Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  This turned out to be an invitation. Camilla—obviously used to being someone’s cav-of-all-work—helped her sling on her rapier, and waited as she applied a very cursory amount of face paint. She wouldn’t have passed muster with a glaucomic nun in a room with the lights shot out, but it was enough to get on with. She didn’t quite have to lean on Camilla’s arm, but every so often was the recipient of a brusque shoulder press to get her standing straight. They kept mutual and pleasant silence, and the sunset bled through all the windows and gaps of the House of the First and made puddles of red and orange before them.

  Every so often a white-belted skeleton crossed their path with an easy, arm-swinging gait. Each time a bonely figure appeared from a corner or clattered through a doorway, Gideon noticed Camilla’s fingers close on her rapier out of pure reflex. When they stopped at the threshold of the dining hall, the cavalier of the Sixth was poised like a waiting shrike: there were voices within.

  “—Princess Ianthe has one. It’s not at all the same thing,” someone was saying.

  A tall and golden figure was standing before the tables, her saffron hair unbrushed and sleep in her eyes. Her clothes looked as though she had slept in them. Coronabeth was still magnificent.

  She was talking to Teacher, who was sitting at one of the long polished tables—there was Palamedes next to him with an uneaten meal and a piece of paper scribbled almost to holes, and some of the sizzling tautness surrounding Camilla went off the boil. Her shoulders relaxed, just a fragment.

  Teacher said gently: “Ah, ah, that is also not correct. The owner is Naberius the Third. If it is being held for him by Princess Ianthe—it’s still his. One key for the Third House and one only, I am afraid.”

  “Then the Fifth’s key should be given to me. Magnus wouldn’t mind—wouldn’t have minded.”

  “Magnus the Fifth had asked for his own facility key, and I do not know where it is,” said Teacher.

  Scalded by the bright orange light of the setting sun coming down through the great ceiling windows, Corona looked like a grief-stricken king: her lovely chin and shoulders were thrust out defiantly, and her mouth was hard and remorseless as glass. Her violet eyes looked as though she had been crying, though perhaps from anger.

  Palamedes’s chair clattered as he rose, saying courteously to this vision: “Princess, if you wish it, I’ll escort you down to the facility right now.”

  Gideon caught Camilla’s low “The hell you will.”

  More chairs scraped on the tiled floor. Gideon hadn’t noticed the duo from the Second House at the table farthest away, drinking hot coffee and looking, as they ever did, as though they had just trimly stepped from the pages of a military magazine. Captain Deuteros said: “I am surprised that the Warden of the Sixth House would break compact like this. You’ve said yourself that this can’t be solved communally.”

  “And I was right, Captain,” said Palamedes, “but this is harmless.”

  Coronabeth had crossed the floor to Palamedes, and though he was tall she towered a full half a head over him if you included the hair. Camilla had edged around the room to stand half a step behind her necromancer, Gideon sloping helplessly behind, but war was not on the Third’s mind. Corona was not smiling, but her mouth was fine and frank and eager, and she rested her hand on his shoulder: “Do this for me,” she said, “and the Third House will owe the Sixth House a favour. Help me get the same keys as my sister—and the Third House will go down on its knees for the Sixth House.”

  Captain Deuteros said, icily: “‘Harmless.’”

  “Princess,” said Palamedes, who had had to blink his extremely lambent grey eyes under this assault, “I can’t. What you’re asking is impossible.”

  “I mean it. Wealth—military prizes—research materials,” she said, intent on encroaching into Palamedes’s personal space. Gideon was in awe of the Sixth at this point, as under the same treatment she would have breathed so hard that she fainted. “The Third’s thanks will be as gracious as you need them to be.”

  “Corona. This is rank bribery. The Second won’t stand for it, and the Sixth is too wise to buy into it.”

  “Oh, shut up, Judith,” she said. “Your House would give bribes in a heartbeat if you had any money.”

  Judith said slowly, “You insult the Second.”

