Gideon the Ninth

Palamedes was shouldering the zip-up bag and saying, “Give her water and food when she wakes up. She’ll take care of the rest. Probably. She needs eight hours of sleep—in a bed, not a library. When she asks how I knew she was in the library, tell her Cam says she clinks when she walks.”

Gideon reached down to take her burden up again, slinging Harrow’s limp and speechless body to occupy her other shoulder. She paused at the foot of the stairs, measuring in her mind’s eye the distance back down the corridor, to the terrace, down the zigzag flights of steps and back through to the Ninth House quarters. Plenty of corners to concuss Harrow with, on the way.

“I owe you one,” she said.

It was Camilla who said, in her quiet, curiously deep voice, “He did it for free.” It was the first time she had looked at Gideon without the flat, stony aggression of a retaining wall, which was nice.

Palamedes said, “What Cam said. Just—look, take a word of advice, here.”

As she waited, he pressed the pads of his fingertips together. His cavalier was looking at him dead on, tense, waiting. In the end, he said: “It’s unbelievably dangerous down there, Ninth. Stop splitting your forces.”

“Dangerous how?”

“If I knew,” said Palamedes, “it’d be a hell of a lot less dangerous.”

Gideon was impatient with vagaries. She wasn’t in Drearburh now. “How do you figure?”

The Sixth House necromancer walked forward and paused before her in the stairwell. He was washed in dilute light from above and behind Gideon, and it showed that he really was thin—the kind of thin made thinner by his grey, shapeless robe, the thinness of trousers cinched too tight to hips. Camilla hovered a perfect half step behind—the half step Aiglamene had trepanned into Gideon—as though suspicious even of the steps.

He said coolly: “Because I’m the greatest necromancer of my generation.”

The unconscious figure sacked across Gideon’s shoulder muttered, “Like hell you are.”

“Thought that would wake her up,” said Palamedes, with no small amount of satisfaction. “Well—I’m off. Like I said, liquids and rest. Good luck.”

Chapter 13

Either Harrowhark fell back unconscious, having used her last remaining energy to spite Palamedes, or she was just already such a dick she could spite him in her sleep. Or maybe she was playing dead. Gideon didn’t care. Her necromancer remained heavy and unmoving all the way back to their rooms. Nobody saw them on the way, for which she was grateful, and she was heartily glad by the end of it to dump her prone and black-wrapped burden on the bed.

Nonagesimus had looked like crap in the darkness of the weird facility. In the comfortable gloom of their quarters she looked worse. Unwrapping her hood and veil revealed torn lips and cracked face paint, flaking off in big brown-glazed smears at one temple. The veil had slipped down with the trip up the ladder. Gideon could see that her nostrils were ringed with a thick black rime of blood, and her hairline was also smeared with thin, crusty traces of it. There were no other signs of blood on the rest of her clothes or her robes, just sweat patches. Gideon had checked for injuries and been traumatised by the experience.

She went to the bathroom and filled up a glass of water from the tap, and she left it next to Harrow, then hesitated hard. How to rehydrate? Was she meant to—wash her mouth, or something? Did she need to clean off the tusks of dried blood at each nostril? Gideon popped each shoulder twice in indecision, grabbed the water glass, and reached toward Harrow.

“Touch me again and I’ll kill you,” said Harrow, scratch-throated, without opening her eyes. “I really will.”

Gideon pulled her fingers back as though from a flame, and exhaled.

“Good luck with that, bucko,” she said. “You look all mummification and no meat.”

Harrow did not move. There was a bruise peeking out behind her ear, already deep purple. “I’m not saying it wouldn’t hurt me, Griddle,” she murmured. “I am just saying you’d be dead.”

Gideon leant back heavily against the bedside table and took a long, malicious pull from Harrow’s glass of water. She felt tight and jangly, and the sweat had cooled to both an itch and a shiver inside her robes. She threw back the hood and shrugged herself out of the robe, feeling like a sleep-deprived child. “‘Thanks, Gideon,’” she said aloud. “‘I was in a pickle and you saved me, which I had no reasonable expectation of, since I’m an asshole who got stuck in a bone in a basement.’ Is that what you’ve been doing without me, all this time? Dicking around in a basement?”

The adept’s lips curled back, showing little slashes of swollen pink through the grey. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I was dicking around in the basement. You didn’t need to get involved. You did just what I was afraid you would do, which was to remove me from a situation that I didn’t need to be removed from.”

“Didn’t need—? What, you were having a nap of your own free will?”

“I was recuperating—”

“Balls you were.”