Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)

by Tamsyn Muir

“There’s House business, and you’re wanted downstairs.” “This is her being sad and desperate,” said Gideon. “This is her obsession … this is her need for control. There’s nothing she can do. I’ll keep my nose clean. Keep my mouth shut. I’ll even—you can write this down, you can quote me here—do my duty to the Ninth House. But don’t pretend at me, Aiglamene, that the moment I go down there a sack won’t come down over my head and I won’t spend the next five weeks concussed in an oss.” “You egotistical foetus, you think our Lady rang the muster call just for you?”

“Such a quick study, and you still don’t understand. That’s on my head, I suppose. The more you struggle against the Ninth, Nav, the deeper it takes you; the louder you curse it, the louder they’ll have you scream.”

the door.” 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.

in some far-off way Gideon had always known that this would be how she went: gangbanged to death by skeletons.

LOL

“It’s the best idea we have. Nav,” said her teacher, “our Lady is going off-planet. That’s the long and short of it. You can stay here—in the House you hate—or go attain your liberty—in service to the House you hate. This is your one chance to leave, and to gain your freedom cleanly.”

“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?”

which curved inward into wicked points that almost met. Slim columns reached up to support this weird stone bunting, and wound around each column was something carved to seem writhing and alive—a fat, slithering thing, bulging and animal. Gideon reached out to touch the intricately carved marble and felt tiny overlapping scales, touched the seam where its ridged underbelly met its back. It was very cold.

Snake

“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.

“Murder is done by the living,” said Teacher. “They were found entering the facility … I cannot begin to explain how grave a threat that is to anyone’s safety. I will not bother trying to keep it secret now. I told each of you who asked my permission to enter that place that it would mean your death. I did not say that figuratively. I told all of you that you were walking into the most dangerous place in the system of Dominicus, and I meant it. There are monsters here.”

“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.” She held out the key to Gideon. “Put it in the hole, Griddle.” “That’s what she said,”

“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.”

“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.

ease give Gideon my congratulations, howev

“Nav,” she’d said. “I could already make bone hunks. But now I can make them regenerate.”

The key ring was snapped around the chain, and on the key ring were two keys: the saw-toothed hatch key, and a thick grey key with unpretentious teeth, the kind you’d lock a cabinet with. She made herself look anywhere else.

her pocket. Now she could look Harrow dead in the eye. “I’d rather be your battery than feel you rummaging around in my head. You want my juice? I’ll give you juice.” “Under no circumstances will I ever desire your juice,”

“Nav, you don’t know precisely what this is asking. I will be draining you dry in order to get to the other side. If at any point you throw me off—if you fail to submit—I die. I have never done this before. The process will be imperfect. You will be in … pain.”

When she spoke again, she made her voice quite calm and normal: “Why?” “Probably because you asked.”

“I can’t be bribed with goods and services,” said Palamedes, “but I can’t be bribed with moral platitudes, either. My conscience doesn’t permit me to help anyone do what we have all embarked upon.”

“I would be a fool to answer,” he said, “but I can tell you that I have fewer than you think. I am not the only one who came here wanting to be a Lyctor, Captain. You’ve just been too damned slow on the uptake.”

“Griddle, you’re incorrect.” “How—” “Nothing stands between myself and Lyctorhood,” said Harrowhark, “and you are not a part of the equation. Don’t get carried away by the Sixth’s ideas. The tests are not concerned with some frankly sickening rubric of sentiment and obedience; they’re testing me and me alone. By the end, neither I nor the Ninth will need you for this pantomime. You may hate me all you wish; I still don’t even remember about you half the time.”

“Poor child,” he said, “we’re all sorry. We never intended this to happen, none of us. The poor child.” Gideon might’ve been the child in question; she might’ve not. She strongly did not care either way.

With numb fingers, Gideon removed the severed head of Protesilaus the Seventh.

“But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve known her as long as she’s lived. And I thought I knew how far she’d go, because I will tell you for free she has gone to some intensely shitty lengths, and I guess she’s gone to some shittier lengths than I thought concerning me, but that’s the thing—it’s me, Sextus. It’s always me. She nearly killed me half a dozen times growing up, but I always knew why.” Palamedes took off his glasses. He finally stopped molesting the head, and he pushed himself up and away from the desk; he sat down heavily on the mattress next to Gideon, skinny knees tucked up into his chest. “Okay. Why?” he asked simply. “Because I killed her parents,” said Gideon.

And then Gideon couldn’t wait anymore. She pushed open the door and she walked in—and found Pelleamena and Priamhark hanging from the rafters, purple and dead. Mortus the Ninth, their huge and tragic cavalier, swung beside them from a rafter groaning with his bulk. And she walked in on Harrowhark, holding lengths of unused rope among the chairs her parents had kicked aside, with eyes like coals that had burnt away. Harrow had beheld her. She had beheld Harrow. And nothing had ever gone right after that, never ever.

Awkwardly, and a bit brusquely, he took her hand. He squeezed it. They were both obviously embarrassed by this, but Gideon did not let go—not when she rummaged in the pocket of her robe with her other hand, and not when she passed over the scrumpled-up piece of flimsy that had bewildered her for so long.

