Tamsyn Muir - Gideon the Ninth

“Eight we hope will meditate and ascend to the Emperor in glory in the temple of the First House, eight new Lyctors joined with their cavaliers; and if the Necrolord Highest blesses but does not take, they shall return home in full honour, with trump and timbrel.

“There is no dutiful gift so perfect, nor so lovely in his eyes.”

Harrowhark lowered the paper to a long silence; a real silence, without even the hint of a prayer knuckle clacking or a skeleton’s jaw falling off. The Ninth seemed completely taken aback. There was a wheezing squeal from one of the pews in the transept behind Gideon as one of the faithful decided to go the whole hog and have a heart attack, and this distracted everyone. The nuns tried their best, but a few minutes later it was confirmed that one of the hermits had died of shock, and everyone around him celebrated his sacred good fortune. Gideon failed to hide a snicker as Harrowhark sighed, obviously calculating inside her head what this did to the current Ninth census.

“I won’t!”

A second hand disturbed the community tomb as Ortus’s mother stood, finger trembling, her other arm draped around her son’s shoulders. He looked completely affrighted. She looked as though she were about to follow the faithful departed to an untimely grave, face frozen beneath her alabaster base paint, black skull paint slipping with sweat.

“My son—my son,” she cried out, shrill and cracked; “my first-born sweet! His father’s endowment! My only joy!”

“Sister Glaurica, please,” said Harrow, looking bored.

Ortus’s mother had wrapped both arms around him now, and was weeping fully into his shoulder. Her own shook with very real fear and grief. He looked wetly depressed. She was saying, between sobs: “I gave you my husband—Lord Noniusvianus, I gave you my spouse—Lord Noniusvianus, do you demand my son of me? Do you demand my son? Surely not! Surely not now!”

“You forget yourself, Glaurica,” Crux snapped.

“I know the things that befall cavaliers, my lord, I know his fate!”

“Sister Glaurica,” Harrowhark said, “be calm.”

“He is young,” quavered Ortus’s mother, half-pulling him into the safety of the chevet when she realised Lord Noniusvianus would not intercede. “He is young, he is not robust.”

“Some would say otherwise,” said Harrowhark, sotto voce.

But Ortus said, with his big, sombre eyes and his squashed, disheartened voice: “I do fear death, my Lady Harrowhark.”

“A cavalier should welcome death,” said Aiglamene, affronted.

“Your father welcomed death unflinching,” said Crux.

At this tender piece of sympathy, his mother burst into tears. The congregation muttered, mostly reproachful, and Gideon started to perk up. It wasn’t quite the worst day of her life now. This was some A-grade entertainment. Ortus, not bothering to disentangle himself from his sobbing parent, was mumbling that he would make sure she was provided for; the heinous great-aunts had returned to prayer and were crooning a wordless hymn; Crux was loudly abusing Ortus’s mother; and Harrowhark stood in this sea, mute and contemptuous as a monument.

“—leave and pray for guidance, or I’ll have you, I’ll take you off the sanctuary,” Crux was saying.

“—I gave this house everything; I paid the highest price—”

“—what comes of Mortus marrying an immigrant Eighth, you shameful hag—”

Gideon was grinning so hugely that her split lips recommenced bleeding. Amid the massed heads of the uncaring dead and the disturbed devout, Harrowhark’s eyes found hers, and that disdainful mask slipped in its blankness; her lips thinned. The people clamoured. Gideon winked.

“Enough,” snapped the Reverend Daughter, voice like a knife’s edge. “Let us pray.”

Silence sank over the congregation, like the slowly falling flakes of luminescent dust. The sobbing of Ortus’s mother hushed into silent, shuddering tears, buried in her son’s chest as he put his doughy arm around her. He was crying soundlessly into her hair. The hymn of the nasty great-aunts ended on a high and tremulous note, never relieved, wasting away in midair; Harrow bowed her head and her parents did too, simultaneous in obedience. The great-aunts nodded their heads to their chests; Aiglamene and Crux followed suit. Gideon stared up at the ceiling and recrossed her ankles over each other, blinked bits of luminescent grit from her eyes.

“ I pray the tomb is shut forever, ” recited Harrowhark, with the curious fervidity she always showed in prayer. “ I pray the rock is never rolled away. I pray that which was buried remains buried, insensate, in perpetual rest with closed eye and stilled brain. I pray it lives, I pray it sleeps … I pray for the needs of the Emperor All-Giving, the Undying King, his Virtues and his men. I pray for the Second House, the Third, the Fourth, the Fifth; the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth. I pray for the Ninth House, and I pray for it to be fruitful. I pray for the soldiers and adepts far from home, and all those parts of the Empire that live in unrest and disquiet. Let it be so.”

They all prayed to let it be so, with much rattling of bones. Gideon had not prayed for a very long time. She looked over the bald, gleaming skulls of the assembled skeletons and the short-haired heads of the faithful Ninth, and wondered what she’d do first when she left for Trentham. The sobs of Ortus’s unfortunate mother interrupted the clatter and her less-than-realistic thoughts of doing chin-ups in front of a dozen clapping ensigns, and she saw Harrow whispering to Crux, gesturing at mother and son, her face a painting of bloodless patience. Crux led them off the sanctuary none too gently. They passed down the centre of the nave, Crux hustling, Ortus lumbering, Ortus’s mother barely able to stand in her misery. Gideon gave the unfortunate cavalier a thumbs-up as they passed: Ortus returned a brief and watery smile.

Muster broke up after that. Most of the congregation stayed to keep praying at their good fortune, knowing that the Secundarius Bell would be ringing in a scant hour anyway. Gideon would have vaulted up to leave and sprint back to her shuttle first thing, but the skeletons flooded out in neat, serried ranks down the centre of the nave, two abreast, blocking all other progress in their readiness to get back to their snow leeks and the heat lamps of their fields. The disgusting great-aunts removed themselves behind the parcloses to the claustrophobic family chapel off to one side, and Harrowhark ordered her parents’ complaisant mummies out of sight to wherever she usually hid them. Back in their lavish household cell, probably, and to bar the door after. Gideon was massaging sprains from her fingers as her sword-master came seesawing down the aisle.

“She lies,” said Gideon absently, by way of greeting. “If you hadn’t noticed. She never keeps her promises. Not a one.”

Aiglamene did not answer. Gideon didn’t expect her to. She just stood there, not yet meeting her student’s gaze, one liver-spotted hand clutched tight to the grip of her sword. Eventually, she said gruffly: “You have always suffered from a want of duty, Nav. You can’t argue that. You couldn’t spell obligation if I shoved the letters up your ass.”

“I gotta say, I don’t think that would help,” said Gideon. “God, I’m glad you didn’t teach me my spelling.”

“A soldier’s best quality is her sense of allegiance. Of loyalty. Nothing else survives.”

“I know,” said Gideon, and, experimenting, rose from the pew. She was standing fine, but her ribs ached; one was probably cracked. Her butt hurt from being dragged. She was going to be swollen with bruises before nightfall, and she needed to have a tooth put back in—not by one of the nuns, though, never again. The Cohort would have bone magicians aplenty. “I know. It’s fine. Don’t get me wrong, Captain. Where I’m going, I promise to piss fidelity all the livelong day. I have lots of fealty in me. I fealt the Emperor with every bone in my body. I fealt hard. ”