Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  His voice trailed off. His body collapsed to the floor. The silence in the wake of his settling was huge and loathsome.

  Palamedes said, “Judith—”

  “Give me her sword,” she said.

  The rapier was too heavy for her to hold. Camilla laid it over the necromancer’s knees, and Judith’s fingers closed around it. The steel of the hilt was bright in her hand. She squeezed down until her knuckles were white.

  “At least let us get you out of here,” said Gideon, who thought it was a shitty room to die in.

  “No,” she said. “If he comes back to life again, I will be ready. And I won’t leave her now … nobody should ever have to watch their cavalier die.”

  The last Gideon ever saw of Captain Judith Deuteros was her propped up on the armchair, sitting as straight as she could possibly manage, bleeding out through the terrible wound at her gut. They left her with her head held high, and her face had no expression at all.

  33

  IT SEEMED AS THOUGH just when you least wanted them, the Eighth House were always there. They were striding down the whitewashed corridor outside Dulcinea’s room as the rest of the group made their way back to her, making the whitewash look off-colour and dirty with the spotlessness of their robes. Gideon nearly drew her sword; but they had come in need, rather than in warfare.

  “The Third House have defiled a body,” said Silas Octakiseron, by way of hello. “The servants are all destroyed. Where’s the Second and the Seventh?”

  Harrow said, “Dead. Incapacitated. So is Teacher.”

  “That leaves us critically shorthanded,” said the Eighth House necromancer, who could not be accused of having the milk of human kindness running through his veins. He did not even have the thin and tasteless juice of feigned empathy. “Listen. The Third have opened up Lady Pent—”

  Palamedes said, “Abigail?” and Harrow said, “Opened up?”

  “Brother Asht saw the Third leave the morgue this morning, but we have not seen them since,” said Silas. “They are not in their quarters and the facility hatch is locked. We are compelled to join forces. Abigail Pent has been interfered with and opened up.”

  “Please elaborate opened up, because my imagination is better than your description and I am not having a lot of fun here,” said Gideon.

  The Eighth cavalier said heavily, “Come and see.”

  It couldn’t have been an ambush. There was one House versus two. And for once, Silas Octakiseron seemed genuinely jumpy. Gideon hung back near Harrowhark as the grisly procession made its way down through the hallways again, to the atrium, working their way toward the dining hall and the makeshift morgue off the kitchen.

  Harrow murmured beneath her breath, for Gideon’s ears only: “The Second dead and dying. Teacher dead, and the revenants with him—”

  “Teacher turned against the Second. Why are you so sure that Teacher didn’t kill the others?”

  “Because Teacher was afraid of Canaan House and the facility most of all,” said Harrow. “I need to go back and check, but I suspect he was incapable of going down that ladder at all. He was a construct himself. But what was Teacher the mould for? Griddle, at the first sign of trouble—”

  “Run like hell,” said Gideon.

  “I was going to say, Hit it with your sword,” said Harrow.

  The morgue was dreary and chill and serene. The anxiety of the rest of Canaan House had not touched it. It was getting to be untenably full: the two teens were still safely away in their cold iron drawers, and Protesilaus was in situ, though he was a head without the body. As it would have been difficult to cram all of him in, this was maybe a blessing in disguise. Magnus was also laid out on his own slab, a little too tall for comfort: but his wife—

  Abigail’s body had been left out, pulled fully away from its niche. She was still cold and ashen-faced and dead. Her shirt had been rolled up to her ribs. With no great elegance, a knife had been used to open up her abdomen on the right side of her body. There was a big bloodless hole there the size of a fist.

  Their unseemly interest never quenched, both of the Sixth House immediately peered into the wound. Camilla flicked on her pocket torch. Harrow crowded in beside them while Gideon stayed to watch the Eighth. Silas looked as wan and uncomfortable as Abigail did; his cavalier was as impassive as ever, and he did not meet Gideon’s eye.

  “The cut was made with Tern’s triple-knife,” said Palamedes. He had laid his hand over the wound. He eased his fingers into the hole without any hint of a wince, and he held them there for a second. “And removed the—no, the kidney’s still present. Cam, there was something here.”

