Tamsyn Muir - Gideon the Ninth

It was not a fair fight. As they fought—and fighting was like a dream, like falling asleep—they could see Cytherea was made up of different parts. Her eyes had been taken from somewhere else, two blue spots of someone else’s fire. Within her chest another conflagration burned, and this one was eating her alive: it smoked and smouldered where her lungs ought to have been, bulging, dark, and malignant. It had swollen to the bursting point inside her body, and most of Cytherea’s energy was being expended on holding it still. Harrow could touch what Palamedes had done; nudge it; knock it out of Cytherea’s grip.

“There,” said Gideon, in Harrow’s ear, her voice softer now. “Thanks, Palamedes.”

“Sextus was a marvel,” admitted Harrow.

“Too bad you didn’t marry him. You’re both into old dead chicks.”

“Gideon—”

“Focus, Nonagesimus. You know what to do.”

Cytherea the First vomited a long stream of black blood. There was no fear in her now. There was only anticipation verging on panicked excitement, like a girl waiting for her birthday party. The weight of Gideon’s arms on Harrow’s forearms was getting more ephemeral, harder to perceive; the brush of Gideon’s cheek was suddenly no more substantial than the remembrance of an old fever. Her voice was in her ear, but it was very far away.

Harrow placed the tip of her sword to the right of Cytherea’s breastbone. The world was slow and chilly.

“One flesh, one end,” said Gideon, and it was a murmur now, on the very edge of hearing.

Harrow said, “Don’t leave me.”

“ The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee, ” said Gideon. “See you on the flip side, sugarlips.”

Harrowhark drove the blade home, straight through the malignant thing in Cytherea’s chest: it bubbled and clawed out of her, a well of tumours, a cancer, and she seized up. It ran through her like a flame touched to oil, seething visibly beneath her skin, her veins, her bones. They bulged and buckled. Her skin tore; her heart strained, stretched, and, after ten thousand years’ poor service, gave out.

Cytherea the First sighed in no little relief. Then she toppled over, and she died.

The sword made a terrific clatter as it dropped to the ground. The breeze blew Harrow’s hair into her mouth as she ran back and strained at the arms of her cavalier, pulled and pulled, so that she could take her off the spike and lay her on her back. Then she sat there for a long time. Beside her, Gideon lay smiling a small, tight, ready smile, stretched out beneath a blue and foreign sky.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus came around in a nest of sterile white. She was lying on a gurney, wrapped up in a crinkly thermal blanket. She turned her head; next to her there was a window, and outside the window was the deep velvet blackness of space. Cold stars glimmered in the far distance like diamonds, and they were very beautiful.

If it had been possible to die of desolation, she would have died then and there: as it was, all she could do was lie on the bed and observe the smoking wreck of her heart.

The lamps had been turned down to an irritatingly soothing glow, bathing the small room in soft, benevolent radiance. They shone down on her gurney, on the white walls, on the painfully clean white tiles of the floor. The brightest light in the room came from a tall reading lamp, positioned next to a metal chair in the corner. In the chair sat a man. On the arm of his chair was a tablet and in his hands was a sheaf of flimsy, which he would occasionally shuffle and take notes on. He was simply dressed. His hair was cropped close to his head, and in the light it shone a nondescript dark brown.

The man must have sensed her wakefulness, for he looked up from his flimsy and his tablet at her, and he shuffled them aside to stand. He approached her, and she saw that his sclera were black as space. The irises were dark and leadenly iridescent—a deep rainbow oil slick, ringed with white. The pupils were as glossy black as the sclera.

Harrow could never tell precisely how she knew who he was, only that she did. She threw off the rustling thermal blanket—someone had dressed her in an unlovely turquoise hospital smock—and got out of bed, and she threw herself down shamelessly at the feet of the Necromancer Prime; the Resurrection; the God of the Nine Houses; the Emperor Undying.

She pressed her forehead down onto the cold, clean tiles.

“Please undo what I’ve done, Lord,” she said. “I will never ask anything of you, ever again, if you just give me back the life of Gideon Nav.”

“I can’t,” he said. He had a bittersweet, scratchy voice, and it was infinitely gentle. “I would very much like to. But that soul’s inside you now. If I tried to pull it out, I’d take yours with it and destroy both in the process. What’s done is done is done. Now you have to live with it.”

She was empty. That was the terrible thing: there was nothing inside her but the sick and bubbling detestation of her House. Even the silence of her soul could not dilute the hatred that had fermented in her from the genesis of the Ninth House downward. Harrowhark picked herself up off the floor and looked her Emperor dead in his dark and shining eyes.

“How dare you ask me to live with it?”

The Emperor did not render her down to a pile of ash, as she partway wished he would. Instead, he rubbed at one temple, and he held her gaze, sombre and even.

“Because,” he said, “the Empire is dying.”

She said nothing.

“If there had been any less need you would be sitting back home in Drearburh, living a long and quiet life with nothing to worry or hurt you, and your cavalier would still be alive. But there are things out there that even death cannot keep down. I have been fighting them since the Resurrection. I can’t fight them by myself.”

Harrow said, “But you’re God. ”

And God said, “And I am not enough.”

She retreated to sit on the edge of the bed, and she pulled the hem of her hospital smock down over her knees. He said, “It wasn’t meant to happen like this. I intended for the new Lyctors to become Lyctors after thinking and contemplating and genuinely understanding their sacrifice—an act of bravery, not an act of fear and desperation. Nobody was meant to lose their lives unwillingly at Canaan House. But—Cytherea…”

The Emperor closed his eyes. “Cytherea was my fault,” he said. “She was the very best of all of us. The most loyal, the most humane, the most resilient. The one with the most capacity for kindness. I made her live ten thousand years in pain, because I was selfish and she let me. Don’t despise her, Harrow—I see it in your eyes. What she did was unforgivable. I can’t understand it. But who she was … she was wonderful.”

“You’re awfully forgiving,” said Harrow, “considering she said she was out to kill you.”

“I wish she’d said that to me,” said the Emperor heavily. “If she and I had just fought this out, it would have been a hell of a lot better for everyone.”

Harrow was silent. He seemed lost in thought. He said presently, “Most of my Lyctors have been destroyed by a war I’ve thought best to fight slowly, through attrition. I have lost my Hands. Not just to death. The loneliness of deep space takes its toll on anyone, and the necrosaints have all put up with it for longer than anybody should ever be asked to bear anything. That’s why I wanted only those who had discovered the cost and were willing to pay it in the full knowledge of what it would entail.”