Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)

by Tamsyn Muir

“Of course we’re not running,” said Harrowhark disdainfully. “I said a necromancer alone. I have you. We bring hell.” “Harrow—Harrow, Dulcinea’s a Lyctor, a real one—” “Then we’re all dead, Nav, but let’s bring hell first,” said Harrow. Gideon looked over her shoulder at her, and caught the Reverend Daughter’s smile. There was blood sweat coming out of her left ear, but her smile was long and sweet and beautiful. Gideon found herself smiling back so hard her mouth hurt.

She struck at spines with the mad fury and sudden belief that if she just hit and hit and hit—accurately enough and hard enough and well enough—she could rewrite time and save Isaac and Jeannemary; save Abigail, save Magnus.

“I have bested my father,” said Harrow to nobody, staring upward at nothing, alight with fierce and untrammelled triumph. They were both lying supine on a pile of what felt like feet. “I have bested my father and my grandmother—every single necromancer ever taught by my House—every necromancer who has ever touched a skeleton. Did you see me? Did you behold me, Griddle?” This was all said somewhat thickly, through pink and bloodied teeth, before Harrow smugly passed out.

“You’re a nice girl,” the Lyctor said. “I had a nice girl as a cavalier too … once. She died for me. What can you do?” Camilla said nothing. Her face was slick with sweat and blood. Her crop of dark, blunt-cut hair was powdered grey with bone. Cytherea looked faintly amused by the blade that was a finger’s breadth away from being buried in her jugular. She drawled, “Is this meant to kill me?” “Give me time,” said Camilla, through gritted teeth. Cytherea gave this due consideration. “I’d rather not,” she said.

Camilla stared up at her as though trying to work out why everything hadn’t gone black. A red stain was spreading across the thin bedsheet. The Lyctor’s face didn’t change, but she turned her head slightly. A pale head was now nearly pillowed on her shoulder, peeking over, as though to make sure the sword had hit home. Colourless fair hair spilled over Cytherea’s collarbone like a waterfall: the figure behind her smiled. “Spoke too soon, old news,” said Ianthe. “Oh,” said Cytherea, “oh, my! A baby Lyctor.”

“He say anything?” Gideon wavered. “He said to tell you he loved you,” she said. “What? No, he didn’t.” “Okay, no, sorry. He said—he said you knew what to do?” “I do,” said Camilla with grim satisfaction, and laid herself back down among the bones.

“Oh, yeah,” said Gideon. “Sextus gave her turbo cancer.” Camilla nodded with enormous personal satisfaction. “Well,” she said, “that’ll do it.”

gross but effective

The Lyctor turned her head and coughed miserably into the crook of her elbow. Then she looked at the knife, wondering at it. She turned her head to look at Camilla and Harrow and Gideon. She sighed pensively and ran one hand through her curls again. “Oh no,” she said, “heroics.”

Camilla was huddled in a corner, now standing upright—that was probably her own last fuck-you salute—but her wounded arm hung uselessly. She had lost a lot of blood. Her face was now pallid olive. “Ninth,” said the Sixth impatiently. “Get out of here. Take your necromancer. Go.”

The Lyctor arched her free hand languorously behind her back; she slid into position, weighting herself on her back foot, the sword in her hand luminous—tinted green like still water, or pearls. “You know you can’t do this, Gideon of the Ninth,” she said. “You’re very brave—a bit like another Gideon I used to know. But you’re prettier in the eyes.” “I may be from the Ninth House,” said Gideon, “but if you say any more cryptic shit at me, you’re going to see how well you can regenerate when you’re in eighteen pieces.”

“Cry mercy,” said Cytherea. The dimple was still there. “Please. You don’t even know what you are to me … You’re not going to die here, Gideon. And if you ask me to let you live you might not have to die at all. I’ve spared you before.” Something ignited deep in her rib cage. “Jeannemary Chatur didn’t ask for mercy. Magnus didn’t ask for mercy. Or Isaac. Or Abigail. I bet you Palamedes never even considered asking for mercy.” “Of course he didn’t,” said the Lyctor. “He was too busy detonating.”

It ought to have cleaved the Lyctor open from the shoulder to the gut. She’d wanted it to. But the edge of her sword sank into Cytherea’s collarbone and bounced off, like she was trying to cut steel. There was the faintest pink mark on the skin—and then nothing. Her two-hander had failed. Something in Gideon rolled over and gave up.

Gideon rolled away, seized her sword, and crawled. Her pierced arm left a snail’s trail of slippery red behind her. It was only years of training under Aiglamene that gave her the guts to wobble herself upright before her adept, blind with blood, blade leant flat on her good shoulder. Two more dead giants were already knitting themselves together. Harrow couldn’t afford this, she thought dimly; Harrow couldn’t afford this at all.

“I’m not done,” said Gideon’s half-dead necromancer. Harrow closed her hands. The last thing Gideon saw was the debris of her perpetual servants rattling toward them, bouncing through the air and over the flagstones, hardening in a shell over her and Camilla and Harrow as all those tendrils struck them at once. The noise was deafening: WHAM—WHAM—WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM—until it became a single hammer, a metered pounding: WHAM … WHAM … WHAM … The world vibrated around them. Everything was suddenly very dark. A wavering yellow light flicked on, and Gideon realised that against all odds Camilla had somehow retained her pocket torch.