  “Magnifier?”

  “Don’t need it. It was metal—Camilla, it was here for a while … the flesh had sealed over it. It would—fuck!”

  The rest of the room jumped. But nothing had bitten Palamedes, except maybe internally: he was staring off into the middle distance, horrified. He looked as though he had just been given a piece of chocolate cake and found, after two bites, half a spider.

  “My timing was wrong,” he said softly, to himself, and again more waspishly: “Nonagesimus. My timing was wrong.”

  “Use your words, Sextus.”

  “Why didn’t I investigate Abigail before—The Fifth went down into the facility—they must have completed a challenge. The night of the dinner. Pent was nobody’s fool. They were caught out on the top of the stairs coming back. Something was hidden inside her to avoid detection—God knows why she did it, or why anyone did it—three inches long, metal, shaft, teeth—”

  “A key,” said Silas.

  “But that’s insane,” said Gideon.

  “Someone wanted to hide that key very badly—it may have been Lady Pent herself,” said Palamedes. Finally, he withdrew his hand from her insides, and crossed to wash it in the sink, which Gideon thought was the civilised thing to do. “Or it may have been the person who killed her. There is one room that someone has made every attempt to keep us from. Octakiseron, this wasn’t defilement for the sake of defilement, it was someone breaking open a lockbox.”

  Silas said calmly, “Are those rooms worth carrying such a sin?”

  Harrow stared at him.

  “You took two keys off the Seventh House,” she demanded, “won one from a challenge, and never bothered to open their doors?”

  “I won the first key to see what I was up against, and took possession of two more to preserve them from misuse,” said Silas. “I hate this House. I despise the reduction of a holy temple to a maze and a puzzle. I took the keys so that you wouldn’t have them. Nor the Sixth, nor the Third.”

  Palamedes wiped his hands dry on a piece of towelling and pushed his glasses up his nose. They had fogged up from his breath, in that cold and quiet place.

  “Master Octakiseron,” he said, “you are an intellectual cretin and a dog in a manger, but at least you’re consistent. I know which door this opens, as does the Ninth. And, we have to assume, so does the Third. I know where they’ll be, and I want to see what they’ve found—”

  “Before it is too late,” said Harrow.

  She went over to the racks of bodies, and she opened up one last slab that Gideon had forgotten about entirely. It was the sad pile of cremains and bone that they had found in the furnace. The biggest bits of the corpses were no bigger than a thumbnail. Surprising Gideon—yet again—it was Colum who moved opposite to Harrow, gesturing to the bones and the ashes almost impatiently.

  “This one,” he said. “Half of it. It’s the Seventh cavalier.”

  “I had assumed as much,” said Harrow. “There was no skull. The time of death only made sense if it was Protesilaus.”

  “The other half is someone else,” said Silas.

  “We can’t do anything for them yet,” said Palamedes. “The living have to take precedence here, if we want to keep living.”

  As it turned out, he was wrong.

  34

  SIX OF THEM WALKED the dim hallways of Canaan House: thre
e necromancers, three cavaliers. Every so often they would come across the fallen-down body of a skeletal servant, still and grinning emptily up at the ceiling, the chains that had bound them to this tower finally broken. Gideon found the sight of the little heaps and piles weirdly distressing. They had been walking around for ten thousand years, probably, and after two moments of panic and tragedy it was all over. The priests of the First House were gone. Maybe it was relief, or maybe it was sacrilege.

  Gideon wondered what her state of mind would be after a whole myriad: bored as hell, probably. Desperate to do anything or be anyone else. She would have done everything there was to do, and if she hadn’t seen it, she could probably imagine what it looked like.

  They followed Harrow’s map to the hallway of the stopped-up Lyctor door. The lock still carried the mark of the regenerating bone that had been such a bastard to remove. The stark painting of the waterless canyon had been taken away, and now all three necromancers stood silently before the great black pillars and bizarre carvings above. Silas said, “I feel no wards here.”

