Gideon the Ninth

Her feet took her, heavy and unwilling, back to the bone-wreathed door of the Ninth quarters: her hands pushed open the door hard, recklessly. There was no sign of anyone within. The door to the main bedroom was closed, but Gideon pushed that open too, without even knocking.

There was nobody there. With the curtains drawn Harrow’s room was dark and still, the bed inhabiting the centre of the room like a big hulking shadow. The sheets were rumpled and unmade. She could see the foetal-curl dent on the mattress where Harrow slept. Pens spilled off the mildew-spotted dressing table, and books propped up other, usefuller books on the drawers. The whole room smelled like Harrow: old Locked Tomb veils and preserving salts, ink, the faint smell of her sweat. It skewed harder toward the preserving salts. Gideon stumbled around blindly, kicking the corner of the four-poster bed in the same way that Corona had sunk her teeth into her cavalier’s arm, stubbing her toe, not caring.

The wardrobe door was ajar. Gideon made a beeline toward it, pulling it open violently, though she had no heart to sew shut the cuffs on all of Harrowhark’s shirts as she once might have done. She half-expected bone wards to yank both her arms from their sockets, but there was nothing. There was no guard. There was nothing to have ever stopped her doing this. This drove her demented, for some reason. She slapped the rainbow of black clothes aside: neatly patched trousers, neatly pressed shirts, the formal vestments of the Reverend Daughter tied up inside a net bag and hung from a peg. If she looked at them too long she would feel tight-chested, so she very forcibly didn’t.

There was a box at the bottom of the cupboard—a cheap polymer box with dents in it, tucked beneath a pair of Harrowhark’s boots. She would not have noticed it except that there had been a cursory attempt to hide it with the aforementioned boots and a badly ripped cloak. It was about a forearm’s length on every side. A sudden exhaustion of everything Harrow had ever locked away drove her to mindlessly pull it out. She eased off the pockmarked top with her thumbs, expecting diaries, or prayer bones, or underwear, or lithographs of Harrow’s mother.

With numb fingers, Gideon removed the severed head of Protesilaus the Seventh.

Chapter 30

In the flimsy-papered living room of the Sixth quarters, Gideon sat staring into a steaming mug of tea. It was grey with the sheer amount of powdered milk stirred into it, and it was her third cup. She had been terribly afraid that they’d put medicines into it, or tranquillizers or something: when she wouldn’t drink, both necromancer and cavalier had taken sips to prove it was unadulterated, with expressions that plainly said idiot. Palamedes had been the one to wait patiently next to her while she had thrown up lavishly in the Sixth’s toilet.

Now she sat, haggard and empty, on a spongy mattress they had pulled out as a chair. Protesilaus’s head sat, dead-eyed, on the desk. It looked exactly as it had in life: as though, upon being separated from its trunk, it had entered into some perfect state of preservation to remain boring forever. It looked about as lively as it had when she’d met him. Palamedes was investigating the white gleam of the spinal column at the nape of the neck for maybe the millionth time.

Camilla had shoved a mug of hot tea into Gideon’s hands, strapped two swords to her back, and disappeared. This had all happened before Gideon could protest and now she was left alone with Palamedes, her discovery, and a cluster headache. Things were happening too much. She took a hot mouthful, swilled tea around her teeth, and swallowed mechanically. “She’s mine.”

“You’ve said that five times now.”

“I mean it. Whatever goes down—whatever happens—you have to let me do it. You have to.”

“Gideon—”

“What do I do,” she said, quite casually, “if she’s the murderer?”

His interest in the spinal column was not abating. Palamedes had slipped his glasses down his long craggy nose, and was holding the head upside down like he was emptying a piggy bank. He had even shone light into the nose and ears and horrible warp of the throat. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you do?”

“What would you do if you discovered Camilla was a murderer?”

“Help her bury the body,” said Palamedes promptly.

“Sextus.”

“I mean it. If Camilla wants someone dead,” he said, “then far be it from me to stand in her way. All I can do at that point is watch the bloodshed and look for a mop. One flesh, one end, and all that.”

“Everyone wants to tell me about fleshes and ends today,” said Gideon unhappily.

“There’s a joke in there somewhere. You’re sure there was nothing else along with the head—bone matter, fingernails, cloth?”

“I checked. I’m not a total tool, Palamedes.”