Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  “Reconstruction?”

  “Not all of us can respring a body by dint of a molar, Reverend Daughter. Anyway, I must have examined that tooth for two hours. I know every single thing there is to know about that tooth. Mandibular second, deciduous eruption, vitamin deficiency, male, died in his sixties, flossed obediently, never left the planet. Died in this selfsame tower.”

  Both of them were riffling through the papers left on the desk: Palamedes left them in forensically exact piles divided by where they had been found. He adjusted his glasses and said, “Then Camilla took over because I wasn’t bloody thinking.”

  Camilla grunted. She had meandered over to look at the rust-pitted crossbars of the chin-up, and Gideon had repaired to the worm mound of sleeping bags to kick them unhelpfully. Harrow said impatiently, “Get to the denouement, Sextus.”

  “I had tracked the tooth. It told me nothing—no spiritual links to any part of the building. It was a black hole. It was as though the body it came from had never been alive. No ghost remnants, nothing—this is impossible, you understand, it meant the spirit had somehow been removed entirely. So I did some old-fashioned detective work.”

  He peered under an abandoned clearfile. “I looked upstairs for the skeleton with the missing upper molar. He wouldn’t come down with me, but he did let me make a plaster impression of his clavicle. The clavicle! Someone was having a joke. Anyway, you can imagine my reaction when I unlocked the box with it and found it empty.”

  Gideon looked up from a pasteboard box she had found: it was full of the ring tabs you got on pressurised drink cans, and jingled unmusically when she shook it. “The constructs? Like, the bone servants?”

  “Second’s right, first isn’t,” said Camilla laconically.

  “They’re the opposite of what Lady Septimus calls the beguiling corpse,” said Palamedes. “They seem to have most of their faculties intact. Mine was very nice, though he’s forgotten how to write. The skeletons aren’t reanimations, Ninth, they’re revenants: ghosts inhabiting a physical shell. They simply lack a true revenant’s ability to move itself along a thanergetic link. The beguiling corpse is a remnant of spirit attached to a perfect and incorruptible body—that’s the idea, anyway—where what I’ll term the hideous corpse is a fully intact spirit attached permanently to a rotting body. Not that someone hasn’t preserved those bones beautifully.”

  Harrowhark slammed a ring-binder down on the bench.

  “I’m a fool,” she said bitterly. “I knew they moved too well to be constructs—no matter how I tried to mimic how they’d been done. I just could have sworn—but that’s impossible. They’d need someone to control them.”

  “They do—themselves,” said Palamedes. “They are autonomously powering themselves. It debunks every piece of thanergy theory I ever learned. The old fogeys back home would peel their feet for half an hour alone with one. It still doesn’t explain why there’s no energy signature on the bones, though. Anyway, this is the laboratory of the Lyctor who created them—and here’s their theory.”

  Much like the one back in the other laboratory, the theorem was carved into a big stone slab pinned down in a dusty back corner and covered up with loose-leaf flimsy. Both cavaliers drifted over, and they all together stared at the carved diagrams. The laboratory was very quiet and the spotlights haloed streams of dust so thick you could lick them.

  Resting on the edge of the stone set into the table, there was a tooth. Palamedes picked it up. It was a premolar, with long and horrible roots: it was brown with age. He handed it to Harrow, who gently unfolded it in the way that only a bone magician could and in the way that always made Gideon’s jaw hurt. She turned it into a long ribbon of enamel, an orange with the skin taken off and flattened, a three-dimensional object turned two-dimensional.

  Written on the tooth in tiny, tiny letters was this:

  FIVE HUNDRED INTO FIFTY

  IT IS FINISHED!

  Harrowhark took out her fat black journal and was scribbling down notes, but Palamedes had abruptly lost interest in the theory stone. He was looking at the walls instead, flipping open some of the ring-binders that she had discarded. He stopped in front of a faded pinboard, riddled thick with pins, all with bits of string attached. Gideon came to stand next to him.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  There were rainbow splotches of pins all over the board. There were tiny clusters, and Gideon noticed that at the centre of each cluster there was one white pin; the smallest and most numerous clusters had three pins fixed around one white pin. Some others had five or six. Then there were two other separate whorls of pins, each made up of dozens alone, and then one enormous pin-splotch: more than a hundred of them in a rainbow of colours, thickly clustered around one in white.

