Gideon the Ninth

Harrow said finally, “In what way can I earn your trust?”

“Let us sleep for eight bloody hours and never talk like this again,” said Gideon, and her necromancer relaxed, very minutely. Her eyes were so lightlessly black that it was hard to see the pupil; her mouth was thin and waspish and unsure. She remembered when Harrow was nine, when she had walked in at just the wrong moment. She remembered that nine-year-old Harrow’s mouth falling slightly slack. There was something curious about Harrow’s face when it was not fixed into the bland church mask of the Reverend Daughter: something thin and desperate and quite young about it, something not totally removed from Jeannemary’s desperation.

“Eight and a half,” Harrow said, “if we start again immediately in the morning.”

“Done.”

“Done.”

Several hours later, Gideon turned over in her bed, chilled by the realisation that Harrow had not promised to never talk like that again. Too much of this shit, and they’d end up friends.

“All I know,” said Harrowhark eventually, “is that they created the theorem, and were responsible for the experiment downstairs. I wish I knew more. I yearn to know more … But I don’t. I’m going to study this spell, Griddle, and learn it, and then I will be one step closer to knowing. We cannot suffer the same fate as Quinn and Pent.”

Gideon was amazed at how badly it hurt, all of a sudden.

“He’s really dead,” she said aloud.

“Yes. I will be more upset if he suddenly changes condition,” said Harrow. “He was a stranger, Nav. Why does it affect you so much?”

“He was nice to me,” she found herself saying. She was very tired. She tried to wake herself up by stretching, dropping down to touch her toes and feeling the blood rush into her head. “Because he was a stranger, I think … He didn’t have to bother with me, to make time for me or remember my name, but he did. Hell, you treat me more like a stranger than Magnus Quinn did and I’ve known you all my life. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Harrow’s hand, peeled and naked without a glove and stained with ink all the way up to her cuticles, appeared in front of her. Gideon found her shoulder drawn back so that she had to look Harrow square in the face. The necromancer regarded her with a strangely fierce eye: mouth a worn-down line of indecision, forehead puckered as though she was thinking her entire face into a wrinkle. There was still blood flaking out of her eyebrows, which was gross.

“I must no longer accept,” she said slowly, “being a stranger to you.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Gideon, sudden sweat prickling the back of her neck, “yes you can, you once told me to dig myself an ice grave. Stop before this gets weird.”

“Quinn’s death proves that this is not a game,” said Harrow, moistening her ashy lips with her tongue. “The trials are meant to winnow out the wheat from the chaff, and it is going to be exceptionally dangerous. We are all the sons and daughters that the House of the Ninth possesses, Nav.”

“I’m not anybody’s son or daughter,” said Gideon firmly, now in no small panic.

“I need you to trust me.”

“I need you to be trustworthy.”

Harrowhark set her hands on the black stone crossbar of the door almost reverently, and pressed her ear to the rock as though she could hear what was going on inside. She stroked her thumbpad over the deep-set keyhole and pulled her hood over her head.

“Unlock it,” she said.

“Don’t you want the honours?”

“It’s your key ring,” said Harrow unexpectedly, and: “We will do this by the book. If Teacher’s correct, there is something around here that is fairly hot on etiquette, and etiquette is cheap. The key ring is yours … I have to admit it. So you must admit us.”

We have a door to open.”

“Yes, tomorrow morning after at least eight hours’ sleep,” Gideon suggested without hope.

“An admirable attempt at comedy in these trying times,” said Harrowhark. “Let’s go.”

With marked frostiness, Harrow said: “We locked the hatch before continuing in.”

“You’re sure?”

Gideon, who had been the one to turn the key, was oddly grateful that Harrowhark did not even bother looking in her direction: she simply said, “I am certain.”

“How many people had these hatch keys other than the Ninth?” said Corona. “We had no idea the basement was even there.”

“The Sixth,” said Camilla and Palamedes as one.

Dulcinea said, small and tired: “Pro and I have one,” which made Gideon’s eyebrows raise right to her hairline.

“Colum has the copy given to the Eighth House,” said a voice from the floor.

It was Silas. He had sat up and was now mopping his face with a very white piece of cambric. His eye was red and shiny and swollen, and he dabbed carefully around it: Corona gallantly offered him her arm but he refused, pulling himself to stand heavily against a chair. “He has the key,” he said. “And I told Lady Pent of the existence of a facility beneath this floor, after the party.”

It was Harrow who said, “Why?”

“Because she asked,” he said, “and because I do not lie. And because I’m not interested in the Ninth House ascending to Lyctorhood alone … simply because they guessed a childish riddle.”

Harrowhark closed herself up like a folding chair, and her voice was like cinders: “Your hatred of us is superstition, Octakiseron.”

“Is it?” He folded the dirty handkerchief neatly and tucked it inside his chain mail. “Who was in the facility when Lady Pent and Sir Magnus died? Who was conveniently first on the scene to discover them—”

“You have one black eye already, courtesy of the Seventh House,” said Harrow, “and you seem to yearn for symmetry.”

“That was the Seventh, then?” The Eighth necromancer did not seem particularly displeased. “I see … it happened so swiftly I wasn’t sure.”

“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.

Teacher, perennially pleased to see them for no reason Gideon ever knew, cornered them immediately. He and the other priests were there already and each had a birthday expression of glee: for his part, Teacher was twinkling with a magnitude usually reserved for dying stars.

“I still don’t get how this whole test is meant to work.”

The Reverend Daughter gave this consideration, for once. “All right. Let me—hmm. You know that a bone construct is animated by a necromantic theorem.”

“No way! I assumed you just thought super hard about bones until they happened.”

Ignoring this, Harrow continued: “This particular construct is animated by multiple theorems, all—woven together, in a sense. That enables it to do things normal constructs can’t possibly.”

“Like regenerate.”

“Yes. The way to destroy it is to unpick that tapestry, Nav, to pull on each thread in turn—in order—until the web gives way. Which would take me ten seconds, if I only had it at arm’s length.”

“Huh,” said Gideon, unwillingly starting to get it. “So I unpick it for you.”

“Only with my assistance. You are not a necromancer. You cannot see thanergetic signatures. I have to find the weak points, but I have to do it through your eyes, which is made infinitely more difficult by you waving a sword around the whole time while your brain—yells at me.”

Gideon opened her mouth to say My brain is always yelling at you, but was interrupted by a sharp rap on the door.