Gideon the Ninth

“So you know how it happens. Clever boy! I knew you’d all work it out … eventually. I didn’t want to do it either … I didn’t want to do it at all … but I was dying. Loveday—she was my cavalier—she and I thought it could make me live. Instead I’ve just kept dying, all this time. No, you wouldn’t have done it, and you’re smart not to. You can’t do that to somebody’s soul. Teacher was nearly demented. Did you know what we did to him? I say we, but he wasn’t my project … he was a holy terror. Blame your own House for that! I can’t be grateful enough to those Second ninnies for killing him and calling for help. He was the only one here who scared me. He couldn’t have stopped me, but he might have made things stupid.”

“Why did Teacher not recognise you?”

“Perhaps he did,” said the woman. It sounded like she was smiling. “Who knows what that soul melange was ever thinking?”

There was another pause. She said, “You’ve taken this much more sensibly than I thought you would. When you’re young, you do everything the moment you think about it. For example, I’ve been thinking about doing this for the last three hundred years … but I assumed you would try something silly when you realized she was dead.”

“I wouldn’t ever try to do something silly,” Palamedes said lightly. “I made the decision to kill you the moment I knew there was no more chance to save her. That’s all.”

She laughed, as clear and as bright as ice. It was arrested midway through by a cough—a deep, sick-sounding cough—but she laughed through it anyway, as though she didn’t care.

“Oh, don’t … don’t.”

“I just had to buy enough time,” he said, “to do it slowly enough that you wouldn’t notice—to keep you talking.”

There was another laugh, but this one was punctuated by a big wet cough too. No laughter followed. She said, “Young Warden of the Sixth House, what have you done?”

“Tied the noose,” said Palamedes Sextus. “You gave me the rope. You have severe blood cancer … just as Dulcinea did. Advanced, as hers was when she died. Static, because the Lyctor process begins radical cell renewal at the point of absorption. All this time we’ve been talking, I’ve been taking stock of everything that’s wrong with you—your bacterial lung infection, the neoplasms in your skeletal structure—and I’ve pushed them along. You’ve been in a terrific amount of pain for the last myriad. I hope that pain is nothing to what your own body’s about to do to you, Lyctor. You’re going to die spewing your own lungs out of your nostrils, having failed at the finish line because you couldn’t help but prattle about why you killed innocent people, as though your reasons were interesting … This is for the Fifth and the Fourth—for everyone who’s died, directly or indirectly, due to you—and most personally, this is for Dulcinea Septimus.”

The coughing didn’t stop. Not-Dulcinea sounded impressed, but not particularly worried. “Oh, it’s going to take a great deal more than that. You know what I am … and you know what I can do.”

“Yes,” said Palamedes. “I also know you must have studied radical thanergetic fission, so you know what happens when a necromancer disperses their entire reserve of thanergy very, very quickly.”

“What?” said the woman.

He raised his voice:

“Gideon!” he called out. “Tell Camilla—”

He stopped.

“Oh, never mind. She knows what to do.”

The sickroom exploded into white fire, and the bonds pinning Gideon snapped. She fell hard against the wall and spun, drunkenly, lurching back down the corridor as Palamedes Sextus made everything burn. There was no heat, but Gideon sprinted away from that cold white death without bothering to spare a glance behind as though flames were licking at her heels. There was another enormous CRRR-RRR-RRRACK and a boom. The ceiling shook wide showers of plaster dust down on her head as she threw herself bodily through a doorway. She ran for her life down the long corridors, past ancient portraits and crumbling statues, the grave goods of the tomb of Canaan House, the mechanisms of this feeble shitty machine crumbling as Palamedes Sextus became a god-killing star.

Gideon fell to her knees in the atrium, before the dried-up fountain with its dried-up skeleton and his soggy towels. She put her forehead to the lip of the fountain’s marble and pressed a dent into herself, still listening to the muffled sounds of destruction behind her. She pressed as though sheer surface contact alone would allow her to get off the ride. How long she did that for—how hard she pressed, and how long she huddled—she did not know. Her mouth was tight with wanting to cry, but her eyes were dry as salt.

Years later—lifetimes later—there was movement at the entrance of the atrium she had flung herself through. Gideon turned her head.