Tamsyn Muir: Gideon the Ninth

WHAM—WHAM—WHAM!

“I don’t know how you’re holding it now,” said Gideon and she backed up, looked at what she was backing toward, looked back at her necromancer.

She sucked in a wobbly breath. Harrow was looking at her with a classic expression of faint Nonagesimus pity, as though Gideon had finally lost her intellectual faculties and might wet herself at any moment. Camilla watched her with an expression that showed nothing at all. Camilla the Sixth was no idiot.

She said, “Harrow, I can’t keep my promise, because the entire point of me is you. You get that, right? That’s what cavaliers sign up for. There is no me without you. One flesh, one end.”

A shade of exhausted suspicion flickered over her necromancer’s face. “Nav,” she said, “what are you doing?”

“The cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole entire life, believe me,” said Gideon. “You’ll know what to do, and if you don’t do it, what I’m about to do will be no use to anyone.”

Gideon turned and squinted, gauged the angle. She judged the distance. It would have been the worst thing in the world to look back, so she didn’t.

She mentally found herself all of a sudden in front of the doors of Drearburh—four years old again, and screaming—and all her fear and hate of them went away. Drearburh was empty. There was no Crux. There were no godawful great-aunts. There were no restless corpses, no strangers in coffins, no dead parents. Instead, she was Drearburh. She was Gideon Nav, and Nav was a Niner name. She took the whole putrid, quiet, filth-strewn madness of the place, and she opened her doors to it. Her hands were not shaking anymore.

WHAM—WHAM— WHAM. The structure bowed and creaked. Big chunks were falling away now, letting in wide splotches of sunlight. She felt movement behind her, but she was faster.

“For the Ninth!” said Gideon.

And she fell forward, right on the iron spikes.

“okay,” said Gideon. “Okay. Get up.”

Harrowhark Nonagesimus got up.

“Good!” said her cavalier. “You can stop screaming any moment now, just an FYI. Now—first make sure nothing’s going to ice Camilla—I meant it about not wanting an afterlife subscription to Palamedes Sextus’s Top Nerd Facts. ”

“Gideon,” said Harrow, and again, more incoherently: “Gideon.”

“No time,” said Gideon. A hot wind blew over them both: it whipped Harrow’s hair into her face. “Incoming.”

The shield sighed, shuddered, and finally broke. The ancient Lyctoral construct surged forward, triumphant in its brainlessness. Harrow saw it for what it was: a spongy breadth of regenerating ash, and many lengths of teeth. For all its killing speed before, it now crested before them as though it were travelling through syrup. It shivered in the air, a hundred white lances ready.

Gideon said, “Take it down.”

And Harrow took it down. It was bafflingly simple. It was nothing more than a raised skeleton, and not one that had been formed with any particular grace. It was half gone already, having torn itself free like an animal from her trap. The head was just a chitinous plate. The trunk was a roll of bone. The remaining tentacles fell like rain, arrested in midswing. The bone responded to their call, and together they sailed the thing through the cracked glass panes of the terrace garden to fall—a huge white comet, with flailing tails of bone—into the rolling ocean.

“There’s my sword,” Gideon said. “Pick it up—pick it up and stop looking at me, dick. Don’t. Don’t you dare look at me.”

Harrow turned her head away from the iron railing and picked up the longsword, and cried out: it was far too heavy, far too awkward. Gideon reached her arm out to steady Harrow’s sword hand, shifting the other arm around her in a strange embrace. Her fingers wrapped around Harrow’s, scratchy with callouses. The sheer weight of the thing still stretched the muscles of Harrow’s forearms painfully, but Gideon clasped her wrist, and despite the pain they lifted the sword together.

“Your arms are like fucking noodles,” said Gideon disapprovingly.

“I’m a necromancer, Nav!”

“Yeah, well, hope you like lifting weights for the next myriad.”

They were cheek to cheek: Gideon’s arm and Harrow’s arm entwined, holding the sword aloft, letting the steel catch the light. The terrace stretched out before them, glass shards spraying in the wake of the construct, falling as slowly and as lightly as down. Harrow looked back at Gideon, and Gideon’s eyes, as they always did, startled her: their deep, chromatic amber, the startling hot gold of freshly-brewed tea. She winked.

Harrow said—

“I cannot do this.”

“You already did it,” said Gideon. “It’s done. You ate me and rebuilt me. We can’t go home again.”

“I can’t bear it.”

“Suck it down,” said Gideon. “You’re already two hundred dead daughters and sons of our House. What’s one more?”

Before them stood Cytherea the First, though they noticed her only as an afterthought. She stood with her sword down, just watching them, her eyes as wide and as blue as the death of light. The garden narrowed to her and her bloody green sword. Her lips were parted in a tiny o. She did not even seem particularly troubled: just amazed, as though they were an aurora, a mirage, an unreal trick of the sunshine.

“Now we kick her ass until candy comes out,” said Gideon. “Oh, damn, Nonagesimus, don’t cry, we can’t fight her if you’re crying.”

Harrow said, with some difficulty: “I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it.”

“Yes you can, it’s just less great and less hot,” said Gideon.

“ Fuck you, Nav—”

“Harrowhark,” said Gideon the Ninth. “Someday you’ll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then. For now—I can’t say you’ll be fine. I can’t say we did the right thing. I can’t tell you shit. I’m basically a hallucination produced by your brain chemistry while coping with the massive trauma of splicing in my brain chemistry. Even if I wasn’t, I don’t know jack, Harrow, I never did—except for one thing.”

She lifted Harrow’s arm with the hilt clutched in it. Her fingers, rough and strong and sure, moved Harrow’s other hand into place above the pommel.

“I know the sword,” she said. “And now, so do you.”

Gideon brought them into position: weight on the forward foot, knee bent a little, light on the right. She tilted the blade so that it was held with the blade pointed high before them, a perfect line. She moved Harrow’s head up and corrected her hips.

Time sped up, blurred, moved in bright lights before them. Now the old Lyctor Cytherea—wretchedly old, it seemed impossible that they could have ever taken her for anything else—stood there at the bottom of the stairs. Her radioactive blue eyes were quiet; her sword was held at the ready. She was smiling with colourless lips.

“How do you feel, little sister?” she said.

Harrowhark’s mouth said, “Ready for round three,” and, “or round four, I think I lost track.”

Their swords met. The noise of metal on metal screamed in that empty garden. Cytherea the First had been Cytherea the First for ten thousand years, and even ten thousand years ago her cavalier had been great. Time had made her more perfect than a mortal cavalier could understand. In a fair fight, they might even have fought to a standstill.