Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  She made herself look anywhere else. By now they had reached the very end of the corridor, which terminated in a single door marked LABORATORY EIGHT. Wriggling free of Gideon’s arm, Dulcinea opened it onto a little foyer alike in indignity to LABORATORY TWO. There were hooks on the walls here, and a bunch of old, crumpled boxes made of thin metal, the type you might carry files in; these were dented and empty. Someone had taken the time and effort to affix a beautiful swirl of human teeth above the door in a widening spiral of size: in the centre, the neat little shovels of incisors, tessellated with arched canines and ringed all around with the long, racine tusks of molars. In neat print the label on the door read: #14–8 DIVERSION. PROCEDURAL CHAMBER.

  Beneath the neat print, a more elaborate hand had written in fainter ink: AVULSION!

  “Here we are,” said Dulcinea. “Before we go through, please give me a little bit of your blood. I have warded the place up and down and I’m dreadfully afraid you won’t be able to go through the door without giving me a shock.”

  This little nod to paranoia made Harrow’s shoulders relax minutely. Gideon looked to her, and Harrowhark nodded. In the dim and dusty foyer both offered up their hands to be pricked: the necromancer of the Seventh tilted her head, beautiful brown ringlets spilling over her shoulders, and took blood from their thumbs and their ring fingers. Then she pressed the blood into her palm and spat delicately with what Gideon noticed was pink-tinged spittle; she pressed her thin hand to the door.

  “It’s not a hold ward,” Dulcinea explained, “but it’s not just physical. The ward will alert me if the immaterial try to pass … if they’ve instantiated, I mean, if they’ve crossed over. I don’t want to stop them,” she added, when Harrowhark started fidgeting with a bone fragment from her pocket. “I want to see whatever would try to sneak in on us … I want to know what it looks like. Let’s go.”

  Rather than the neatly sectional space that had constituted Laboratory Two, with its Imaging and Response chambers and orderly empty shelves, Laboratory Eight opened up on an enormous grate. A lattice of thick black steel barred the first part of the room from the second, which—espied through the holes—proved to be a long space with a claustrophobic ceiling. It was like stepping into a pipe. The door led to a metal platform on struts and a short flight of stairs leading down into the space, barred by the huge grate. The Seventh necromancer went to the wall and flicked a switch, and with a low vibrating moan, the grate slowly began to tuck itself up into the ceiling.

  With the removal of the grate, the room seemed enormously grey and empty. Only two things broke up the vast monotony of grey metal and white light: far off at the other end of the chamber was a metal plinth, boxed on top with what looked like clear glass or plex; and at the bottom of the stairs, about a metre away from its base, was a yellow-and-black-striped line that had been painted horizontally from wall to wall.

  It was easily a hundred metres from the stripe to the plinth: a long way to walk. It looked simple enough, which was how Gideon knew it was probably a huge pain in the ass.

  And yet her adept was already gliding down the stairs, standing before the yellow-and-black-emblazoned line as though at the edge of a fire. Dulcinea came after, leaning more heavily on her crutches as she swung herself down the stairs. Protesilaus came last.

  “If you put your hand through,” she said, “you’ll see—there.” Harrow had bitten off a cry of pain. She had stuck her gloved fingers tentatively over the line, and now she was yanking off her glove to see the damage. Gideon had been the victim of this once before, through Palamedes Sextus, but it was still a disquieting sight. Harrow’s fingertips had shrivelled: the nails had split horribly, and the moisture looked as though it had been siphoned forcibly out, wrinkling the skin like paper. Her adept shook her hand in the air like you would with a burn; the wrinkles smoothed out, slowly, and the nails knit themselves back together.

  “Hardly insurmountable,” said Harrow, having regained her composure.

  “Very hopeful! What would you use?”

  “A corporeal ward; skin-bound, tight focus.”

  “Try it.”

  Harrowhark flexed her fingers slowly. Gideon watched as she narrowed her eyes into obsidian slits, fringed thickly with blunt black lashes, and then extended her hand beyond the line again. There was a brief shower of blue sparks; Harrow snatched her hand back, amazed and furious. The fingers had withered into puckered twigs; her little nail had fallen off entirely. The edges of her sleeve had holed and frayed as though assaulted by moths. Gideon lunged out of a sheer desire to do something, but Harrow held her back with her healthy hand, staring fixedly at the hurt one as it slowly mended. Dulcinea watched with eager eyes: Protesilaus hulked next to the stairs.

