Tamsyn Muir - Gideon the Ninth

She was also given knuckles: they were even less ornate, being obsidian and steel set in thick and heavy bands. There were three black blades on the back of the gauntlet, rigidly fixed in place. “But for God’s sake don’t use them for anything but a parry,” said her teacher.

“This is confusing. You made me train empty-handed.”

“Gideon,” said her teacher, “after eleven ghoulish weeks of training you, beating you senseless, and watching you fall around like a dropsical infant, you are on a miraculous day up to the standard of a bad cavalier, one who’s terrible.” (This was great praise.) “But you fall apart as soon as you start to overthink your offhand. Use the knuckles to balance. Give yourself options if someone gets inside your guard—though better yet, don’t let them get inside your guard. Keep moving. Be fluid. Remember that your hands are now sisters, not twins; one executes your primary action and the other supports the move. Pray they don’t watch you fight too closely. And stop blocking every blow. ”

On the final day the entire House of the Ninth filled the tier of the landing field, and they left room to spare: it was sad to watch their eagerness, their kissing Harrowhark’s hem over and over. They all knelt in prayer with the godawful great-aunts as their Reverend Daughter stood and watched, tranquil and bloodless as the skeletons ploughing in the tiers above.

Gideon had noticed the absence of the ex-Reverend Father and Mother, but hadn’t thought anything of it. She was too busy thinking about her itchy secondhand clothes and the rapier buckled at her side, and the paint that was now a second skin on her face. But she was still surprised when Harrow said: “Brothers and sisters, listen. My mother and father will not be with you. My father has sealed shut the passageway to the tomb that must always be locked, and they have decided to continue their penitence behind that wall until I return. The marshal will act as seneschal for me, and my captain will act as marshal.”

Testament to Harrow’s timing for drama, the Secundarius Bell began ringing. From above the drillshaft the shuttle started to make its descent, blotting out the ever-fainter light of the equinox. For the very first time Gideon did not feel the overwhelming sense of dread and suspicion: a pinprick of anticipation curled in her gut instead. Round two. Go.

Harrowhark looked out at the people of the Ninth. So did Gideon. There were all the assorted nuns and brethren; old pilgrims and ageing vassals; every gloomy, severe, and stern face of adept and mystic, of joyless and wasted men and women, of the grey and monotonous population that had made up Gideon’s life and never shown her one single moment of sympathy or kindness. Harrow’s face was bright with elation and fervour. Gideon would have sworn there were tears in her eyes, except that no such liquid existed: Harrow was a desiccated mummy of hate.

“You are my beloved House,” she said. “Rest assured that wherever I go, my heart is interred here.”

It sounded like she really meant it.

Harrow began, “ We pray the tomb is shut forever …” and Gideon found herself reciting simply because it was the only prayer she’d ever known, enduring the words by saying them as sounds without meaning. She stopped when Harrowhark stopped, her hands clasped, and added: “I pray for our success for the House; I pray for the Lyctors, devoted Hands of the Emperor; I pray to be found pleasing in his eyes. I pray for the cavalier…”

At this Gideon caught the dark, black-rimmed eye, and could imagine the mental accompaniment:… to choke to death on her own vomit.

“Let it be so,” said the Lady of the Ninth House.

The rattling of the assorted prayer bones very nearly drowned out the clank of the shuttle, docking. Gideon turned away, not meaning to make any kind of goodbye; but she saw Aiglamene, hand crooked into a stiff salute, and realised for the first time that she might never see the woman again. God help her, she might never come back. For a moment everything seemed dizzyingly unsure. The House continued on in grand and grisly majesty because you were always looking at it; it continued because you watched it continue, changeless and black, before your eyes. The idea of leaving it made it seem so fragile as to crumble the moment they turned their backs. Harrowhark turned toward the shuttle and Gideon realised with an unwelcome jolt that she was crying: her paint was wet with tears.

And then the whole idea became beautiful. The moment Gideon turned her back on it, the House would die. The moment Gideon walked away, it would all disappear like an impossibly bad dream. She mentally staved in the sides of the enormous, shadowy cave and buried Drearburh in rock, and for good measure exploded Crux like a garbage bag full of soup. But she saluted Aiglamene as crisply and as enthusiastically as a soldier on her first day of service, and was pleased when her teacher rolled her eyes.

As they pulled themselves into the shuttle, the door mechanism sliding down with a pleasingly final whunk, she leaned into Harrow: Harrow, who was dabbing her eyes with enormous gravity. The necromancer flinched outright.

“Do you want,” Gideon whispered huskily, “my hanky.”

“I want to watch you die.”

“Maybe, Nonagesimus,” she said with deep satisfaction, “maybe. But you sure as hell won’t do it here.”

From space, the house of the First shone like fire on water. Wreathed in the white smoke of its atmosphere, blue like the heart of a gas-ignited flame, it burned the eye. It was absolutely lousy with water, smothering it all in the bluest of blue conflagrations. Visible even up here were the floating chains of squares and rectangles and oblongs, smudging the blue with grey and green, brown and black: the tumbled-down cities and temples of a House both long dead and unkillable. A sleeping throne. Far away its king and emperor sat on his seat of office and waited, a sentinel protecting his home but never able to return to it. The Lord of the House of the First was the Lord Undying, and he had not come back in over nine thousand years.

Gideon Nav pressed her face up to the plexiform window of the shuttle and looked as if she couldn’t ever get enough of looking, until her eyes were red and streaming and huge migraine motes danced along the edge of her vision. All the other shutters were closed up tight and had been for most of the trip, which had taken about an hour of rapid travel. They had been surprised to find that, behind the plex privacy barrier Harrowhark had coolly slid up the moment they were inside, there was no pilot on board. The ship was being remotely piloted at great expense. There was no clearance for anybody to land at the First House without explicit invitation. There was a button to press if you needed to talk to the remote navigator, and Gideon had been eager to hear another voice, but Harrow had slid the barrier back down with an air of distinct finality.

She looked worn and exhausted, even vulnerable. For the journey’s length she had kept her prayer knuckles in her hands and moodily clinked them into each other. In Gideon’s comics, Cohort adepts always sat on plackets of grave dirt to ameliorate the effects of deep space and the loss of their power source; trust Harrowhark not to take the placebo. Gideon had warmed herself with the thought that it was the perfect time to kick her ass up and down the shuttle, but in the end, the natural embarrassment of arriving with one’s necromancer’s elbows on backward saved Harrow’s life. All thoughts of ass-kicking had subsided as the approach of the First House reflected light through the open window, light that spilled into the passenger bay in fiery gouts; Gideon had to turn her face away, half-blind and breathless. Harrow was tying a piece of black voile around her eyes, as calm and uninterested as if what hung outside the window was dreary Ninth sky.