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The man who’d put the sword to her neck was uncomfortably buff. He had upsetting biceps. He didn’t look healthy; he looked like a collection of lemons in a sack.
It was with glacial disregard that she said, “The Ninth House wishes health to the Lady Septimus, and prudence to Protesilaus the Seventh,” turned on her heel, and left in an abrupt swish of black cloth.
The House of the First had been abandoned, and breathlessly waited to be used by someone other than time.
“Continuity is a marvellous thing,” said salt-and-pepper plait, proving themself insanely tedious.
It was no wider than a book and no deeper than two books stacked on top of each other, estimated Gideon, who thought of all books as being basically the same size.
Gideon wished that she could flop into a seat or take a sly nap. Everybody was poised in readiness for the outlined syllabus, and scholarship made her want to die.
There would be some litany of how breakfast would take place every morning at this time, and then there’d be study with the priests for an hour, and then Skeleton Analysis, and History of Some Blood, and Tomb Studies, and, like, lunchtime, and finally Double Bones with Doctor Skelebone. The most she could hope for was Swords, Swords II, and maybe Swords III.
She tried to cheer herself up with the thought that this at least meant Harrow wasn’t around, a thought that would have cheered up anyone.
There was a bowl with taps that Gideon knew to be a sink only because she’d read a lot of comics, and an enormous person-sized recess in the ground that she didn’t know what to do with at all.
Gideon comforted herself by recoiling at her reflection in the cracked mirror: a grinning death’s-head with a crop of incongruously red hair and a couple of zits. She pulled her sunglasses out of the pocket of her robe and eased them on, which completed the effect, if the effect you wanted was “horrible.”
She was in a position of some expertise here. You couldn’t spend any time in the Ninth House without coming away with an unwholesome knowledge of skeletons. She could’ve easily filled in for Doctor Skelebone without practising a single theorem.
Gideon was genuinely surprised to find that she was shy, and more still to find she was relieved by Harrow’s diktat against talking. Gideon Nav, absolutely goddamn starved of any contact with people who didn’t have dark missals and advanced osteoporosis, should’ve yearned to talk. But she found that she couldn’t imagine a single thing to say.
“Do forgive us,” he said. “We’re a bit short on black priests in the Fourth and the Fifth, and my valiant Fourth companions are, er, a bit overcome.” (“Nooooo, Magnus, don’t say we’re overcome,” moaned the nasty girl, sotto voce. “Don’t mention us, Magnus,” moaned the other.)
There were metal ladders going down into the pit, but why would you though.
It’s a swimming pool lmao
Nobody’d be finding that one any time soon. It was a stupid, secretive Ninth thing to do, done out of habit, and Gideon hated how comforting it felt.
The cavalier had lots of hair, an aquiline face, and a self-satisfied little jacket.
“Ianthe, don’t make me cross.” “Please don’t be cross,” said her sister. “You know your brain can only deal with one emotion at a time.”
HARROWHARK DID NOT APPEAR for a midday meal. Gideon, still unused to the concept of midday meal or honestly midday, appeared a good hour earlier than anyone else would have.
No, whoever had raised them had been extraordinarily talented. She suspected it was Teacher. Harrow wouldn’t like that. The House of the Ninth was meant to have cornered the market on perfect reconstruction, and here were a whole bunch of them probably made by a little man who clapped his hands together unironically.
He gave the impression of being the guy fun sought out for death.
She wanted to fight bloody. She wanted to fight until bone adepts had to be called to put people’s feet back on. She knew the price—waking up mummified in aggressive notes, or maybe dying—but didn’t care anymore.
What was she now? An unwelcome spectre roaming the halls without a necro to pursue—the stinging slap in the face that she didn’t even have Harrow—still alone, just in better lighting.
Gideon went to the chair and fiddled with the fastening, immediately emasculated by the difficulty of working out a simple chair-latch.
It was in this moment of charged stupidity that Protesilaus turned up, saving her bacon by dint of being very large and ignoring her.
Dulcinea said: “I hope we talk again soon.” Hell! thought Gideon, taking the stairs blindly two at a time. She didn’t. She had said too much already, and all without speaking a single word.
