Tamsyn Muir: Gideon the Ninth

In the apse was a long bench, and there sat the last handful of the nobles of the House of the Ninth: Reverend Daughter Harrowhark, sitting modestly to the side, face dusted with a handful of luminescent powder that had stuck to the blood trails coming out her nose; her ghastly great-aunts; and her parents, the Lord and Lady of the House, the Reverend Father and the Reverend Mother. The latter two had pride of place, before the altar, side-on to the congregation. Crux had the honour of sitting on a chair in one of the dank chevets amid a sea of candles, half of them already out. Next to him sat the only house cavalier, Ortus, a wide and sad Ninth youngster of thirty-five, and next to Ortus sat his lady mother, an absolutely standard Ninth crone who kept fussing at his ear with a handkerchief.

Gideon blinked so that her vision would stop wobbling and focused on the apse. They hadn’t managed to cozen her inside Drearburh for a good two years, and she hadn’t seen the hideous great-aunts nor the Lord and Lady for a while. Blessed Sister Lachrimorta and Blessed Sister Aisamorta were unaltered. They were still tiny, their faces still tight, grey-painted dribbles, and as the Ninth was free from miracles, they were still blind. They had black bands tied over their faces with white, staring eyes painted on the front. Each preferred to pray two sets of beads, one string in each shrivelled hand, so they sat there clicking a four-part percussion with their suspiciously agile fingers.

Ortus hadn’t changed either. He was still lumpy and sad. Being the primary cavalier to the House of the Ninth had not for eras been a title of any renown. Cavaliers in other Houses might be revered and noble men and women of long genealogy or particular talent, frequent heroes of Gideon’s less prurient magazines, but in the Ninth everyone knew you were chosen for how many bones you could hump around. Ortus was basically a morbid donkey. His father—cavalier to Harrow’s father—had been an enormous, stony man of some gravity and devotion, with a sword and two huge panniers of fibulae, but Ortus wasn’t made in his mould. Coupling him to Harrow had been rather like yoking a doughnut to a cobra. Aiglamene had probably focused her frustrations on Gideon because Ortus was such a drip. He was a sensitive, awful young man, and his mother was obsessed with him; each time he caught a cold he was swaddled and made to lie still until he got bedsores.

The Lord and Lady she looked at too, though she honestly didn’t want to. Lady Pelleamena and Lord Priamhark sat side by side, one gloved hand placed on a knee, the other joined to their partner’s as they prayed simultaneously on a string of ornate bones. Black cloth swathed them toe to neck, and their faces were mostly obscured by dark hoods: Gideon could see their pale, waxy profiles, streaked with luminescent powder, the mark of Harrow’s handprint still visible on both. Their eyes were closed. Pelleamena’s face was still frozen and fine as it had been the last time Gideon had seen her, the dark wings of her brows unsilvered, the thin fretwork of lines next to each eye uncrowded by new. Priam’s jaw was still firm, his shoulder unstooped, his brow clear and unlined. They were utterly unchanged; less changed, even, than the shitty great-aunts. This was because they’d both been dead for years.

Their mummified faces did not yield to time because—as Gideon knew, and the marshal, and the captain of the guard, and nobody else in the universe—Harrowhark had frozen them forever. Ever the obsessive and secretive scholar, she had derived at great cost some forgotten way of preserving and puppeting the bodies. She had found a nasty, forbidden little book in the great Ninth repositories of nasty, forbidden little books, and all the Houses would have had a collective aneurysm if they knew she’d even read it. She hadn’t executed it very well—her parents were fine from the shoulders up, but from the shoulders down they were bad—though she had, admittedly, been ten.

Gideon had been eleven when the Lord and Lady of the House of the Ninth had slipped into death in sudden, awful secret. It was such a huge bag of ass how it had happened: what she’d found, what she’d seen. She hadn’t been sad. If she’d been stuck being Harrow’s parents she would have done the same years ago.

“Listen,” said the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth, rising to stand.

The enthroned Lord and Lady should have taken charge of the sacred ritual, but they couldn’t, because they were mega-dead. Harrowhark had handily gotten around this by giving them a vow of silence. Every year she added to their penitents’ vows—of fasting, of daily contemplation, of seclusion—so blandly and barefacedly that it seemed inevitable that someone would eventually say hang on a minute, this sounds like … A LOAD OF HOT GARBAGE, and she’d be found out. But she never was. Crux covered for her, and so did Aiglamene, and the Lord’s cavalier had helpfully decided to die the day that Priam died. And so Gideon covered too, hating every moment, saving up this last secret in the hopes that with it she could extort her freedom.

All prayer beads stopped clacking. The hands of Harrow’s parents stilled unnaturally in unison. Gideon slung her arms around the back of her pew and kicked one foot up atop the other, wishing her head would stop ringing.

“The noble House of the Ninth has called you here today,” said Harrowhark, “because we have been given a gift of enormous import. Our sacred Emperor—the Necrolord Prime, the King of the Nine Renewals, our Resurrector—has sent us summons.”

That got asses in seats. The skeletons remained perfectly still and attentive, but a querulous excitement arose from the assorted Ninth congregation. There were soft cries of joy. There were exclamations of praise and thankfulness. The letter could have been a drawing of a butt and they would have been lining up thrice to kiss the edge of the paper.

“I will share this letter with you,” said Harrowhark, “because nobody loves their people, their sacred brothers and sacred sisters, as the Ninth House loves her people—her devotees and her priests, her children and her faithful.” (Gideon thought Harrow was slathering it on pretty thick.) “If the Reverend Mother will permit her daughter to read?”

Like she’d say no with Harrow’s hands on her strings. With a pallid smile, Pelleamena gently inclined her head in a way she never had in life: alive, she had been as chill and remote as ice at the bottom of a cave. “With my gracious mother’s permission,” said Harrow, and began to read:

“ADDRESSING THE HOUSE OF THE NINTH, ITS REVEREND LADY PELLEAMENA HIGHT NOVENARIUS AND ITS REVEREND LORD PRIAM HIGHT NONIUSVIANUS:

“Salutations to the House of the Ninth, and blessings upon its tombs, its peaceful dead, and its manifold mysteries.

“His Celestial Kindliness, the First Reborn, begs this house to honour its love for the Creator, as set in the contract of tenderness made on the day of the Resurrection, and humbly asks for the first fruits of your household …

(“My name is listed here,” said Harrowhark, simpering modestly, then with less enthusiasm: “—and Ortus’s.”)

“For in need now are the Emperor’s Hands, the most blessed and beloved of the King Undying, the faithful and the everlasting! The Emperor calls now for postulants to the position of Lyctor, heirs to the eight stalwarts who have served these ten thousand years: as many of them now lie waiting for the rivers to rise on the day they wake to their King, those lonely Guard remaining petition for their numbers to be renewed and their Lord above Lords to find eight new liegemen.

“To this end we beg the first of your House and their cavalier to kneel in glory and attend the finest study, that of being the Emperor’s bones and joints, his fists and gestures …