Gideon the Ninth

by Tamsyn Muir

  “Then what must we logically assume?” she said. “That, as Teacher has said, there is a malevolent or obstructive force within the First House? Vengeful ghosts, or monsters born of some necromantic act?”

  The awful necromantic teen rose to stand now. His eyes were raw and red, and his fists were dirty with blood. The numb agony on his face was like an animal in pain: when he spoke one expected only tortured baying.

  But he said, “If there is a monster—it’s got to be hunted. If there’s a haunting—it’s got to be banished. Whatever was strong enough to kill Abigail and Magnus, it can’t be left alone.” Then, more wildly: “I can’t go home until whatever killed Abigail and Magnus is dead.”

  Jeannemary said instantly, “I’m with Isaac. I say we hunt it.”

  “No,” said Palamedes.

  He had taken off his glasses to polish them, huffing once on one lens, then on the other. Everyone’s eyes were on him by the time he put his spectacles back on his beaky nose. Camilla perched on the table behind him like a grey-coated crow, haunting his shoulder. “No,” he repeated. “We’ll proceed scientifically. Nothing can be assumed until we have a better sense of how they both died. With everyone’s permission, I’ll examine the bodies; anyone who wants to join me can do so. Once we ascertain the facts we may plan a course of action, but until then, no conclusions. No monsters, no murder, no accidents.”

  Coronabeth said warmly, “Hear, hear.”

  “Obliged, Princess. We now all know about the existence of the facility,” he continued. “I imagine this will lead to it being explored freely. We should all keep an eye out for—unusual danger, and agree that information is the best gift we can give one another.”

  Harrowhark said, “I have no intention of collaborating.”

  “You won’t be forced to, Reverend Daughter. But it’s not orthogonal to the Lyctor experiment to warn your colleagues if you think there’s something out of place,” said Palamedes, leaning his chair back. “Exempli gratia, a horde of vengeful ghosts.”

  “There is one final matter of keys,” said Teacher.

  Everyone, now probably getting neck strain, looked back to him. They waited for a punchline, but there was none. Then they followed his line of sight: he was looking straight at Princess Ianthe in her clinging nightgown, pallid hair falling in two smooth braids down to bloodless shoulders, staring back with eyes like violets on dialysis.

  “I am also in possession of one,” she said, unruffled.

  “What?”

  She did not lose composure. “Don’t act the jilted lover, Babs.”

  “You never said a damned word!”

  “You didn’t keep your eyes on your key ring.”

  “Ianthe Tridentarius,” said her cavalier, “you are—you’re—Corona, why didn’t you tell me?”

  Corona stopped him, one slender hand on his shoulder. She was looking at her twin, who calmly avoided her gaze. “Because I didn’t know,” she said lightly, chair scraping as she rose to stand. “I didn’t know either, Babs. I’m going to bed now—I think—I’m somewhat overwrought.”

  Courteously, Palamedes stood too: “Cam and I want a look at the bodies,” he said. “If Captain Deuteros and Lieutenant Dyas would like to accompany us—as I assume you’re going to?”

  “Yes,” said Judith. “I’d like a closer look.”

  “Cam, you go on ahead,” Palamedes said. “I want a quick word.”

  The scene broke up after that. The salt-and-pepper priest was talking to Isaac very quietly, and Isaac’s shoulders were shaking as he tucked himself into his seat. The Third left with dislocated proximity and the clenched jaws of three people on their way to have an enormous tiff. Dulcinea was whispering quietly to her cavalier, and they surprised Gideon by following the mob to the freezer. Maybe not that surprising. Dulcinea Septimus could out-morbid the Ninth.

  The word Palamedes wanted turned out to be with Harrow; he plucked her sleeve and beckoned her off to the corner of the room, and she went without a cavil. Gideon was left alone, watching Teacher join the whey-faced Silas as he knelt before his cavalier. His lips moved in silent prayer. Colum was now greyish all over, and his eyes had the thousand-yard stare of a man in a stupor. Silas did not appear to be worried. He had clasped one of those big hard-bitten hands between his own and murmured to him, and Gideon caught some of the words: I bid you return.