You should have seen her when she was five—” (“Magnus, do not talk about me being five.”) “Now, let me tell you this story—” (“Magnus, do not tell anyone this story.”)
“Of course I’m willing, and the princess is gracious,” he said, “but I didn’t get to be cavalier primary due to being the best with a rapier. I’m cavalier primary only because my adept is also my wife. I suppose you could say that I—ha, ha—cavalier primarried!”
“Will the Ninth honour us?” she murmured prettily. Stronger women than Gideon could not have said no to an up-close-and-personal Corona Tridentarius.
There were four pairs of hungry eyes watching that fight, but they all blurred into the background of a dream: the lines one’s brain filled in to abbreviate a place, a time, a memory.
Conversations were happening around her, not to her: A bit plaintively: “I’m not quite that out of form, am I?—” (“Magnus! Maaaaagnus. Three moves, Magnus.”) “—Am I getting old? Should Abigail and I divorce?—” “I didn’t even see her move.” Corona was breathing hard. “God, she’s fast.”
“Put me in. Dyas can get another look at me.” (Next to him, the Cohort cavalier who was obviously hight Dyas raised her eyebrows the exact one-eighth of an inch to indicate how much she wanted to get another look at him.)
She hadn’t been this overstimulated since that one time when training had consisted of Crux, a repeating crossbow, and two skeletons with machetes.
He was narrow shouldered with long, long arms, and she was beginning to believe that he was not simply a douchebag who used lip balm, but a douchebag who used lip balm and had a very long reach.
She couldn’t believe she was being held at bay by someone who had eaten every cavalier manual and chewed dutifully twenty-five times.
She had left Harrowhark a note on her vastly underused pillow— WHATS WITH THE SKULLS? and received only a terse— Ambiance.
She had the sinking feeling that Dulcinea was doing her a favour. Lady Septimus was, delicately, showing she did not care that Gideon was Gideon the Ninth, a paint-faced shadow cultist, a Locked Tomb nun apparent: or at least, if she cared, she viewed it as the delight of her days.
In her comic books, necromancers kissed the gloved palms of their front-liner comrades in blessed thanks for all that they did. In the comic books none of these adepts had heart disease, and a lot of them had necromantically uncharacteristic cleavage.
Given twenty-four hours to break a bone ward, Gideon would have immediately made plans to get into Harrow’s wardrobe and do up all the buttons on her shirts, making sure that each button went into the hole above the one it was meant to go into. It was an inevitability that the Reverend Daughter never would have allowed for.
(i) was contingent on either the world’s happiest accident or murder, and if it was murder, what if the murderer was, like, weird, which would make their subsequent marriage to Gideon pretty awkward? Maybe they could just swap friendship bracelets.
Magnus the Fifth was standing watch over them with a furrowed expression of good-natured bewilderment, right next to his trig and glossy-haired adept, and he managed an “Er—Ninth! Hope you’re enjoying the … room!” before she bolted out of it.
It was stupid and it made her feel stupid. And it was Nonagesimus’s own fault for being controlling and secretive about every aspect of her whole ghastly little life. She would not thank Gideon even if she had sat her flat ass in a puddle of molten lava, especially not as Gideon would religiously mark each anniversary of the day Harrow destroyed her butt with magma.
“Inexplicable, Warden.” “Certainly not. Like everything else in this ridiculous conglomeration of cooling gas, it’s perfectly explicable, I just need to explic-it.” “Indubitable, Warden.” “Stop that. I need you listening, not racking your brain for rare negatives. Either this entire building was scavenged from a garbage hopper, or I am being systematically lied to on a molecular level.”
It was probably not a comforting sight to see a penitent of the Locked Tomb in the half dark, swathed in black, skull-painted.
He had the eyes of a very beautiful person, trapped in resting bitch face.
Gideon hauled again at the hatch, as though offering up the universe’s most useless act might endear her to the physics of a locked door.
This did not surprise or alarm him. In fact, his tightly-wound shoulders relaxed a fraction from black-hole stress fracture to pressure at the bottom of the ocean.
This rhapsody of greys and sterile blacks was interrupted over the nearest arch, where, twisting in the dry breeze of the climate cooler, hung a bundle of old bones. Ancient prayer wrappers were ringed around it, and it was the only human, normal touch.
