Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1)

by Tamsyn Muir

Gideon was amazed at how badly it hurt, all of a sudden. “He’s really dead,” she said aloud. “Yes. I will be more upset if he suddenly changes condition,” said Harrow. “He was a stranger, Nav. Why does it affect you so much?” “He was nice to me,” she found herself saying. She was very tired. She tried to wake herself up by stretching, dropping down to touch her toes and feeling the blood rush into her head. “Because he was a stranger, I think … He didn’t have to bother with me, to make time for me or remember my name, but he did. Hell, you treat me more like a stranger than Magnus Quinn did and I’ve known you all my life. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it.”

The necromancer regarded her with a strangely fierce eye: mouth a worn-down line of indecision, forehead puckered as though she was thinking her entire face into a wrinkle. There was still blood flaking out of her eyebrows, which was gross.

“I must no longer accept,” she said slowly, “being a stranger to you.” “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Gideon, sudden sweat prickling the back of her neck, “yes you can, you once told me to dig myself an ice grave. Stop before this gets weird.”

“I’m not anybody’s son or daughter,”

“I need you to trust me.” “I need you to be trustworthy.”

They stared at each other with shared panic.

“In what way can I earn your trust?” “Let us sleep for eight bloody hours and never talk like this again,”

Her eyes were so lightlessly black that it was hard to see the pupil; her mouth was th...

Several hours later, Gideon turned over in her bed, chilled by the realisation that Harrow had not promised to never talk like that again. Too much of this shit, and they’d end up friends.

(Harrow always lied),

“And then the key—what, lets you into a room where you can rub your face all over ye olde necro’s olde notebooks?”

Because even though I’m dying—there’s nothing wrong with my brain.”

“Oh, whoops, my bad,” said Gideon. “For a moment I thought you weren’t a huge bitch.”

“I’d rather be your battery than feel you rummaging around in my head. You want my juice? I’ll give you juice.”

“Under no circumstances will I ever desire your juice,”

felt like nothing, at first. Besides Harrow touching her neck, which was a one-way trip to No Town. But it was just Harrow, touching her neck.

“Oh, Gideon,” someone was saying, “you poor baby.”

Was she screaming? Oh, shit, she was screaming.

“Ha-ha,” said Gideon, “first time you didn’t call me Griddle,” and died.

Dulcinea, whose eyes were still the dusty blue of blueberries.

“You big baby,” she said, and shamelessly kissed her on the forehead.

“Lady Septimus,” she said, “unhand my cavalier.

Gideon wanted to say, Nonagesimus, quit the sacred-bat-black-vestal act,

“Again … unhand her.”

“Lady Septimus,” the other necromancer repeated, “I will not ask thrice.”

Dulcinea unwound herself, which was a shame; she was warm, and the room was colder than ten witches’ tits.

her necromancer leant down and heaved one of Gideon’s arms around her skinny shoulders. Before Gideon could even think Oh shit, she had been pulled to stand as Harrowhark’s knees buckled beneath her.

“Harrow, you can’t just ask someone why they want to be a Lyctor,”

“Sorry your clothes melted.”

“By which point it had eaten your underwear,” said Gideon. “Nav.” “I just had a near-death experience,” she said, “let me have my little moment.”

“Quit looking at me like that,” she eventually commanded Harrow, wiping bloody muck onto her hanky. “I’m alive.”

Don’t price your life so cheaply, Griddle. I have absolutely no interest in you losing your sense of self-preservation.

WHEN GIDEON WOKE UP later, Dominicus had made the room wet and orange with evening light.

I have taken the keys and gone to examine the new laboratory. DO NOT come and find me.

DO NOT leave the quarters. I will ask Sextus to look at you.

DO NOT go anywhere. I have left some bread for you in a drawer.

“Go anywhere” in this case is defined as leaving the quarters to go to any other location in Canaan House, which you are banned from doing.

“I’m not eating your nasty drawer food,”

She combed through her hair with her fingers, and thought of Dulcinea, and for some reason blushed deeply.

The bread in the drawer—which she ate, ravenously, like a wraith—was not.

“What’s your mum’s name,”

her fine sheets of slate-brown hair were cut sharply below her chin, giving a general air of scissor blades.

“Passing blood? In your piss?” “Look, this conversation is all I’ve ever dreamed about,” said Gideon, “but I’m fine. H— My necromancer overreacted.”

Gideon submitted to this treatment because she had gone a round with Camilla the Sixth before and had a healthy fear of her.

“But I’m healthy.” “Didn’t say your brain was.” “I’m taking that as a very witty joke and want it to be known that I laughed,”

The Eighth probably does have brain damage. It’s not his brain they need.

Corona looked like a grief-stricken king: her lovely chin and shoulders were thrust out defiantly, and her mouth was hard and remorseless as glass. Her violet eyes looked as though she had been crying, though perhaps from anger.

She stared with glassy eyes at Camilla the Sixth’s plate—Camilla, who had finished most of hers, rolled her eyes and pushed her leftovers to Gideon. This was an act for which she was fond of Camilla forever after.

Oh, exquisite! Harrowhark had kept Palamedes Sextus in a loop that didn’t include Gideon. She felt angry; then she felt bereft; then she felt angry again. This felt like being hot and cold at once.

“Because he’s a prig and a nasty weirdo,” said Gideon.