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.

IN THE MYRIADIC YEAR OF OUR LORD—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

“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.”

“You talk so loudly for chattel, Nav,” said the marshal. “You chatter so much for a debt. 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. Come here, and I’ll black your eyes for you and knock you dead.”

“You are not half as good with that sword as you think you are, Gideon Nav,” said the marshal of Drearburh, “and one day I’ll flay you for disrespect. One day we will use your parts for paper. One day the sisters of the Locked Tomb will brush the oss with your bristles. One day your obedient bones will dust all places you disdain, and make the stones there shine with your fat. There is a muster, Nav, and I command you now to go.”

She pulled her watch out of her pocket and checked it: twenty minutes to go, a quarter hour and change. Gideon was home free. Gideon was gone. Nothing and nobody could change that now.

Her teacher was unmoved. “There was no disservice done. You didn’t get her permission.” “I’m allowed to apply for the military, Captain. I’m indentured, not a slave. I’m no fiscal use to her here.”

“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—”

Back straight as a poker, Aiglamene walked away with her funny seesawing walk, and Gideon felt as though she’d failed a test. It didn’t matter, she told herself. Two down, none to go. Eleven minutes until landing, her clockwork told her, eleven minutes and she was out. That was the only thing that mattered. That was the only thing that had mattered since a much younger Gideon had realised that, unless she did something drastic, she was going to die here down in the dark. And—worst of all—that would only be the beginning.

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.

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.

Gideon marvelled that someone could live in the universe only seventeen years and yet wear black and sneer with such ancient self-assurance.

“You’d do it even if there was no ultimate gain,” the Lady said, and she even seemed to be marvelling at it. “Even though you know what you’d suffer. Even though you know what it means. And all because…?” “All because,” said Gideon, checking her clock again, “I completely fucking hate you, because you are a hideous witch from hell. No offence.”

“No. A fair fight and you can go with the commission,” said Harrow. “If I win, you come to the muster, and you leave afterward—with the commission. If I lose, you leave now—with the commission.” She snatched the paper from the ground, pulled a fountain pen from her pocket, and slid it between her lips to stab it deeply into her cheek. It came out thick with blood—one of her party tricks, Gideon thought numbly—and signed: Pelleamena Novenarius, Reverend Mother of the Locked Tomb, Lady of Drearburh, Ruler of the Ninth House.

What happened was that Harrowhark peeled off her gloves. Her hands were wrecked. The fingers were riddled with dirt and oozing cuts, and grit stuck in the wounds and beneath the messed-up nails. She dropped the gloves and wiggled her fingers in Gideon’s direction, and Gideon had a split second to realise that it was drillshaft grit, and that she was absolutely boned in all directions.

“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. “Call it, Crux,” ordered Harrowhark.

Gideon had been eleven when the Lord and Lady of the House of the Ninth had slipped into death in sudden, awful secret. It was such a huge bag of ass how it had happened: what she’d found, what she’d seen. She hadn’t been sad. If she’d been stuck being Harrow’s parents she would have done the same years ago.

Gideon was grinning so hugely that her split lips recommenced bleeding. Amid the massed heads of the uncaring dead and the disturbed devout, Harrowhark’s eyes found hers, and that disdainful mask slipped in its blankness; her lips thinned. The people clamoured. Gideon winked.

“I pray the tomb is shut forever,” recited Harrowhark, with the curious fervidity she always showed in prayer. “I pray the rock is never rolled away. I pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate, in perpetual rest with closed eye and stilled brain. I pray it lives, I pray it sleeps … I pray for the needs of the Emperor All-Giving, the Undying King, his Virtues and his men. I pray for the Second House, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth; the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth. I pray for the Ninth House, and I pray for it to be fruitful. I pray for the soldiers and adepts far from home, and all those parts of the Empire that live in unrest and disquiet. Let it be so.”