  Harrow shook a bracelet over her hurt hand, and bands of spongy osseous matter wrapped around her knuckles before forming thick plaques of bone. Gauntleted, she reached her hand out again—

  “It won’t work,” said Dulcinea, dimpling.

  —The gauntlet exploded into fragments of bone. Those that passed the yellow line fragmented further, and those bits degraded into dust and that into powder. The glove fell away in hunks, dwindling into fine sand before it even hit the ground, and Harrow yanked her hand back to stare at its sad puckered appearance a third time. She sat heavily on the stairs, and a bead of blood sweat trickled down one temple as, away from the barrier, her hand relaxed back into wholeness. Gideon longed to say: What the fuck?

  “It’s two spells, overlaying each other,” said Dulcinea.

  “You can’t have two spells with coterminous bounds. It’s impossible.”

  “But true. They’re really coterminous—not just interwoven or spliced. It’s truly delicious work. The people who set it in place were geniuses.”

  “Then one half is senescence—”

  “And the other half is an entropy field,” said Dulcinea simply.

  Gideon followed Harrow’s gaze over the long, dully gleaming field of corrugated metal, and the plinth shining at the end like a beacon. She saw Harrow suck in and bite the inside of one cheek, always a sign of furious thinking, flexing her fingers all the while as though still worried about their integrity. She took an old, ivory-coloured knuckle from her pocket, and she passed it to Gideon. “Throw,” she commanded.

  Gideon obligingly threw. It was a good toss—the knuckle hit the field high and travelled for about half a metre before fragmenting into a rain of grey particles. Harrow’s gaze fixed on the crumbling shards: more tiny spikes and spurs of bone burst out of them and shrivelled, stillborn—another burst as Harrow curled her fist into a ball—then nothing. There was no more bone left.

  Dulcinea breathed in admiration: “It’s awful quick.”

  “Then,” said the adept of the House of the Ninth, “it is—and I don’t say this lightly—impossible. This is the most efficient death trap I’ve ever seen. The senescence decays anything before it can cross, and the entropy field—God knows how it’s holding—disperses any magical attempt to control the rate of decay. But why hasn’t the whole room collapsed? The walls should be so much dust.”

  “The field and the flooring are a few micrometres apart—maybe the Ninth could make a very very weeny construct to go through that gap,” said the Seventh helpfully.

  Harrow said, in bottom-of-the-ocean tones: “The Ninth House has not practised its art on—weeny—constructs.”

  “Before you ask, it’s not a lateral puzzle either,” said Dulcinea. “You can’t go through the floor because it’s solid steel, and you can’t go through the ceiling because that’s also solid steel, and there’s no other access. And Palamedes Sextus estimated you could walk for probably three seconds before you died.”

  Harrow got very focused very suddenly. “Sextus has seen this?”

  “I asked him first,” said Dulcinea, “and when I told him the method, he said he’d never do it. I thought that was fascinating. I’d love to get to know him better.”

  That got every particle of
Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s attention. Dulcinea absently tossed her crutches to Protesilaus one by one, and he caught them out of the air as though he didn’t even have to think about it, which Gideon had to admit was cool. She sat down heavily on the stairs quite close to Harrow, and she said: “There is one way of doing it … and he wouldn’t. I’m sorry that I didn’t admit it … but you were my second choice. If black vestals won’t cross this line, I don’t think anyone will. And I can’t, because I physically can’t walk the whole way unassisted. If I faint or go funny halfway there it will mean my timely death.”

  “And what is it,” said Harrow, in a voice that meant trouble, “that even Palamedes Sextus won’t do?”

  “He won’t siphon,” said Dulcinea.

  The shutters on Harrow’s face were pulled shut. “And nor will I,” she said.