  Teacher was saying: “He’ll have a hard fight to come back, Master Octakiseron … harder than he may have anticipated. Is he used to the journey?”

  “Brother Colum has fought harder and in colder climes,” said Silas calmly. “He has come back to me through stranger ghosts. He has never once let his body become corrupted, and he never shall.” Then he went back to the mantra: I bid … I bid …

  For some reason that image stayed with her: the mayonnaise magician and his thickset nephew, older than him by far, staring out of empty eyes as Teacher watched with the air of a man with front-row seats to back-alley dental surgery. Gideon watched too, fascinated by an act she couldn’t understand, when a hand closed around her wrist.

  It was Jeannemary Chatur, her eyes red-rimmed, sticky and stained, her hair in a frizz. There was no sign of pluck in her now, except maybe a wild hardness around the eyes as she looked at Gideon.

  “Ninth,” she said hoarsely, “if you know anything, tell me now. If you—if you know anything, I’ve got to— They meant too much to us, so if you know—”

  Gideon felt very sad. She put her hand on the bad teen’s shoulder, and Jeannemary flinched away. She shook her head no, and when Jeannemary’s big eyes—lashes clumped with last night’s makeup, irises an inky brown—filled with tears she tried to furiously blink away, Gideon stopped being able to even slightly deal. She put her hand on top of the other cavalier’s head, which was damp and curly like a sad puppy’s, and said: “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  “I believe you,” said Jeannemary thickly, not seeming to register the fact that the Ninth had spoken. “Magnus likes you … liked … He wouldn’t have let anything happen to Abigail,” she added all in a rush. “She hated heights. She never would’ve risked falling. And she was a spirit magician. If it was ghosts, why couldn’t she—”

  From before them, Colum gave such a racking and explosive cough that it made both Jeannemary and Gideon jump. His eyes rolled back in his head as he choked, staccato gasps, pulling in reeking smoke, while his adept said merely: “Fifteen minutes. You’re getting tardy,” and nothing more.

  * * *

  Gideon would have liked Jeannemary to finish her sentence, but Harrow was limping over with an expression like trouble. She had the distant, brow-puckered frown of a woman untying gruesomely knotted shoelaces. Gideon watched the cavalier of the Fourth walk away with hunched shoulders and a hand clasped around the grip of her rapier, and she fell into Harrow’s wake, a half step behind her.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m sick of these people,” said Harrowhark, ducking down a passageway and away from the central atrium. “I am sick of their slowness … sick to death. I can’t wait here for one of them to grasp the implications of everything they have been told”—Gideon couldn’t wait to grasp those implications either, but it didn’t seem likely anytime soon—“because we will be far ahead of them by then. We have a door to open.”

  “Yes, tomorrow morning after at least eight hours’ sleep,” Gideon suggested without hope.

  “An admirable attempt at comedy in these trying times,” said Harrowhark. “Let’s go.”

  19

  THE KEY THEY HAD purchased so dearly from the construct gave very little away, other than its unusual colour. It was big; the shaft was as long as Gideon’s middle finger, and the clover head satisfactorily heavy to hold, but it had no helpful tag saying, e.g., FIRST FLOOR. This did not seem to give Harrowhark pause. She whipped out her stained journal and brooded over her maps, hiding in a dark alcove and making her cavalier keep watch. Considering that there were exactly zero people around,
this seemed stupid.

  Then again, the idea that there might not be zero people around—that there was something horrible infesting Canaan House, something that had killed Abigail and Magnus for a perceived slight—well, Gideon did not stand there as easily as she might have yesterday. The First House was no longer a beautiful and empty shell, buffeted by the erosion of time. Now it seemed more like the blocked-up labyrinths beneath the Ninth House, kept sealed in case something became restless. When she was young she used to have nightmares about being on the wrong side of the door of the Locked Tomb. Especially after what Harrow had done.

  “Look,” said Harrowhark.