Gideon said, with difficulty: “What—about—the shuttle?” “Oh, Ortus and his mother stole it,” said Harrowhark. “They must be gone already. She still has family back on the Eighth, and she thinks they’ll take them in.” At her expression, Harrow laughed: “You make it so easy, Griddle. You always do.”

well shit

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.

honestly relatable

“If you want to do something interesting, come with me,” she commanded. “If you want to wallow in your shockingly vast reserves of self-pity, cut your throat and save me the food bill.” “Oh damn! Then can I join your old man and lady in the puppet show?”

“‘Hello, I’m the woman who helped Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s fascist rise to power,’” said Gideon to nobody in particular. “‘Yes, the universe sucks now. I knew this going in. Also, she betrayed me afterward and now my body has been shot into the sun.’” Harrow came too close, and Gideon did what she had never done in the past: she raised the rusted sword so that its naked point was level with the other girl’s forehead. The necromancer adept did not flinch, just made her black-smeared mouth a mocking moue of shock. “I—will never—trust you. Your promises mean nothing. You’ve got nothing to give me. I know what you’d do, given half a chance.”

“Oh, if she pulls this off she can have whatever she likes,” said Harrowhark easily—way too easily. “She’ll have glory squirting out each orifice. She can do or be anything she pleases, preferably over on the other side of the galaxy from where I am.” “Then I thank you for your mercy and your grace, and regard the matter settled,” said Aiglamene. “How is it settled. I have patently not agreed to this shit.”

“Go on and say no,” said her captain. “It’s your choice … If she doesn’t take you, I’ll go with her and gladly. But she knows … and I know … and I think you damn well know … that if you don’t get out now, you won’t even get out in a box.”

“Ten thousand years of tradition, Griddle.” “I don’t have ten thousand years of tradition, bitch,” said Gideon, “I have ten years of two-hander training and a minor allergy to face paint. I’m worth so much less to you with pizza face and a toothpick.”

Gideon checked her face, and put down the paint and the wadding. Act accordingly meant that any attempt to talk to an outsider as a kid had led to her getting dragged away bodily; act accordingly meant the House had been closed to pilgrims for five years. 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. Act accordingly, to Gideon, meant being secret and abstruse and super obsessed with tomes.

“God, no!” said Harrow. “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.

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. Harrowhark turned toward the shuttle and Gideon realised with an unwelcome jolt that she was crying: her paint was wet with tears. And then the whole idea became beautiful. The moment Gideon turned her back on it, the House would die. The moment Gideon walked away, it would all disappear like an impossibly bad dream.

“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.”

Harrowhark did not care for any herald. She had drifted out like a black ship in sail, a bony figure wreathed in layers and layers of night-coloured cloth with a lace overcloak trailing behind her; adorned with bones, painted like a dead woman, eyes blindfolded with black net. Now she dropped to her knees five paces from the shuttle door and began counting prayers on the knuckle beads in a click-clack monotone. Showtime. Gideon ambled over and knelt next to Harrow on the sun-warmed metal of the dock, her own robes pooling black around her, staring inscrutably at the tint-dimmed chaos of what was going on. The clacking beads made her almost feel normal.

“Only trouble at the end of the line,” he said, “and a trouble confined to them.” Once the other priest had gone, Harrowhark said repressively: “Twins are an ill omen.” Teacher seemed tickled. “How delightful to hear someone say an ill omen could come from the Mouth of the Emperor!”

Her dress was a frivolous concoction of seafoam green frills, the blood on it startling against such a backdrop. Her skin seemed transparent—horribly transparent, with the veins at her hands and the sides of her temples a visible cluster of mauve branches and stems. Her eyes fluttered open: they were huge and blue, with velvety brown lashes. The girl coughed up a clot, which ruined the tableau, and those big blue eyes widened in dismay.

The girl in Gideon’s lap covered her face and seemed to break into sobs, but it became apparent that they were gurgles of mirth. “You’ve done it now, Pro!” she gasped. “They could demand satisfaction, and you’d end up a mausoleum centrepiece! Lady or Lord of the Ninth, please accept my heartfelt apologies. He was hasty, and I was a fool.”