  Harrow said, “It’s a lure.”

  “Or carelessness,” said Palamedes.

  “Or they just didn’t give a shit, guys,” said Gideon, “given that the key is still inside the lock.”

  It was the third door that day they had opened with absolutely no knowledge of what would lie within. The yellow light flooded out into the corridor, and inside—

  The other two laboratories Gideon had seen were caves. They were practical places to work and sleep and train and eat, homely at best, cheerless at worst, laboratories in the real sense of the word. This room was something else. It had been light and airy, once. The floors were made of varnished wood, and the walls were great whitewashed panels. The panels had been painted lovingly, a long time ago, with a sprawling expanse of fanciful things: white-skinned trees with pale purple blossoms trailing into orange pools, golden clouds thick with flying birds. The room was sparsely furnished—a few broad desks with pots of neatly arranged pencils and books; a polished marble slab with a tidy array of knives and pairs of scissors; what looked to be an ancient chest freezer; some rolled-up mattresses and embroidered quilts, decaying in an open locker at one end.

  This was all immaterial. Three things caught Gideon’s attention immediately:

  On one of the sweetly painted frescoes, fresh paint marred the blossom-decked trees. Over them, on the wall, black words a foot high proclaimed:

  YOU LIED TO US

  Someone was crying in the slow, dull way of a person who had been crying for hours already and didn’t know how to stop.

  And Ianthe sat in the centre of the room, waiting. She had taken up position on an ancient and sagging cushion, reclining on it like a queen. Joining a growing trend, her pale golden robes were spattered with blood, and her pallid yellow hair was spattered with more. She was trembling so hard that she was vibrating, and her pupils were so dilated you could have flown a shuttle through them.

  “Hello, friends,” she said.

  The source of the crying became apparent a little way into the room. Next to the marble slab, Coronabeth was huddled, her arms wrapped around her knees as she rocked backward and forward. Next to her on the ground—

  “Yes,” said Ianthe. “My cavalier is dead, and I killed him. Please don’t misunderstand, this isn’t a confession.”

  Naberius Tern lay awkwardly sprawled on the ground. His expression was that of a man who had suffered the surprise of his life. There was something too white about his eyeballs, but otherwise he looked perfectly real, perfectly alive, perfectly coiffed. His lips were still a little parted, as if he were going to crossly demand an explanation any minute now.

  They were stock-still. Only Palamedes had the presence of mind to move: he bypassed Ianthe entirely and crossed to where the cavalier lay, stretched out and stiffening. There were blood spatters down his front, a great tear ripped in his shirt. The blade had come through his back. Palamedes reached down, grimaced at something, and shut the man’s staring eyes.

  “She’s right. He’s gone,” he said.

  At this, Silas and Colum came to themselves. Colum drew. But Ianthe gave a sudden shrill trill of a laugh—a laugh with too many edges.

  “Eighth! Sword away,” she said. “Oh, Eighth. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Ianthe suddenly tucked her knees into her chest and moaned: it was the low, querulous moan of someone with a stomach pain, almost comical.

  “This is not how I had envisioned this,” she said afterward, teeth chattering. “I am merely telling you. I won.”

  Gideon said, slowly: “Princess. None of us here speaks crazy lady.”

  “A very hurtful name,” said Ianthe, and yawned. Her teeth started chattering again halfway through, and she bit her tongue, yowled, and spat on the floor. A thin wisp of smoke arose from the mingled spit and blood. They all stared at it.

  “I admit it, this smarts,” she said, broodingly. “I had my speech all planned out—I was going to brag somewhat, you understand. Because I didn’t need any of your keys, and I didn’t need any of your secrets. I was always better than all of you—and none of you noticed—nobody ever notices, which is both my virtue and my downfall. How I hate being so good at my job … You noticed, didn’t you, you horrible little Ninth goblin? Just a bit?”

  The horrible little Ninth goblin stared at her with tight-pressed lips. She had inched away from Gideon toward the theorem plate, and with no sense of shame began to look it over.

