Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  Beneath the paint, Gideon could see that Harrow had changed colours a number of times through this little speech. She went from being a rather ashen skeleton to a skeleton who was improbably green around the gills. To an outsider, it would have just been a blank Ninth House mask twinging from darque mystery to cryptique mystery, giving nothing away, but to Gideon it was like watching fireworks go off.

  Her necromancer said gruffly: “Fine. But we’ll watch over the Seventh House. I’m not going down the ladder with your invalid cavalier.”

  Palamedes said, “Fine. Perhaps that’s better use of our talents, anyway. Fourth, are you all right to go with Gideon the Ninth? I realise I am presupposing that our motives all align—but all I can assure you is that they really do. Search the facility, and if you find him—or come up short—come back to us, and we’ll move from there. Get in and get out.”

  The bleary necromantic teen looked to his bleary cavalier. Jeannemary said immediately, “We’ll go with the Ninth. She’s all right. The stories about the Ninth House seem probably bullshit, anyway.”

  She’s all right? Gideon’s heart billowed, despite the fact that she had her own suspicions as to why her necromancer didn’t want her sitting with Dulcinea Septimus, and they were all extremely petty. The Sixth House adept adjusted his glasses again and said, “Sorry. Ninth cavalier, I should ask you your thoughts on all of this.”

  She cracked the joints in the back of her neck as she considered the question, stretching out the ligaments, popping her knuckles. He urged again, “Thoughts?”

  Gideon said, “Did you know that if you put the first three letters of your last name with the first three letters of your first name, you get ‘Sex Pal’?”

  The dreadful teens both stared with eyes so wide you could have marched skeletons straight through them.

  “You—do you talk?” said Isaac.

  “You’ll wish she didn’t,” said Camilla.

  Her wound had opened again. Palamedes was searching his pockets and the sleeves of his robe for more handkerchiefs to staunch it. As the Fourth conducted a quick conversation in what they thought were whispers, Harrow came to Gideon and unwillingly passed over the great iron ring that their keys jingled on, bodies almost pressing so that she could keep them out of sight of Palamedes.

  “Come back with these or having choked on them,” she whispered, “and don’t get complacent around the Fourth. Never work with children, Griddle, their prefrontal cortexes aren’t developed. Now—”

  Gideon put her arms around Harrowhark. She lifted her up off the ground just an inch and squeezed her in an enormous hug before either she or Harrow knew what she was about. Her necromancer felt absurdly light in her grip, like a bag of bird’s bones. She had always thought—when she bothered to think—that Harrow would feel cold, as everything in the Ninth felt cold. No, Harrow Nonagesimus was feverishly hot. Well, you couldn’t think that amount of ghastly thoughts without generating energy. Hang on, what the hell was she doing.

  “Thanks for backing me up, my midnight hagette,” said Gideon, placing her back down. Harrow had not struggled, but gone limp, like a prey animal feigning death. She had the same glassy thousand-yard stare and stilled breathing. Gideon belatedly wished to be exploded, but reminded herself to act cool. “I appreciate it, my crepuscular queen. It was good. You were good.”

  Harrow, at a total loss for words, eventually managed the rather pathetic: “Don’t make this weird, Nav!” and stalked off after Palamedes.

  Jeannemary sidled up alongside Gideon, rather shyly. Isaac was parasitically drifting with her: he was in the process of braiding her curly hair safely up with a tatty blue ribbon. She said, “Have you two been paired a very long time?”

  (“Don’t just ask them that,” her necromancer hissed. “It’s a weird thing to ask.”

  “Shut up! It was just a question!”)

  Gideon contemplated the growing braid, and the sight of Palamedes squeezing the noxious contents of a blue dropper into Camilla’s wound, and Camilla kneeing him with beautiful abruptness in the thigh. Harrowhark lurked next to them, pointedly not looking at Gideon, head hidden deep inside her second-best hood. She still didn’t understand what she was meant to do or think or say: what duty really meant, between a cavalier and a necromancer, between a necromancer and a cavalier.

