Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

“But you’re surrounded by sea,” said Gideon.

  “Yes,” said Teacher unexpectedly, “it is a bit of a pisser.”

  Gideon laughed—slightly hysterical—and he joined in, but his eyes filled with tears.

  “Poor child,” he said, “we’re all sorry. We never intended this to happen, none of us. The poor child.”

  Gideon might’ve been the child in question; she might’ve not. She strongly did not care either way. She soon found herself wandering through the little vestibule and past the gently lapping pool that Teacher hated: the low whitewashed ceiling, the softly gleaming tiles. Past the glass-fronted doors, which stood open, lay abandoned towels on the floor of the training room where the cavaliers practised their art, and what was unquestionably Naberius’s prissily pinned-up jacket. And inside the training room was Corona.

  Her lovely golden hair was stuck up in sweaty tendrils atop her head, and she had stripped down to her camisole and her shorts, which Gideon was far too befuddled to appreciate but not too befuddled to overlook. Her long tawny limbs were leprous here and there with chalk dust, and she held a rapier and a knife. She was fixed in the classic training attitude, arm coming down in a slowly controlled arc through the movements of thrust—half step—knife thrust—retreat, and there was a deep red flush of exertion on her face. Her necromantic robe lay abandoned in a thin filmy heap at the side, and Gideon watched, fascinated, through the open door.

  Coronabeth spun to face her. Her stance was good: her eyes were very beautiful, like amethysts.

  “Have you ever seen a necromancer hold a sword before?” she asked gaily.

  “No,” said Gideon, “I thought their arms would all flop around.”

  The Third princess laughed. The flush on her cheeks was a little bit too hot and pink. “My sister’s do,” she said. “She can’t hold her arms up long enough to braid her hair. Do you know, Ninth, I’ve always wanted to challenge you?” This was said with a low, intense breathlessness, ruined by the addendum: “Babs said it was incredible.”

  This was maybe the worst statement of a day so filled with terrible statements that they crowded one another, like spectators at a duel. Once Gideon would have loved to hear Corona talk to her with that low, breathy intensity, maybe saying “Your biceps … they’re eleven out of ten,” but right now she did not want anyone to talk to her at all.

  “If I never fought Naberius again I’d be happy,” she said. “He’s a prick.”

  Corona laughed in a hard, light trill. Then she said smilingly: “You might have to, eventually. But I don’t mean him.”

  She lunged. Gideon drew, because despite her brain’s long droning white noise her nervous system was still full of adrenaline. She slipped her hand into her gauntlet and was cautious when she met Corona’s shiny Third blade with her own—was surprised at the force behind the blow, at the manic energy in the other girl’s eyes. Gideon pushed down, forcing Corona’s blade aside—and Corona moved with her, sliding her blade down with the pressure, her footwork taking her into a beautiful disengage. She pressed, and it was only a hasty parry on Gideon’s part that kept the Princess at bay.

  Corona was breathing hard. For a moment Gideon thought that this was the necromancer weakness coming to bear—the lungs already sagging under the strain—but she realised that Corona was excited, and also very nervous. It was like the queenly, confident Corona of old, masked over badly damaged stuffing. This lasted just a moment. She gave a sudden purple, furtive look over Gideon’s shoulder, stiffening and retreating backward, and there was an indrawn breath from the doorway.

  “Drop it,” barked Naberius Tern.

  Not fucking likely, thought Gideon—but he skirted far around her reach, lunging past her to curl a hand hard around Corona’s forearm. His eyes were bugged out with alarm. He was in his undershirt, with his collection of rangy and sinuous muscles all being brought to bear on his princess. She sagged mutinously, like a child caught fist-deep in the lollies jar, and he was putting his arm around her. “You can’t,” he was saying, and Gideon realised: he was also terrifically afraid. “You can’t.”

  Corona made a giving-up sound of incoherent, fruitless rage, muffled by Naberius’s arm. It was, thankfully, not tears. She said something that Gideon missed, and Naberius said in reply: “I won’t tell her. You can’t do this, doll, not now.”

