by Tamsyn Muir
Jeannemary the Fourth screamed again. “I want to die,” she said afterward.
“Tough luck.”
She did, at least, stop kicking. The myriad cuts over Gideon’s hands and face were starting to really sting, but she paid them no mind. It was still a deep black night outside and the wind was howling around the side of Canaan House; she carried Jeannemary inside and down the big rotting staircase, and then she absolutely blanked on what to do next. The Fourth House cavalier couldn’t even stand: she was reduced to the small, disbelieving sobs of someone whose heart had broken forever. It was the second time Gideon had listened to Jeannemary really cry, and the second time was a lot worse than the first.
She had to get her to safety. Gideon wanted her longsword and she wanted Harrow. There were the Ninth quarters—but bone wards could be broken, even Harrow’s. She could march straight to where the others were guarding Dulcinea—but that was a long way to go with her catatonic cargo. And if she met an avaricious Naberius, or an overobedient Colum—she’d still prefer them to whatever was down there, in the facility, in the dark. Gideon’s hand was still gripping the key ring with the facility key she had just now so frantically used, and the red key on it—and lightning struck.
Jeannemary did not ask where they were going. Gideon ran down the soggy Canaan House staircase, and across silent nighttime corridors, and down the sloping little passage that led to the foyer for the training rooms. She pushed aside the tapestry and sprinted down the hall to the great black door that Harrow had called X-203. The door and the lock were so black in the night, and she was so slippery with fear, that for an excruciating minute she couldn’t seem to find the keyhole. And then she found it, and slid the red key home, and opened the door to the long-abandoned study.
The rail of spotlights all lit up, illuminating the clean laminate countertops of the laboratory and the still-shining wooden stairs to the living room. She slammed the door shut behind them and locked it so quickly that it ought to have broken the sound barrier. Gideon half-heaved, half-carried Jeannemary up the staircase and put her down on the squashy armchair, which wheezed with the sudden use. The sorrowful teen curled into a foetal position, bleeding and hiccupping. Gideon barrelled away and started taking stock of the room, wondering if she could haul the big wooden bookcases down as barricades.
“Where are we?” the Fourth eventually said, drearily.
“One of the key rooms. We’re safe, here. I’m the only one with a key.”
“What if it breaks down the door?”
Gideon said bracingly, “Are you kidding? That thing’s three-inch-thick iron.”
This neither comforted nor satisfied Jeannemary, who had possibly seen a makeshift blockade in the other girl’s eyes, but her crying diminished—every five seconds another sob would rack her, but she had swapped weeping for hysterical sucked-in breaths. Until she said: “It’s not fair,” and started up again with the great lung-filling fits of tears.
Gideon had moved before the aged gun, frightened into wondering whether or not it worked. Who knew? The swords still all held edges. “No. It’s not.”
“You d-don’t understand.” The cavalier was fighting for control, fierce eyes wet with hate and despair. She was shivering so hard that she was vibrating. “Isaac’s cautious. Not reckless. He’s not—he didn’t— He was always so careful, he shouldn’t have— I hated him when we were little, he wasn’t at all what I wanted—”
She gave in to crying again. When she could, she said, “It’s not fair! Why did he get stupid now?”
There was absolutely nothing Gideon could say to this. She needed more firepower than bookcases and antiques. What she badly needed was Harrow Nonagesimus, for whom a gigantic construction of bones would be more fun opportunity than hellish monstrosity, and she needed her longsword. But she couldn’t leave Jeannemary, and right now Jeannemary was a liability.
She mopped her hands over her bleeding face, demolishing her face paint and trying to get her thoughts straight, and settled on: “Look. We’ll stay in here until you’re fighting fit—don’t try to tell me you’re fit, you’re exhausted, you’re in shock, and you look like hot puke. Take half an hour, lie down, and I’ll get you some water.”
It took an enormous effort to get Jeannemary onto one of the dusty, mattress-squeaking beds, and much more effort to get her to take even tiny sips of the water that came out of the tap at the laboratory—the pipes rattled in shock that they were being used—in a little tin mug that had probably not had anybody’s lips near it since the Ninth House was young. The recalcitrant teen drank a little, rested her head on the spongy old pillow, and her shoulders shook for a long time. Gideon settled down in the overstuffed armchair and kept her rapier out over her knees.