  “I don’t mean soul siphoning … not quite. When Master Octakiseron siphons his cavalier, he sends the soul elsewhere and then exploits the space it leaves behind. The power that rushes in to fill that space will keep refilling, for as long as either of them can survive. You wouldn’t have to send anyone anywhere. But the entropy field will drain your own reserves of thanergy as soon as you cross the line, so you need to draw on a power source on this side of the line, where the field can’t touch it. Do you understand?”

  “Don’t patronize me, Lady Septimus. Of course I understand. Understanding a problem is nowhere near the same as implementing a solution. You should have asked Octakiseron and his human vein.”

  “I probably would have,” said Dulcinea candidly, “if Pro hadn’t blacked his eye for him.”

  “So technically,” said Harrow, acid as a battery, “we’re your third choice.”

  “Well, Abigail Pent was a very talented spirit magician,” said Dulcinea, and relented when she saw Harrow’s expression. “I’m sorry! I’m teasing! No, I don’t think I would have asked the Eighth House, Reverend Daughter. There is something cold and white and inflexible about the Eighth. They could have done this with ease … maybe that’s why. And now Abigail Pent is dead. What am I to do? If you were to ask Sextus for me, do you think he’d do it? You seem to know him better than me.”

  Harrow pushed herself up from the stairs. She had not seemed to notice that Dulcinea was leaning with her flowerlike face in her hands and drinking in her every movement, nor her expression of carefully studied innocence. Gideon was undergoing complicated feelings about not being the centre of the Seventh’s attention.

  With a flourish of inky skirts, Harrowhark turned back to the stairs, staring through Dulcinea rather than at her. “Let’s say I agree with your theory,” she said. “To maintain enough thanergy for my wards inside the field, I’d need to fix a siphon point outside it. The most reasonable source of thanergy would be—you.”

  “You can’t move thanergy from place to place like that,” said the Seventh, with very careful gentleness. “It has to be life to death.… or death to a sort of life, like the Second do. You’d have to take my thalergy.” She raised a wasted hand, and then let it flutter back to her face like a drifting paper plane. “Me? I could get you maybe—ten metres.”

  “We adjourn,” said Harrowhark.

  Harrow grasped Gideon hard around the arm and practically dragged her back up the stairs, out past the foyer and into the hallway. The noise of the door slamming behind them echoed around the corridor. Gideon found herself staring straight down the barrel of a loaded Harrowhark Nonagesimus, hood shaken back to reveal blazing black eyes in a painted white face.

  “‘Avulsion’,” she said bitterly. “Of course. Nav, I’m going to bear down hard on your trust again.”

  “Why are you so into this?” asked Gideon. “I know you’re not doing it for Dulcinea.”

  “Let me make my business plain. I have no interest in Septimus’s woes,” Harrow said. “The Seventh House is not our friend. You’re making yourself an utter fool over Dulcinea. And I dislike her cavalier even more—” (“Massive slam on Protesilaus out of nowhere,” said Gideon.) “—but I would finish the challenge that sickened Sextus. Not for the high ground. But because he must learn to stare these things in the face. Do you know what I’d have to do?”

  “Yeah,” said Gideon. “You’re going to suck out my life energy in order to get to the box on the other side.”

  “A ham-fisted summary, but yes. How did you come to that conclusion?”

  “Because it’s something Palamedes wouldn’t do,” she said, “and he’s a perfect moron over Camilla the Sixth. Okay.”

  “What do you mean, ‘okay’—”

  “I mean okay, I’ll do it,” said Gideon, although most of her brain was trying to give the part of her brain saying that a nipple-gripple. She chewed at a damp fleck of lip paint and took off her dark glasses, then popped them into her pocket. Now she could look Harrow dead in the eye. “I’d rather be your battery than feel you rummaging around in my head. You want my juice? I’ll give you juice.”

  “Under no circumstances will I ever desire your juice,” said her necromancer, mouth getting more desperate. “Nav, you don’t know precisely what this is asking. I will be draining you dry in order to get to the other side. If at any point you throw me off—if you fail to submit—I die. I have never done this before. The process will be imperfect. You will be in … pain.”

  “How do you know?”

  Harrowhark said, “The Second House is famed for something similar, in reverse. The Second necromancer’s gift is to drain her dying foes to strengthen and augment her cavalier—”

  “Rad—”

  “It’s said they all die screaming,” said Harrow.

