by Tamsyn Muir
“What the hell are you going to tell them?”
“Nothing, idiot!” said Harrow. “This is the House of the Ninth, Griddle. We act accordingly.”
Gideon checked her face, and put down the paint and the wadding. Act accordingly meant that any attempt to talk to an outsider as a kid had led to her getting dragged away bodily; act accordingly meant the House had been closed to pilgrims for five years. Act accordingly had been her secret dread that ten years from now everyone else would be skeletons and explorers would find Ortus reading poetry next to her and Harrow’s bodies, their fingers still clasped around each other’s throats. Act accordingly, to Gideon, meant being secret and abstruse and super obsessed with tomes.
“I won’t have people asking questions. You’ll look the part. Give me that,” commanded Harrow, and she took the fat stick of black char from Gideon’s hand. She tried to turn Gideon’s face up to hers by force, fingers grasping beneath the chin, but Gideon promptly bit her. There was a simple joy in watching Harrow swear furiously and shake her hand and peel off the bitten glove, like in seeing sunlight or eating a good meal.
Harrow began fiddling ominously with one of the bone pins at her ear, so with extreme reluctance, as of an animal not wanting to take medicine, Gideon tilted her face up to get painted. Harrow took the black and stroked it beneath Gideon’s eyes—none too gently, making her anticipate an exciting jab in the cornea. “I don’t want to dress up like a goddamn nun again. I got enough of that when I was ten,” said Gideon.
“Everyone else will be dressing exactly how they ought to dress,” said Harrow, “and if the Ninth House contravenes that—the House least likely to do any such thing—then people will examine us a hell of a lot more closely than they ought. If you look just right then perhaps they won’t ask you any tricky questions. They may not discover that the cavalier of the House of the Ninth is an illiterate peon. Hold your mouth closed.”
Gideon held her mouth closed and, once Harrow was done, said: “I object to illiterate.”
“Pinup rags aren’t literature, Nav.”
“I read them for the articles.”
When as a young and disinclined member of the Locked Tomb Gideon had painted her face, she had gone for the bare minimum of death’s-head that the role demanded: dark around the eyes, a bit around the nose, a slack black slash across the lips. Now as Harrowhark gave her a little palm of cracked mirror, she saw that she was painted like the ancient, tottering necromancers of the House: those ghastly and unsettling sages who never seemed to die, just disappear into the long galleries of books and coffins beneath Drearburh. She’d been slapped up to look like a grim-toothed, black-socketed skull, with big black holes on each side of the mandible.
Gideon said drearily, “I look like a douche.”
“I want you to appear before me every day, like this, until the day we leave,” said Harrowhark, and she leant against the desk to view her handiwork. “I won’t cut you bald—even though your hair is ridiculous—because I know you won’t shave your head daily. Learn this paint. Wear the robe.”
“I’m waiting for the and,” said Gideon. “You know. The payoff. If you let me have my head, I’d wear my breastplate and use my sword—you’re an imbecile if you think I’ll be able to fight properly wearing a robe—and I could cavalier until the rest of them went home. I could cavalier until they just made you a Hand on the first day and put sexy pictures of me on a calendar. Where’s the and, Nonagesimus?”
“There is no and,” Harrow said, and pushed herself away from Gideon’s chair to throw herself back down on the sofa once more. “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.”
“Isn’t this the part where you give me intel,” Gideon said, standing up and flexing her stiff muscles, “tell me all you know of the tasks ahead, who we’re with, what to expect?”
“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.”
Which was, Gideon had to admit, entirely plausible.
6
IF GIDEON HAD WORRIED that the next three months would see her in close proximity to the Reverend Daughter, she was dead wrong. She spent six hours a day learning where to put her feet when she wielded a one-handed sword, where to rest (what seemed to her to be) her useless, unused arm, how to suddenly make herself a sideways target and always move on the same stupid foot. At the end of each punishing session, Aiglamene would take her in a one-on-one fight and disarm her in three moves.
“Parry, damn you, parry!” was the daily refrain. “This isn’t your longsword, Nav, you block with it again and I’ll make you eat it!”
On the few early days when she had foregone the paint, Crux had appeared and turned off the heating to her cell: she would end up slumped on her tier, screaming with cold, numb and nearly dead. So she wore the goddamn paint. It was nearly worse than her pre-cavalier life, except that as a small mercy she could train instead of going to prayers and, as a bigger mercy, Crux and Harrow were nearly never around. The heir to the House had ordered her marshal to do something secret down in the bowels of Drearburh, where bowed and creaking Ninth brothers and sisters worked hour after hour at whatever grisly task Harrowhark had set.