“What was that thing?”
Gideon startled; she had been lulled into a fug of reverie, and Jeannemary’s voice was thick with weeping and the pillow.
“Dunno,” she said. “All I know is that I’m going to kick its ass for it.”
Another moment’s silence. Then: “This is the first time Isaac and me really left the House … I wanted him to sign us up to go out to the front ages ago, but Abigail said no … and he wouldn’t … I mean, he’s got three younger brothers and four younger sisters to look after. He had, I mean.”
It sounded as though she was going to burst into tears again. Gideon said, “That’s—a significant amount?”
“You need spares when you’re in the Fourth House,” said Jeannemary, sniffling. “I’ve got five sisters. Do you have a big family?”
“The Ninth doesn’t do big families. I think I’m an orphan.”
“Well, that’s pretty Fourth House too,” said the cav. “My mum jumped on a grenade during the Pioneer expedition, even though she wasn’t supposed to be out on post-colony planets beyond the rim. Isaac’s dad went out on a state visit to a hold planet and got blown up by insurgents.”
There was no more after that, not even tears. After a few minutes Gideon was not surprised to see that the poor bloodied girl had cried herself unconscious. She did not wake her. There would be time enough to wake her, and even a short rest would probably do her good. It sucked to be a teen, and it sucked more to be a teen whose best friend had just died in a horrible way, even if you were used to mothers jumping on grenades and fathers getting exploded. At least in the Ninth House, the way you usually went was pneumonia exacerbated by senility.
Gideon rested her head on the fat back of the armchair. She would not have said it was at all possible, but—watching the rise and fall of Jeannemary’s breath, a safe up-and-down rhythm, the drying tearstains on the sleeping teen’s cheeks—she promptly fell asleep.
* * *
It couldn’t have been long. Fifteen minutes at the very most. She startled awake with the sheer unconscious panic of someone realising they couldn’t afford to slip into deep REM, a haptic jerk flicking her awake. Her sword rattled off her knees and jangled to the floor. The only sound that could have woken her was a persistent drip she’d thought was coming from the tap.
Gideon did not understand what she was looking at when she awoke, and when she cleared her eyes and looked properly, she still didn’t understand.
Jeannemary was still lying prone in the old bed, arms and legs now flung wide, as if she had kicked off the blankets and sheets in a bad dream: this would have been fine, except for the huge shafts of bone spearing each shoulder to the mattress. Two more through the thighs. One straight through the very centre of her ribs. These spears of bone met Jeannemary’s body with haloes of red, splotching through her clothes, seeping into the bedspread.
“No,” said Gideon meditatively, “no, no, no, no, no.”
Jeannemary’s eyes were very slightly open. There was blood spattered in her curls, and there was blood spattered over the headboard. Gideon’s gaze followed the splatter upward. Written on the wall, in silky wet red, was:
SWEET DREAMS
ACT FOUR
26
SIDE BY SIDE, THE
Fourth teens were laid to an uneasy sleep in the morgue, right next to the adults who had failed so terminally to look after them. Somebody had (how? It was a mystery) taken the cooling body from Gideon’s arms (who had plucked those spears from those terrible holes and carried Jeannemary back?) and a lot of people had spoken a lot of words to her, none of which had pierced her short-term memory. Teacher was there, in her mind’s eye, praying over the broken sieve of Isaac Tettares; and Harrowhark was in there somewhere too, and Palamedes, tweezering a big fragment of something out of the cooling corpse of Jeannemary the Fourth. These images were as jumbled-up and lacking in context as a dream.
She remembered one thing: Harrowhark saying you dullard—you imbecile—you fool, all the old contempt of the Ninth House nursery back and fresh as though she were there again. Harrow the architect, sweeping down the halls of Drearburh. Harrow the nemesis, flanked by Crux. It wasn’t clear what in particular Harrow was haranguing her for, but whatever the reason, she deserved it. Gideon had tuned out all the rest of the necromancer’s tirade, her head in her hands. And then Harrowhark had balled up her fists—breathed hard once through her nose—and gone away.
