Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)

by Tamsyn Muir

“I trust Camilla. I trust that her reasons for ending someone’s life would be logical, moral, and probably to my benefit,” he said, sliding one fragile eyelid up an eyeball. “Your problem here is that you suspect that Harrow has killed people for much less.”

“Um. You are now getting the impression that my relationship with her is more—fraught—than you might’ve guessed.”

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.”

“Because I killed her parents,”

Harrowhark had hated Gideon the moment she clapped eyes on her,

most people ignored small Gideon Nav the way you would a turd that had sprouted legs,

tiny Harrow had found her an object of tormentable fascination—prey, rival, and audie...

though Gideon hated the cloisterites, and hated the Locked Tomb, and hated the ghastly great-aunts, and hated Crux most of all, she was hungry fo...

Everyone acted as though the Emperor had personally resurrected Harrowhark just to bring them joy:

she had been born healthy and whole, a prodigious necromancer, a perfect penitent nunlet.

They fought each other bloody, for which Harrow was not punished and Gideon was.

They set elaborate traps, sieges, and assaults, and grew up in each other’s pockets, even if it was generally while trying to grievously injure the other one.

At last she set her gaze on the one thing truly forbidden to her: Harrow became obsessed with the Locked Door.

Out of everyone who found Gideon Nav repellent, Harrow’s parents had always found her particularly so.

Just hours before, she’d wrestled Harrow down in the dirt, and Harrow had scratched until she’d had half of Gideon’s face beneath her fingernails.

she was a shitty trash child she wanted to relish the one chance she had of hearing Harrowhark raked over the coals.

Harrow had beheld her. She had beheld Harrow. And nothing had ever gone right after that, never ever.

“I was eleven,” said Gideon. “And here I am, narking all over again.”

Gideon felt absolutely the opposite: dirty and muddy, terribly exposed, as though she had unbuttoned her chest and given him a good long look at what was inside her ribs.

“If, the second I stepped off my shuttle,” said the suddenly revealed double murderer blithely, “I had snatched Cam’s dagger and put it straight through Teacher’s throat, the Lyctoral trial could never have begun. There’d have been uproar. The Cohort would have arrived, I’d have been dragged away, and everyone else would have been sent safe back home. Because I didn’t kill Teacher, the trial began, and because the trial began, Magnus Quinn and Abigail Pent are dead. So: I did it. It’s my fault. All I ask is that you put some pen and flimsy in my cell so I can start on my memoirs.”

how she’d cuffed Harrow was going to be a tale of terror for another day.

Ianthe Tridentarius’s acid drawl was loudest: “Well, this is the only interesting thing she’s ever done.”

“A dying woman is the perfect necromancer,” said Ianthe.

The skull’s mine by finder’s rights—”

“Ninth, the head is going in the morgue where it belongs,” said the captain. “You don’t have carrion rights over found murders, and today is not the day when I’ll countenance your House taking bones that don’t belong to it.”

“Some people will do anything to get … a head.”

“The furnace bones are still mine to identify.”

“I always said he didn’t look right,” said the cavalier. “You said no such thing,” said the first twin. “At no point did you ever say that,” said the second twin.

She simply turned in a swish of black cloth and said, “Follow me.”

Gideon had prepared beforehand a fuck-you salvo so long and so loud that Harrow would have to be taken away to be killed; but then Harrow added, “Please.”

Gideon might well have shaken her until the teeth in her head and the teeth in her pockets all rattled.

“Oh, thank God for that,” said Gideon hysterically, profoundly embarrassed at how her heart rate had spiked. “Shut up and get in the pool.”

Harrow stepped in too—walking off the side carelessly, slipping beneath the water like a clean black knife.

“Oh shit,” she said. “You really meant it. This is it. This is go time.”

“Griddle,” said Harrow, “I have not puppeted my own parents around for five years and learned nothing.”

“No, you monster’s ass,”

mean, why didn’t you tell me you’d killed him before you sent Jeannemary Chatur and her necromancer down to the facility to look for the guy who was in a box in your closet?

Let’s not send two children downstairs to get fucked up by a ...

My plan was to get you clear of a necromantic duel. At the time I even thought it elegant.”

“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,” said Gideon, “if my heart had a dick you would kick it.”

“I did not want to alienate you more than I already had. And then it seemed as though—we we...

would have waited for you in our rooms, with my sword drawn, and I would have gone for you. I was so convinced you were behind everything. That you’d killed Jeannemary and Isaac. Magnus and Abigail.”

The silence was terrible. It lasted for such a long time that she wondered if Harrow had slyly drowned herself in the interim, until—

“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.”

“The infants alone generated enough thanergy to take out the entire planet. Babies always do—for some reason.”

the noise of her heartbeat thumping through her skull was like an explosion.

“Gross,” said Gideon dully. “Ick. The worst. What can I say to that? What the fuck can I say to all that?”

“It let me be born,” said the necromancer. “And I was—me. And I have been aware, since I was very young, about how I was created. I am exactly two hundred sons and daughters of my House, Griddle—I am the whole generation of the Ninth. I came into this world a necromancer at the expense of Drearburh’s future—because there is no future without me.”