  “Nice to know that the other Houses are also creeps,” said Gideon.

  “Nav.”

  She said, “I’ll still do it.”

  Harrowhark chewed on the insides of her cheeks so hard that they looked close to staving in. She steepled her fingers together, squeezed her eyelids shut. When she spoke again, she made her voice quite calm and normal: “Why?”

  “Probably because you asked.”

  The heavy eyelids shuttered open, revealing baleful black irises. “That’s all it takes, Griddle? That’s all you demand? This is the complex mystery that lies in the pit of your psyche?”

  Gideon slid her glasses back onto her face, obscuring feelings with tint. She found herself saying, “That’s all I ever demanded,” and to maintain face suffixed it with, “you asswipe.”

  When they returned, Dulcinea was still sitting on the stairs and talking very quietly to her big cavalier, who had dropped to his haunches and was listening to her as silently as a microphone might listen to its speaker. When she saw that the Ninth House pair were back in the room, she staggered to rise—Protesilaus rose with her, silently offering her an arm of support—as Harrowhark said, “We’ll make our attempt.”

  “You could practise, if you wanted,” said Dulcinea. “This won’t be easy for you.”

  “I wonder why you make that assumption?” said Harrowhark.

  Dulcinea dimpled. “I oughtn’t to, ought I?” she said. “Well, I can at least look after Gideon the Ninth while you’re over there.”

  Gideon still saw no reason why she would need looking after. She stood in front of the stairs feeling like a useless appendage, hand gripping the hilt of her sword as though through sheer effort she could still use it. It seemed dumb to be a cavalier primary with no more use than a big battery. Her necromancer stood in front of her with much the same nonplussedness, hands working over each other as though wondering what to do with them. Then she swept one gloved hand over the side of Gideon’s neck, fingers resting on her pulse, and breathed an impatient breath.

  It felt like nothing, at first. Besides Harrow touching her neck, which was a one-way trip to No Town. But it was just Harrow, touching her neck. She felt the blood pump through the artery. She felt herself swallow, and that swallow go down past the flat of Harrow’s hand. Maybe there was a little twinge—a shudder around the skull, a tactual t
witch—but it was not the pressure and the jolt she remembered from Response and Imaging. Her adept took a step back, thoughtful, fingers curling in and out of her palms.

  Then she turned and plunged through the barrier, and there was the jolt. It started in Gideon’s jaw: starbursts of pain rattling all the way from mandible to molars, electricity blasting over her scalp. She was Harrow, walking into no-man’s-land; she was Gideon, skull juddering behind the line. She sat down on the stairs very abruptly and did not pay attention to Dulcinea, reaching out for her before drawing back. It was like Harrow had tied a rope to all her pain receptors and was rappelling down a very long drop. She dimly watched her necromancer take step after painstakingly slow step across the empty metal expanse. There was a strange fogging around her. It took Gideon a moment to realise that the spell was eating through Harrow’s black robes of office, grinding them into dust around her body.

  Another lightning flash went through her head. Her immediate instinct was to reject it, to push against awareness of Harrow—the sense of crushing pressure—the blood-transfusion feel of loss. Bright lights danced in her vision. She fell to the side and became disjointedly aware of Dulcinea, her head on Dulcinea’s thin thigh, the glasses slipping off her nose and rattling down onto the next step. She watched Harrow walk as though against a wind, blurred with particles of black—then she found herself snorting out big hideous fountains of blood. Her vision blurred again greyly, and her breath stuttered in her throat.

  “No,” said Dulcinea. “Oh, no no no. Stay awake.”

  Gideon couldn’t say anything but blearrghhh, mainly because blood was coming enthusiastically out of every hole in her face. Then all of a sudden it wasn’t—drying up, parching, leaving her with a waterless and arid tongue. The pain moved down to her heart and massaged it, electrifying her left arm and her left fingers, her left leg and her left toes. It was beyond pain. It was as though her insides were being sucked out through a gigantic straw. In her dimming vision she saw Harrowhark, walking away; no longer haloed by fragments but limned with a great yellow light that flickered and ate at her heels and her shoulders. Tears filled Gideon’s eyes unbidden, and then they gummed away. It all blurred grey and gold, then just grey.