Gideon the Ninth

She would question later why she did it, but she did it. Depth perception fled as she squinted an eye shut, backing away from the construct as it slithered around in useless circles, crippled. For a moment her gaze drunkenly slid into place, and she could see—something—at the very corners of her vision: some kind of peripheral mirage, a susurrus of light that moved in a way she’d never seen before. It was like a gel overlay across real life. It balled around various bits of the construct as though attracted to it, like iron filings to a magnet. She blinked hard. There was fresh panting over the speakers.

“All right,” came Harrow’s voice, “all right, all right—”

The construct reared up, centre of gravity restored. Gideon’s heart hammered. The speakers hissed again. Harrow said, “What’s on top of it?”

“What—the arms?”

“I can’t see,” said Harrow, “blurry—”

Gideon had to open both eyes again. She couldn’t not. She parried the first uppercut thrust from the construct as it bounded toward her, but it cracked her in the shoulder with another. She got it with her knives on the backswing—the sharpened arm cracked, bounced away, and hit the wall—but she had to fall back into a crouch and seethe with pain, worrying that her shoulder had popped out entirely. The speakers bellowed. The construct reared up, other blades at the ready, and—disassembled.

It turned to liquid and trickled toward the grate in the centre of the room as Gideon stared. The Response door slid open, and after a moment’s testing of her shoulder, she pulled herself to stand. She was working the muscles as she went through the doorway—it locked shut, Imaging opened—and she found herself face-to-face with Harrow, who was taut as death and trembling.

“The hell,” said Gideon, “was that?”

“It’s the test.” Harrow’s lips were pink where she had bitten off the paint. She seemed to be having trouble swallowing, and she was staring right through her cavalier. She said unsteadily, “You’re the test.”

“Um—”

“Frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital, hippocampus—I fought with them all inside you,” she said. “I’m not equipped to deal with a living spirit still attached to a nervous system. You’re so noisy. It took me five minutes to peel away the volume just to see. And the pain is so much worse than skeleton feedback—your spirit rendered me deaf! Your whole body makes noise when you fight! Your temporal lobe—God—I have such a headache!”

This entire speech was incoherent, but the bottom-line realisation was humiliating. Heat rose rapidly up Gideon’s neck. “You can control my body,” she said. “You can read my thoughts.”

“No. Not remotely.” That was a relief, until it was followed up with: “If only I could. The moment I get a handle on even one of your senses, I’m overwhelmed by another.”

“You are banned from squatting in my lobes and my hippocampus. I don’t want you pushing all the furniture around in there.”

Perhaps there was some tiny grain of sympathy in Harrow. She did not respond with a horrid laugh or a dark Ninth saying: she just flapped her hand. “Don’t have an aneurysm, Nav. I cannot and will not read your thoughts, control your body, or look at your most intimate memories. I don’t have the ability and I certainly don’t have the desire.”

“It’s for your protection, not mine,” said Gideon. “I imagined Crux’s butt once when I was twelve.”

Harrow ignored her. “Winnowing,” she said. “I’m a fool. It wants the wheat from among the chaff—or the signal from the noise, if you like. But why? Why can’t I just do it myself?”

She swayed lightly, and swabbed a pink line across her face with one sleeve. Her cultist paint was looking distinctly sepia, but she looked elated, grimly satisfied somehow.

“I now know how to complete this trial,” she said meditatively. “And we’ll do it—if I work out the connection and rethink what I know about possession theory, I can do it. Knowing what to work on was the battle, and now I know. But first, Griddle, I’m afraid I have to pass out.”

And she crumpled neatly back onto the floor. Pure sentiment found Gideon kicking out one leg to catch her. She ended up lightly punting her necromancer on the shoulder but assumed that it was the thought that counted.

Chapter 15

“I’d do a hell of a lot better with a longsword,” Gideon said.

A few hours after, Harrowhark had woken up from her floor nap and accompanied her cavalier back to their quarters. She’d been all for trying again then and there, but it took Gideon one look at her slightly crossing eyes and shaky hands to nix that plan. Now they were back in their main, dark-panelled room, the noonday light filtering through the blinds in hot slats of white, with Gideon galumphing down bread and Harrow picking at crusts. The necromancer had woken up just as sour as ever, which gave Gideon some hope that everything back there had been a passing fit of insanity.