The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House smiled, tiny and triumphant. Then she keeled into Gideon’s arms. Gideon stumbled, sick with terror, kneeling them both down to the ground as Harrow lay like a broken rag doll. She forgot her sword, forgot everything as she cradled her used-up adept. She forgot the wrecked ligaments in her sword arm, her messed-up knee, the cups of blood she’d lost, everything but that tiny, smouldering, victorious smile.

“Griddle, you made me a promise. You agreed to go back to the Ninth. You agreed to do your duty by the Locked Tomb—” “Don’t do this to me.” “I owe you your life,” said Harrowhark, “I owe you everything.” Harrow let go of her shirt and subsided to the floor. Her paint had all come off. She kept choking and sniffling on the thick rivulets of blood coming out her nose. Gideon tilted the wet, dark head so that her necromancer did not die untimely from drowning in her bloodied mucus, and tried desperately to think of a plan.

“Nav,” she said, “have you really forgiven me?” Confirmed. They were all going to eat it. “Of course I have, you bozo.” “I don’t deserve it.” “Maybe not,” said Gideon, “but that doesn’t stop me forgiving you. Harrow—” “Yes?” “You know I don’t give a damn about the Locked Tomb, right? You know I only care about you,” she said in a brokenhearted rush. She didn’t know what she was trying to say, only that she had to say it now. With a bad, juddering noise, a tentacle had started to pound their splintering shelter again: WHAM. “I’m no good at this duty thing. I’m just me. I can’t do this without you. And I’m not your real cavalier primary, I never could’ve been.”

Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound. “Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House,” she said hoarsely, “you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.”

She said, “Harrow, I can’t keep my promise, because the entire point of me is you. You get that, right? That’s what cavaliers sign up for. There is no me without you. One flesh, one end.” A shade of exhausted suspicion flickered over her necromancer’s face. “Nav,” she said, “what are you doing?” “The cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole entire life, believe me,” said Gideon. “You’ll know what to do, and if you don’t do it, what I’m about to do will be no use to anyone.”

WHAM—WHAM—WHAM. The structure bowed and creaked. Big chunks were falling away now, letting in wide splotches of sunlight. She felt movement behind her, but she was faster. “For the Ninth!” said Gideon. And she fell forward, right on the iron spikes.

WHAT THE FUCK

OKAY,” SAID GIDEON. “Okay. Get up.” Harrowhark Nonagesimus got up. “Good!” said her cavalier. “You can stop screaming any moment now, just an FYI. Now—first make sure nothing’s going to ice Camilla—I meant it about not wanting an afterlife subscription to Palamedes Sextus’s Top Nerd Facts.”

“I cannot do this.” “You already did it,” said Gideon. “It’s done. You ate me and rebuilt me. We can’t go home again.” “I can’t bear it.” “Suck it down,” said Gideon. “You’re already two hundred dead daughters and sons of our House. What’s one more?”

Harrow said, with some difficulty: “I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it.” “Yes you can, it’s just less great and less hot,” said Gideon. “Fuck you, Nav—”

“One flesh, one end,” said Gideon, and it was a murmur now, on the very edge of hearing. Harrow said, “Don’t leave me.” “The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee,” said Gideon. “See you on the flip side, sugarlips.”

Cytherea the First sighed in no little relief. Then she toppled over, and she died. The sword made a terrific clatter as it dropped to the ground. The breeze blew Harrow’s hair into her mouth as she ran back and strained at the arms of her cavalier, pulled and pulled, so that she could take her off the spike and lay her on her back. Then she sat there for a long time. Beside her, Gideon lay smiling a small, tight, ready smile, stretched out beneath a blue and foreign sky.

HARROWHARK NONAGESIMUS CAME AROUND in a nest of sterile white. She was lying on a gurney, wrapped up in a crinkly thermal blanket. She turned her head; next to her there was a window, and outside the window was the deep velvet blackness of space. Cold stars glimmered in the far distance like diamonds, and they were very beautiful.

“Please undo what I’ve done, Lord,” she said. “I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav.” “I can’t,” he said. He had a bittersweet, scratchy voice, and it was infinitely gentle. “I would very much like to. But that soul’s inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I’d take yours with it and destroy both in the process. What’s done is done is done. Now you have to live with it.”

“All the Houses will have questions tonight,” he said. “I can hardly blame them. I’m sorry, Harrow, we couldn’t recover your cavalier either.” Her brain listed sharply. “Gideon’s gone?”

There was a vague reflection of her in the window, interrupted by distant space fields pocketed thick with stars. She turned away. If she saw herself in a mirror, she might fight herself: if she saw herself in a mirror, she might find a trace of Gideon Nav, or worse—she might not find anything, she might find nothing at all.

She said, “I will have to go back eventually.” “I know,” said the Emperor. “I need to find out what happened to my cavalier’s body. I need to know what happened to the others.” “Of course.” “But for now,” said Harrow, “I will be your Lyctor, Lord, if you will have me.” The Emperor said, “Then rise, Harrowhark the First.”