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.

Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.

Gideon never ran unless she had to.

It tasted gorgeously grey and horrible.

Whenever Gideon had been made to go through those doors as a kid, she’d screamed like she was dying.

“Thirty whole minutes since I took it off, Crux,”

“It’s almost like you want me to leave here forever. Ohhhh shit, you absolutely do though.”

marshal of Drearburh, whose main claim to fame was that he was more decrepit alive than some of the legitimately dead.

“You falsified documents. You stole a key. You removed your cuff. You wrong this house, you misuse its goods, you steal its stock.”

“You hate me, I hate you. Just let me go without a fight and you can retire in peace. Take up a hobby. Write your memoirs.”

“You wrong this house. You misuse its goods. You steal its stock.”

Crux loved...

“Say my shuttle exploded. I died, and it was such a shame. Give me a break, Crux, I’m begging you here—I’ll trade you a skin m...

“Okay, okay. I take it back. Frontline Titties isn’t a ...

Crux advanced like a glacier wit...

Crux might have been very nearly dead, but he was built like gristle with what seemed like thirty knuckles to each fist. He was old, but he was goddamn ghastly.

“Take this much further and you’re in danger of enjoying yourself.”

“You talk so loudly for chattel, Nav,”

“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 Nin...

threat’s meant to be ‘Come here, or…’”

“Come here and I’ll black your eyes for you and knock you dead,”

the day he died, Crux would keep going anyway out of sheer malice.

“Black my eyes and knock me dead,” she said slowly, “but your Lady can go right to hell.”

“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.”

“He said you made your blade naked to him. He said you offered him sick pornographies.”

“Threaten a house official and I wouldn’t make toilet-wiper in the Cohort.”

“And the pornography?”

“I did offer him stupendous work of a titty nature, and...

The Cohort’s not going to care about that though. Have I mentioned the Cohort? You do know the Cohort, right? The Cohort I’ve lef...

“Save the drama, y...

She was younger than Crux, which was to say, old as balls:

“The last time, she jammed me in the lift. The time before that she turned off the heating and I got frostbite in three toes. Time before that: she poisoned my food and had me crapping blood for a month. Need I go on.”

“This is her being sad and desperate,”

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...

“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—”

Aiglamene slapped her,

“I guess I’ll disgrace you,” Gideon admitted easily. “I feel like I was born to it. I’m naturally demeaning.”

Nav was a Niner name,

They knew by age five that she was not a necromancer, and suspected by eight that she would never be a nun. Certainly, they would have known by ten that she knew too much, and that she could never be allowed to go.

simple attempts to run away numbered eighty-six by the time she was eighteen. She’d started when she was four.

THERE WERE FIVE MINUTES to go when Gideon’s eighty-seventh escape plan got messed up fantastically.

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.

“I don’t care that you run away. I care that you do it badly. Take your hand from your sword, you’re humiliating yourself.”

“It’s a cute story, but badly characterised,” she said. “Why the sudden mercy on my part?”

“Some of your magazines are very nasty,”

“I squeal so long and so loud they hear me from the Eighth. I tell them everything. You know what I know. And I’ll tell them the numbers. They’d bring me home in cuffs, but I’d come back laughing my ass off.”

“How coarse and ordinary,” she said. “How effective, how crass. My parents should have smothered you.”

“I’d like to see them try it now,”

“I completely fucking hate you, because you are a hideous witch from hell. No offence.”