  For the second time that day, Gideon drifted away from a scenario she was utterly shut out of, something she did not want to be privy to. The saline tickled her nose as she sheathed her rapier and backtracked away, before Naberius decided he might as well challenge for her keys while she was there, but as she darted a glance over her shoulder he had utterly discarded her presence: he had placed his arm like a crossbar over Corona’s collarbone, and she had bitten him, apparently to soothe her own obscure feelings.

  Gideon wished for no more part in any of this. Gideon went home.

  * * *

  Her feet took her, heavy and unwilling, back to the bone-wreathed door of the Ninth quarters: her hands pushed open the door hard, recklessly. There was no sign of anyone within. The door to the main bedroom was closed, but Gideon pushed that open too, without even knocking.

  There was nobody there. With the curtains drawn Harrow’s room was dark and still, the bed inhabiting the centre of the room like a big hulking shadow. The sheets were rumpled and unmade. She could see the foetal-curl dent on the mattress where Harrow slept. Pens spilled off the mildew-spotted dressing table, and books propped up other, usefuller books on the drawers. The whole room smelled like Harrow: old Locked Tomb veils and preserving salts, ink, the faint smell of her sweat. It skewed harder toward the preserving salts. Gideon stumbled around blindly, kicking the corner of the four-poster bed in the same way that Corona had sunk her teeth into her cavalier’s arm, stubbing her toe, not caring.

  The wardrobe door was ajar. Gideon made a beeline toward it, pulling it open violently, though she had no heart to sew shut the cuffs on all of Harrowhark’s shirts as she once might have done. She half-expected bone wards to yank both her arms from their sockets, but there was nothing. There was no guard. There was nothing to have ever stopped her doing this. This drove her demented, for some reason. She slapped the rainbow of black clothes aside: neatly patched trousers, neatly pressed shirts, the formal vestments of the Reverend Daughter tied up inside a net bag and hung from a peg. If she looked at them too long she would feel tight-chested, so she very forcibly didn’t.

  There was a box at the bottom of the cupboard—a cheap polymer box with dents in it, tucked beneath a pair of Harrowhark’s boots. She would not have noticed it except that there had been a cursory attempt to hide it with the aforementioned boots and a badly ripped cloak. It was about a forearm’s length on every side. A sudden exhaustion of everything Harrow had ever locked away drove her to mindlessly pull it out. She eased off the pockmarked top with her thumbs, expecting diaries, or prayer bones, or underwear, or lithographs of Harrow’s mother.

  With numb fingers, Gideon removed the severed head of Protesilaus the Seventh.

  30

  IN THE FLIMSY-PAPERED LIVING room of the Sixth quarters, Gideon sat staring into a steaming mug of tea. It was grey with the sheer amount of powdered milk stirred into it, and it was her third cup. She had been terribly afraid that they’d put medicines into it, or tranquillizers or something: when she wouldn’t drink, both necromancer and cavalier had taken sips to prove it was unadulterated, with expressions that plainly said idiot. Palamedes had been the one to wait patiently next to her while she had thrown up lavishly in the Sixth’s toilet.

  Now she sat, haggard and empty, on a spongy mattress they had pulled out as a chair. Protesilaus’s head sat, dead-eyed, on the desk. It looked exactly as it had in life: as though, upon being separated from its trunk, it had entered into some perfect state of preservation to remain boring forever. It looked about as lively as it had when she’d met him. Palamedes was investigating the white gleam of the spinal column at the nape of the neck fo
r maybe the millionth time.

  Camilla had shoved a mug of hot tea into Gideon’s hands, strapped two swords to her back, and disappeared. This had all happened before Gideon could protest and now she was left alone with Palamedes, her discovery, and a cluster headache. Things were happening too much. She took a hot mouthful, swilled tea around her teeth, and swallowed mechanically. “She’s mine.”

  “You’ve said that five times now.”

  “I mean it. Whatever goes down—whatever happens—you have to let me do it. You have to.”

  “Gideon—”

  “What do I do,” she said, quite casually, “if she’s the murderer?”

  His interest in the spinal column was not abating. Palamedes had slipped his glasses down his long craggy nose, and was holding the head upside down like he was emptying a piggy bank. He had even shone light into the nose and ears and horrible warp of the throat. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you do?”