The only thing that had made sense was that she had ended up in the whitewashed room where they were keeping Dulcinea, sitting alone in an armchair, and there she had gritted tears out of her eyes for an hour. Someone had washed out all her cuts with reeking vermillion tarry stuff, and it smelled bad and hurt like hell whenever an errant drip of salt water touched the wounds. This made her feel sorry for herself, and feeling sorry for herself made her eyes even wetter.
Dulcinea Septimus was a good person to do this in front of. She did not say “You’ll be fine,” as Dulcinea lacked the lung capacity to spend on platitudes; she just sat propped up on about fifteen pillows and kept her thin hot hand on Gideon’s palm. She waited until Gideon had stopped her hard blinking, and then she said—
“There was nothing you could have done.”
“Bullshit there wasn’t anything I could have done,” said Gideon, “I’ve thought of everything I should’ve done. There’s about fifty things I could’ve done and didn’t.”
Dulcinea gave her a crooked smile. She looked terrible. It was a few hours before morning, and the early light was grey on her biscuit-coloured curls and blanched skin. The fine green veins at her throat and wrists seemed terribly prominent, like most of her epidermis had sloughed off already. When she breathed, it sounded like custard sloshing around an air conditioner. There was high colour in her cheeks, but it had the hectic brilliance of hot slag.
“Oh, could’ve … should’ve,” she said. “You can could have and should have yourself back into last week … back into the womb. I could have kept Pro by my side, or I should have gone with him. I can go back and make things happen perfectly if I just think about what I should have or could have done. But I didn’t … you didn’t … that’s the way it is.”
“I can’t bear it,” said Gideon honestly. “It’s just such crap.”
“Life is a tragedy,” said Dulcinea. “Left behind by those who pass away, not able to change anything at all. It’s the total lack of control … Once somebody dies, their spirit’s free forever, even if we snatch at it or try to stopper it or use the energy it creates. Oh, I know sometimes they come back … or we can call them, in the manner of the Fifth … but even that exception to the rule shows their mastery of us. They only come when we beg. Once someone dies, we can’t grasp at them anymore, thank God!—except for one person, and he’s very far from here, I think. Gideon, don’t be sorry for the dead. I think death must be an absolute triumph.”
Gideon could not get behind this. Jeannemary had died like a dog while Gideon napped, and Isaac had been made into a big teenage colander; she wanted to be sorry for them forever. But before she could say anything to this effect, a great cough that filled up about two and a half handkerchiefs tore at Dulcinea. The contents of these handkerchiefs made Gideon envy the dead, let alone Dulcinea.
“We’ll find your cav,” she said, trying to sound steady and failing so completely she set a record.
“I just want to know what happened,” said Dulcinea drearily. “That’s always the worst of it … not knowing what happened.”
Gideon didn’t know whether she could get behind this either. She would’ve been devoutly grateful to live not knowing exactly the things that had happened, in vivid red-and-purple wobbling intensity. Then again, her mind kept flaying itself over Magnus and Abigail, down there in the dark, alone—over the when, and the how; over whether Magnus had watched his wife be murdered like Jeannemary had watched Isaac. She thought: It is stupid for a cavalier to watch their necromancer die.
Gideon felt hot and empty and eager to fight. She said without real hope, “If you want your keys back from Silas Octakiseron, I’ll deck him for you.”
The coughing turned into a bubbling laugh. “Don’t,” said Dulcinea. “I gave them up freely, by my own will. What would I want with them now?”
Gideon asked baldly, “Why were you trying to do this whole thing in the first place?”
“Do you mean, even though I’m dying?” Dulcinea gave a friable smile, but one with a dimple in it. “That’s not a complete barrier. The Seventh House thinks my condition is an asset. They even wanted me to get married and keep the genes going—me! My genes couldn’t be worse—in case they produced poetry down the line.”
“I don’t understand.”