  “You knew about the beguiling corpse,” Harrow said. “You knew how impossible it was.”

  “Yee-ee-s. I knew the energy transferral didn’t add up. None of the thanergy signatures in this building added up … until I realised what we were all being led to. What the Lyctors of old were trying to tell us. You see, my field has always been energy transferral … large-scale energy transferral. Resurrection theory. I studied what happened when the Lord our Kindly God took our dead and dying Houses and brought them back to life, all those years ago … what price he would have had to pay. What displacement, the soul of a planet? What happens when a planet dies?”

  “You’re an occultist,” said Palamedes. “You’re a liminal magician. I thought you were an animaphiliac.”

  “That’s just for show,” said Ianthe. “I’m interested in the place between death and life … the place between release and disappearance. The place over the river. The displacement … where the soul goes when we knock it about … where the things are that eat us.”

  Harrow said, “You make it sound a lot more interesting than it really is.”

  “Stop being such a bone adept,” said Ianthe. She coughed and laughed again, fretfully. She closed her eyes and let her head loll suddenly downward. When she opened them again the pupil and the iris were gone, leaving the terrible white of the eyeball. They all flinched as Ianthe cried aloud. She closed her eyes tight and shook her head like a rattle, and when she opened them back up, she was panting with exertion, as though she’d just run a race. Gideon remained in a state of flinch.

  Neither of her eyes were their original colour. Both the pupil and the iris were intermingled shades of brown, purple, and blue. Ianthe closed her eyes a third time, and when the pale lashes opened, both had returned to insipid amethyst.

  Palamedes had moved to the wall behind Ianthe, flanking her. She did not even bother to turn or notice. She just curled in on herself. Behind Sextus, YOU LIED TO US stretched out in vast array.

  “Step one,” she said, singsong, “preserve the soul, with intellect and memory intact. Step two, analyse it—understand its structure, its shape. Step three, remove and absorb it: take it into yourself without consuming it in the process.”

  “Oh, fuck,” said Harrow, very quietly. She had moved back to Gideon’s side now, slipping her journal back into her pocket. “The megatheorem.”

  “Step four, fix it in place so it can’t deteriorate. That’s the part I wasn’t sure of, but I found the method he
re, in this very room. Step five, incorporate it: find a way to make the soul part of yourself without being overwhelmed. Step six: consume the flesh. Not the whole thing, a drop of blood will do to ground you. Step seven is reconstruction—making spirit and flesh work together the way they used to, in the new body. And then for the last step you hook up the cables and get the power flowing. You’ll find that one a walk in the park, Eighth, I suspect it was your House’s contribution.”

  Palamedes said: “Princess. You never had any keys. You never saw any of these rooms, except this one.”

  “Like I said,” said Ianthe, “I am very, very good, and moreover I’ve got common sense. If you face the challenge rooms, you don’t need the study notes—not if you’re the best necromancer the Third House ever produced. Aren’t I, Corona? Baby, stop crying, you’re going to get such a headache.”

  “I came to the same conclusion you did,” said Palamedes, but his voice was cold and inflexible. “I discarded it as ghastly. Ghastly, and obvious.”

  “Ghastly and obvious are my middle names,” said the pale twin. “Sextus, you sweet Sixth prude. Use that big, muscular brain of yours. I’m not talking about the deep calculus. Ten thousand years ago there were sixteen acolytes of the King Undying, and then there were eight. Who were the cavaliers to the Lyctor faithful? Where did they go?”

  Palamedes opened his mouth as though to answer this question; but he had bumped against something on the back wall, and had gone still. Gideon had never known him to be still. He was a creature of sudden movement and twitchy fingers. Camilla was watching him with obvious suspicion; one of his thumbs was tracing the edge of a black-painted letter, but the rest of his body was rigid. He looked as though someone had turned his power switch off.

  But Silas was saying—

  “None of this explains why you have killed Naberius Tern.”

  Ianthe cocked her head to one side, drunkenly, to take him in. The violet of her eyes was dried-up flowers; her mouth was the colour and softness of rocks.