were no echoes: they were squashed and absorbed into the panelling. The three of them clanked unmusically down the tunnel until it opened into a big nonagonal room, with passageways radiating out like bronchiae. Letters of brushed steel were set beside each passage:

  LABORATORY ONE–THREE

  LABORATORY FOUR–SIX

  LABORATORY SEVEN–TEN

  PRESSURE ROOM

  PRESERVATION

  MORTUARY

  WORK ROOMS

  SANITISER

  Light wells above made the panelling white; lights from below—little blinking lights attached to huge machines that went down metres beneath the grille, a huge deep way beneath their feet—made the floors softly green. The walls were unadorned, except for an enormous old whiteboard rimmed in metal, printed with lines for a timetable that had not been used in a very, very, very long time. The lines had blurred; the board was stained. Here and there meaningless bits of letters survived: the loop of what might be O or C; the arch of an M; a line-suffixed curve that could be G or Q. But in one bottom corner lingered the ghost of a message, drawn thickly in black ink once, now faded but still quite clear:

  It is finished!

  The atmosphere down here was oppressive. The air was so dry it made her eyes and mouth prickle. Camilla had one hand on her sword, and Palamedes kept wringing his together, rocking from foot to foot as he moved in a long, slow, 360-degree sweep of the room. At some stimulus, or lack of stimulus, he took a sharp turn toward Sanitiser. Gideon followed.

  The short hallway to Sanitiser was floored with panels rather than grille, covered in a powdery build-up like salt, scuffed underfoot and heaped in little drifts. These dunes dissolved like an exhaled breath if kicked.

  Quite abruptly there was blood. Palamedes thumbed his tiny flashlight out of his pocket and the liquid gleamed redly beneath the beam. Blood had been spilt, in some quantity, and then smeared heavily away down the hall, leaving a long dark scrape of drying gore. Smaller splatters had dried on the surrounding walls.

  The door at the end of the hallway—a huge blast door, metal, with a glass panel set in its centre that was so grimy you could no longer see through it—opened with a touchpad that was also smudged with curls of dried blood. Dried, and drying. Gideon pressed it so hard that the doors twanged open like they were startled.

  The first room of Sanitiser stretched before them as a huge, low-ceilinged, white-panelled maze of cubicles: long steel tables beneath the upside-down metal mushrooms of spray heads, and narrow boxes a human could stand upright in. It was fully as big as the grand, destroyed hall of Canaan House. The lights whirred overhead. A panel on the wall blinked furiously as some mechanism in it tried to wake up—it looked like a screen—but eventually it decided better, went blank, and the room was resubmerged in shadow. Gideon was hunting with a dog’s mindless, preternatural panic for a scent, trying to find—

  Spatters of blood led her to a big ridged lump in one of the cubicles. This cocoon-looking thing was about the size of a person, if that person wasn’t particularly tall. Before Palamedes and Camilla could stop her, Gideon strode up to it and gave it an enormous kick. Osseous matter showered one side of the cubicle, tinkling away as the spell broke into the oily grey ash of cremains. Curled up inside—hands bloodied, paint smeared, the skin beneath it the same oily grey as the cremains—was Harrowhark Nonagesimus.

  Gideon, who had spent the morning planning the wild, abandoned dance of joy with which she would greet Harrow’s dead body, turned back to Camilla and Palamedes.

  “I can take it from here,” she said.

  Ignoring her, Palamedes pushed past to the broken-bone chrysalis and fished around in its awful contents. He pulled a bit of Harrow’s black robe aside, then the collar of her shirt, past three necklaces of bone chips strung on thread, revealing a startling patch of bare skin—yikes—and pressed two fingers to her neck; he held a hand over her mouth; he said sharply, “Cam,” and she dropped to her knees beside him. She pulled a wallet from somewhere inside her shirt and removed, of all things, a wire. The outer insulation had been stripped from each end, revealing sharp metal tips, and one of these he jabbed into the fleshy part between his thumb and forefinger. It drew blood. The other end he pressed to Harrow’s neck where his fingers had been.

  There followed a rapid conversation, high-speed, totally obtuse:

  “High dilation rate. Blood loss not from outside injury. Hypovolemia. Breathing’s okay. Honestly—dehydration more than anything.”

  “Saline?”

  “Nah. She can refill herself when she’s awake.”

  Gideon couldn’t help herself. She could understand finding Harrow with her legs on backward and an exploded skull, but she was only following about half of this. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.

  Palamedes rocked back on his haunches. He was pinching the edge of the bone cocoon, testing it, flexing it this way and that. “She hasn’t eaten or taken water for a while,” he said. “That’s all. She would have pushed
too hard and experienced a rapid drop in blood pressure and heart rate. Likely fainted, woke up, made this—this is incredible, I can’t even … then she fell asleep. It’s all one piece, no wonder she’s out. Is this normal for her?”