  “It feels like forever,” she said honestly. Gideon slipped her dark-tinted glasses out of her pocket and slid them on, and she felt better for it. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  25

  DESPITE THE FACT THAT they now knew Gideon had a working pair of vocal reeds and the will to use them, the trip down to the facility was spent in silence. Any travel into the depths of the First House put both of the teens on high alert: they were so paranoid that they would have been welcomed into the dark bosom of the suspicious Ninth. Both startled at every shadow and watched the passing-by of creaking skeletons with no little hate and despair. They did not like the open terrace where the waves howled far below, nor the cool marble hallway, nor the marble stairwell that led down to the nondescript room with the hatch to the facility. They only spoke when Gideon slipped her facility key into the hatch and turned it with a sharp click. It was Jeannemary, and she was troubled.

  “We still don’t have a key,” she said. “Maybe we—shouldn’t be here.”

  “Abigail died, and she had permission,” said her counterpart sombrely. “Who cares?”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I’ve been down without permission,” said Gideon, as she used one booted foot to ease the hatch open. Cold air wheezed out like a pent-up ghost. “The Sixth let me in once without a key, and I’m still breathing.”

  Jeannemary seemed uncomforted and unconvinced. So she added, “Hey, look at it this way: you were down here just the other night, so if that’s the sticking point, you’re already totally boned.”

  “You don’t talk like—how I thought you might talk,” said Isaac.

  All three travelled down the cold, dark staple-ladder to the fluorescent lights and dead stillness of the landing. Gideon went first. The other two lagged behind a little, captivated by the increasingly old and bloody gobbets that still decorated the grille at the bottom. She had to herd them forward, down the tunnel that led to the radial room, to the ancient whiteboard and the signs above the warren of corridors.

  She turned: Jeannemary and Isaac had not come with her. Jeannemary had stopped in the doorway, pressing herself flat against it, looking around at the strange, anachronistic tunnels of steel and plate metal and LED lighting.

  “I thought I heard a noise,” she said, eyes darting back and forth.

  “Coming from where?”

  She didn’t answer. Isaac, who had pressed himself into the shadows where the side of the doorway met the wall, said: “Ninth, why were bone fragments found in Magnus’s body, and in Abigail’s?”

  “Don’t know. It’s a good question.”

  “At first I thought it meant the skeletons,” he said, in a sunken whisper, which made sense from the nonsense of why he and his cavalier had jumped at the creaking approach of each bone servant in the place. “There’s something unnatural about the constructs upstairs—like they’re listening to you…”

  Gideon looked back at both of them. They had pressed themselves into either side of the corridor, not daring to come into the open space, pupils very dilated as though with adrenaline. They both looked at her: the young cavalier with her brown eyes muddy in the darkness, the young necromancer with his deep hazel eyes and spiderleggy mascara. Pressurized air from some cooling fan wheezed through a vent, making the ceiling creak.

  “Come on, don’t just lurk there,” said Gideon impatiently. “Let’s find this guy. It shouldn’t be too hard, he’s massive.”

  Neither wanted to be coaxed out. Their puff had seemed to leave them. They clustered close together, grave-faced and tense. Isaac raised a hand and faint, ghostlike flames appeared at his fingertips—bluish-greenish, giving off a sickly
little light that did not do much to illuminate what was going on around them. He insisted on warding every single radiating doorway—daubing blood and his cavalier’s spit around the mouth of each corridor. He was nervous and crabby, and it was slow work applying teen gunge to every single exit. “His enclosures are good,” Jeannemary kept saying defensively.

  “I thought the Fourth were meant to be all about headfirst dives and getting all crazy,” said Gideon, who stared hard into every shadow.

  “It’s stupid to get killed if it doesn’t help,” said Isaac, tracing his thumb in curious shapes along the doorjamb. “The Fourth isn’t cannon fodder. If we’re first on the ground we need to stay alive … wards were the first thing I learned. When we get shipped out next year, we’ll get them scarified onto our backs.”

  Next year. Gideon was taut with impatience, but still spent a couple of seconds grappling with the notion that the gawky teens in front of her would be facing the Empire’s foes at age fifteen-and-whatever. For all that she’d longed to be on the front lines from the age of eight up, it suddenly didn’t seem like such a great idea.