The woman in front of her shifted, raising her hand to brush a few fawn-coloured strands away from her forehead. She didn’t answer for a while. Then she said, “When you don’t have it too badly—when you can live to maybe fifty years—when your body’s dying from the inside out, when your blood cells are eating you alive the whole time … it makes for such a necromancer, Gideon the Ninth. A walking thanergy generator. If they could figure out some way to stop you when you’re mostly cancer and just a little bit woman, they would! But they can’t. They say my House loves beauty—they did and they do—and there’s a kind of beauty in dying beautifully … in wasting away … half-alive, half-dead, within the very queenhood of your power.”
The wind whistled, thin and lonely, against the window. Dulcinea struggled to raise herself up on her elbows before Gideon could stop her, and she demanded: “Do I look like I’m at the queenhood of my power?”
This would’ve made anyone sweat. “Uh—”
“If you lie I’ll mummify you.”
“You look like a bucket of ass.”
Dulcinea eased herself back down, giggling fretfully. “Gideon,” she said, “I told your necromancer I didn’t want to die. And it’s true … but I’ve been dying for what feels like ten thousand years. I more didn’t want to die alone. I didn’t want them to put me out of sight. It’s a horrible thing to fall out of sight … The Seventh would have sealed me in a beautiful tomb and not talked about me again. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. So I came here when the Emperor asked me … because I wanted to … even though I knew I came here to die.”
Gideon said, “But I don’t want you to die,” and realised a second afterward that she had said it aloud.
The first finger and thumb of the hand ringed around hers. The dark blue eyes were luminous—too luminous; their lustre was wet and hot and bright—and Gideon pressed those fingers between her hands, very carefully. It felt as though even a little bit of pressure would crush Dulcinea to dust between her palms, like the very oldest bones kept in the Ninth House oss. Her heart felt sore and tender; her brain felt sore and dry.
“I don’t plan on it, you know,” said Dulcinea, though her voice was thinning out now, like water poured into milk. She closed her eyes with a gravelly sigh. “I’ll probably live forever … worse luck. Whatever happened to one flesh, one end?”
“I’ve seen those words before,” said Gideon, thoughtless of where she had seen them. “What do they mean?”
The blue eyes cracked open.
“They’re not familiar?”<
br />
“Should they be?”
“Well,” said Dulcinea calmly, “you would have said them to your Reverend Daughter the day you pledged yourself in the service of her cavalier, and she would have said them to you—but you never did that, did you? You weren’t trained in the traditions of the House of the Locked Tomb, and you’re nothing like a Ninth House nun. And you fight like—I don’t know. I’m not even certain you were raised in the Ninth House.”
Gideon let her head rest against the bed frame momentarily. When she had thought about this moment, she had expected to feel panic. There was no more panic left in the box. She just felt tired.
“Rumbled,” she said. “I’m sick of pretending, so yeah. Right on nearly all those counts. You know I’m the fakest-ass cavalier who ever faked. The actual cav had chronic hyperthyroid and was a serial limpdick. I’ve been faking my way through his duties for less than two months. I’m a pretend cavalier. I could not be worse at it.”
The smile she got in return had no dimples. It was strangely tender—as Dulcinea was always strangely tender with her—as though they had always shared some delicious secret. “You’re wrong there,” she said. “If you want to know what I think … I think that you’re a cavalier worthy of a Lyctor. I want to see that, what you’d become. I wonder if the Reverend Daughter even knows what she has in you?”
They looked at each other, and Gideon knew that she was holding that chemical blue gaze too long. Dulcinea’s hand was hot on hers. Now the old panic of confession seemed to rise up—her adrenaline was getting a second wind from deep down in her gut—and in that convenient moment the door opened. Palamedes Sextus walked in with his big black bag of weird shit, adjusted his glasses, and stared two seconds too long at their hands’ proximity.
There was something dreadfully tactful and remote and un-Palamedes-y as he said, “I came to check in on the both of you. Bad time?”
“Only in that I am officially out,” said Gideon, snatching her hand away. Everyone was mad at her, which was great, albeit they could not possibly be as mad as she was. She stood and rolled her neck until all the joints popped and crackled anxiously, was relieved to find her rapier still on her hip, and squared up to Palamedes feeling—terrifically dusty and guilty. “I’m going back to my quarters. No, I’m fine, quit it. Thanks for the ointment, it smells bewitchingly like piss.”