  “You can tell all that with Sixth necromancy?”

  Shockingly, both he and Camilla laughed. They had gruff, barking little laughs, and Camilla took this opportunity to roll the wire back up into its wallet, pinching Harrow’s blood off one end. “Medical necromancy,” said her adept drily, “there’s an oxymoron for you. No. Being a necromancer helps, but no. It’s curative science. Don’t you have that on the Ninth? Don’t answer, I was joking. You can move her now.”

  The Reverend Daughter was very light as Gideon folded her (both Palamedes and Camilla winced) into an over-shoulder lift. Air wheezed out of Harrow’s lungs, and the bone cocoon dissolved into a shower of chips and pebbles pattering onto the floor like hail. This seemed to be the one thing to really unnerve the Sixth House necromancer. He swore under his breath and then actually whipped a ruler out of his pocket, measuring one of the chips on the floor.

  Gideon shifted, so that the weight and heft of Harrow was more evenly distributed. Her brain had not come back online enough to register that weight, or to save it for later detail in her fantasies where she dropped the Ninth House scion off the side of the docking bay. Her necromancer smelled like sweat and blood and old, burnt bone; her corselet of ribs poked painfully into Gideon’s shoulders. Ascending a staple-wall ladder with a body in tow was a hell of a lot more difficult than descending without one. Palamedes ascended first, then she did, each rung a fight with her awkward load; Camilla followed, and by the time they got to the top Gideon’s jaw hurt from clenching.

  The cavalier of the Sixth took Harrow’s shoulders when she reached the top so that Gideon could get out, which was decent of her. Maybe it was just so they could hurry up and close the huge metal trapdoor, turning the key in the lock with a satisfying click. She sat down next to the unconscious figure and rolled one shoulder in its socket, then the other.

  Palamedes was shouldering the zip-up bag and saying, “Give her water and food when she wakes up. She’ll take care of the rest. Probably. She needs eight hours of sleep—in a bed, not a library. When she asks how I knew she was in the library, tell her Cam says she clinks when she walks.”

  Gideon reached down to take her burden up again, slinging Harrow’s limp and speechless body to occupy her other shoulder. She paused at the foot of the stairs, measuring in her mind’s eye the distance back down the corridor, to the terrace, down the zigzag flights of steps and back through to the Ninth House quarters. Plenty of corners to concuss Harrow with, on the way.

  “I owe you one,” she said.

  It was Camilla who said, in her quiet, curiously deep voice, “He did it for free.” It was the first time she had looked at Gideon without the flat, stony aggression of a retaining wall, which was nice.

  Palamedes said, “What Cam said. Just—look, take a word of advice, here.”

  As she waited, he pressed the pads of his fingertips together. His cavalier was looking at him dead on, tense, waiting. In the end, he said: “It’s unbelievably dangerous down there, Ninth. Stop splitting your forces.”

  “Dangerous how?”

  “If I knew,” said Palamedes, “it’d be a hell of a lot less dangerous.”

  Gideon was impatient with vagaries. She wasn’t in Drearburh now. “How do you figure?”

  The Sixth House necromancer walked forward and paused before her in the stairwell. He was washed in dilute light from above and behind Gideon, and it showed that he really was thin—the kind of thin made thinner by his grey, shapeless robe, the thinness of trousers cinched too tight to hips. Camilla hovered a perfect half step behind—the half step Aiglamene had trepanned into Gideon—as though suspicious even of the steps.

  He said coolly: “Because I’m the greatest necromancer of my generation.”

  The unconscious figure sacked across Gideon’s shoulder muttered, “Like hell you are.”

  “Thought that would wake her up,” said Palamedes, with no small amount of satisfaction. “Well—I’m off. Like I said, liquids and rest. Good luck.”

  13

  EITHER HARROWHARK FELL BACK unconscious, having used her last remaining energy to spite Palamedes, or she was just already such a dick she could spite him in her sleep. Or maybe she was playing dead. Gideon didn’t care. Her necromancer remained heavy and unmoving all the way back to their rooms. Nobody saw them on the way, for which she was grateful, and she was heartily glad by the end of it to dump her prone and black-wrapped burden on the bed.

  Nonagesimus had looked like crap in the darkness of the weird facility. In the comfortable gloom of their quarters she looked worse. Unwrapping her hood and veil revealed torn lips and cracked face paint, flaking off in big brown-glazed smears at one temple. The veil had slipped down with the trip up the ladder. Gideon could see that her nostrils were ringed with a thick black rime of blood, and her hairline was also smeared with thin, crusty traces of it. There were no other signs of blood on the rest of her clothes or her robes, just sweat patches. Gideon had checked for injuries and been traumatised by the experience.