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.
The only dubious advantage to this was that she would sometimes hear snatches of conversation, standing motionless and rigid-backed with her hand on the pommel of her sword and her sightline somewhere beyond Harrow’s shoulder. Gideon was hungry for intel, but these exchanges were never very illuminating. The most she got was the day Harrow, too fretful to modulate her voice, said outright: “Naturally it’s a competition, Captain, even if the wording…”
“Well, the Third House will naturally be the best equipped…”
“And the Second will have spent half their lives at the front and be covered in Cohort decorations. It doesn’t signify. I don’t care about soldiers or politicians or priests. It’s a greyer House I worry about.”
Aiglamene said something that Gideon did not catch. Harrow gave a short, hard laugh.
“Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.”
Otherwise Harrow stayed with her books and studied her necromancy, getting leaner and more haggard, crueller and more mean. Each night Gideon fell into bed and was asleep before she could tend her blistered feet and massage her bruised body. On days when she had behaved very well Aiglamene let her train with her longsword instead, which had to pass for fun.
The last week before they were due to leave came all at once, like startling awake from a half-remembered and unsettling dream. The marshal of Drearburh reappeared like a chronic disease to stand over Gideon as she loaded her trunk, all of it with old hand-me-downs of Ortus’s that could be hastily remade into three different Gideon-sized articles. These reclaimed robes were like her normal clothes, dour and black, but better made, dourer, and blacker. She spent a significant amount of time boring slats into the bottom of the trunk so that she could squirrel away her beloved, deserted longsword, packing it like precious contraband.
Aiglamene had found and reforged the sword of Ortus’s grandmother’s mother, and presented it to a nonplussed Gideon. The blade was black metal, and it had a plain black guard and hilt, unlike the intricate messes of teeth and wires that adorne
d some of the other rapiers down at the monument. “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?”
She was also given knuckles: they were even less ornate, being obsidian and steel set in thick and heavy bands. There were three black blades on the back of the gauntlet, rigidly fixed in place. “But for God’s sake don’t use them for anything but a parry,” said her teacher.
“This is confusing. You made me train empty-handed.”
“Gideon,” said her teacher, “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.) “But you fall apart as soon as you start to overthink your offhand. Use the knuckles to balance. Give yourself options if someone gets inside your guard—though better yet, don’t let them get inside your guard. Keep moving. Be fluid. Remember that your hands are now sisters, not twins; one executes your primary action and the other supports the move. Pray they don’t watch you fight too closely. And stop blocking every blow.”
On the final day the entire House of the Ninth filled the tier of the landing field, and they left room to spare: it was sad to watch their eagerness, their kissing Harrowhark’s hem over and over. They all knelt in prayer with the godawful great-aunts as their Reverend Daughter stood and watched, tranquil and bloodless as the skeletons ploughing in the tiers above.
Gideon had noticed the absence of the ex-Reverend Father and Mother, but hadn’t thought anything of it. She was too busy thinking about her itchy secondhand clothes and the rapier buckled at her side, and the paint that was now a second skin on her face. But she was still surprised when Harrow said: “Brothers and sisters, listen. My mother and father will not be with you. My father has sealed shut the passageway to the tomb that must always be locked, and they have decided to continue their penitence behind that wall until I return. The marshal will act as seneschal for me, and my captain will act as marshal.”
Testament to Harrow’s timing for drama, the Secundarius Bell began ringing. From above the drillshaft the shuttle started to make its descent, blotting out the ever-fainter light of the equinox. For the very first time Gideon did not feel the overwhelming sense of dread and suspicion: a pinprick of anticipation curled in her gut instead. Round two. Go.
Harrowhark looked out at the people of the Ninth. So did Gideon. There were all the assorted nuns and brethren; old pilgrims and ageing vassals; every gloomy, severe, and stern face of adept and mystic, of joyless and wasted men and women, of the grey and monotonous population that had made up Gideon’s life and never shown her one single moment of sympathy or kindness. Harrow’s face was bright with elation and fervour. Gideon would have sworn there were tears in her eyes, except that no such liquid existed: Harrow was a desiccated mummy of hate.
“You are my beloved House,” she said. “Rest assured that wherever I go, my heart is interred here.”
It sounded like she really meant it.
Harrow began, “We pray the tomb is shut forever…” and Gideon found herself reciting simply because it was the only prayer she’d ever known, enduring the words by saying them as sounds without meaning. She stopped when Harrowhark stopped, her hands clasped, and added: “I pray for our success for the House; I pray for the Lyctors, devoted Hands of the Emperor; I pray to be found pleasing in his eyes. I 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.
