Tamsyn Muir - Gideon the Ninth

“Oh damn! Then can I join your old man and lady in the puppet show?”

“How the world would suffer without your wit,” said Harrowhark blandly. “Get your robe. We’re going down to the catacomb.”

It was almost gratifying, Gideon reflected, struggling with the black folds of her church gown, that the heir to the House of the Ninth refused to walk with her on the inside of the tier: she walked close to the wall instead, keeping pace half a step behind Gideon, watching for Gideon’s hands and Gideon’s sword. Almost gratifying, but not quite. Harrow could make even overweening caution offensive. After long days with just her little reading lamp, Gideon’s eyes stung from the lukewarm light of the Ninth drillshaft: she blinked myopically as the lift rattled them down to the doors of Drearburh.

“We’re not going into the inner sanctuary, you recreant,” Harrow said as Gideon balked. “We’re going to the monument. Come.”

The lifts that went down into the foetid bowels of Drearburh were death traps. The ones they entered now, down to the crypts, were especially bad. This one was an open platform of oxygen-addled, creaking metal, tucked behind an iron door that Harrow opened with a tiny chipkey from around her neck. As they descended, the air that rushed up to meet them was so cold that it made Gideon’s eyes water; she pulled the hood of her cloak down over her head and shoved her hands up its sleeves. The central buried mechanism that made their pit on this planet possible sang its low, whining song, filling the elevator shaft, dying away as they went deeper and deeper into the rock. It was profoundly dark.

Stark, strong light swamped their landing, and they walked out into the labyrinth of cages filled with whirring generators that nobody knew how to work. The machines sat alone in their carved-out, chilly niches, garlanded with black crepe from Ninth devotees long dead, their barred housings keeping the two at arm’s length as they passed. The cave narrowed into a passageway and the passageway terminated in a pitted door: Harrow pushed this open and led the way into a long, oblong chamber of bone-choked niches and bad copies of funerary masks, of wrapped bundles and seriously ancient grave goods.

At one niche, Aiglamene kneeled, having set herself the task of ransacking as many of the wrapped bundles as she could. Instead of a Ninth robe she wore a thick wool jacket and gloves, which gave her the appearance of a marshmallow pierced with four toothpicks of differing lengths. She was wearing a particularly po-faced, battle-weary expression as she picked through around a hundred swords in varying stages of death; next to her was a basket of daggers and a handful of knuckle knives. Some were rusted to hell, some were halfway rusted to hell. She was examining a sword and gloomily rubbing at a bit of built-up plaque on the blade.

“This plan is doomed,” she said to them, without looking up.

“Success, Captain?” said Harrowhark.

“They’re all archaeology, my lady.”

“Unfortunate. What was Ortus preferring, these days?”

“Speaking freely,” said Aiglamene, “Ortus preferred his mother and a book of sad poems. His father trained him to fight sword-and-buckler, but after his death—” She gave a somewhat creaking shrug. “He was a damned poor swordsman at his peak. He was not his father’s son. I would have trained him sword-and-powder, but he said he had the catarrh.”

“But his sword must be good, surely.”

“God no,” said Aiglamene. “It was heavy oil amalgam, and it had a rubber tip. Lighter than Nav’s head.” (“Harsh!” said Gideon.) “No, lady; I’m looking for a blade in the style of his great-grandmother’s. And a knife—or a knuckle.”

“Powder,” said Harrowhark decidedly, “or chain.”

“A knife, I think, my lady,” her captain said again, with more gentle deference than Gideon had known the old woman possessed. “Knife or knuckle. The knife will be impossibly difficult to adjust to as it is. You fight in a crowd. A chain in close melee will be more of a danger to you than it will to anyone else.”

Gideon had long since decided that this was not a good place to be, and that the plans being hatched here were not plans she liked. She started to edge backward, toward the door, picking her path as lightly as possible. Suddenly there was Harrow, squeezing herself between two pillars and draping her arms above her head: long folds of black robe shook down from her arms, making her look like a roadblocking bat. “Oh, Nav, no,” she said calmly. “Not when you owe me.”

“ Owe you—”

“Why, of course,” said Harrowhark. “It was your shuttle my cavalier ran off in.”

Gideon’s fist jacked out toward Harrow’s pointy nose. Less by design than accident, the other girl stumbled out of the way, half-tripping, dusting herself off and narrowing her eyes as she circled around the pillar. “If you’re going to start that again,” she said, “here.”

She reached down and hauled up one of the discarded blades. It was at least mildly hilarious to see Harrow have to heave with all the might of her, like, three muscles. Gideon took it while the necromancer rubbed fretfully at her wrists. “Try that,” she said.

Gideon unsheathed and examined the sword. Long, black pieces of crooked metal formed a decaying basket hilt. A terrifically worn black pommel seal depicted the Tomb wrapped in chains, the sign of the Ninth. The blade itself was notched and cracked. “Only way this kills someone is with lockjaw,” she said. “How are you going to get Ortus back, anyway?”

Did Harrow look momentarily troubled? “We’re not.”

“Aiglamene’s too old for this.”

“And that is why you, Griddle,” said the Lady, “are to act as cavalier primary of the House of the Ninth. You will accompany me to the First House as I study to become a Lyctor. You’ll be my personal guard and companion, dutiful and loyal, and uphold the sacred name of this House and its people.”

Once Gideon had stopped laughing, leaning against the icy pillar and beating on it with her fist, she had to breathe long and hard in order to not crack up again. The beleaguered grimace on Aiglamene’s hard-carved face had deepened into an outright sense of siege. “Whoo,” she managed, scrubbing away tears of mirth. “Oh damn. Give me a moment. Okay— like hell I will, Nonagesimus.”

Harrow ducked out from behind her pillar and she walked toward Gideon, hands still clasped together. Her face held the beatific, fire-white expression she’d had the day she told Gideon she was going off-planet: an unwavering resolve almost like joy. She stopped in front of the other girl and looked up at her, shaking the hood from her dark head, and she closed her eyes into slits. “Come on, Nav,” she said, and her voice was alight. “This is your chance. This is your opportunity to come into glory. Follow me through this, and you can go anywhere. House cavaliers can get any Cohort position they like. Do this for me and I won’t just set you free, I’ll set you free with a fortune, with a commission, with anything you want.”

This nettled her. “You don’t own me.”

“Oh, Griddle, but I do, ” said Harrowhark. “You’re bound to the Locked Tomb … and at the end of the night, the Locked Tomb is me. The nominated Hands are to enter the First House, Nav; their names will be written in history as the new Imperial saints. Nothing like this has ever happened before, and it may never happen again. Nav, I am going to be a Lyctor.”

“‘Hello, I’m the woman who helped Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s fascist rise to power,’” said Gideon to nobody in particular. “‘Yes, the universe sucks now. I knew this going in. Also, she betrayed me afterward and now my body has been shot into the sun.’” Harrow came too close, and Gideon did what she had never done in the past: she raised the rusted sword so that its naked point was level with the other girl’s forehead. The necromancer adept did not flinch, just made her black-smeared mouth a mocking moue of shock. “I—will never—trust you. Your promises mean nothing. You’ve got nothing to give me. I know what you’d do, given half a chance.”