  “We wanted to go this year,” said the cavalier, dolorously, “but Isaac got mumps a week before deployment.”

  Remembrance of Isaac’s mumps threw them both into gloom, but at least that diluted their terror. In the end Gideon found herself leading them down the hallway marked SANITISER, the place where she had first found Harrow. Their three pairs of feet kicked up huge scuffs of white powder, glowing mixed colours under Isaac’s necrolight, settling down in silent sprays in the panel grouting, grinding to nothing beneath their footsteps. The doors moaned open to the panelled maze of stainless steel cubicles, and the vents moaned too in sympathy, creaking so much that the teens both gritted their molars.

  Harrow’s old blood was still here, but Protesilaus wasn’t. They all split up to walk the maze of metal tables, checking beneath them to see if he had lain down for a swift nap, or something equally probable; they prowled rows of metal cubicles, all empty. They called out, “Hello!” and “Protesilaus!,” their voices reverberating thinly off the walls. As the echoes faded, they heard the scuttling noises of air being blown through the vents’ metal teeth. “There’s something here,” Isaac said.

  They all listened. Gideon could hear nothing but the sounds of old machinery running in the same exhausted way it had run for thousands of years, kept alive by perfect mechanism and necromantic time. They were no different from the background noises of the Ninth House. She said, “I can’t hear it.”

  “It’s not just hearing,” said Isaac, brow furrowing, “it’s more—what I’m feeling. There’s movement here.”

  Jeannemary said, “Another House?”

  “No.”

  “Wards?”

  “Nothing.”

  She stalked the facility with her rapier drawn and her dagger clutched in her hand. Gideon, stranger to teamwork, worried that if she startled her by accident she’d end up with the Fourth’s offhand in her gut. Isaac said, “Bodies were brought into here—a long time ago. A lot of bone matter. The First feels like a graveyard all over, but this is worse. I’m not faking.”

  “I believe you,” said Gideon. “Some of the stuff I’ve seen down here would ruin your eyelids. I don’t know what the hell they were researching, but I don’t like it. Only bright side is that it’s all pretty self-contained.”

  “I’m … not super certain,” said the adept. Sweat was beading on his brow.

  Jeannemary said, “He’s not in here. Let’s go somewhere else.”

  They left the bright antiseptic room of Sanitiser. The lights went off with rhythmic boom, boom, booms as Gideon pressed down on the touchpad that still held little black whorls of Harrow’s blood, and they spilled out into the corridor. Sweat was openly dripping down the sides of Isaac’s temples now. His cavalier threw her arm over his shoulder, and he buried his hot wet face in her shoulder. Gideon again found this difficult to look at.

  “Let’s bounce,” said Jeannemary.

  As they turned the corner to where the Sanitiser corridor met the main artery, the rhythmic boom, boom, boom of lights shutting down caught up with them. The lights in the grille beneath them winked out of existence, and so did the dully glowing panels above, and so did the bright lights ringing the big square room ahead. They were left in total darkness, every nerve in Gideon’s body singing with fear. She ripped her glasses off to try to cope.

  The necromancer was close to hyperventilating. His cavalier kept saying, with eerie calm: “Your wards aren’t tripped. It’s just the lights. Don’t freak out.”

  “The wards…”

  “Aren’t tripped. You’re good with wards. There’s nobody down here.”

  One of the motion-sensor lights struggled back on behind them, a short way down the passage. A ceiling panel threw the metal siding into sharp white relief. It was daubed with words that had not been there a few seconds before, written in blood so fresh and red that there were little drips:

  DEATH TO THE FOURTH HOUSE

  The light flickered off. After no sleep—after days of threat and grief and panic that would have floored a man twice his age—Isaac lost it completely. With a strangled cry he flared in a halo of blue and green. Jeannemary yelled, “Isaac, behind me—” but he was sizzling with light, too bright to see by, a sun and not a person. Gideon heard him flee into the room ahead of them, blinded by the running aurora.

