Gideon the Ninth

The whites of Judith’s eyes were very white, her carefully merciless face suddenly a picture of hesitation. Her gaze moved, more remorselessly than Gideon’s ever could have, to her cavalier; then she returned it to them, half-furious, half-beseeching. Palamedes moved in.

“I can’t save you,” he said. “I can’t even make you comfortable. A team of trained medics could do both. How far away is the Second? How long do we have to wait for Cohort backup?”

“The Second’s not coming,” said Captain Deuteros.

She smiled, tight and bitter. “There’s no communication with the rest of the system,” she said, hoarsely now. “He didn’t lie. There was no way to reach the Houses … I got through to the Imperial flagship, Sixth. The Emperor is coming … the King Undying.”

Next to Harrow, Teacher gurgled.

“You draw him back—to the place—he must not return to,” said the dead man, with a thin and reedy whistle of a voice around the blade in his vocal cords. His whole body wriggled. His dead eyes no longer twinkled drunkenly, but his tongue slithered. His spine arched. “Oh, Lord—Lord—Lord, one of them has come back—”

His voice trailed off. His body collapsed to the floor. The silence in the wake of his settling was huge and loathsome.

Palamedes said, “Judith—”

“Give me her sword,” she said.

The rapier was too heavy for her to hold. Camilla laid it over the necromancer’s knees, and Judith’s fingers closed around it. The steel of the hilt was bright in her hand. She squeezed down until her knuckles were white.

“At least let us get you out of here,” said Gideon, who thought it was a shitty room to die in.

“No,” she said. “If he comes back to life again, I will be ready. And I won’t leave her now … nobody should ever have to watch their cavalier die.”

The last Gideon ever saw of Captain Judith Deuteros was her propped up on the armchair, sitting as straight as she could possibly manage, bleeding out through the terrible wound at her gut. They left her with her head held high, and her face had no expression at all.

Chapter 33

It seemed as though just when you least wanted them, the Eighth House were always there. They were striding down the whitewashed corridor outside Dulcinea’s room as the rest of the group made their way back to her, making the whitewash look off-colour and dirty with the spotlessness of their robes. Gideon nearly drew her sword; but they had come in need, rather than in warfare.

“The Third House have defiled a body,” said Silas Octakiseron, by way of hello. “The servants are all destroyed. Where’s the Second and the Seventh?”

Harrow said, “Dead. Incapacitated. So is Teacher.”

“That leaves us critically shorthanded,” said the Eighth House necromancer, who could not be accused of having the milk of human kindness running through his veins. He did not even have the thin and tasteless juice of feigned empathy. “Listen. The Third have opened up Lady Pent—”

Palamedes said, “Abigail?” and Harrow said, “Opened up?”

“Brother Asht saw the Third leave the morgue this morning, but we have not seen them since,” said Silas. “They are not in their quarters and the facility hatch is locked. We are compelled to join forces. Abigail Pent has been interfered with and opened up.”

“Please elaborate opened up, because my imagination is better than your description and I am not having a lot of fun here,” said Gideon.

The Eighth cavalier said heavily, “Come and see.”

It couldn’t have been an ambush. There was one House versus two. And for once, Silas Octakiseron seemed genuinely jumpy. Gideon hung back near Harrowhark as the grisly procession made its way down through the hallways again, to the atrium, working their way toward the dining hall and the makeshift morgue off the kitchen.

Harrow murmured beneath her breath, for Gideon’s ears only: “The Second dead and dying. Teacher dead, and the revenants with him—”

“Teacher turned against the Second. Why are you so sure that Teacher didn’t kill the others?”

“Because Teacher was afraid of Canaan House and the facility most of all,” said Harrow. “I need to go back and check, but I suspect he was incapable of going down that ladder at all. He was a construct himself. But what was Teacher the mould for? Griddle, at the first sign of trouble—”

“Run like hell,” said Gideon.

“I was going to say, Hit it with your sword,” said Harrow.

The morgue was dreary and chill and serene. The anxiety of the rest of Canaan House had not touched it. It was getting to be untenably full: the two teens were still safely away in their cold iron drawers, and Protesilaus was in situ, though he was a head without the body. As it would have been difficult to cram all of him in, this was maybe a blessing in disguise. Magnus was also laid out on his own slab, a little too tall for comfort: but his wife—