Gideon the Ninth

The reason why they had stopped dead was unclear. She had stopped dead because the necromancer was staring at her with an expression of naked hostility. He looked at her as though he had finally come face-to-face with the murderer of a beloved family pet.

Gideon had spent too long in the depths of Drearburh not to know when to, put scientifically, get outie. It was not the first time she had received that look. Sister Lachrimorta had looked at her that way almost exclusively, and Sister Lachrimorta was blind. The only difference in the way that Crux had looked at her was that Crux had managed also to encapsulate a complete lack of surprise, as though she already had managed to disappoint his lowest expectations. And a very long time ago—painfully folded in the back of her amygdala—the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father had also looked at her like that, though in their case, their diffidence had been cut through with a phobic flinch: the way you’d look at an unexpected maggot.

“Please deal with the shadow cultist,” said the whey-faced boy, who had the deepest, weariest, most repressive voice she had ever heard in her life.

“Yes, Uncle,” said the bigger man.

Gideon was raw for a fight. She wanted nothing more than for the cross-faced man in boiled leather to draw on her. He was strong-boned and weathered, deeply creased, yellow-brown and yellow-coarse all over. Next to his almost daintily dressed necromancer in white, he looked dusty and ferocious. He looked tough. Thank God. She wanted to fight bloody. She wanted to fight until bone adepts had to be called to put people’s feet back on. She knew the price—waking up mummified in aggressive notes, or maybe dying—but didn’t care anymore. Gideon was measuring, in her mind’s eye, the length of her rapier to the collarbones of the cavalier opposite.

He disappointed her viscerally by standing a few steps away, putting his hands together, and bowing over them to her. It was polite, though not apologetic. He had a lighter, rougher voice than his necromancer, somewhat hoarse, like he suffered from a lifelong cold or a smoker’s cough.

“My uncle can’t eat with your kind around,” he said. “Please leave.”

Gideon had a million questions. Like: Your kind? And: Why do you have such a baby uncle, one the colour of mayonnaise? And: Is “your kind” people who aren’t nephews and who have middle fingers? But she said nothing. She stared him down for a few seconds; he stared back—his face did not hold the same brand of hate, but it held a bullish, deadened expression that seemed to go right through her. If it had been Crux she would have given him the finger. As it was, she nodded and pushed past with her mind an indignant whirl.

Gideon felt awfully suckered by the whole thing. She had longed for the Cohort, in part, due to being heartily sick of her time alone in the dark; she’d wanted to be a part of something bigger than encroaching dementia and snow-leek husbandry. What was she now? An unwelcome spectre roaming the halls without a necro to pursue—the stinging slap in the face that she didn’t even have Harrow—still alone, just in better lighting. She had cherished the tiny delusion that the Lyctor trials would see her being useful for more than spying on conversations and spoiling breakfasts. Even Swords II would have been a sweet reprieve from idleness. It was in this frame of mind, reckless with disappointment, that she pushed her way at random through a collection of dark, empty antechambers and up a flight of damp brick steps; and then suddenly she found herself outside, in a terraced garden.

The sun blazed down through a canopy of glass or some thick, transparent plex. It was admittedly a garden only in a very sad sense of the word. Wherever the First House grew its food leaves, they didn’t grow them here. The salt was thick on each metal strut. The planters were full of shrubby, stunted green things, with long stems and drooping blossoms, bleached from the thick white light overhead. Weird fragrances rose like heat above them, heavy smells, strange smells. Nothing that grew on the Ninth had a real scent: not the moss and spores in its caves, and not the dried-out vegetables cultivated in its fields. The plex ended in a genuinely open area where the wind ruffled the wrinkled leaves of some wrinkled old trees, and there—under an awning in the undulating sun, looking like a long-stemmed, drooping blossom herself—was Dulcinea.