More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“If it were merely about getting what I wanted, I wouldn’t have bothered to take you at all. I would have you packed up in nine boxes and sent each box to a different House, the ninth box kept for Crux to comfort him in his old age. I will succeed with you in tow and nobody will ever know that there was aught amiss with the House of the Ninth. Paint your face. Train with the rapier. You’re dismissed.”
“God, no!” said Harrow. “All you need to know is that you’ll do what I say, or I’ll mix bone meal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut.”
As for the Lady of the Ninth herself, she locked herself in the library and didn’t come out.
Very occasionally she would watch Gideon train, remark on the absolute lack of progress, make Gideon strip her paint off her face and command her to do it again. One day she and Aiglamene made Gideon walk behind Harrow, up and down the tiers, shadowing her until Gideon was nearly mad with impatience.
“Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.”
Harrow stayed with her books and studied her necromancy, getting leaner and more haggard, crueller and more mean.
The marshal of Drearburh reappeared like a chronic disease
“Oh, this is boring,” Gideon had said in disappointment. “I wanted one with a skull puking another, smaller skull, and other skulls flying all around. But tasteful, you know?”
“after eleven ghoulish weeks of training you, beating you senseless, and watching you fall around like a dropsical infant, you are on a miraculous day up to the standard of a bad cavalier, one who’s terrible.” (This was great praise.)
pray for the cavalier…” At this Gideon caught the dark, black-rimmed eye, and could imagine the mental accompaniment:… to choke to death on her own vomit.
“Do you want,” Gideon whispered huskily, “my hanky.” “I want to watch you die.” “Maybe, Nonagesimus,” she said with deep satisfaction, “maybe. But you sure as hell won’t do it here.”
FROM SPACE, THE HOUSE of the First shone like fire on water. Wreathed in the white smoke of its atmosphere, blue like the heart of a gas-ignited flame, it burned the eye. It was absolutely lousy with water, smothering it all in the bluest of blue conflagrations. Visible even up here were the floating chains of squares and rectangles and oblongs, smudging the blue with grey and green, brown and black: the tumbled-down cities and temples of a House both long dead and unkillable. A sleeping throne. Far away its king and emperor sat on his seat of office and waited, a sentinel protecting his home
...more
Harrow had slid the barrier back down with an air of distinct finality.
Gideon had warmed herself with the thought that it was the perfect time to kick her ass up and down the shuttle, but in the end, the natural embarrassment of arriving with one’s necromancer’s elbows on backward saved Harrow’s life.
It was incredible. It was exquisite. She wanted to throw up.
Her mouth was pinched in a tight ripple, worrying the black-painted blotch on the lower lip into blood.
“I came prepared, my sweet.” “What are you even saying half the time—”
Gideon realised that Harrow was trembling; little licks of hole-black hair were pasted to her pale grey forehead with sweat, threatening to dissolve the paint.
“Hood up,” breathed Harrowhark, “hide that ridiculous hair.” “Your dead mummified mother’s got ridiculous hair.” “Griddle, we’re within the planet’s halo now, and I will delight in violence.”
“But then you couldn’t have admired … these,” and whipped on the glasses she’d unearthed back home. They were ancient smoked-glass sunglasses, with thin black frames and big mirrored lenses, and they greyed out Harrow’s expression of incredulous horror as she adjusted them on her nose.
The whole place had the look of a picked-at body. But hot damn! What a beautiful corpse.
sulky young man with an air of hair gel and filigree,
The other two were young women, both blond, though the similarity ended there: one girl was tall and statuesque, with a star-white grin and masses of bright gold curls. The other girl seemed smaller, insubstantial, with a sheet of hair the anaemic colour of canned butter and an equally bloodless smirk. They were actually the same height, Gideon realised; her brain had just deemed that proposition too stupid to credit on first pass. It was as though the second girl were the starved shadow of the first, or the first an illuminated reflection. The boy just looked a bit of a dick.
“Twins are an ill omen.”
Gideon never ran unless she had to,
For the person folded up in Gideon’s arms seemed a her. It was a slender young thing whose mouth was a brilliant red with blood. Her dress was a frivolous concoction of seafoam green frills, the blood on it startling against such a backdrop. Her skin seemed transparent—horribly transparent, with the veins at her hands and the sides of her temples a visible cluster of mauve branches and stems. Her eyes fluttered open: they were huge and blue, with velvety brown lashes. The girl coughed up a clot, which ruined the tableau, and those big blue eyes widened in dismay.
“Oh, God, I was rescued by a shadow cultist!
“You can’t just get your rapier out willy-nilly.”
light streamed down in such quantities it made Gideon halfway blind again.
Harrowhark refused to sit.
Harrowhark held her cup as though it were a live slug.
She choked discreetly: the Reverend Daughter gave her a look that withered the bowels.
There was only one prayer on the Ninth.
Gideon had known on some basic level that the religion practised in the dark depths of Drearburh was not quite the religion practised by the other Houses. It was still a shock to the system to have it confirmed.
“Griddle,” she said, “this planet spins much faster than ours.” At Gideon’s continued blank expression: “It’s night, you tool.”
a bed for Gideon, except that it was placed at the foot of Harrowhark’s bed, which she could not have noped at harder.
GIDEON WOKE TO AN unfamiliar ceiling, a fuzzy taste on her tongue, and the exciting smell of mould.
Don’t talk to anybody. “Guess I won’t talk to … any body,” said Gideon, but then read on: I have taken the ring.
There was no mistake greater or stupider than to let Harrowhark Nonagesimus at you when you were in any way vulnerable; she should have booby-trapped the threshold. It
She tried to cheer herself up with the thought that this at least meant Harrow wasn’t around, a thought that would have cheered up anyone.
Maybe this pretending to be a cavalier gig wasn’t so bad after all.
(but Ninth soap had been made of human fat so no thanks)
Fix your face, idiot.
Do not try to find me. I am working. Keep your head down and stay out of trouble. I reiterate the order that you do not talk to anybody. Another note was stuck beneath, belatedly: To clarify, anybody is a word that refers to any person alive or dead.
Paint your face adequately.
“Your parents must have been so relieved to die.”
She pulled her sunglasses out of the pocket of her robe and eased them on, which completed the effect, if the effect you wanted was “horrible.”
There was a man sitting close to a pair of ghastly teens: younger than Gideon, still in the midst of losing their fight with puberty. The boy wore trim navy robes and the girl had a jewelled scabbard on her back, and when Gideon entered they had looked up at the cultist of the Ninth with unabashed interest close to awe. The man close to this horrible pair had a kind, jovial face and curly hair, with clothes of excellent cut and a gorgeously wrought rapier at his side.
You couldn’t spend any time in the Ninth House without coming away with an unwholesome knowledge of skeletons.
From three tables over, the loathsome teens greeted his audacity with low moans: they lost all appearance of restrained respectability and instead chorused his name in slow, hurt-animal noises, lowing “Magnus! Maaaaagnus,”
