Gideon the Ninth

Everything in that room was beautiful, and all had gone to seed. It wasn’t like back in the Ninth where unbeautiful things were now old and ruined to boot—the Ninth must have always been a corpse, and corpses putrefied. The House of the First had been abandoned, and breathlessly waited to be used by someone other than time. The floors were of wood—where they weren’t of gold-shot marble, or a rainbow mosaic of tiles gone leprous with age and disrepair—and enormous twin staircases jutted up to the floor above, spread with narrow, moth-eaten rugs. Vines peeked through in number where the glass of the ceiling had cracked, spreading tendrils that had since gone grey and dry. The pillars that reached up to support the shining glass were carpeted thickly with moss, still alive, still radiant, all orange and green and brown. It obscured old portraits on the walls in spatters of black and tan. It hung atop an old, dry fountain made of marble and glass, three tiers deep, a little bit of standing water still skulking in the bottom bowl.

Harrowhark refused to sit. Gideon stood next to her, feeling the hot, wet air glue the black folds of her robe to her skin. The cavalier of the Seventh, Protesilaus, didn’t sit either, she noticed, not until his mistress patted the chair next to her own, and then he folded down with unhesitating obedience. The white-garbed skeletons circulated trays filled with cups of astringent tea, steaming green—funny little cups with no handles, hot and smooth to the touch, like stone but smoother and thinner. The Seventh cavalier held his but did not drink it. His adept tried to drink but had a minor coughing fit that lasted until she gestured for her cavalier to thump her on the back. As the other necromancers and cavaliers drank with varied enjoyment, Harrowhark held her cup as though it were a live slug. Gideon, who had never drunk a drink hot in all her days, knocked back half in one gulp. It burned all the way down her throat, more smell than flavour, and left a grassy tang on her cauterised taste buds. Some of her lip paint stayed on the rim. She choked discreetly: the Reverend Daughter gave her a look that withered the bowels.

All three priests sat at the lip of the fountain, holding their teacups unsipped in their hands. Unless they were hiding a bunch more in some cupboard, it seemed terrifically lonely to Gideon. The second was the tottery priest, his frail shoulders bowing as he fretted with his bloodstained belt; the third was mild of face and sported a long salt-and-pepper plait. They might have been a woman and might have been a man and might have been neither. All three wore the same clothes, which gave them the look of white birds on rainbow leashes, but somehow Teacher was the only one of the three who seemed real. He was eager, interested, vital, alive. The penitent calm of his fellows made them seem more like the robed skeletons arrayed at the sides of the room: silent and immovable, with a red speck of light dancing in each socket.

Once everyone was awkwardly perched on the exquisite wrecks of furniture, finishing their tea, clutching their cups with the gaucherie of people who didn’t know where to put them, making zero conversation, salt-and-pepper plait raised their pale voice and said: “Now let us pray for the lord of that which was destroyed, remembering the abundance of his pity, his power, and his love.”

Gideon and Harrowhark were silent during the ensuing chant: “Let the King Undying, ransomer of death, scourge of death, vindicator of death, look upon the Nine Houses and hear their thanks. Let the whole of everywhere entrust themselves to him. Let those across the river pledge beyond the tomb to the adept divine, the first among necromancers. Thanks be to the Ninefold Resurrection. Thanks be to the Lyctor divinely ordained. He is Emperor and he became God: he is God, and he became Emperor.”

Gideon had never heard this one. There was only one prayer on the Ninth. All other services were call-and-speaks or knucklebone orison. Most of the crowd rattled it off as though they’d been saying it from the cradle, but not all. The hulking mass of man-meat, Protesilaus, stared straight ahead without even mouthing the words, his lips as still as the pale Third twin’s. The others joined in without hesitation, though with varying fervour. Once the last word had sunk into silence, Teacher said: “And perhaps the devout of the Locked Tomb will favour us with their intercession?”