  “Don’t toss the gauntlet at me,” said Corona, “Naberius would just treat it as an early birthday present— Sixth, believe me, I’m good for it.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want what you’re offering. It’s that you’re asking for the impossible,” said Palamedes, with a touch more impatience in his voice. “You can’t get the keys your sister has. Each key is unique. Frankly, there are only one or two left in all Canaan House that haven’t been claimed already.”

  The room fell silent. The Second’s carefully placid faces were frozen. Corona had gone still. Gideon’s own face must have been doing something, because the rangy necromancer of the Sixth looked at her, and then looked at the Second, and said: “You must have realised this.”

  Gideon wondered why she hadn’t realised this: she wondered why she had assumed that—that maybe there were infinity keys, or enough for a full set each. She sat down hard on the closest chair at the closest table, counting the keys mentally—the red and white keys that she and Harrow had won, the second of them half Dulcinea’s by right. At another look at everyone’s faces, Palamedes said, more irascibly: “You must have realised this.”

  The golden hand had not dropped from his shoulder, but instead fisted in his shirt. “But that means—that means the challenge must be communal,” said Corona, with an exquisite furrow of her brow. “If we’re all only given pieces of this puzzle, refusing to share the knowledge means that nobody can solve it. We need to pool everything, or none of us will be ever be Lyctor. That has to be it, hasn’t it, Teacher?”

  Teacher had sat with his hands around his cup of tea as though enjoying the heat, breathing in its curls of fragrant steam. “There is no law,” he said.

  “Against teaming up?”

  “No,” said Teacher. “What I mean is, there is no law. You could join forces. You could tell each other anything. You could tell each other nothing. You could hold all keys and knowledge in common. I have given you your rule, and there are no others. Some things may take you swiftly down the road to Lyctorhood. Some things may make the row harder to plough.”

  “We still come under Imperial law,” said Marta the Second.

  “All of us come under the sway of Imperial law,” agreed her necromancer, whose expression was now a shade doubtful. “Rules exist. Like I’ve said before, the First House falls under Cohort jurisdiction.”

  “Where you got that idea from,” said Teacher tartly, and it was the first time Gideon had heard him give even a little reproof, “I do not know. We are in a sacred space. Imperial law is based on the writ of the Emperor, and here the Emperor is the only law. No writ, no interpretation. I gave you his rule. There is no other.”

  “But natural law—the laws against murder and theft. What prevents us from stealing one another’s keys through intimidation, blackmail, or deception? What would stop someone from waiting for another necromancer and their cavalier to gather a sufficient number of keys, then taking them by force?”

  Teacher said, “Nothing.”

  Coronabeth had finally dropped her hand from Palamedes’s shoulder. She looked over at the Second House—a sombre understanding was dawning on Captain Deuteros’s face, and Lieutenant Dyas’s was as inscrutable as ever—and then she looked at Palamedes, whose expression was that of a soldier who had just heard the call to the front. There was a shields-up twist to his mouth and eyes.

  Corona breathed, “Ianthe has to know,” and fled from the room. Her leaving was a little like an eclipse: the evening sun seemed to cool with her, and the duller electric lights vibrated to life with her passing.

  In an almost inexcusably banal act, a white-belted skeleton appeared from the kitchen with two st
eaming plates of the poached pale meat and root vegetables. One of these was put in front of Gideon, and she remembered that she was ravenous. She ignored the knife and fork that the skeleton carefully laid at either side of the plate, as nicely as anyone with a soul would have, and started cramming food into her mouth with her hands.

  Teacher was still bracing his hands around his cup, his expression more final than troubled: too serene to be worried, but still somehow thoughtful, a little woebegone.

  “Teacher,” said Palamedes, “when did Magnus the Fifth ask you for a facility key?”

  “Why, the night he died,” said Teacher, “he and little Jeannemary. After the dinner. But she didn’t take hers. Magnus asked me to hold on to it … for safekeeping. She was not happy. I thought perhaps the Fourth would come and ask for it today. Then again—if I could prevent either of those two children from going down to that place, I would.”

  He looked up through the skylight at the deepening dusk, the curls of steam from his mug slowly thinning away.