Harrow was ignoring her entirely in favour of Palamedes, and she was saying: “I wasn’t sure you’d be willing to go that far, even for the truth.” Palamedes looked at her with an expression as grey and airless as the ocean outside the window. “Then you do not know me, Harrowhark.”

“The Ninth House has a secret, Nav,” said Harrow. She sounded calm and measured and frank in a way she’d never been before. “Only my family knows of it. And even we could never discuss it, unless—this was my mother’s rule—we were immersed in salt water. We kept a ceremonial pool for the purpose, hidden from the rest of the House. It was cold and deep and I hated every moment I was in it. But my mother is dead, and I find now that—if I really am to betray my family’s most sacred trust—I am obliged at the least to keep, intact, her rule.” Gideon blinked. “Oh shit,” she said. “You really meant it. This is it. This is go time.” “This is go time,” agreed Harrowhark.

“I had reason to believe,” said Harrow, “that you would trust her more than you trusted me.”

I—I did not want to hurt you, Griddle! I didn’t want to disturb your—equilibrium.”

“Harrow,” she said slowly, “by resources, are you saying—” “Two hundred children,” said Harrowhark tiredly. “From the ages of six weeks to eighteen years. They needed to all die more or less simultaneously, for it to work. My great-aunts measured out the organophosphates after weeks of mathematics. Our House pumped them through the cooling system.”

“You were meant to die, Griddle, along with all the others. You inhaled nerve gas for ten full minutes. My great-aunts went blind just from releasing it and you weren’t affected, even though you were just two cots away from the vent. You just didn’t die. My parents were terrified of you for the rest of their lives.”

“Of course I wouldn’t be worth it,” Harrow said scornfully. “I’m an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground. My parents committed a necromantic sin that we ought to have been torpedoed into the centre of Dominicus for. If any of the other Houses knew of what we’d done they would destroy us from orbit without a second’s thought. I am a war crime.”

said the war crime.

“What? My parents killed my parents. I should know.” “But I told them—” “My parents killed themselves because they were frightened and ashamed,” said Harrow tightly. “They thought it was the only honourable thing to do.”

My mother and father weren’t angry, Nav. They were very kind to me. They tied their own nooses, and then they helped me tie mine. I watched them help Mortus onto the chair. Mortus didn’t even question it, he never did … “But I couldn’t do it. After all I’d convinced myself I was ready to do. I made myself watch, when my parents—I could not do the slightest thing my House expected of me. Not even then. You’re not the only one who couldn’t die.”

I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”

“Too many words,” said Gideon confidentially. “How about these: One flesh, one end, bitch.” The Ninth House necromancer flushed nearly black. Gideon tilted her head up and caught her gaze: “Say it, loser.” “One flesh—one end,” Harrow repeated fumblingly, and then could say no more.

“There’s no communication with the rest of the system,” she said, hoarsely now. “He didn’t lie. There was no way to reach the Houses … I got through to the Imperial flagship, Sixth. The Emperor is coming … the King Undying.”

Next to Harrow, Teacher gurgled. “You draw him back—to the place—he must not return to,”

The bizarre sight of a necromancer holding a sword—a ghost fighting inside the meat suit of his adept—made it real that Naberius was dead, but that he was dead inside Ianthe.

“The Warden,” she said, “has been exchanging letters with Dulcinea Septimus for twelve years. He’s been—a weenie—over her. One of the reasons he became the heir of the House was to meet her on even footing. His pursuit of medical science was entirely for her benefit.”

“He asked her to marry him a year ago,”

An eight-year-old writing love letters to a terminally ill teenager. A girl falling in love with the beautiful stiff she’d been conceived solely to look after. A foundling chasing the approval of a House disappointed with her immunity to foundling-killing gas.

“Why was I born so attractive?” “Because everyone would have throttled you within the first five minutes otherwise,”

“You should have listened more closely. But I never ever lied. I am from the Seventh House … and it was an accident. Anyway, she and I talked. She was a sweet little thing. I really had wanted to do something for her—and afterward, I kept her for the longest time … until someone took out my cavalier. Then I had to get rid of her, quickly … the furnace was the only option. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not a monster. Septimus was dead before the shuttle landed at Canaan … she hardly suffered.”

This is for the Fifth and the Fourth—for everyone who’s died, directly or indirectly, due to you—and most personally, this is for Dulcinea Septimus.”

“My name is Cytherea the First,” she said. “Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, the seventh saint to serve the King Undying. I am a necromancer and I am a cavalier. I am the vengeance of the ten billion. I have come back home to kill the Emperor and burn his Houses. And Gideon the Ninth…” She walked toward Gideon, and she raised her sword. She smiled. “This begins with you.”

“I’ll keep it off you. Nav, show them what the Ninth House does.” Gideon lifted her sword. The construct worked itself free of its last confines of masonry and rotten wood and heaved before them, flexing itself like a butterfly. “We do bones, motherfucker,”

“Fuck you, Nav—” “Harrowhark,” said Gideon the Ninth. “Someday you’ll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then. For now—I can’t say you’ll be fine. I can’t say we did the right thing. I can’t tell you shit. I’m basically a hallucination produced by your brain chemistry while coping with the massive trauma of splicing in my brain chemistry. Even if I wasn’t, I don’t know jack, Harrow, I never did—except for one thing.”