  “The problem of necromancy,” said Palamedes, “is that the acts themselves, if understood, aren’t difficult to do. But maintaining anything … we’re glass cannons. Our military survives because we have hundreds of thousands of heavily armed men and women with big swords.”

  “There’s always more thanergy to feed from, Sextus,” said Harrow distantly, flicking her eyes back and forth as she copied. “Give me a single death and I can go for ten minutes.”

  “Yes, but that’s the problem, isn’t it; ten minutes, then you need more. Thanergy’s transient. A necromancer’s biggest threat is honestly themselves. My whole House for a reliable food source—”

  “Warden,” said Camilla, quite suddenly.

  She had opened up a ring-binder untidy with pages. Inside were an array of old flimsy lithographs, the black-and-white kind. On the very first page there was a faded note that had once been yellow, the letters still legible in a short, curt hand:

  CONFIRMED INDEPENDENTLY HIGHLIGHTED BEST OPTION

  ASK E.J.G.

  YRS, ANASTASIA.

  P.S. GIVE ME BACK MY CALIPERS I NEED THEM

  Camilla flipped through the binder. The pictures were hasty, low-quality snaps of men and women from the shoulders up, squinting at the camera, eyes half-shut as though they hated the light: most of them looked very serious and solemn, as though posing for a mugshot. Some of these men and women had been crossed out. Some had a few ticks against their picture. Camilla thumbed a page over, and they all paused.

  The overexposure did not disguise a head-and-shoulders photo of the man they all called Teacher, bright blue eyes a desaturated sepia, still smiling from a lifetime away. He looked not a day older or younger. And his photograph had been ringed around in a black marker pen.

  “Sextus,” Harrow began, ominously.

  “I couldn’t tell,” said Palamedes. For his part, he sounded almost dazed. “Ninth, I absolutely could not tell. Another beguiling corpse?”

  “Then who’s controlling him? There’s nobody here but us, Sextus.”

  “I’d like to hope so. Could he be independent? But how—”

  Palamedes’s eyes drifted back to the pinboard. He took his spectacles off and squinted his lambent grey eyes at it. He was counting under his breath. Gideon followed along with him gamely up into the hundreds until a dreadful noise startled them out of any mental arithmetic.

  It was an electronic klaxon. From somewhere within the room—and without—it howled: BRRRRAAARRP … BRRRRARRRRP … BRRRRARRRRRP …

  This was followed by, bafflingly, a woman’s voice, unreasonably calm. “This is a fire alarm. Please make your way to designated safe zones, led by your fire warden.” Then the klaxon again: BRRRARRRRP … BRRRRARRRRP … BRRRRARRRRRRRRP … and the exact same recorded inflexion: “This is a fire alarm. Please make your way…”

  They looked at each other. Then all four of them sprinted for the door. Palamedes didn’t even stop to shut it behind them.

  The Sixth and the Ninth Houses knew that a fire was absolutely no joke, and moved like people who had learned that a fire alarm could be the last thing any of them heard, the last thing their whole House heard. But this was curious. There was no smoke to smell, nor any latent heat: when t
hey all got to the atrium, the only thing they saw amiss was that one of the skeletons had fallen over with an armful of towels, spread-eagle in the awful dried-up fountain.

  Camilla looked around, narrowed her eyes, and headed toward the lunch room. Here there was an ongoing pssshhhtt sound that Gideon could not identify until they reached the kitchen—there was a bad smell, and white steam—and realised it was a water sprinkler, the really old kind. They all squashed themselves through the kitchen door and stood out of the reach of the spray.

  All the skeletons were gone. In their places were untidy piles of bones and sashes. A pan of fish smoked on a lit stove: Gideon waded in, kicked aside a humerus, and fumbled with the knobs until the fire extinguished. There were piles of bones at the sink, a skull floating in a familiar pot of green soup: the tap had been left on, and the sink was close to overflowing. A pile of bones had mixed in among the potato peelings. Gideon ducked back out and away from the spray and stared. She was only vaguely aware of Harrowhark disdainfully mopping her wet head with a handkerchief.