  She went to the bathroom and filled up a glass of water from the tap, and she left it next to Harrow, then hesitated hard. How to rehydrate? Was she meant to—wash her mouth, or something? Did she need to clean off the tusks of dried blood at each nostril? Gideon popped each shoulder twice in indecision, grabbed the water glass, and reached toward Harrow.

  “Touch me again and I’ll kill you,” said Harrow, scratch-throated, without opening her eyes. “I really will.”

  Gideon pulled her fingers back as though from a flame, and exhaled.

  “Good luck with that, bucko,” she said. “You look all mummification and no meat.”

  Harrow did not move. There was a bruise peeking out behind her ear, already deep purple. “I’m not saying it wouldn’t hurt me, Griddle,” she murmured. “I am just saying you’d be dead.”

  Gideon leant back heavily against the bedside table and took a long, malicious pull from Harrow’s glass of water. She felt tight and jangly, and the sweat had cooled to both an itch and a shiver inside her robes. She threw back the hood and shrugged herself out of the robe, feeling like a sleep-deprived child. “‘Thanks, Gideon,’” she said aloud. “‘I was in a pickle and you saved me, which I had no reasonable expectation of, since I’m an asshole who got stuck in a bone in a basement.’ Is that what you’ve been doing without me, all this time? Dicking around in a basement?”

  The adept’s lips curled back, showing little slashes of swollen pink through the grey. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I was dicking around in the basement. You didn’t need to get involved. You did just what I was afraid you would do, which was to remove me from a situation that I didn’t need to be removed from.”

  “Didn’t need—? What, you were having a nap of your own free will?”

  “I was recuperating—”

  “Balls you were.”

  Harrow opened her eyes. Her voice rose, cracking with tension: “The Sixth House, Griddle! Do you know how difficult it is to stay ahead of Palamedes Sextus? Didn’t I tell you to keep your pneumatic mouth shut? I would have been fine; I’d fainted; I was resting.”

  “And how I’m meant to know that,” said Gideon heavily, “I’ve got no idea. I want answers, and I want them yesterday.”

  The whites around Harrow’s eyes were pink and inflamed, probably from too little rest and too much fainting. She closed them again and her head came down, heavy, back to the bed. Her dead black hair fell in lank and tangled hanks on the pillow. She looked flat and tired.

  “I’m not having this conversation with you,” she said finally.

  “Yeah, you are,” said Gideon. “I took my key ring back, so if you ever want to dick around in that basement again you’ll have a hell of a time getting back in there.”

  The necromanc
er’s lips pursed in a sour, thin line that was obviously meant to show iron resolve but simply showed a bunch of mouth scabs. “That’s easily contrived. You can’t stay awake forever.”

  “Quit bluffing, Nonagesimus! Quit acting like I was the one who messed up here! You haven’t spoken more than twenty words to me since we arrived, you’ve kept me totally in the dark, and yet I’ve done every single thing you ever goddamned asked of me no matter what it was—okay, I did come to find you, nearly every single thing—but I kept my head down and I didn’t start shit. So if you could see your way to being even ten percent less salty with me, that’d be just terrific.”

  Silence spread between them. The iron resolve on that scabrous mouth seemed to waver, just a little bit. Gideon added, “And don’t push me. The places where I can and would stick this thing for safekeeping would astonish you.”

  “Puke,” murmured Harrow. And: “Give me the water, Griddle.”

  She could barely drink it. She lifted her head for a few spluttering sips, then lay back down, eyelashes brushing eyelids again. For a couple of moments Gideon thought she had gone back to sleep: but then Harrow stirred and said colourlessly: “I’d hardly call sucker-punching the Third cavalier keeping your head down.”

  “You disapprove?”

  “What? Hardly,” said Harrow, unexpectedly. “You should have finished the job. On the other hand, dallying with the Seventh House is the act of the naif or the fool, or both. What part of Don’t talk to anybody did you not register—”

  “Dulcinea Septimus is dying,” said Gideon. “Give me a break.”

  Harrow said, “She picked an interesting place to die.”

  “What are you doing, where are you doing it, why are you doing it? Start talking, Reverend Daughter.”

  They stared each other down, both similarly mulish. Harrow had taken another swig of water and was slowly swilling it around in her cheeks, apparently thinking hard. Gideon dropped back to sit on the gently sagging dresser, and she waited. Her necromancer’s mouth was still puckered up with a sourness that would’ve impressed a lemon, but she asked abruptly: