Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)

by Tamsyn Muir

“Ninth,” he said, “if she were capable of anything, in order to become a Lyctor—don’t you think she’d be one already? If she really wanted to watch the world burn—wouldn’t we all be alight?” “Stop flattering her. But—thanks,” said Gideon, and she darted off into the corridor after Harrow.

“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

“I didn’t kill him,” said Harrowhark sharply. “Someone else did—blade through the heart, from what I saw, though I only got a few minutes to look before I had to run. I only had to push the theorem the most basic bit before he came apart. I took the head and left when I thought I heard someone coming. This was the night after we completed the entropy field challenge.”

“Nonagesimus, all you had to do was delay, tell me you were freaking out. All you had to do was say that Dulcinea’s cav was a mummy man—” “I had reason to believe,” said Harrow, “that you would trust her more than you trusted me.” This answer contorted Gideon’s face into her best are you fucking kidding me expression. Opposite, Harrow smoothed her forehead out with her thumbs, which took away another significant portion of skeleton. “I thought you were compromised,” she continued waspishly. “I assumed you would assume that I dismantled the puppet as an act of bad faith and go straight to the Seventh. I wanted to do enough research to present you with a cut-and-dry case. I had no idea what it would mean for the Fourth House. The Ninth is deep in their blood debt and I am undone by the expense. I—I did not want to hurt you, Griddle! I didn’t want to disturb your—equilibrium.”

“My conclusion: if the murders are linked and if some adept, rather than a revenant force or the facility itself, is behind the construct you saw—then it is one of us,” said Harrow. “We’re the only living beings in Canaan House. That means the suspect list is the Tridentarii; Sextus; Octakiseron; the Second; or myself. And I haven’t discounted Teacher and the priests. Septimus has something of an alibi—” “Yes, being nearly dead,” said Gideon. Harrowhark said, rather grudgingly: “I’ve downgraded her in some respects. Logically, judging by ability, and mind, and the facility to combine both in service to an end, it’s Palamedes Sextus and his cavalier.” She shook her head as Gideon opened her mouth to protest. “No, I realise neither has, as you might put it, a fucking motive. A logical conclusion is worth very little if I don’t have all the facts. Then there’s Teacher—and the Lyctor laboratories—and the rules. Why those theorems? What powers them? Why was the Fourth cavalier killed, but you left alive?”

“It’s important. My mother needed to carry a child to term, and that child needed to be a necromancer to fill the role of true heir to the Locked Tomb. But as necromancers themselves, they found the process doubly difficult. We hardly had access to the foetal care technology that the other Houses do. She had tried and failed already. She was getting old. She had one chance, and she couldn’t afford chance.” Gideon said, “You can’t just control whether or not you’re carrying a necro.” “Yes, you can,” said Harrow. “If you have the resources, and are willing to pay the price of using them.” The hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck rose, wetly. “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.”

Thats fucked

The Reverend Father and Mother hadn’t found her unnatural because of how she’d been born: they’d found her unnatural because of how she hadn’t died. And all the nuns and all the priests and all the anchorites of the cloister had taken the cue from them, not knowing that it was because Gideon was just some smothered and unfortunate animal who had still been alive the next day.

“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.”

The Locked Tomb’s meant to house the one true enemy of the King Undying, Nav, something older than time, the cost of the Resurrection; the beast that he defeated once but can’t defeat twice. The abyss of the First. The death of the Lord. He left the grave with us for our safekeeping, and he trusted the ones who built the tomb a myriad ago to wall themselves up with the corpse and die there. But we didn’t. And that’s how the Ninth House was made.”

“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.” “I think your parents must’ve been frightened and ashamed for a hell of a long time.” “I’m not saying I didn’t blame you. I did … it was much easier. I pretended for a long time that I could have saved them by talking to them. Them and Mortus the Ninth. When you walked in, when you saw what you saw … when you saw what I had failed to do. I hated you because you saw what I didn’t 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.”

“You apologise to me?” she bellowed. “You apologise to me now? You say that you’re sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second’s goddamned thought! I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren’t dead, all because—I regretted I wasn’t! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re sorry?” There were flecks of spittle on Harrowhark’s lips. She was retching for air. “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.

Harrow said, “In the event of my death—Gideon, if something ever does get the better of me—I need you to outlast me. I need you to go back to the Ninth House and protect the Locked Tomb. If I die, I need your duty not to die with me.” “That is such a dick move,” said Gideon reproachfully. “I know,” said Harrow. “I know.”

“Inside the Locked Tomb is the corpse of a girl. “They packed her in ice—she’s frozen solid—and they laid a sword on her breast. Her hands are wrapped around the blade. There are chains around her wrists, coming out of her grave, and they go down into holes by each side of the tomb, and there are chains on her ankles that do the same, and there are chains around her throat … “Nav, when I saw her face I decided I wanted to live. I decided to live forever just in case she ever woke up.”

I feel like this book will end with the girl in the tomb waking up

“One last question for you, Reverend Daughter,” said Gideon. Harrow said, a little unsteadily: “Nav?” Gideon leaned in. “Do you really have the hots for some chilly weirdo in a coffin?” One of the skeletons punted her back into the water.

“This won’t work,” she said. “I’ve never had to work with something so small before.” “That’s what she said,” murmured Gideon, sotto voce.

Harrowhark and Palamedes picked their way through the mess to the tables. Palamedes was saying in his explanation voice: “It’s not as though I didn’t complete this challenge by lunchtime, though I had a distinct advantage. It was a psychometrical challenge. The main difficulty was working out what the challenge wanted in the first place: it was set up by someone with an obscure sense of humour. It was just a room with a table, a locked box, and a single molar.” “Reconstruction?” “Not all of us can respring a body by dint of a molar, Reverend Daughter. Anyway, I must have examined that tooth for two hours. I know every single thing there is to know about that tooth. Mandibular second, deciduous eruption, vitamin deficiency, male, died in his sixties, flossed obediently, never left the planet. Died in this selfsame tower.”

“They’re the opposite of what Lady Septimus calls the beguiling corpse,” said Palamedes. “They seem to have most of their faculties intact. Mine was very nice, though he’s forgotten how to write. The skeletons aren’t reanimations, Ninth, they’re revenants: ghosts inhabiting a physical shell. They simply lack a true revenant’s ability to move itself along a thanergetic link. The beguiling corpse is a remnant of spirit attached to a perfect and incorruptible body—that’s the idea, anyway—where what I’ll term the hideous corpse is a fully intact spirit attached permanently to a rotting body. Not that someone hasn’t preserved those bones beautifully.” Harrowhark slammed a ring-binder down on the bench. “I’m a fool,” she said bitterly. “I knew they moved too well to be constructs—no matter how I tried to mimic how they’d been done. I just could have sworn—but that’s impossible. They’d need someone to control them.” “They do—themselves,” said Palamedes. “They are autonomously powering themselves. It debunks every piece of thanergy theory I ever learned. The old fogeys back home would peel their feet for half an hour alone with one. It still doesn’t explain why there’s no energy signature on the bones, though. Anyway, this is the laboratory of the Lyctor who created them—and here’s their theory.”

Written on the tooth in tiny, tiny letters was this: FIVE HUNDRED INTO FIFTY IT IS FINISHED!

photo of the man they all called Teacher, bright blue eyes a desaturated sepia, still smiling from a lifetime away. He looked not a day older or younger. And his photograph had been ringed around in a black marker pen. “Sextus,” Harrow began, ominously. “I couldn’t tell,” said Palamedes. For his part, he sounded almost dazed. “Ninth, I absolutely could not tell. Another beguiling corpse?” “Then who’s controlling him? There’s nobody here but us, Sextus.” “I’d like to hope so. Could he be independent? But how—

the priest lurched very gently sideways, limp and heavy, until the Sixth cavalier had to prop them up so that they wouldn’t slide off the chair entirely. “Dead as space,” said Harrowhark, “though, accurately, that’s been true for a very, very long time.” Palamedes turned to Dulcinea, who had given up thrashing her way to her elbows and was lying flat on the pillows, panting in exertion. He brushed her hair gently away from her forehead and said, “Where’s Teacher?” “He left me maybe an hour ago,” said Dulcinea helplessly, eyes darting between him and the rest of them. “He said he wanted to lock a door. What’s going on? Why is the priest dead? Where did Teacher go?” Palamedes patted her hand. “No idea. This is the interesting part.”

Teacher lay unmoving by her side. There was a rapier buried in his chest, and a dagger through his neck. There was no blood around the blades, only great splashes of it at his sleeves and his girdle. Gideon looked around for the lieutenant, found her, and then looked away again. She didn’t need a very long look to tell that Dyas was dead. For one thing, her skeleton and her body had apparently tried to divorce.

“Captain,” said Palamedes, “what did you come to do?” The Second necromancer shifted, grunted in pain, closed her eyes. She sucked in a breath, and a bead of sweat travelled down her temple. “Save our lives,” she said. “I sent an SOS. Backup’s coming, Warden … it’s just up to you to make sure nobody else dies … He said I’d betrayed the Emperor … said I’d put the Emperor at risk … I entered the Emperor’s service when I was six.” Captain Deuteros’s chin was drooping. She lifted it back up with some effort. “He wasn’t human,” she said. “He wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. Marta put him down—Marta … Go tell them she avenged the Fifth and the Fourth.” Palamedes had ignored the kick and moved in again. The Second laid one booted foot on his shoulder in warning. He said, “Captain, you are no use to anyone dead.” “It is my privilege to no longer be of use,” said the captain. “We fixed the problem none of the rest of you could … did what we had to do … and paid for it, dearly.”

“This man was a shell filled with a hundred souls,” said Harrow. The captain’s eyes flicked open, and stayed open. “He was a thing of ridiculous power—but he was a prototype. I doubt he had killed anyone before today. I would be astonished if he had a hand in the deaths of the Fourth and Fifth Houses, as he was created for the sole purpose of safeguarding the place. There is something a great deal more dangerous than an old experiment loose in the First House, and he could have helped us find out what it is. But now you’re going to die too, and you’ll never know the whole story.” The whites

Harrow murmured beneath her breath, for Gideon’s ears only: “The Second dead and dying. Teacher dead, and the revenants with him—” “Teacher turned against the Second. Why are you so sure that Teacher didn’t kill the others?” “Because Teacher was afraid of Canaan House and the facility most of all,” said Harrow. “I need to go back and check, but I suspect he was incapable of going down that ladder at all. He was a construct himself. But what was Teacher the mould for? Griddle, at the first sign of trouble—”

“The cut was made with Tern’s triple-knife,” said Palamedes. He had laid his hand over the wound. He eased his fingers into the hole without any hint of a wince, and he held them there for a second. “And removed the—no, the kidney’s still present. Cam, there was something here.” “Magnifier?” “Don’t need it. It was metal—Camilla, it was here for a while … the flesh had sealed over it. It would—fuck!”

“Someone wanted to hide that key very badly—it may have been Lady Pent herself,” said Palamedes. Finally, he withdrew his hand from her insides, and crossed to wash it in the sink, which Gideon thought was the civilised thing to do. “Or it may have been the person who killed her. There is one room that someone has made every attempt to keep us from. Octakiseron, this wasn’t defilement for the sake of defilement, it was someone breaking open a lockbox.” Silas said calmly, “Are those rooms worth carrying such a sin?” Harrow stared at him. “You took two keys off the Seventh House,” she demanded, “won one from a challenge, and never bothered to open their doors?” “I won the first key to see what I was up against, and took possession of two more to preserve them from misuse,” said Silas.

“This one,” he said. “Half of it. It’s the Seventh cavalier.” “I had assumed as much,” said Harrow. “There was no skull. The time of death only made sense if it was Protesilaus.”

“The other half is someone else,” said Silas. “We can’t do anything for them yet,” said Palamedes. “The living have to take precedence here, if we want to keep living.” As it turned out, he was wrong.

What does that mean?

The other two laboratories Gideon had seen were caves. They were practical places to work and sleep and train and eat, homely at best, cheerless at worst, laboratories in the real sense of the word. This room was something else. It had been light and airy, once. The floors were made of varnished wood, and the walls were great whitewashed panels. The panels had been painted lovingly, a long time ago, with a sprawling expanse of fanciful things: white-skinned trees with pale purple blossoms trailing into orange pools, golden clouds thick with flying birds.

“Hello, friends,” she said. The source of the crying became apparent a little way into the room. Next to the marble slab, Coronabeth was huddled, her arms wrapped around her knees as she rocked backward and forward. Next to her on the ground— “Yes,” said Ianthe. “My cavalier is dead, and I killed him. Please don’t misunderstand, this isn’t a confession.” Naberius Tern lay awkwardly sprawled on the ground. His expression was that of a man who had suffered the surprise of his life. There was something too white about his eyeballs, but otherwise he looked perfectly real, perfectly alive, perfectly coiffed.

The horrible little Ninth goblin stared at her with tight-pressed lips. She had inched away from Gideon toward the theorem plate, and with no sense of shame began to look it over. “You knew about the beguiling corpse,” Harrow said. “You knew how impossible it was.” “Yee-ee-s. I knew the energy transferral didn’t add up. None of the thanergy signatures in this building added up … until I realised what we were all being led to. What the Lyctors of old were trying to tell us. You see, my field has always been energy transferral … large-scale energy transferral. Resurrection theory. I studied what happened when the Lord our Kindly God took our dead and dying Houses and brought them back to life, all those years ago … what price he would have had to pay. What displacement, the soul of a planet? What happens when a planet dies?” “You’re an occultist,” said Palamedes. “You’re a liminal magician. I thought you were an animaphiliac.” “That’s just for show,” said Ianthe. “I’m interested in the place between death and life … the place between release and disappearance. The place over the river. The displacement … where the soul goes when we knock it about … where the things are that eat us.” Harrow said, “You make it sound a lot more interesting than it really is.”

“Step one,” she said, singsong, “preserve the soul, with intellect and memory intact. Step two, analyse it—understand its structure, its shape. Step three, remove and absorb it: take it into yourself without consuming it in the process.” “Oh, fuck,” said Harrow, very quietly. She had moved back to Gideon’s side now, slipping her journal back into her pocket. “The megatheorem.” “Step four, fix it in place so it can’t deteriorate. That’s the part I wasn’t sure of, but I found the method here, in this very room. Step five, incorporate it: find a way to make the soul part of yourself without being overwhelmed. Step six: consume the flesh. Not the whole thing, a drop of blood will do to ground you. Step seven is reconstruction—making spirit and flesh work together the way they used to, in the new body. And then for the last step you hook up the cables and get the power flowing. You’ll find that one a walk in the park, Eighth, I suspect it was your House’s contribution.” Palamedes said: “Princess. You never had any keys. You never saw any of these rooms, except this one.”

“None of this explains why you have killed Naberius Tern.” Ianthe cocked her head to one side, drunkenly, to take him in. The violet of her eyes was dried-up flowers; her mouth was the colour and softness of rocks. “Then you weren’t listening. I haven’t killed Naberius Tern. I ate Naberius Tern,” she said, indifferently. “I put a sword through his heart to pin his soul in place. Then I took it into my body. I’ve robbed Death itself … I have drunk up the substance of his immortal soul. And now I will burn him and burn him and burn him, and he will never really die. I have absorbed Naberius Tern … I am more than the sum of his half, and mine.”

The Crown Princess of Ida was not acknowledging the fact that anyone was speaking to her. Her sister continued: “Everyone’s blind. Corona? A born necromancer? She was as necromantic as Babs. But Dad wanted a matched set. And we didn’t want anything to separate us—so we started the lie. I’ve had to be two necromancers since I was six. It sharpens your focus, I tell you what. No … Corona couldn’t’ve stopped me becoming a Lyctor.” Palamedes said, vaguely, “This can’t be right.” “Of course it’s right, goosey, the Emperor himself helped come up with it.” “So that is Lyctorhood,” said Silas. He sounded quiet, almost fretful, lost in thought. Gideon thought—just for a moment—that she could see Colum Asht’s throat working, that his pupils had dilated just a very, very little. “To walk with the dead forever … enormous power, recycled within you, from the ultimate sacrifice … to make yourself a tomb.” “You understand, don’t you?” said Ianthe. “Yes,” said Silas. Colum closed his eyes and was still. “Yes,” repeated Silas. “I understand fallibility … and fallibility is a terrible thing to understand. I understand that if the Emperor and King Undying came to me now and asked me why I was not a Lyctor, I would fall on my knees and beg his forgiveness, that any of us had ever failed this test. May I be burnt one atom at a time in the most silent hole in the most lightless part of space, Lord—Kindly Prince—should I ever contemplate betraying the compact you appointed between him, and you, ...

“I will cleanse everything here, Ninth, to stop the Houses from finding out how we have debased ourselves,” said Silas. His cavalier drew his great sword and slipped his calloused, stumped-up fingers into his targe: he had stepped before them all with an expression of something that was too deep into relief for Gideon to really translate it. His adept said: “Colum the Eighth. Show no mercy.” “Somebody stop him,” said Ianthe. “Sixth. Ninth. I don’t intend for anyone’s blood to be spilled. Well, you know, any more.”

It was only then that it hit home to Gideon what Ianthe had done. 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. It was not that he had taught her how to fight: it was him fighting. There was Naberius’s instant counterstrike; there was Naberius’s gorgeous deflection, the tiny movement knocking Colum’s shield away. Normally Gideon would have been fascinated to watch the cavalier of the Eighth at work—he was as light on his feet as a feather, and yet his blows were all heavy as lead—but her gaze was locked on Ianthe, only Ianthe, who was moving more Naberius than Naberius ever could, whose body was agile and lithe and as suprahuman as a wisp. But there was one catch. The sword of the Third House must have weighed at least a kilogram, and Naberius’s muscle memory could not quite account for Ianthe’s arms.

The Princess of the Third House raised her hand to her mouth, gored a chunk of flesh from the heel of her palm, and spat it at him like a missile. Ianthe disappeared beneath a greasy, billowing tent—cellular, fleshy, coated all over with neon-yellow bubbles and thin pink film. Colum bounced off this thing as though he had hit a brick wall. He went ass-over-teakettle and rolled over and over, only at the last skidding back up to stand, locking himself into position, panting. Where there had been a necromancer, there was instead a semitransparent dome of skin and subcutaneous fat, baffling to the eye. Nothing loath, Colum charged again, smashing his shield down on it with a bad wet noise like squirk. It was rubbery: it bounced back against him. He gave a mighty slash downward with his sword: the flesh-bubble tore and bled, but did not give.

“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.” This turned all the fluids in Gideon’s body to ice-cold piss. “She—she never mentioned him at all,” she said, stupidly. “No,” said Camilla. “But she—I mean, I was spending so much time with her—” “Yes,” said Camilla. “Oh, God,” said Gideon. “And he was so nice about it. Oh my God. Why the fuck did he not say anything? I didn’t—I mean, I never really—I mean, she and I weren’t—” “He asked her to marry him a year ago,” said Camilla ruthlessly, some floodgate down now, “so that she could spend the rest of her time with someone who cared about her comfort. She refused, but not on the grounds that she didn’t like him. And they weren’t going to relax Imperial rules about necromancers marrying out of House. The letters grew sparser after that. And when he arrived here—she’d moved on. He told me he was glad that she was spending time with someone who made her laugh.”

Gideon, facedown on the dusty ground, moaned: “I want to die.” She was nudged with a foot, not unkindly. “Get up, Griddle.” “Why was I born so attractive?” “Because everyone would have throttled you within the first five minutes otherwise,” said her necromancer. Her attention was on Camilla: “Yet why her about-face, if it’s all how you say it was? I still don’t understand.” “If I did,” said the Sixth cavalier restlessly, “my quality of life, my sleep, and my sense of well-being would improve. Ninth, get up. He

Im dead i cant

I’m glad you didn’t. I didn’t comprehend your mastery of the ghost-within-the-thing. Sixth psychometry.” There was a sudden, tinkling laugh. “I think you ought to be really glad I didn’t comprehend that. Pent by herself gave me such a fright.” “And you put the key inside her—why?” “Time,” said Dulcinea. “I couldn’t afford anybody catching me with it. Hiding it in her flesh obscured its traces. I thought you’d find it earlier, honestly … but it gave me time to gum up the lock. Who

got rid of that? I’d thought I’d made it absolutely unusable.” “That was the Ninth.”

