Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)

by Tamsyn Muir

Two is for discipline, heedless of trial; Three for the gleam of a jewel or a smile; Four for fidelity, facing ahead; Five for tradition and debts to the dead; Six for the truth over solace in lies; Seven for beauty that blossoms and dies; Eight for salvation no matter the cost; Nine for the Tomb, and for all that was lost.

Then Gideon whistled through her teeth as she unlocked her security cuff, and arranged it and its stolen key considerately on her pillow, like a chocolate in a fancy hotel.

The shades of the Ninth were deep and shifty; they were bruise-coloured and cold. In these surrounds, Gideon rewarded herself with a little plastic bag of porridge. It tasted gorgeously grey and horrible.

The First Bell clanged its uncanorous, complaining call for beginning prayers, sounding as always like it was getting kicked down some stairs; a sort of BLA-BLANG … BLA-BLANG … BLA-BLANG that had woken her up every morning that she could recall.

“Thirty whole minutes since I took it off, Crux,” she said, hands busy. “It’s almost like you want me to leave here forever. Ohhhh shit, you absolutely do though.”

I hate you, and yet you are my wares and inventory. I have written up your lungs as lungs for the Ninth. I have measured your gall as gall for the Ninth. Your brain is a base and shrivelled sponge, but it too is for the Ninth.

One day your obedient bones will dust all places you disdain, and make the stones there shine with your fat.

“And the pornography?” “I did offer him stupendous work of a titty nature, and he got offended,” said Gideon.

“So, here’s the thing, your Lady would set the Locked Tomb on fire if it meant I’d never see another sky,” Gideon said, looking up. “Your Lady would stone cold eat a baby if it meant she got to lock me up infinitely. Your Lady would slather burning turds on the great-aunts if she thought it would ruin my day. Your Lady is the nastiest b—”

One day eighteen years ago, Gideon’s mother had tumbled down the middle of the shaft in a dragchute and a battered hazard suit, like some moth drifting slowly down into the dark. The suit had been out of power for a couple of minutes. The woman landed brain-dead. All the battery power had been sucked away by a bio-container plugged into the suit, the kind you’d carry a transplant limb in, and inside that container was Gideon, only a day old. This was obviously mysterious as hell.

They knew by age five that she was not a necromancer, and suspected by eight that she would never be a nun. Certainly, they would have known by ten that she knew too much, and that she could never be allowed to go. Gideon’s appeals to better natures, financial rewards, moral obligations, outlined plans, and simple attempts to run away numbered eighty-six by the time she was eighteen. She’d started when she was four.

The Lady of the Ninth House stood before the drillshaft, wearing black and sneering. Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus had pretty much cornered the market on wearing black and sneering. It comprised 100 percent of her personality. Gideon marvelled that someone could live in the universe only seventeen years and yet wear black and sneer with such ancient self-assurance.

“All because,” said Gideon, checking her clock again, “I completely fucking hate you, because you are a hideous witch from hell. No offence.”

“What about a bribe?” “This is going to be good,” said Gideon to nobody in particular. “‘Gideon, here’s some money. You can spend it right here, on bones.’ ‘Gideon, I’ll always be nice and not a dick to you if you come back. You can have Crux’s room.’ ‘Gideon, here’s a bed of writhing babes. It’s the cloisterites, though, so they’re ninety percent osteoporosis.’”

It was more than generous. Harrow was shooting herself in the foot. She was gamely firing into one foot and then taking aim at the other.

She was struggling out of her long, ornate robes, the human rib cage she wore clasped around her long torso shining whitely against the black.

Crux stared back at her with the hate of an exploding star: the empty hate of pressure pulled inward, a deforming, light-devouring resentment.

“Gideon Nav, take back your honour and give your lady a weapon.” Gideon couldn’t help herself: “Are you asking me to … throw her a bone?” “Nav!” “I gave her my whole life,” said Gideon, and unsheathed her blade.

Harrowhark’s talent had always been in scale, in making a fully realised construct from as little as an arm bone or a pelvis, able to make an army of them from what anyone else would need for one, and in some far-off way Gideon had always known that this would be how she went: gangbanged to death by skeletons.

“It’s pathetic,” she repeated, slightly thick with blood. “I turn up the volume. I put on a show. You feel bad. You make it so easy. I got more hot and bothered digging all night.” “You dug,” wheezed Gideon, rather muffled with grit and dust, “all night.” “Of course. This floor’s hard as hell, and there’s a lot to cover.” “You insane creep,” said Gideon.

It was very dark: a rail of gas-discharged light ran all around the aisles, but it always lit like it didn’t like the idea and glowed dismally.

Squinting blearily over her shoulder, she saw that most of the sanctum was skeletons. It was a skeleton party. There was room in this deep, long channel of a church for a thousand, and it was half full of skeletons and only very pockmarked with people.