  No murder, sorrow, or fear could ever touch Harrow Nonagesimus. Her tired eyes were alight. A lot of her paint had peeled away or been sweated off down in the facility, and the whole left side of her jaw was just grey-tinted skin. A hint of her humanity peeked through. She had such a peculiarly pointed little face, high browed and tippy everywhere, and a slanted and vicious mouth. She said irascibly, “At the key, moron, not at me.”

  The moron looked at the key, but did give her the middle finger. Harrow was holding the thing upside down for inspection. At the butt end, where the teeth terminated, a tiny carving had been made in the metal. It was a collection of dots joined together with a line and two half circles.

  “It’s the sign on my door,” said Gideon.

  “You mean—X-203?”

  “Yeah, I mean that, if you’re talking in moonspeak,” said Gideon. “It’s definitely the symbol on my door.”

  Harrow nearly trembled with eagerness. It took them a while to sneak down the curling route from the atrium to the corridor to the foyer leading to the pit; she was paranoid, and her paranoia had infected Gideon. They kept waiting before turning corners and then stopping to hear if they were being followed. By the time they reached the airless little vestibule, and had slipped the tapestry aside from the door frame and ducked through, Gideon’s stomach wanted breakfast.

  Nonetheless, her palms were slick with anticipation as they stood in front of the enormous black door. The animal skulls were as eerie and unwelcoming as they had been the first time; the writhing fat figure curled around each column as creepy and as cold. Harrowhark set her hands on the black stone crossbar of the door almost reverently, and pressed her ear to the rock as though she could hear what was going on inside. She stroked her thumbpad over the deep-set keyhole and pulled her hood over her head.

  “Unlock it,” she said.

  “Don’t you want the honours?”

  “It’s your key ring,” said Harrow unexpectedly, and: “We will do this by the book. If Teacher’s correct, there is something around here that is fairly hot on etiquette, and etiquette is cheap. The key ring is yours … I have to admit it. So you must admit us.” She held out the key to Gideon. “Put it in the hole, Griddle.”

  “That’s what she said,” said Gideon, and she took the ring from Harrow’s gloved fingers. She did not put her own hood up, but she slipped her glasses back on to her nose: now that she’d adjusted she really only needed them for the midday light, but they’d become something of a comfort. She drummed her fingers on the bevelled frame of lightless stone, and then she slid the red Response key into the lock.

  It fit. The lock clicked open as easily as if it had been kept oiled for the last ten thousand years. Without the slightest creak or groan of hinge, the door swung inward at a push. Gideon slipped her rapier from her belt and her knuckle-knives onto her left hand, and she walked into the darkness.

  It was dark. She did not dare go farther into the quiet and shadowy stillness, thrown into deeper quiet by her necromancer slipping in behind and pushing the massive door shut. They stood in the room and smelled the age of it: the dust, the chemicals hanging in the air. You could almost smell the darkness.

  Harrow’s voice, almost a whisper: “A light, Nav.”

  “What?”

  “You did bring a torch.”

  “This is a service I was unaware I was meant to provide,” said Gideon.

  There followed soft cursing. She felt Harrow turn back toward the door, measure its width with her hands, grope blindly along the doorframe in order to find a lantern: she found something, and from the wall there came a loud click. Electric lights blared to life overhead, throwing the dark and lonely room into knife-sharp relief.

  Gideon didn’t know what she’d expected. She stood, rooted to the ground, and so did Harrow; and for long moments they just got their fill of looking.

  It was a study, left crystallised by someone who had one day stood up and never come back to the place where they must have worked for years. It was a long, square, spacious apartment, windowless, but beautifully lit. A long rail of electric lamps threw spotlights on important points in the room’s geography. One end of the room was occupied by a laboratory: stained, scoured-laminate benches, and shelves and shelves of notes in leather-bound books or ring binders. The big metal sink and the scrubbing-up brush looked strange against the walls, which were inlaid with bones. A pot was still full of fat chalk sticks to draw diagrams, and the flasks of preserved blood were still full and very red. Tacked up over one bench were thick sheaves of flimsy, dark with graphs and models: one of the flimsies was a rough drawing of a familiar chimera, many armed, armour ribbed, squat skulled. There were jewelled tools. There were epoxy spatulas that had been melted in some experiment. There was a blown-up picture on the wall—a lithograph, or a polymer photograph—of a group of people clustered around a table. Their faces had all been scribbled out with a thick black marker pen.