  When her eyes cleared, Gideon was confronted with the biggest skeletal construct she had ever seen. The room was full of it, bluely aflame with Isaac’s light, a massed hallucination of bones. It was bigger by far than the one in Response, bigger than anything recorded in a Ninth history textbook. It had assembled itself into the room by no visible means, since it never could have fit through one of the doors. It was just simply, suddenly there, like a nightmare—a squatting, vertiginous hulk; a nonsense of bones feathering into long, spidery legs, leaning back on them fearfully and daintily; trailing jellyfish stingers made up of millions and millions of teeth all set into each other like a jigsaw. It shivered its stingers, then stiffened all of them at once with a sound like a cracking whip. There was so much of it.

  It was cringing away from Isaac Tettares, who had planted his feet wide in line with his hips and was screaming soundlessly in fear and anger. He had thrown his arms out wide as though in embrace, and there was a sodium explosion in the air between him and the room-cramping construct. It left a suction, like he was trying to drag something out of the unwilling creature. Bright blue points of contact appeared on it, and the mass of bone and energy began to lose form, drifting instead toward Isaac, tiny bones plinking down to the grille like rain.

  Gideon woke from her confusion, drew her sword and ran. With a gauntleted hand she picked up the nearest stinger and yanked it, then smashed the back of her heavy glove into another, finding a naked shank of legbone and punching it as hard as she could. One of the tendrils of teeth wrapped around her ankle, but she found purchase and stamped it into a corona of molars. Gideon looked behind her to see Jeannemary whipped off her feet by another tendril, lashing out wildly with her feet and her blades. Everywhere she looked was filled with construct: everywhere Isaac’s light touched there was a veritable cancer of bone and tooth.

  Gideon bellowed, voice deadened by a thousand million frigging bones:

  “Run! Don’t fight it, RUN—”

  But the enormous thing slapped another couple dozen tendrils down on the grille, sinuous, and flexed into long sharp wires. Isaac’s blue-green fire fell upon a giant trunk of bone, a skull terrifically mangled into the thing’s only coherent core: a simulacrum of a face with closed eyes and closed lips, as though locked perpetually in prayer. This vast mask loomed down from the ceiling and strained beneath Isaac’s pull. One of the tendrils gave in and was sucked into the vortex that the Fourth House was so valiantly creating. The spirit pinned to it was dissolving, the limb pattering into individual bits, one among hundreds.


  Isaac did not stop and he did not run. It was one of the bravest and stupidest things Gideon had ever fucking seen. The construct teetered, getting its footing, cocking its great head as though in contemplation. The long straight spars of teeth hovered above the necromancer, bobbing and warping occasionally as though about to be sucked into his fiery gyre. Then at least fifty of them speared him through.

  Blue fire and blood sprayed the room. Gideon sheathed her sword, set her shoulders, put one arm up above her eyes, and charged through the field like a rocket. It was like running through a landslide. A thousand fragments of bone ripped her robes to shreds and tore at every inch of exposed skin. She didn’t pay them any mind, but crashed into Jeannemary Chatur like the vengeance of the Emperor. Jeannemary had no intention of stopping: she was tearing into her unbeatable foe as though running away had never been in question. She barely seemed to notice that Gideon had grabbed her, her limbs thrashing, her throat one long howl that Gideon only translated later: Fidelity! Fidelity! Fidelity!

  How she scrambled through that hallway, the other girl clutched to her bosom, long tendrils of bone snaking after them from the central room, she did not know. The fact that she shinnied up the ladder with Jeannemary attached, kicking and screaming, was even more unlikely. She tossed the cavalier down—she would have been surprised if the girl had even felt it—slammed the hatch lid, and turned the key so frantically that it made gouges in the metal.

  Jeannemary rolled over on the cold black tiles, and she threw up. She pulled herself up on her bone-whipped, cut-up, bashed-in arms and legs, wobbling, and she began to shake. She sank back to her knees and screamed like a whistle. Gideon caught her up again—the grief-stricken teenager thrashed and bit—and started off on a jog away from the hatch.

  Jeannemary kept kicking in her arms. “Put me down,” she wept. “Let me go back. He needs me. He could still be alive.”

  “He’s seriously not,” said Gideon.