His father—cavalier to Harrow’s father—had been an enormous, stony man of some gravity and devotion, with a sword and two huge panniers of fibulae, but Ortus wasn’t made in his mould. Coupling him to Harrow had been rather like yoking a doughnut to a cobra.

There was a wheezing squeal from one of the pews in the transept behind Gideon as one of the faithful decided to go the whole hog and have a heart attack, and this distracted everyone. The nuns tried their best, but a few minutes later it was confirmed that one of the hermits had died of shock, and everyone around him celebrated his sacred good fortune.

“You have always suffered from a want of duty, Nav. You can’t argue that. You couldn’t spell obligation if I shoved the letters up your ass.” “I gotta say, I don’t think that would help,” said Gideon. “God, I’m glad you didn’t teach me my spelling.”

“I know. It’s fine. Don’t get me wrong, Captain. Where I’m going, I promise to piss fidelity all the livelong day. I have lots of fealty in me. I fealt the Emperor with every bone in my body. I fealt hard.”

Gideon could only manage, “Why?” The girl’s expression was the same as it was on the day that Gideon had found her parents, dangling from the roof of their cell. It was blank and white and still. “Because I completely fucking hate you,” said Harrowhark, “no offence.”

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN neater, perhaps, if all of Gideon’s disappointments and woes from birth downward had used that moment as a catalyst: if, filled with a new and fiery determination, she had equipped herself down there in the dark with fresh ambition to become free. She didn’t. She got the depression.

By way of hello she said, “Fuck you,” and switched to push-ups. “Stop sulking, Griddle.” “Go choke on a dick.” “I have work for you,” said Harrowhark.

“Only way this kills someone is with lockjaw,” she said.

“She’s a genius. With the proper motivation, Griddle could wield two swords in each hand and one in her mouth. While we were developing common sense, she studied the blade. Am I right, Griddle?”

Act accordingly had been her secret dread that ten years from now everyone else would be skeletons and explorers would find Ortus reading poetry next to her and Harrow’s bodies, their fingers still clasped around each other’s throats.

She tried to turn Gideon’s face up to hers by force, fingers grasping beneath the chin, but Gideon promptly bit her. There was a simple joy in watching Harrow swear furiously and shake her hand and peel off the bitten glove, like in seeing sunlight or eating a good meal.

“All you need to know is that you’ll do what I say, or I’ll mix bone meal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut.” Which was, Gideon had to admit, entirely plausible.

On days when she had behaved very well Aiglamene let her train with her longsword instead, which had to pass for fun.

These reclaimed robes were like her normal clothes, dour and black, but better made, dourer, and blacker.

The blade was black metal, and it had a plain black guard and hilt, unlike the intricate messes of teeth and wires that adorned some of the other rapiers down at the monument. “Oh, this is boring,” Gideon had said in disappointment. “I wanted one with a skull puking another, smaller skull, and other skulls flying all around. But tasteful, you know?”

Remember that your hands are now sisters, not twins; one executes your primary action and the other supports the move.

Harrow’s face was bright with elation and fervour. Gideon would have sworn there were tears in her eyes, except that no such liquid existed: Harrow was a desiccated mummy of hate.

For a moment everything seemed dizzyingly unsure. The House continued on in grand and grisly majesty because you were always looking at it; it continued because you watched it continue, changeless and black, before your eyes. The idea of leaving it made it seem so fragile as to crumble the moment they turned their backs.

she leaned into Harrow: Harrow, who was dabbing her eyes with enormous gravity. The necromancer flinched outright. “Do you want,” Gideon whispered huskily, “my hanky.” “I want to watch you die.” “Maybe, Nonagesimus,” she said with deep satisfaction, “maybe. But you sure as hell won’t do it here.”

Gideon had warmed herself with the thought that it was the perfect time to kick her ass up and down the shuttle, but in the end, the natural embarrassment of arriving with one’s necromancer’s elbows on backward saved Harrow’s life.

It was incredible. It was exquisite. She wanted to throw up.

Gideon winked at her increasingly agitated companion. She said, sotto voce: “But then you couldn’t have admired … these,” and whipped on the glasses she’d unearthed back home. They were ancient smoked-glass sunglasses, with thin black frames and big mirrored lenses, and they greyed out Harrow’s expression of incredulous horror as she adjusted them on her nose. That was the last thing she saw before the light got in.

The whole place had the look of a picked-at body. But hot damn! What a beautiful corpse.

“Hail to the Lady of the Ninth House,” warbled a voice delightedly, bringing the count of people who had ever been happy to see Harrow up to three.

He was like an old and twisted oak still covered with leaves.

Gideon the Ninth, who would have paid cash to be called absolutely anything else, rose as her mistress rose.

As Gideon died gently of shock, buoyed back to this life only by the weird bruises forming at the top of her spine, the other girl broke out into miserable coughs.

“Oh, God, I was rescued by a shadow cultist! I’m so sorry! Thank you! This is one for the history books.”