Gideon the Ninth

Harrowhark said, rather grudgingly: “I’ve downgraded her in some respects. Logically, judging by ability, and mind, and the facility to combine both in service to an end, it’s Palamedes Sextus and his cavalier.” She shook her head as Gideon opened her mouth to protest. “No, I realise neither has, as you might put it, a fucking motive. A logical conclusion is worth very little if I don’t have all the facts. Then there’s Teacher—and the Lyctor laboratories—and the rules. Why those theorems? What powers them? Why was the Fourth cavalier killed, but you left alive?”

These were all questions that Gideon had privately asked the dead of night many times since Jeannemary had died. She let her shoulders slide back into the water until it was cold up to the backs of her ears, staring at the single fluorescing bar that swung above the pool. Her body floated, weightless, in a puddle of yellow light. She could have asked Harrow anything: she could have asked about the bomb that had taken Ortus Nigenad’s life instead of hers, or she could have asked about her whole entire existence, why it had happened and for what reason. Instead, she found herself asking: “What do you know about the conditioner pathogen that bumped off all the kids—the one that happened when I was little, before you were born?”

The silence was terrible. It lasted for such a long time that she wondered if Harrow had slyly drowned herself in the interim, until—

“It didn’t happen before I was born,” said the other girl, sounding very unlike herself. “Or at least, that’s not precise enough. It happened before I was even conceived.”

“That’s unwholesomely specific.”

“It’s important. My mother needed to carry a child to term, and that child needed to be a necromancer to fill the role of true heir to the Locked Tomb. But as necromancers themselves, they found the process doubly difficult. We hardly had access to the foetal care technology that the other Houses do. She had tried and failed already. She was getting old. She had one chance, and she couldn’t afford chance.”

Gideon said, “You can’t just control whether or not you’re carrying a necro.”

“Yes, you can,” said Harrow. “If you have the resources, and are willing to pay the price of using them.”

The hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck rose, wetly.

“Harrow,” she said slowly, “by resources, are you saying—”

“Two hundred children,” said Harrowhark tiredly. “From the ages of six weeks to eighteen years. They needed to all die more or less simultaneously, for it to work. My great-aunts measured out the organophosphates after weeks of mathematics. Our House pumped them through the cooling system.”

From somewhere beneath the pool, a filter made blurting sounds as it recycled the spilloff. Harrow said, “The infants alone generated enough thanergy to take out the entire planet. Babies always do—for some reason.”

Gideon couldn’t hear this. She held her knees to the chest and let herself go under, just for a moment. The water sluiced over her head and through her hair. Her ears roared, then popped. When she pushed above the surface again, the noise of her heartbeat thumping through her skull was like an explosion.

“Say something,” said Harrowhark.

“Gross,” said Gideon dully. “Ick. The worst. What can I say to that? What the fuck can I say to all that?”

“It let me be born,” said the necromancer. “And I was—me. And I have been aware, since I was very young, about how I was created. I am exactly two hundred sons and daughters of my House, Griddle—I am the whole generation of the Ninth. I came into this world a necromancer at the expense of Drearburh’s future—because there is no future without me.”

Gideon’s stomach churned, but her brain was more urgent than her nausea.

“Why leave me, though?” she demanded. “They murdered the rest of the House, but they left me off the list?”

There was a pause.

“We didn’t,” said Harrow.

“What?”

“You were meant to die, Griddle, along with all the others. You inhaled nerve gas for ten full minutes. My great-aunts went blind just from releasing it and you weren’t affected, even though you were just two cots away from the vent. You just didn’t die. My parents were terrified of you for the rest of their lives.”

The Reverend Father and Mother hadn’t found her unnatural because of how she’d been born: they’d found her unnatural because of how she hadn’t died. And all the nuns and all the priests and all the anchorites of the cloister had taken the cue from them, not knowing that it was because Gideon was just some smothered and unfortunate animal who had still been alive the next day.