Gideon the Ninth

Colum the Eighth’s eyes were as liquid black as, before, Ianthe’s had been liquid white. He had stopped moving as a human being did. The warrior’s economy of movement; the long and lovely lines of someone who had trained with the sword his whole life; the swift-footedness was gone. He now moved like there were six people inside him, and none of those six people had ever been inside a human being before. He sniffed. He craned his head around—and kept craning. With an awful crack, his head turned one hundred and eighty degrees to look impassively at the room behind him.

One of the lightbulbs screamed, exploded, died in a shower of sparks. The air was very cold. Gideon’s breath came as frosty white frills in the sudden darkness, and the remaining lights struggled to pierce the gloom. Colum licked his lips with a grey tongue.

Particles of bone bounced along the floor. Harrowhark had thrown them in a long, overhand arc, and they fell true at Colum’s feet. Spikes erupted from the ground, crowding Colum between them, locking him in tight. Colum raised his white-booted foot indifferently, and kicked through them. They exploded into dusty, tooth-coloured clouds of calcium.

Silas looked up, nearly foetal, from the floor. He still glowed like a pearl in a sunbeam, but he’d lost his focus. Ianthe stepped out of his spell disdainfully, flesh plumping, colour coming back to her face, and she itched herself. There were lights beneath Colum the Eighth’s skin: things pushed and slithered along his muscles as he walked, heavy-footed, rocking from side to side.

Silas wiped the blood away from his nose and mouth and said calmly: “Brother Asht, listen to the words of the head of your House.”

Colum advanced.

“Come back,” said Silas, unruffled. “I bid you return. I bid you return. Colum—I bid you return. I bid you return. I bid you return. I bid. I bid, I bid, I bid— Colum—”

The thing that lived in Colum raised Colum’s sword, and drove the point through Silas Octakiseron’s throat.

Gideon moved. She heard Harrow shout a warning, but she couldn’t help it. She drew her rapier from its scabbard, and she threw herself at the grey thing wearing a person skin. It was not a cavalier: it did not meet the arc of her sword with a parry. It just clouted her with Colum’s shield with a strength no human being ever had. Gideon staggered, very nearly fell, ducked out of the way of a sword gracelessly slammed downward. She took advantage of his movement, got up close, pinned his arm between her body and her sword and shattered his wrist with a meaty crack. The thing opened its mouth and opened its eyes, right up in her face. Its eyeballs were gone—Colum’s eyeballs were gone—and now the sockets were mouths ringed with teeth, with little tongues slithering out of them. The tongue in his original mouth extended out, down, wrapping itself around her neck—

“Enough,” said Ianthe.

She appeared behind the grey-thing-that-had-been-Colum. She took its twisted neck in her hands as calmly and easily as though it were an animal, and she tilted it. The neck snapped. Her fingertips dipped inside the skin; the eye-mouths shrilled, and the tongue around Gideon’s neck flopped away, and both those mouths dissolved into brackish fluid. The body dropped to the floor—

—and it was Colum again, face disfigured, neck on the wrong way, sprawled over the pierced shell of his young dead uncle. There was no solace in that big, beat-up body, clutched around his necromancer’s in morbid imitation of the whole of their lives. Neither of them wore white anymore: they were stained all the way through, yellow, red, pink.

The lights buzzed again dismally. The air cleared. Ianthe was left among the gore looking like a moth, fairylike. She picked up the hem of her skirts delicately and shook them. The blood and muck came off like it was powder.

The Princess of Ida beheld the mess around her: then she slapped herself very lightly, like you would to wake someone up.

“Get it together,” she told herself. “You nearly lost that.”

She turned to Gideon, Camilla, and Harrow, and she said—

“There are worse things than myself in this building. Have that one for free.”

Then she stepped backward, into the puddled spray of Silas’s blood, and disappeared. They were left alone in the room, with the quiet, stretched-out corpses of Silas Octakiseron, Colum Asht, and Naberius Tern; and the low, dreary breathing of Coronabeth Tridentarius, looking like chopped-up jewellery.

Gideon lurched toward her, out of desperation to move—to move away from the middle and what was in it, to move toward the abandoned Third twin. Corona looked up at her with tears on her beautiful lashes and eyes swollen from crying. She threw herself into Gideon’s arms, and she sobbed, silently now, utterly destroyed. Gideon was soothed by the fact that someone in this madhouse was still human enough to cry.

“Are you okay—I mean, are you all right,” said Gideon.