  The sprinklers stopped. Camilla knelt down and, amidst all the dripping and burbling, touched one of the phalanges that had fallen on the tiles. It dissolved into ash like a sigh.

  Palamedes went and turned off the tap like someone in a dream. The bones in the sink gently bobbed against a saucepan. He and Harrow looked at each other and said—

  “Shit.”

  With only the faintest liquid whisper of metal on sheath, Camilla drew her swords. Gideon had never had the opportunity to study Camilla’s two short swords before: they were more like very long daggers, slightly curved at each end, wholly utilitarian. They glittered clean and hot beneath the soggy light of the kitchen; she marched back toward the door to the dining hall.

  “Split up?” she said.

  “Hell no,” said Gideon.

  Harrow said, “Let’s not waste time. Get to Septimus,” and Gideon could have kissed her.

  There seemed to be nobody else in the long, echoing halls of Canaan House, now longer and more echoey than ever. They passed another skeleton, arrested by an unseen force in the middle of carrying a basket. As it tumbled to the floor the weight of the basket had crushed its brittle pelvis to a powder. When they got to Dulcinea’s sickroom, Gideon had a sharp moment of not knowing what the hell to expect; but they found Dulcinea, struggling feebly to try to sit up, whey-faced and wide-eyed. Opposite her was the salt-and-pepper priest in the high-backed chair, looking as though they were peacefully asleep.

  “It wasn’t me,” Dulcinea wheezed, in no small alarm.

  Camilla ducked forward. The white-robed priest’s chin had slumped forward to their chest, and the braid was tucked beneath their chin. As Camilla pressed her hand to their neck, the priest lurched very gently sideways, limp and heavy, until the Sixth cavalier had to prop them up so that they wouldn’t slide off the chair entirely.

  “Dead as space,” said Harrowhark, “though, accurately, that’s been true for a very, very long time.”

  Palamedes turned to Dulcinea, who had given up thrashing her way to her elbows and was lying flat on the pillows, panting in exertion. He brushed her hair gently away from her forehead and said, “Where’s Teacher?”

  “He left me maybe an hour ago,” said Dulcinea helplessly, eyes darting between him and the rest of them. “He said he wanted to lock a door. What’s going on? Why is the priest dead? Where did Teacher go?”

  Palamedes patted her hand. “No idea. This is the interesting part.”

  “Dulcinea,” said Gideon, “are you going to be okay by yourself?”

  Dulcinea grinned. Her tongue was scarlet with blood. The veins in her eyelids were so dark and prominent that the blue of her eyes appeared a limpid, moonless purple.

  “What can anyone do to me now?” she said simply.

  They could not even warn her not to let anyone in: she seemed exhausted simply from the act of sitting up. They left her with only the dead priest for company and headed to a wing where Gideon had never gone: the hot, sultry corridor lined with fibrous green plants of all sorts, the wing where the priests and Teacher lived.

  It was a pretty, whitewashed passageway, totally out of kilter with the rest of Canaan House. The light bounced off the walls from the clean, well-kept windows. There was no need to knock at the doors or yell to find the action; at the end of the corridor, there was an absolute pile-up of bones, sashes, and the laid-out body of the other wizened priest. He had collapsed flat on his face with his arms outstretched, as if he had tripped while running.

  The bones were all piled up outside a closed door, as though they had been trying to get through it. Palamedes led the way, crunching through the wreckage. Gideon put her hand on the hilt of her sword, and Palamedes threw open the door.

  Inside, Captain Deuteros looked up, somewhat wearily. She was sitting in a chair facing the door. Her left arm hung uselessly at her side, wizened and crumpled. Gideon did not want to look at it. It looked like it had been put in a bog for a thousand years and then stuck back on. Her right arm was tucked up against her stomach. There was an enormous crimson stain spreading out onto the perfect white of her jacket, and her right hand was clasped, as though ready to draw, around the enormous bone shard shoved deep in her gut.