  “Oh, Emperor of the Nine Houses,” he said to the night, “Necrolord Prime, God who became man and man who became God—we have loved you these long days. The sixteen gave themselves freely to you. Lord, let nothing happen that you did not anticipate.”

  There came the noisy clatter of bowls. It was the Second, who—instead of sitting back down—were collating their cutlery and pushing in their chairs. They left in taut silence, single file, without a glance back at anyone remaining. Camilla sat down opposite Gideon as the skeleton put the second plate in front of her, and she used her knife and fork, though not with any great elegance.

  The necromancer of the Sixth was rubbing at his temples. His cavalier looked at him, and he offhandedly took a few bites of his meat and his vegetables, but then he stopped pretending and put down his fork.

  “Cam,” he said. “Ninth. When you’re finished, come with me.”

  It didn’t take long for Gideon to finish, as in any case she hadn’t much bothered to chew. She stared with glassy eyes at Camilla the Sixth’s plate—Camilla, who had finished most of hers, rolled her eyes and pushed her leftovers to Gideon. This was an act for which she was fond of Camilla forever after. Then they both followed a stoop-shouldered Palamedes as he pushed through the door that the Second had left from—down a corridor and a short flight of steps—turning a wheel on an iron door, its glass window rimed thickly with frost.

  This appeared to be where the priests stored anything perishable. Strings of startle-eyed, frozen fish with their scales and tails intact hung like laundry on lines above steel countertops, bewildering Gideon with the reality of what she had been eating. Other, even weirder meats were stacked in alcoves to one side of the room, expiration dates labelled with spidery handwriting. A fan blasted the area with toe-curlingly cold air as Gideon wrapped her cloak more thickly around her. Barrels lined some of the other walls: fresh vegetables, obviously just picked for tonight’s chopping, lay on a granite board. A skeleton was packing linen-wrapped wheels of some waxy white substance into a box. A door led away from this fridge—it opened, and the Second emerged. They did not look happy to see the newcomers.

  Captain Deuteros said heavily, “You’re a fool, Sextus.”

  “I don’t deserve that,” said Palamedes. “You’re the one who just found nothing for the second time.”

  “The Sixth House is welcome to succeed where the Second has failed.” She tugged her already perfect gloves into even glassier unwrinkled smoothness, and flakes of ice settled on her braided head. “The community needs this over and done with,” she said. “It needs someone who can take command, end this, and send everyone back in one piece. Will you consider working with me?”

  “No,” said Palamedes.

  “I’m not bribing you with goods and services. I’m asking you to choose stability.”

  “I can’t be bribed with goods and services,” said Palamedes, “but I can’t be bribed with moral platitudes, either. My conscience doesn’t permit me to help anyone do what we have all embarked upon.”

  “You don’t understand—”

  Palamedes said savagely, “Captain, God help you when you understand. My only consolation is that you won’t be able to put any responsibility on my head.”

  The Cohort necromancer closed her eyes and seemed to count slowly to five. Then she said: “I’m not interested in veiled threats or vagaries. Will you answer honestly, if I ask you how many keys you have?”

  “I would be a fool to answer,” he said, “but I can tell you that I have fewer than you think. I am not the only one who came here wanting to be a Lyctor, Captain. You’ve just been too damned slow on the uptake.”

  Lieutenant Dyas’s fingers closed slowly and deliberately around the hilt of her functional rapier. Camilla’s fingers were already on hers; her other hand was on the hilt she kept at her left hip, the unembossed grip of her dagger. Gideon, who had just eaten one and a quarter dinners, felt unbelievably unready for whatever was about to go down. She was relieved when the necromancer of the Second said, “Leave it. The die is cast,” and both women pushed past them.

  Palamedes led the other two cavaliers through the nondescript door to another nondescript room past the cooling larder. This room held big shelves at one end, stacked one atop the other; a few tables with wheels from which the rubber was peeling off in big strips were parked in a corner. These tables were high and long enough to hold a whole person, lying flat. It was the morgue, though a more impersonal and featureless morgue Gideon could not imagine.

  Gideon said, “How long have you known about the keys?”

  “Long enough,” said Palamedes, hooking his fingers underneath the lid of a morgue shelf. “Your Nonagesimus confirmed it with me after the Fifth were killed. Yes, I know you’ve known the whole time.”