  “What would you do if you discovered Camilla was a murderer?”

  “Help her bury the body,” said Palamedes promptly.

  “Sextus.”

  “I mean it. If Camilla wants someone dead,” he said, “then far be it from me to stand in her way. All I can do at that point is watch the bloodshed and look for a mop. One flesh, one end, and all that.”

  “Everyone wants to tell me about fleshes and ends today,” said Gideon unhappily.

  “There’s a joke in there somewhere. You’re sure there was nothing else along with the head—bone matter, fingernails, cloth?”

  “I checked. I’m not a total tool, Palamedes.”

  “I trust Camilla. I trust that her reasons for ending someone’s life would be logical, moral, and probably to my benefit,” he said, sliding one fragile eyelid up an eyeball. “Your problem here is that you suspect that Harrow has killed people for much less.”

  “She didn’t kill the Fourth or Fifth.”

  “Conjecture, but we’ll leave it.”

  “Okay, so,” said Gideon, putting her empty mug next to her mattress. “Um. You are now getting the impression that my relationship with her is more—fraught—than you might’ve guessed.” (“You shock me,” muttered Palamedes.) “But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve known her as long as she’s lived. And I thought I knew how far she’d go, because I will tell you for free she has gone to some intensely shitty lengths, and I guess she’s gone to some shittier lengths than I thought concerning me, but that’s the thing—it’s me, Sextus. It’s always me. She nearly killed me half a dozen times growing up, but I always knew why.”

  Palamedes took off his glasses. He finally stopped molesting the head, and he pushed himself up and away from the desk; he sat down heavily on the mattress next to Gideon, skinny knees tucked up into his chest. “Okay. Why?” he asked simply.

  “Because I killed her parents,” said Gideon.

  He did not say anything. He just waited, and in the space of that waiting, she talked. And she told him the beginning stuff—how she was born, how she grew up, and how she came to be the primary cavalier of the Ninth House—and she told him the secret she had kept for seven long and awful years.

  * * *

  Harrowhark had hated Gideon the moment she clapped eyes on her, but everyone did. The difference was that although most people ignored small Gideon Nav the way you would a turd that had sprouted legs, tiny Harrow had found her an object of tormentable fascination—prey, rival, and audience all wrapped up in one. And though Gideon hated the cloisterites, and hated the Locked Tomb, and hated the ghastly great-aunts, and hated Crux most of all, she was hungry for the Reverend Daughter’s preoccupation. They were the only two children in a House that was otherwise busy getting gangrene.

  Everyone acted as though the Emperor had personally resurrected Harrowhark just to bring them joy: she had been born healthy and whole, a prodigious necromancer, a perfect penitent nunlet. She was already mounting the ambo and reading out prayers even as Gideon began desperately praying herself that she might one day go to be an enlisted soldier, which she had wanted ever since Aiglamene—the only person Gideon didn’t hate all the time—had told her she might be one. The captain had told her stories of the Cohort since Gideon was about three.

  This was probably the best time of their relationship. Back then they clashed so consistently that they were with each other most of the time. They fought each other bloody, for which Harrow was not punished and Gideon was. They set elaborate traps, sieges, and assaults, and grew up in each other’s pockets, even if it was generally while trying to grievously injure the other one.

  By the time Harrow was ten years old, she had glutted herself on secrets. She had grown bored of ancient tomes, bored of the bones she had been raising since before she’d finished growing her first set of teeth, and bored of making Gideon run gauntlets of skeletons. At last she set her gaze on the one thing truly forbidden to her: Harrow became obsessed with the Locked Door.

  There was no key to the Locked Door. Maybe there had never been a key to the Locked Door. It simply didn’t open. What lay beyond would kill the trespasser before they’d cracked it wide enough to go through anyway, and what lay beyond that—long before ever getting to the tomb—would make them wish they were dead long before their final breath. The nuns dropped to their knees at the mere mention of what was through there. It was the brief delight of Gideon’s life that the unnecessarily beatified Harrowhark Nonagesimus chose to ditch her sainthood and unlock it, and that Gideon had been witness to that fact.