  Harrowhark had already drifted to the laboratory. She hadn’t drawn breath yet. She was going to have to, Gideon thought distantly, or she’d be out on the floor. The room had been split into three main parts—there was the laboratory, and then a broad space where the furniture had been moved out of the way for an empty stone floor. The wall had a sword rack, and the sword rack still held two lonely rapiers, gleaming as though they’d been filed and whetted an hour before. A training floor. Leant up against the wall was a hideous collection of oblong metal shapes and stocks. It took Gideon a long time to realise that she was looking at something goddamn ancient: it was a blowback carbine gun. She’d only ever seen pictures.

  The third part of the room was a raised platform with polished wooden stairs. The wood here was not so degraded as in the rest of Canaan House—this lightless, shut-off room must have preserved it, or otherwise somehow been stopped in time. The hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck had risen when the lights came on, and they hadn’t gone back down, as if her intrusion might well tempt time back to claim its grave goods. She found herself climbing the stairs and staring at a sweetly banal and domestic sight: a bookcase, a low table, a squashy armchair, and two beds. On the table was a teapot and two cups that lay abandoned forever.

  The two beds were close to each other—if you lay in one, you could stretch out and touch whoever was sleeping in the other, provided you had a long arm—separated only by a nightstand. Much like the grotesque cradle tacked to the end of the enormous four-poster back in Harrow’s bedroom, the two people here would have been in proximity to wake if the other one sneezed. On the nightstand was another lamp, and debris that people had never cleared up. A very old watch. An empty glass. A filament-fine silver bracelet with no clasp. A shallow, greasy glass dish full of grey stuff like ashes. Gideon could tell they weren’t cremains, and when she touched them a strong scent clung to her fingers. The pillows had been smoothed out on the carved wooden cots, and the beds had been made. Someone had left a pair of extremely worn slippers beneath one, a crumpled piece of flimsy next to the nightstand. Gideon picked up the latter.

  Harrow let out a cry of triumph. Gideon turned away from the beds and put the flimsy in her pocket, then stretched over the stair railing to see what her necromancer was delighted about. She was by the workbench staring at two great stone tablets that had been fused to the stone, shot through with pale green filaments glowing beneat
h Harrow’s touch. The writing was small and cramped and the diagrams totally impenetrable in their obtuseness. Harrow was already pulling out her journal.

  “It’s the theorem from the trial room,” she called out. “It’s the completed methodology for transference—for the utilisation of a living soul. It’s the whole experiment.”

  “Is this an exciting necromancer thing?”

  “Yes, Nav, it is an exciting necromancer thing. I need to copy this down, I can’t lift the stone. Whoever did this was a genius—”

  Gideon let Harrow have at it, and opened the first drawer of the nightstand. Sitting there, offensively ordinary, were three pencils, a finger bone, a coarse sharpening stone—bones and whetstones were beginning to feed her growing suspicion about who’d lived there—and an old, worn-down seal. She stared at the seal awhile: it was the crimson-and-white emblem of the Second House.

  She sat down carefully on one of the beds, and the sprung mattress squeaked. She took the piece of crumpled-up flimsy out of her pocket and began trying to uncrumple it. It was part of a note that had—at some long-ago point—been ripped up, and this was just one scrunched corner.

  “I’m done,” said Harrow, from below. “Tell me anything of import.”

  Gideon stuffed the piece of flimsy back into her pocket and had a quick scan through the other drawers. A lost sock. A scalpel. Oilcloth. A tin with nothing in it but the vague waft of peppermints. This was all the stuff you’d find in anyone’s bedside drawers—though then again, not quite anyone’s; a particular pair of people. She descended the stairs and tipped her dark glasses high on her head. “A cav and their necro lived here,” she said.

  “I drew the same conclusion,” said Harrowhark, shuffling her papers. She put one of her diagrams close to the one inscribed on the stone tablet to compare them for accuracy. “Here. Come and take a look at this.”