Gideon the Ninth

Hell! thought Gideon, taking the stairs blindly two at a time. She didn’t. She had said too much already, and all without speaking a single word.

Chapter 11

Those early days at Canaan House spaced themselves out like beads on a prayer string, dilated. They consisted of big, empty hours, of eating meals in unoccupied rooms, of being alone amid very strange strangers. Gideon couldn’t even rely on the familiarity of the dead. The skeletons of the First were too good, too capable, too watchful—and Gideon didn’t feel truly at her ease anywhere except shut up in the dim rooms that the Ninth had been given, doing drills.

After nearly giving everything away she spent two days almost entirely cloistered, working with her rapier until the sweat had smeared her face paint to a leering, staved-in mask. She stacked a rusting stool on top of the sagging ebon dresser and did chin-ups into the iron wedge that ran across the rafters. She did press-ups in front of the windows until Dominicus limned her with bloody light, completing its sprint around the watery planet.

Both nights she went to bed sore and furious with loneliness. Crux always had said that she was at her most unbearable after confinement. She fell into a deep, black sleep and woke up only once, the second night, when—in the very early morning when the night outside seemed more like the lightless Ninth—Harrowhark Nonagesimus shut the door behind herself, very nearly silently. She kept her eyes mostly closed as the Reverend Daughter paused before the makeshift bed, and as she watched the robed black figure drifted over to the bedroom. Then there was no more noise; and Harrow was gone again, in the morning, when Gideon awoke. She didn’t even leave rude notes.

It was in this abandoned state that the cavalier of the Ninth House ate two breakfasts, starved of both protein and attention, dark glasses slipping on her nose as she drank another bowl of soup. She would have killed to see a couple of haggard nuns tottering around the place, and was therefore 100 percent vulnerable when she looked up to see a Third House twin stride into the room like a lion. It was the lovely one; she had the sleeves of her gauzy robe haphazardly rolled up to each golden shoulder and her hair tied back in a tawny cloud, and she looked at Gideon with an expression like an artillery shell midflight.

“The Ninth!” she said.

She sauntered over. Gideon had risen to stand, remembering the pale eyes of her pissed-off twin, but instead found a beringed hand proffered in her direction: “Lady Coronabeth Tridentarius,” she was told, “Princess of Ida, heir of the Third House.”

Gideon did not know what to do with the hand, which was offered to her fingers out, palm upward. She touched her fingers to it in the hope that she could grip it briefly and get out that way, but Coronabeth Tridentarius, Princess of Ida, took her hand and roguishly kissed the backs of Gideon’s knuckles. Her smile was sparklingly pleased with her own gall; her eyes were a deep, liquid violet, and she spoke with the casual effrontery of someone who expected her every command of jump! to be followed by a rave.

“I’ve organised sparring matches for the cavaliers of all the Houses,” she said. “It’s my hope that even the Ninth will accept my invitation. Will it?”

If Gideon had not been so lonely; if Gideon had not been so used to having a fighting partner, even one more used these days to battling rheumatism; if Coronabeth Tridentarius had not been so astonishingly hot. All these ifs she contemplated wearily, led by the Third House necromancer down the poky, confined little staircase immediately familiar to her as the one she’d explored before; down to the dark, tiled vestibule with the flickering lights, and through to the room with the foul-smelling chemical pit.

This room was now alive with activity. There were three skeletons down in the pit with hairy mops and buckets, cleaning the slime out of it; a fourth was wiping down the streaked glass double doors through to the mirror room beyond. The fug of rot was overlaid with the equally pervasive fug of surfactants and wood polish. Old age still had the place in a chokehold, but in the hot light of the early morning, two figures danced around each other on the outspread flagstone dais of the mirror room. The urgent metal scrape of sword on sword filled the space up to the rafters.