Gideon the Ninth

“Coming down,” said a voice from the top of the ladder.

Down the ladder came the jaundiced, faded cavalier of the Eighth House, dressed in his leathers with his sword at his hip; he helped his uncle, who was white and silver and alight with distaste, to the bottom. The Eighth adept primly rolled up his alabaster sleeves and skirted the corpses, considering, licking two fingers as though to turn a page.

“I will try to find them,” he said, in his strangely deep and sorrowful voice.

Harrow said, “Don’t waste your time, Octakiseron. They’re gone.”

The Eighth necromancer inclined his head. The hair that fell over his shoulders was the funny, ashy white you got when a fire burned away; a headband kept it scraped back and away from his sharp and spiritual face.

“You will pardon me,” he said, “if I do not take advice on spirits from a bone magician.”

Harrow’s face slammed shut. “I pardon you,” she said.

“Good. Now we need not speak again,” said the Eighth necromancer.

The appearance of two skeletons bearing an enormous tureen of food broke the last tension. Under Abigail’s direction, they filled everyone’s bowl with good-smelling grain, white and fluffy, boiled in onion broth. Little drifts of chopped nuts or tiny tart red fruits were scattered throughout, and it was hot and spicy and good, which had completed Gideon’s requirements for a meal at hot.

Magnus clinked his spoon against his water glass. The conversation, which was terminal to start with, convulsed to a halt.

“Before we begin,” he said, “a short speech.”

The three priests looked as though they had never wanted anything so much in their lives as a short speech. One of the teens, slumped out of Magnus’s sight, mimed putting their neck in a noose.

“I thought I’d, er,” he began, “say a few words to bring us all together. This must be the first time in—a very long time that the Houses have been together like this. We were reborn together but remain so remote. So I thought I’d point out our similarities, rather than our differences.

“What do Marta the Second, Naberius the Third, Jeannemary the Fourth, Magnus the Fifth, Camilla the Sixth, Protesilaus the Seventh, Colum the Eighth, and Gideon the Ninth all have in common?”

You could have heard a hair flutter to the floor. Everyone stared, poker-faced, in the thick ensuing silence.

Magnus looked pleased with himself.

“The same middle name,” he said.

Coronabeth laughed so hard that she had to honk her beautiful nose into a napkin. Someone was explaining the joke to the salt-and-pepper priest, who, when they got it, said “Oh, ‘the’!” which started Corona off again. The Second, entombed in dress uniforms so starched you could fold them like paper, wore the tiny smiles of two people who’d had to put up with Cohort formal dinners before.