Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)

by Tamsyn Muir

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.

“Oh, I have hurt your heart,” she said. Gideon kept it absolutely level. “I boohooed for hours.” “It won’t be the last time I make you weep.”

While we were developing common sense, she studied the blade. Am I right, Griddle?”

“Do you want,” Gideon whispered huskily, “my hanky.” “I want to watch you die.”

“Touch me again and I’ll kill you,” said Harrow, scratch-throated, without opening her eyes. “I really will.”

Is that what you’ve been doing without me, all this time? Dicking around in a basement?” The adept’s lips curled back, showing little slashes of swollen pink through the grey. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I was dicking around in the basement.

“Put it in the hole, Griddle.” “That’s what she said,” said Gideon,

Gideon wanted her longsword and she wanted Harrow.

What she badly needed was Harrow Nonagesimus,

“The time has come—” She took a deep breath; and then she undid the catches to her robes, and they fell away from her thin shoulders to puddle around her ankles on the floor. “—to tell you everything,” she said. “Oh, thank God for that,” said Gideon hysterically, profoundly embarrassed at how her heart rate had spiked.

“I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—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.”

She pressed her mouth to the place where Harrow’s nose met the bone of her frontal sinus, and the sound that Harrow made embarrassed them both. “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.

Gideon wiped a thumb over her temple, tidied away a stringy lock of shadow-coloured hair; Harrow shuddered.

Gideon reached over to take Harrow’s hand.

Gideon did not know how to handle this new, overprotective Harrowhark, this girl with the hunted expression. She kept looking at Gideon with the screwed-up eyes of someone who had been handed an egg for safekeeping and was surrounded by egg-hunting snakes.

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

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.

Did you see me? Did you behold me, Griddle?

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.

“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.”

“There’s my sword,” Gideon said. “Pick it up—pick it up and stop looking at me, dick. Don’t. Don’t you dare look at me.” Harrow turned her head away from the iron railing and picked up the longsword, and cried out: it was far too heavy, far too awkward. Gideon reached her arm out to steady Harrow’s sword hand, shifting the other arm around her in a strange embrace. Her fingers wrapped around Harrow’s, scratchy with callouses. The sheer weight of the thing still stretched the muscles of Harrow’s forearms painfully, but Gideon clasped her wrist, and despite the pain they lifted the sword together.

They were cheek to cheek: Gideon’s arm and Harrow’s arm entwined, holding the sword aloft, letting the steel catch the light. The terrace stretched out before them, glass shards spraying in the wake of the construct, falling as slowly and as lightly as down. Harrow looked back at Gideon, and Gideon’s eyes, as they always did, startled her: their deep, chromatic amber, the startling hot gold of freshly-brewed tea. She winked. Harrow said— “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?”

“Oh, damn, Nonagesimus, don’t cry, we can’t fight her if you’re crying.” Harrow said, with some difficulty: “I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it.”

The weight of Gideon’s arms on Harrow’s forearms was getting more ephemeral, harder to perceive; the brush of Gideon’s cheek was suddenly no more substantial than the remembrance of an old fever. Her voice was in her ear, but it was very far away. Harrow placed the tip of her sword to the right of Cytherea’s breastbone. The world was slow and chilly. “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.”

Harrow said, “But you’re God.” And God said, “And I am not enough.”