  Oh, exquisite! Harrowhark had kept Palamedes Sextus in a loop that didn’t include Gideon. She felt angry; then she felt bereft; then she felt angry again. This felt like being hot and cold at once. Totally heedless of her, the Sixth necromancer continued: “I meant what I said though. There are precious few keys left. The faeces hits the fan starting now. Cam, did you bring the box?”

  Gideon said, “What do you mean?”

  Camilla had dropped her heavy bag next to her necromancer, and he was riffling through it with one hand, pulling the shelf out with the other. Well-greased struts smoothly produced a body covered with a thin white sheet, murmuring into view feetfirst. Palamedes pulled the sheet up from the feet all the way to the abdomen and started carefully feeling the legs through the clothes. It was Magnus, and he had not improved since Gideon had last seen him. She regretted again eating one and a quarter dinners.

  “Put it this way,” he said eventually, palpating a hip. “Up till now I’d assumed everyone was being remarkably civil. If the initial method of obtaining keys was cleverness and hard work, the way forward from here will be either what you just saw—heavy-handed alliance attempts—or worse. Why do you think the Eighth picked a fight with the Seventh?”

  “Because he’s a prig and a nasty weirdo,” said Gideon.

  “Intriguingly put,” said Palamedes, “but although he is a prig and a nasty weirdo, Dulcinea Septimus has two keys. Silas has made her a target.”

  This was all getting unreal: a weird mathematics that she hadn’t even been counting. But she was still Ninth enough to hold her tongue. She said instead: “No offense, but what the hell are you doing?”

  He had taken a fingerful of jelly out of a little tub Camilla had proffered. He was rubbing it over, bizarrely enough, the dull gold hoop of Magnus Quinn’s wedding ring. With a stick of grease he made two marks above and below the band of metal, and then held his hand over it like someone cupping a flame. Palamedes closed his eyes, and—after a pregnant pause—steam began to curl above his knuckles.

  All at once, he muttered crossly to himself and took his hand away. This time the grease went beneath the ring, and he started to ease it off the sad dead finger.
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  “I need more contact,” he said to his cavalier. “This touched the key ring, but there’s too much jumble.” And to Gideon: “Our reputation doesn’t precede us, I see. Thanergy attaches to more than just the body, Ninth. Psychometry can track the thanergy lingering in objects—when you get to it early and when there’s a strong association. Give me the scissors, I’m going to take some of his pockets.”

  “What are you—”

  “Quinn’s key ring, Ninth,” said Palamedes, as though her question was really hopelessly obvious. “There was nothing on the bodies yesterday. The Second came to look, but they haven’t got my resources.”

  “That or they took the evidence,” said his cavalier gloomily, but her adept countered: “Not their style. Anyway, if I couldn’t find anything after yesterday’s examination, they wouldn’t.”

  “Don’t get cocky, Warden.”

  “I won’t. But I’m fairly sure, here.”

  Gideon said, “But—hold up. Magnus had only just picked up his facility key the night—you know. He hadn’t reached any challenge labs. The facility key was all he had. Who’d take that?”

  “That’s precisely what I want to know,” said Palamedes. He dropped the wedding ring into a small bleached pouch that Camilla was holding open, and then took a tiny pair of scissors and started clipping at the dead man’s trousers. “Your vow of silence is conveniently variable, Ninth, I’m very grateful.”

  “Turns out I’m variably penitent. Hey, you should be talking to Nonagesimus.”

  “If I wanted to talk to Nonagesimus, I’d talk to Nonagesimus,” he said, “or I’d talk to a brick wall, because honestly, your necromancer is a walking Ninth House cliché. You’re at least only half as a bad.”

  Palamedes glanced up at her. His eyes really were extraordinary: like cut grey rock, or deep weather atmosphere. He cleared his throat, and he said: “How much would you do for the Lady Septimus?”

  Gideon was glad of the paint; she was thrown off balance, unsure of her footing. She said, “Uh—she’s been kind to me. What’s your interest in Lady Septimus?”