Tamsyn Muir: Gideon the Ninth

She charged. It was too late. Next to the drifts of dirt and stone that she had carefully kicked apart, skeletons burst out of the hard earth where they had been hastily interred. Hands erupted from little pockets in the ground, perfect, four-fingered and thumbed; Gideon, stupid with assumption, kicked them off and careened sideways. She ran. It didn’t matter: every five feet—every five goddamned feet—bones burst from the ground, grasping her boots, her ankles, her trousers. She staggered away, desperate to find the limits of the field: there were none. The floor of the drillshaft was erupting in fingers and wrists, waving gently, as though buffeted by the wind.

Gideon looked at Harrow. Harrow was breaking out in blood sweat, and her returned stare was calm and cold and assured.

She plunged back toward the Lady of Drearburh with an incoherent yell, smashing carpals and metacarpals to bits as she ran, but it didn’t matter. From as little as a buried femur, a hidden tibia, skeletons formed for Harrow in perfect wholeness, and as Gideon neared their mistress a tidal wave of reanimated bones crested down on her. Her booted foot knocked Harrow into the arms of two of her creations, who carted her easily out of harm’s way. Harrowhark’s unperturbed gaze disappeared behind a blur of fleshless men, of femur and tibia and supernaturally quick grasp. Gideon used her sword like a lever, showering herself in chips of bone and cartilage and trying to make each cut count, but there were too many of them. There were just so many. Replacements rose even as she pulverized them into rains of bone. More and more cannonballed her down to the ground, no matter in what direction she lurched, from the fruits of the morbid garden Harrow had sowed.

The roar of the shuttle drowned out the clattering of bones and the blood in her ears as she was grabbed by dozens of hands. Harrowhark’s talent had always been in scale, in making a fully realised construct from as little as an arm bone or a pelvis, able to make an army of them from what anyone else would need for one, and in some far-off way Gideon had always known that this would be how she went: gangbanged to death by skeletons. The melee melted away to admit a booted foot that knocked her down. The bone men held her to the earth as she reared up, spitting and bleeding, to find Harrow: tucked between her grinning minions, pensive, serene. Harrowhark kicked Gideon in the face.

For a couple of seconds everything was red and black and white. Gideon’s head lolled to the side as she coughed out a tooth, choking, thrashing to rise. The boot pressed itself to her throat, then down and down and down, forcing her back into the hard grit floor. The shuttle’s descent whipped up a storm of stinging dust, sending some of the skeletons flying. Harrow discarded them and they rattled into still, anatomical piles.

“It’s pathetic, Griddle,” said the Lady of the Ninth. Bones were shedding from her minions now after the initial adrenaline rush: peeling off and falling inert to earth, an arm there, a jawbone here, as they wobbled out of shape. She’d pushed herself very hard. Radiating out from them was a circle of burst pockets in the hard ground, like tiny exploded mines. She stood among her holes with a hot, bloody face and trickling nosebleed, and indifferently wiped her face with her forearm.

“It’s pathetic,” she repeated, slightly thick with blood. “I turn up the volume. I put on a show. You feel bad. You make it so easy. I got more hot and bothered digging all night.”

“You dug,” wheezed Gideon, rather muffled with grit and dust, “all night.”

“Of course. This floor’s hard as hell, and there’s a lot to cover.”

“You insane creep, ” said Gideon.

“Call it, Crux,” ordered Harrowhark.

It was with poorly hidden glee that her marshal called out, “A fair fight. The foe is floored. A win for the Lady Nonagesimus.”

The Lady Nonagesimus turned back to her two retainers and raised her arms up for her discarded robe to be slipped back around her shoulders. She coughed a small knot of blood up into the dirt and waved Crux off as he hovered about her. Gideon lifted her head, then let it fall back hard on the grit floor, dazed and cold. Aiglamene was looking at her now with an expression she couldn’t parse. Sympathy? Disappointment? Guilt?

The shuttle connected its docking feet to the ground, crunching hard into the floor. Gideon looked at it—its gleaming sides, its steaming engine vents—and tried to pull herself up on her elbows. She couldn’t; she was too winded still. She couldn’t even raise a shaking middle finger to the victor: she just kept looking at the shuttle, and her suitcase, and her sword.

“Buck up, Griddle,” Harrowhark was saying. She spat another clot out on the ground, close to Gideon’s head. “Captain, go and tell the pilot to sit and wait: he’ll get paid for his time.”

“What if he asks after his passenger, my lady?” God bless Aiglamene.

“She’s been delayed. Tell him he’ll stand by on my grace for an hour, with apologies. My parents have been waiting long enough, and this took somewhat longer than I thought it would. Marshal, get her down to the sanctuary—”

Gideon willed herself to pass out as Crux’s cold, bony fingers closed around one of her ankles. It nearly worked. She woke up a few times to blink at the monotonous light that illuminated the lift down to the bottom of the main shaft, and stayed awake when the marshal dragged her like a sack of rotten goods across the bottom of the tier. She felt nothing: not pain, not anger, not disappointment, just a curious sense of wonder and disconnect as she was hauled bodily through the doors of Drearburh. She stirred to life for one last escape attempt, but when he saw her scrabbling at the threadbare carpets on the slick dark floor Crux kicked her in the head. Then she did pass out for a little while, for real, only waking up when she was heaped onto a forward pew. The pew was so cold her skin stuck to it, and each breath was like needles in the lung.

She came to, freezing, to the sound of the prayers. There was no spoken invocation in the Ninth service. There was only the clatter of bones—knucklebones, all threaded on woven cords, notched and worn—worked by nuns whose old fingers could pray on them so swiftly that the service became a murmurous rattle. It was a long, narrow hall, and she had been dumped right at the front of it. It was very dark: a rail of gas-discharged light ran all around the aisles, but it always lit like it didn’t like the idea and glowed dismally. The arches overhead had been dusted with bioluminescent powders that sometimes trickled down as pale green glitter into the nave, and in all the radiating chapels sat speechless skeletons, still dusty from the farming. Squinting blearily over her shoulder, she saw that most of the sanctum was skeletons. It was a skeleton party. There was room in this deep, long channel of a church for a thousand, and it was half full of skeletons and only very pockmarked with people.

The people mostly sat in the transept, veiled nuns and solitaires, shaven heads and cropped, the weary and scant inhabitants of the Ninth House. Mostly priests of the Locked Tomb, now; there hadn’t been soldiers or military friars since she was very young. The only member left of that order was Aiglamene, who’d left her leg and any hope of getting the hell out of here on some far-off front line. The clatter in the transept was occasionally interrupted by a wet, racking cough or the haggard clearing of somebody’s throat.