Gideon the Ninth

Gideon limped over near the dusty flowerbeds. WHAM—WHAM—WHAM— She didn’t have much time, but she only had one shot anyway. She struggled out of her black robe and thought about taking off her shirt, in one mental blurt of panic, but decided she didn’t need to. She peeled her gloves off her wet red palms and rolled up her sleeves for no reason, except that it gave her something to do with her shaking hands. She made her voice as calm as possible: in a way, she was calm. She was the calmest she had ever been in her entire life. It was just her body that was frightened.

“Okay,” she said. “I understand now. I really, truly, absolutely understand.”

Harrowhark had leant back on her elbows and was watching her, black eyes lightless and soft. “Nav,” she said, the gentlest she had ever heard Harrow manage. “I can’t hold this for—much longer.”

WHAM—WHAM—WHAM!

“I don’t know how you’re holding it now,” said Gideon and she backed up, looked at what she was backing toward, looked back at her necromancer.

She sucked in a wobbly breath. Harrow was looking at her with a classic expression of faint Nonagesimus pity, as though Gideon had finally lost her intellectual faculties and might wet herself at any moment. Camilla watched her with an expression that showed nothing at all. Camilla the Sixth was no idiot.

She said, “Harrow, I can’t keep my promise, because the entire point of me is you. You get that, right? That’s what cavaliers sign up for. There is no me without you. One flesh, one end.”

A shade of exhausted suspicion flickered over her necromancer’s face. “Nav,” she said, “what are you doing?”

“The cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole entire life, believe me,” said Gideon. “You’ll know what to do, and if you don’t do it, what I’m about to do will be no use to anyone.”

Gideon turned and squinted, gauged the angle. She judged the distance. It would have been the worst thing in the world to look back, so she didn’t.

She mentally found herself all of a sudden in front of the doors of Drearburh—four years old again, and screaming—and all her fear and hate of them went away. Drearburh was empty. There was no Crux. There were no godawful great-aunts. There were no restless corpses, no strangers in coffins, no dead parents. Instead, she was Drearburh. She was Gideon Nav, and Nav was a Niner name. She took the whole putrid, quiet, filth-strewn madness of the place, and she opened her doors to it. Her hands were not shaking anymore.

WHAM—WHAM—WHAM. The structure bowed and creaked. Big chunks were falling away now, letting in wide splotches of sunlight. She felt movement behind her, but she was faster.

“For the Ninth!” said Gideon.

And she fell forward, right on the iron spikes.

Act Five

Chapter 37

“okay,” said Gideon. “Okay. Get up.”

Harrowhark Nonagesimus got up.

“Good!” said her cavalier. “You can stop screaming any moment now, just an FYI. Now—first make sure nothing’s going to ice Camilla—I meant it about not wanting an afterlife subscription to Palamedes Sextus’s Top Nerd Facts.”

“Gideon,” said Harrow, and again, more incoherently: “Gideon.”

“No time,” said Gideon. A hot wind blew over them both: it whipped Harrow’s hair into her face. “Incoming.”

The shield sighed, shuddered, and finally broke. The ancient Lyctoral construct surged forward, triumphant in its brainlessness. Harrow saw it for what it was: a spongy breadth of regenerating ash, and many lengths of teeth. For all its killing speed before, it now crested before them as though it were travelling through syrup. It shivered in the air, a hundred white lances ready.

Gideon said, “Take it down.”

And Harrow took it down. It was bafflingly simple. It was nothing more than a raised skeleton, and not one that had been formed with any particular grace. It was half gone already, having torn itself free like an animal from her trap. The head was just a chitinous plate. The trunk was a roll of bone. The remaining tentacles fell like rain, arrested in midswing. The bone responded to their call, and together they sailed the thing through the cracked glass panes of the terrace garden to fall—a huge white comet, with flailing tails of bone—into the rolling ocean.

“There’s my sword,” Gideon said. “Pick it up—pick it up and stop looking at me, dick. Don’t. Don’t you dare look at me.”

Harrow turned her head away from the iron railing and picked up the longsword, and cried out: it was far too heavy, far too awkward. Gideon reached her arm out to steady Harrow’s sword hand, shifting the other arm around her in a strange embrace. Her fingers wrapped around Harrow’s, scratchy with callouses. The sheer weight of the thing still stretched the muscles of Harrow’s forearms painfully, but Gideon clasped her wrist, and despite the pain they lifted the sword together.

“Your arms are like fucking noodles,” said Gideon disapprovingly.

“I’m a necromancer, Nav!”