  Teacher lay unmoving by her side. There was a rapier buried in his chest, and a dagger through his neck. There was no blood around the blades, only great splashes of it at his sleeves and his girdle. Gideon looked around for the lieutenant, found her, and then looked away again. She didn’t need a very long look to tell that Dyas was dead. For one thing, her skeleton and her body had apparently tried to divorce.

  “He wouldn’t listen to reason,” said Judith Deuteros, in measured tones. “He became aggressive when I attempted to restrain him. Binding spells proved—useless. Marta used disabling force. He was the one to escalate the situation—he blew out her eye, so I was compelled to respond … This didn’t—it didn’t have to happen.”

  Two professional Cohort soldiers, one a necromancer, one a cavalier primary; all this mess for one unearthly old man. Palamedes dropped to his knees beside the captain, but she pushed him away, roughly, with the tip of her boot.

  “Do something for her,” she said.

  “Captain,” said Camilla, “Lieutenant Dyas is dead.”

  “Then don’t touch me. We did what we came to do.”

  Gideon’s eyes were drawn to a machine in the corner. She hadn’t noticed it because it seemed ridiculously normal, but it wasn’t normal at all, not for Canaan House. It was an electric transmitter box, with headphones and a mic. The antenna was set out the window, glowing faint and blue in the afternoon sunshine.

  “Captain,” said Palamedes, “what did you come to do?”

  The Second necromancer shifted, grunted in pain, closed her eyes. She sucked in a breath, and a bead of sweat travelled down her temple.

  “Save our lives,” she said. “I sent an SOS. Backup’s coming, Warden … it’s just up to you to make sure nobody else dies … He said I’d betrayed the Emperor … said I’d put the Emperor at risk … I entered the Emperor’s service when I was six.”

  Captain Deuteros’s chin was drooping. She lifted it back up with some effort. “He wasn’t human,” she said. “He wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. Marta put him down—Marta … Go tell them she avenged the Fifth and the Fourth.”

  Palamedes had ignored the kick and moved in again. The Second laid one booted foot on his shoulder in warning. He said, “Captain, you are no use to anyone dead.”

  “It is my privilege to no longer be of use,” said the captain. “We fixed the problem none of the rest of you could … did what we had to do … and paid for it, dearly.”

  Harrow had gone to stand over the quiet, punctured corpse of Teacher. She dropped to his side like a long-tailed crow. All Gideon could do was press herself back up against the wall, smell the blood, and feel absurdly empty. Her necromancer said, “You fixed nothing.”

&nbs
p; “Harrow,” Palamedes said warningly.

  “This man was a shell filled with a hundred souls,” said Harrow. The captain’s eyes flicked open, and stayed open. “He was a thing of ridiculous power—but he was a prototype. I doubt he had killed anyone before today. I would be astonished if he had a hand in the deaths of the Fourth and Fifth Houses, as he was created for the sole purpose of safeguarding the place. There is something a great deal more dangerous than an old experiment loose in the First House, and he could have helped us find out what it is. But now you’re going to die too, and you’ll never know the whole story.”

  The whites of Judith’s eyes were very white, her carefully merciless face suddenly a picture of hesitation. Her gaze moved, more remorselessly than Gideon’s ever could have, to her cavalier; then she returned it to them, half-furious, half-beseeching. Palamedes moved in.

  “I can’t save you,” he said. “I can’t even make you comfortable. A team of trained medics could do both. How far away is the Second? How long do we have to wait for Cohort backup?”

  “The Second’s not coming,” said Captain Deuteros.

  She smiled, tight and bitter. “There’s no communication with the rest of the system,” she said, hoarsely now. “He didn’t lie. There was no way to reach the Houses … I got through to the Imperial flagship, Sixth. The Emperor is coming … the King Undying.”

  Next to Harrow, Teacher gurgled.

  “You draw him back—to the place—he must not return to,” said the dead man, with a thin and reedy whistle of a voice around the blade in his vocal cords. His whole body wriggled. His dead eyes no longer twinkled drunkenly, but his tongue slithered. His spine arched. “Oh, Lord—Lord—Lord, one of them has come back—”