“Come on,” said Gideon, “you fainted.” “I do do that,” she admitted, and gave another wicked chuckle of delight. This appeared to be the greatest thing that had ever happened to her. She fluttered her hands like she was having the vapours. “Oh, God, I was rescued by a shadow cultist! I’m so sorry! Thank you! This is one for the history books.”

i like her already lol

“What must I do to gain forgiveness?” she said. “If my House blasphemes against the House of the Ninth in the first five minutes, I’m going to feel like a boor.” “Keep your sword off my cavalier,” said Harrow, in tones of the sepulchre. “You heard her, Pro,” said the girl. “You can’t just get your rapier out willy-nilly.”

Twenty-five, thought Gideon, distantly ignoring the ugly twist beneath Harrow’s veil that promised that there would be much to talk about later and that it would not go well for Gideon. Twenty-five years, and Harrowhark was probably going to live forever. They billowed obediently into the priest’s wake, and Gideon remembered the coy wink, and felt terribly sad.

Gideon and Harrowhark were silent during the ensuing chant: “Let the King Undying, ransomer of death, scourge of death, vindicator of death, look upon the Nine Houses and hear their thanks. Let the whole of everywhere entrust themselves to him. Let those across the river pledge beyond the tomb to the adept divine, the first among necromancers. Thanks be to the Ninefold Resurrection. Thanks be to the Lyctor divinely ordained. He is Emperor and he became God: he is God, and he became Emperor.”

Gideon had known on some basic level that the religion practised in the dark depths of Drearburh was not quite the religion practised by the other Houses. It was still a shock to the system to have it confirmed. By the expressions on some of the faces—bewildered or blank or long-suffering or, in at least one case, openly hostile—the others hadn’t been confronted with it either. By the time Harrow had finished the three priests looked softly delighted.

“You’re the ones who will ascend to Lyctor,” he said, “not me. I am certain the way will become clear to you without any input from us. Why, who are we to teach the first after the King Undying?” Then he added smilingly, “Welcome to Canaan House!”

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.)

“Yes, it would have been unfortunate,” agreed her sister placidly, “considering it would have demonstrated within the first five minutes that you’re completely thick.” A curl was wound about one finger. “Oh, shut it, Ianthe.” “We should be celebrating, if we’re being honest with ourselves,” the pallid girl continued, warming to her subject, “since the already poorly hidden fact of you being a great big bimbo would have come to light so quickly that it would have broken the sound barrier.”

“This is not a clever path to start down,” she said softly. “I would not attract attention from the necromancer of the Third House.” The pale twin stepped through and closed the door behind her. Gideon was left alone.

The reason why they had stopped dead was unclear. She had stopped dead because the necromancer was staring at her with an expression of naked hostility. He looked at her as though he had finally come face-to-face with the murderer of a beloved family pet.

She sheathed it immediately, sliding it home to its scabbard in a tight iron whisper. A cold sweat had broken out beneath her clothes. The expression on Dulcinea’s face was simply bright-eyed, mischievous interest, but to Gideon it was the Secundarius Bell chiding a child already ten minutes late for prayer. For a moment a lot of stupid stuff felt very ready to happen. She nearly confessed everything to Dulcinea’s mild and denim-coloured gaze: she nearly opened her mouth and begged wholeheartedly for the woman’s mercy.

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.

If Gideon had not been so lonely; if Gideon had not been so used to having a fighting partner, even one more used these days to battling rheumatism; if Coronabeth Tridentarius had not been so astonishingly hot. All these ifs she contemplated wearily, led by the Third House necromancer down the poky, confined little staircase immediately familiar to her as the one she’d explored before; down to the dark, tiled vestibule with the flickering lights, and through to the room with the foul-smelling chemical pit.

“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!” From the other side of the room, Jeannemary let out a long noise like a death rattle. Princess Corona laughed outright; Magnus looked extremely pleased with himself. The faces of the other two were patiently blank. Gideon made a mental note to write down the joke so that she could use it herself later.

First touch? In Drearburh it was to the floor, but there was no time to contemplate that one: Magnus was smiling at her with the boyish, teacherly enthusiasm of a man about to play a ball game with a younger sibling. But beneath that excellent mask there was a note of doubt about his eyes, a tugging of his mouth, and something in Gideon rose as well: he was a little afraid of her.