“Oh, she’s still here,” said the person who wasn’t Dulcinea Septimus, dismissively. “She came at the Emperor’s call, cavalier in tow. What happened to him was an accident—when I boarded her ship he refused to hear a word of reason, and I had to kill him. Which didn’t have to happen … not like that, anyway. Then she and I talked … We are very much alike. I don’t mean just in appearance, though that was the case, except in the eyes, as the Seventh House

He said, “Then that story about Protesilaus and the Seventh House was a lie.” “You’re not listening. I never lied,” said the voice. “I said that it was a hypothetical, and you all agreed.” “Semantics.” “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.” There was a very long pause. Palamedes’s voice betrayed nothing when he said: “Well, that’s something, at least. I suppose we’re all to follow now?” “Yes, but this wasn’t really about any of you,” said the woman in the room with him. “Not personally. I knew that if I ruined his Lyctor plans—killed the heirs and cavaliers to all the other eight Houses—I’d draw him back to the system, but I had to do it in a subtle enough way that he wouldn’t bring the remaining Hands with him. If I had arrived in full force, he’d have turned up on a war footing, and sent the Lyctors to do all the dirty work like always. This way he’s lulled into a false sense of … semisecurity, I suppose. And he won’t even bother coming within Dominicus’s demesne. He’ll sit out there beyond the system—trying to find ou...

What is going on???

You can’t do that to somebody’s soul. Teacher was nearly demented. Did you know what we did to him? I say we, but he wasn’t my project … he was a holy terror. Blame your own House for that! I can’t be grateful enough to those Second ninnies for killing him and calling for help. He was the only one here who scared me. He couldn’t have stopped me, but he might have made things stupid.” “Why did Teacher not recognise you?” “Perhaps he did,” said the woman. It sounded like she was smiling. “Who knows what that soul melange was ever thinking?” There was another pause. She said, “You’ve taken this much more sensibly than I thought you would. When you’re young, you do everything the moment you think about it. For example, I’ve been thinking about doing this for the last three hundred years … but I assumed you would try something silly when you realized she was dead.” “I wouldn’t ever try to do something silly,” Palamedes said lightly. “I made the decision to kill you the moment I knew there was no more chance to save her. That’s all.”

was another laugh, but this one was punctuated by a big wet cough too. No laughter followed. She said, “Young Warden of the Sixth House, what have you done?” “Tied the noose,” said Palamedes Sextus. “You gave me the rope. You have severe blood cancer … just as Dulcinea did. Advanced, as hers was when she died. Static, because the Lyctor process begins radical cell renewal at the point of absorption. All this time we’ve been talking, I’ve been taking stock of everything that’s wrong with you—your bacterial lung infection, the neoplasms in your skeletal structure—and I’ve pushed them along. You’ve been in a terrific amount of pain for the last myriad. I hope that pain is nothing to what your own body’s about to do to you, Lyctor. You’re going to die spewing your own lungs out of your nostrils, having failed at the finish line because you couldn’t help but prattle about why you killed innocent people, as though your reasons were interesting … 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.”

There was no heat, but Gideon sprinted away from that cold white death without bothering to spare a glance behind as though flames were licking at her heels. There was another enormous CRRR-RRR-RRRACK and a boom. The ceiling shook wide showers of plaster dust down on her head as she threw herself bodily through a doorway. She ran for her life down the long corridors, past ancient portraits and crumbling statues, the grave goods of the tomb of Canaan House, the mechanisms of this feeble shitty machine crumbling as Palamedes Sextus became a god-killing star.

“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.”

“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.

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,” she said.