Gideon the Ninth

“A girl, you yellow-eyed moron,” said Harrowhark. Her voice dropped to a whisper, and her head was dead weight in Gideon’s hands. “Inside the Locked Tomb is the corpse of a girl.

“They packed her in ice—she’s frozen solid—and they laid a sword on her breast. Her hands are wrapped around the blade. There are chains around her wrists, coming out of her grave, and they go down into holes by each side of the tomb, and there are chains on her ankles that do the same, and there are chains around her throat …

“Nav, when I saw her face I decided I wanted to live. I decided to live forever just in case she ever woke up.”

Her voice had the quality of someone in a long dream. She stared through Gideon without looking at her, and Gideon gently took her hands away from Harrow’s jaw. Instead she sat back in the water, buoyed by the salt, her eyes starting to sting from it. They both floated there for a long time in amicable silence, until they pulled themselves up and sat, dripping, on the side of the pool. The salt was crusting up their hair. Gideon reached over to take Harrow’s hand.

They sat there, wet through and uncomfortable, fingers curled into each other’s in the half-light, the pool interminably lapping at the cool tiles that surrounded it. The skeletons stood in perfect, silent ranks, not betraying themselves with even a creak of bone against bone. Gideon’s brain moved and broke against itself like the tiny wavelets they had left, the water lurching restlessly from side to side, until it came to a final conclusion.

She closed the gap between them a little, until she could see tiny droplets run down the column of Harrow’s neck and slide beneath her sodden collar. She smelled like ash, even smothered under litres and litres of saline. As she approached Harrow grew very still, and her throat worked, and her eyes opened black and wide: she looked at Gideon without breathing in, her mouth frozen, her hands unmoving, a perfect bone carving of a person.

“One last question for you, Reverend Daughter,” said Gideon.

Harrow said, a little unsteadily: “Nav?”

Gideon leaned in.

“Do you really have the hots for some chilly weirdo in a coffin?”

One of the skeletons punted her back into the water.

* * *

For all the rest of that evening they were furtive and unwilling to let the other one out of their sight for more than a minute, as though distance would compromise everything all over again—talking to each other as though they’d never had the opportunity to talk, but talking about bullshit, about nothing at all, just hearing the rise and fall of the other one’s voice. That night, Gideon took all her blankets back to the unedifying cavalier bed at the foot of Harrow’s.

When they were both lying in bed in the big warm dark, Harrow’s body perpendicular to Gideon’s body, Gideon said: “Did you try to kill me, back on the Ninth?”

Harrow was obviously startled into silence. Gideon pressed: “The shuttle. The one Glaurica stole.”

“What? No,” said Harrow. “If you’d gotten on that shuttle, you’d have made it safe to Trentham. I swear by the Tomb.”

“But—Ortus—Sister Glaurica—”

There was a pause. Her necromancer said, “Were meant to be brought back after twenty-four hours, in disgrace, with Ortus declared unfit to hold his post, relegated to the meanest cloister of the House. Not that Ortus would have minded. We had paid off the pilot.”

“Then—”

“Crux claimed,” said Harrow slowly, “that the shuttle had a fault, and blew up en route.”

“And you believed him?”

Another pause. Harrow said, “No.” And then: “Above all else, Nav … he couldn’t bear what he saw as disloyalty.”

So it was Crux’s mean, blackened revenge on his own House—his own zealous desire to burn it clear of any hint of insurrection—that had forced Glaurica’s ghost back to her home planet. She did not say this. Silas Octakiseron knew more than he should, but if Harrow discovered that now, she’d be off down the corridor in her nightdress with a sack of emergency bones and a very focused expression. “What a dope,” she said instead. “I was never loyal a day in my life and I still saw you in the raw.”

“Go to sleep, Gideon.”

She fell asleep, and for once didn’t dream of anything at all.

Chapter 32

“This is cheating,” said Harrowhark forbiddingly.

“We’re just being resourceful,” said Palamedes.

They were standing outside a laboratory door that Gideon had never seen. This one had not been hidden, just very inconveniently placed, at the topmost accessible point of the tower: it took more stairs than Gideon’s knees had ever wanted, and was situated plainly at the end of a terrace corridor where the sun slanted in through broken windows. The terrace in question looked so frankly about to disintegrate that Gideon tried to stay close to the corridor’s inside wall, in case most of the floor suddenly decided to fall off the side of Canaan House.