  Out of everyone who found Gideon Nav repellent, Harrow’s parents had always found her particularly so. They were chilly, joyless Ninth House necromancers of the type that Silas Octakiseron seemed to think universally inhabited Drearburh: black in heart, power, and appearance. Once when she had touched a fold of Priamhark Noniusvianus’s vestments he had held her down with skeletal hands and whipped her till she howled. It was only out of the most desperate perversity that she ran straight to them to tell her tale: out of some baffling desire to show some evidence of House loyalty, to absolutely drop Harrow in the shit, to get the pat on the head she knew she’d earned for preserving the integrity and the fervid spirit of the House—precisely the qualities she was so ceaselessly accused of lacking. She felt no flicker of guilt or doubt. Just hours before, she’d wrestled Harrow down in the dirt, and Harrow had scratched until she’d had half of Gideon’s face beneath her fingernails.

  So she told them. And they listened. They had not said a word, either in praise or in censure, but they had listened. They had called for Harrow. And they had made Gideon leave. She waited outside the great dark doors of their room for a very long time, because they hadn’t told her to go away, just go out of the room, and because she was a shitty trash child she wanted to relish the one chance she had of hearing Harrowhark raked over the coals. But she waited a whole hour and never heard a damn thing, let alone Harrow’s screams as she was confined to oss duty until she turned thirty.

  And then Gideon couldn’t wait anymore. She pushed open the door and she walked in—and found Pelleamena and Priamhark hanging from the rafters, purple and dead. Mortus the Ninth, their huge and tragic cavalier, swung beside them from a rafter groaning with his bulk. And she walked in on Harrowhark, holding lengths of unused rope among the chairs her parents had kicked aside, with eyes like coals that had burnt away.

  Harrow had beheld her. She had beheld Harrow. And nothing had ever gone right after that, never ever.

  * * *

  “I was eleven,” said Gideon. “And here I am, narking all over again.”

  Palamedes did not say anything. He just sat there, listening as solemnly as if she had described some new type of novel necromantic theorem. Far from feeling cleansed by her impromptu confession, Gideon felt absolutely the opposite: dirty and muddy, terribly exposed, as though she had unbuttoned her chest and given him a good long look at what was inside her ribs. She was garbage from the neck to the navel. She was packed tight with a dry
and dusty mould. She had been filled up with it since she was eleven, on the understanding that as long as she was attached to the House of the Ninth she could never make it go away.

  Gideon took a long breath, then another.

  “Harrow wants to become a Lyctor,” she said. “She would do anything to become a Lyctor. She’d easily have killed Dulcinea’s cavalier if she thought it would help her become a Lyctor. Nothing else matters to her. I know that now. In the last couple days, I sometimes thought—”

  Gideon did not finish that sentence, which would have been “that she had stopped making it her top priority.”

  Palamedes said very gently, “You really should not need me to tell you that an eleven-year-old isn’t responsible for the suicides of three grown adults.”

  “Of course I’m responsible,” said Gideon disgustedly. “I made it happen.”

  “Yes,” said Palamedes. “If you hadn’t told Harrow’s parents about the door, they would not have made the decision to end their lives. You inarguably caused it. But cause by itself is an empty concept. The choice to get up in the morning—the choice to have a hot breakfast or a cold one—the choice to do something thirty seconds faster, or thirty seconds slower—those choices cause all sorts of things to happen. That doesn’t make you responsible. Here’s a confession for you: I killed Magnus and Abigail.”

  Gideon blinked at him.

  “If, the second I stepped off my shuttle,” said the suddenly revealed double murderer blithely, “I had snatched Cam’s dagger and put it straight through Teacher’s throat, the Lyctoral trial could never have begun. There’d have been uproar. The Cohort would have arrived, I’d have been dragged away, and everyone else would have been sent safe back home. Because I didn’t kill Teacher, the trial began, and because the trial began, Magnus Quinn and Abigail Pent are dead. So: I did it. It’s my fault. All I ask is that you put some pen and flimsy in my cell so I can start on my memoirs.”