“Let it be so,” said the Lady of the Ninth House.
The rattling of the assorted prayer bones very nearly drowned out the clank of the shuttle, docking. Gideon turned away, not meaning to make any kind of goodbye; but she saw Aiglamene, hand crooked into a stiff salute, and realised for the first time that she might never see the woman again. God help her, she might never come back. For a moment everything seemed dizzyingly unsure. The House continued on in grand and grisly majesty because you were always looking at it; it continued because you watched it continue, changeless and black, before your eyes. The idea of leaving it made it seem so fragile as to crumble the moment they turned their backs. Harrowhark turned toward the shuttle and Gideon realised with an unwelcome jolt that she was crying: her paint was wet with tears.
And then the whole idea became beautiful. The moment Gideon turned her back on it, the House would die. The moment Gideon walked away, it would all disappear like an impossibly bad dream. She mentally staved in the sides of the enormous, shadowy cave and buried Drearburh in rock, and for good measure exploded Crux like a garbage bag full of soup. But she saluted Aiglamene as crisply and as enthusiastically as a soldier on her first day of service, and was pleased when her teacher rolled her eyes.
As they pulled themselves into the shuttle, the door mechanism sliding down with a pleasingly final whunk, she leaned into Harrow: Harrow, who was dabbing her eyes with enormous gravity. The necromancer flinched outright.
“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.”
7
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 but never able to return to it. The Lord of the House of the First was the Lord Undying, and he had not come back in over nine thousand years.
Gideon Nav pressed her face up to the plexiform window of the shuttle and looked as if she couldn’t ever get enough of looking, until her eyes were red and streaming and huge migraine motes danced along the edge of her vision. All the other shutters were closed up tight and had been for most of the trip, which had taken about an hour of rapid travel. They had been surprised to find that, behind the plex privacy barrier Harrowhark had coolly slid up the moment they were inside, there was no pilot on board. The ship was being remotely piloted at great expense. There was no clearance for anybody to land at the First House without explicit invitation. There was a button to press if you needed to talk to the remote navigator, and Gideon had been eager to hear another voice, but Harrow had slid the barrier back down with an air of distinct finality.
She looked worn and exhausted, even vulnerable. For the journey’s length she had kept her prayer knuckles in her hands and moodily clinked them into each other. In Gideon’s comics, Cohort adepts always sat on plackets of grave dirt to ameliorate the effects of deep space and the loss of their power source; trust Harrowhark not to take the placebo. 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. All thoughts of ass-kicking had subsided as the approach of the First House reflected light through the open window, light that spilled into the passenger bay in fiery gouts; Gideon had to turn her face away, half-blind and breathless. Harrow was tying a piece of black voile around her eyes, as calm and uninterested as if what hung outside the window was dreary Ninth sky.
Gideon cupped her hands over her eyes to shade them and looked again, getting her fill of the explosive brilliance outside: the velvety blackness of space, with innumerable pinprick white stars; the First, a searing circle of incandescent blue, strewn with dazzling white; and—the outsides of seven more shut
tles, lining up in orbit. Gideon gave a low whistle to see them. To an inhabitant of the sepulchrous Ninth House it seemed amazing that the whole thing didn’t just combust and crumble into flame. There were other Houses that made their homelands on planets closer to the burning star of Dominicus—the Seventh and the Sixth, for instance—but to Gideon they could not imaginably be anything else than 100 percent on fire.
It was incredible. It was exquisite. She wanted to throw up. It seemed stolid insanity that Harrowhark’s only reaction was to slide up the plexiform barrier and hold down the communication button to ask: “How long must we wait?”
The navigator’s voice crackled back: “We are securing your clearance to land, Your Grace.”
Harrow didn’t thank him. “How long?”
“They are scanning your craft now, Your Grace, and we’ll move the moment they have confirmed you’re free to leave orbit.”
The Reverend Daughter sank back into her chair, stuffing her prayer bones into a fold of her robe. Quite unwillingly Gideon caught her eye. The expression on the other girl’s face wasn’t disinterest or distraction, as she’d assumed; even through a layer of veiling, she could tell that Harrow was near-incapacitated with concentration. Her mouth was pinched in a tight ripple, worrying the black-painted blotch on the lower lip into blood.
It took less than five minutes for the thrusters to creak to life again, for the ship to slowly glide out of orbit. Next to them, in a line, seven other shuttles were drifting to one side, sliding into the atmosphere like dominoes falling. Harrow shook her head back into her hood and pinched the bridge of her nose, and said in tones between pleasure and pain: “This planet’s unbelievable.”
“It’s gorgeous.”
“It’s a grave,” said Harrowhark.