Gideon the Ninth

When as a young and disinclined member of the Locked Tomb Gideon had painted her face, she had gone for the bare minimum of death’s-head that the role demanded: dark around the eyes, a bit around the nose, a slack black slash across the lips. Now as Harrowhark gave her a little palm of cracked mirror, she saw that she was painted like the ancient, tottering necromancers of the House: those ghastly and unsettling sages who never seemed to die, just disappear into the long galleries of books and coffins beneath Drearburh. She’d been slapped up to look like a grim-toothed, black-socketed skull, with big black holes on each side of the mandible.

Gideon said drearily, “I look like a douche.”

“I want you to appear before me every day, like this, until the day we leave,” said Harrowhark, and she leant against the desk to view her handiwork. “I won’t cut you bald—even though your hair is ridiculous—because I know you won’t shave your head daily. Learn this paint. Wear the robe.”

“I’m waiting for the and,” said Gideon. “You know. The payoff. If you let me have my head, I’d wear my breastplate and use my sword—you’re an imbecile if you think I’ll be able to fight properly wearing a robe—and I could cavalier until the rest of them went home. I could cavalier until they just made you a Hand on the first day and put sexy pictures of me on a calendar. Where’s the and, Nonagesimus?”

“There is no and,” Harrow said, and pushed herself away from Gideon’s chair to throw herself back down on the sofa once more. “If it were merely about getting what I wanted, I wouldn’t have bothered to take you at all. I would have you packed up in nine boxes and sent each box to a different House, the ninth box kept for Crux to comfort him in his old age. I will succeed with you in tow and nobody will ever know that there was aught amiss with the House of the Ninth. Paint your face. Train with the rapier. You’re dismissed.”

“Isn’t this the part where you give me intel,” Gideon said, standing up and flexing her stiff muscles, “tell me all you know of the tasks ahead, who we’re with, what to expect?”

“God, no!” said Harrow. “All you need to know is that you’ll do what I say, or I’ll mix bone meal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut.”

Which was, Gideon had to admit, entirely plausible.

Chapter 6

If Gideon had worried that the next three months would see her in close proximity to the Reverend Daughter, she was dead wrong. She spent six hours a day learning where to put her feet when she wielded a one-handed sword, where to rest (what seemed to her to be) her useless, unused arm, how to suddenly make herself a sideways target and always move on the same stupid foot. At the end of each punishing session, Aiglamene would take her in a one-on-one fight and disarm her in three moves.

“Parry, damn you, parry!” was the daily refrain. “This isn’t your longsword, Nav, you block with it again and I’ll make you eat it!”

On the few early days when she had foregone the paint, Crux had appeared and turned off the heating to her cell: she would end up slumped on her tier, screaming with cold, numb and nearly dead. So she wore the goddamn paint. It was nearly worse than her pre-cavalier life, except that as a small mercy she could train instead of going to prayers and, as a bigger mercy, Crux and Harrow were nearly never around. The heir to the House had ordered her marshal to do something secret down in the bowels of Drearburh, where bowed and creaking Ninth brothers and sisters worked hour after hour at whatever grisly task Harrowhark had set.

As for the Lady of the Ninth herself, she locked herself in the library and didn’t come out. Very occasionally she would watch Gideon train, remark on the absolute lack of progress, make Gideon strip her paint off her face and command her to do it again. One day she and Aiglamene made Gideon walk behind Harrow, up and down the tiers, shadowing her until Gideon was nearly mad with impatience.

The only dubious advantage to this was that she would sometimes hear snatches of conversation, standing motionless and rigid-backed with her hand on the pommel of her sword and her sightline somewhere beyond Harrow’s shoulder. Gideon was hungry for intel, but these exchanges were never very illuminating. The most she got was the day Harrow, too fretful to modulate her voice, said outright: “Naturally it’s a competition, Captain, even if the wording…”

“Well, the Third House will naturally be the best equipped…”

“And the Second will have spent half their lives at the front and be covered in Cohort decorations. It doesn’t signify. I don’t care about soldiers or politicians or priests. It’s a greyer House I worry about.”

Aiglamene said something that Gideon did not catch. Harrow gave a short, hard laugh.

“Anyone can learn to fight. Hardly anyone learns to think.”