Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)

by Tamsyn Muir

“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.”

“Stop being such a bone adept,”

When she opened them again the pupil and the iris were gone, leaving the terrible white of the eyeball.

Neither of her eyes were their original colour. Both the pupil and the iris were intermingled shades of brown, purple, and blue. Ianthe closed her eyes a third time, and when the pale lashes opened, both had returned to insipid amethyst.

“Oh, fuck,” said Harrow, very quietly. She had moved back to Gideon’s side now, slipping her journal back into her pocket. “The megatheorem.”

you don’t need the study notes—not if you’re the best necromancer the Third House ever produced. Aren’t I, Corona? Baby, stop crying, you’re going to get such a headache.”

“Ghastly and obvious are my middle names,” said the pale twin. “Sextus, you sweet Sixth prude. Use that big, muscular brain of yours. I’m not talking about the deep calculus. Ten thousand years ago there were sixteen acolytes of the King Undying, and then there were eight. Who were the cavaliers to the Lyctor faithful? Where did they go?”

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.

I haven’t killed Naberius Tern. I ate Naberius Tern,”

“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 ab...

“Poor Corona!” said Ianthe. “Don’t get on her case, you little white excuse for a human being. What could she have done? Don’t you know my sister has a bad, sad secret? Everyone looks at her and sees what they want to see … beauty and power. Incredible hair. The perfect child of an indomitable House.”

“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.”

“Of course it’s right, goosey, the Emperor himself helped come up with it.”

“Come off it, you’d drain him dry if you thought it would keep your virtue intact. This is the same thing, just more humane.”

brand you heretic, Ianthe Tridentarius. I sentence you to death.

“Sixth. Ninth. I don’t intend for anyone’s blood to be spilled. Well, you know, any more.”

He came down on Ianthe like a wolf on the fold.

a ghost fighting inside the meat suit of his adept—made

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.

Thin fingers wrapped around her wrist. When she looked around, Harrow was tight-lipped. “Don’t go near them,” she said. “Don’t touch her. Don’t think about touching her.”

With an awful crack, his head turned one hundred and eighty degrees to look impassively at the room behind him.

She drew her rapier from its scabbard, and she threw herself at the grey thing wearing a person skin.

Corona looked up at her with tears on her beautiful lashes and eyes swollen from crying. She threw herself into Gideon’s arms, and she sobbed, silently now, utterly destroyed. Gideon was soothed by the fact that someone in this madhouse was still human enough to cry.

“And who even cares about Babs? Babs! She could have taken me.”

Harrow says I’m a weenie over Dulcinea—” (“You are,” said Harrow, “a weenie over Dulcinea,”)

He’s been—a weenie—over her.

This turned all the fluids in Gideon’s body to ice-cold piss.

“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 told me he was glad that she was spending time with someone who made her laugh.”

An eight-year-old writing love letters to a terminally ill teenager.

Gideon lay on the floor, facedown, and became hysterical.

Gideon, facedown on the dusty ground, moaned: “I want to die.”

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

Your what?” said Harrow, affrighted.)

I’m sorry I’m a homewrecker.”

She tried to speak, but her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth and she tasted blood. She struggled—an insect pinned to its backing—and

Palamedes surveyed his work, and he saw that it was good.

He smiled, and with that strange alchemy he was made lovely, his grey eyes bright and clear.

“That’s more than impressive,” she said. “The Emperor would love to get hold of her … thank goodness he never will.

“Who knows what that soul melange was ever thinking?”

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.

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.”

“Gideon!” he called out. “Tell Camilla—” He stopped. “Oh, never mind. She knows what to do.”

Gideon sprinted away from that cold white death without bothering to spare a glance behind as though flames were licking at her heels.

Palamedes Sextus became a god-killing star.

The woman Gideon had kind of had the hots for held a gleaming rapier. She was barefoot. She leaned in the smoking doorway and turned away, and she began to cough: she spasmed, retched, clung to the frame for support.

“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.”

Harrowhark stood at the top of the stairs, hands full of white particles, her skull-painted face as hard and merciless as morning:

Cytherea the First emerged from the clusterfuck, coughing into the back of her hand, looking rumpled but entirely whole.