Gideon the Ninth

But that meant they were going to go. Gideon reflected on her unexpected victory as she stared in the mirror, idly counting the pimples cropping up as the result of repeated slathers of cult paint. The atmosphere was—relaxed, in this strange and waiting way, like the time she’d got a sedative and knew a nun was coming to whip out her tonsils. She and Nonagesimus were both waiting for the knife. She had never known Harrow to be so malleable, nor to go such a long time without raking her claws across Gideon’s internal tender spots. Maybe the Lyctor trials were having a mellowing effect on her.

No, that was too much to hope for. Harrowhark was pleased because everything was coming up Harrowhark—she was glutted on getting her own way, and the moment that glow wore off the knives would come out again. Gideon couldn’t trust Harrow. There was always some angle. There was always some shackle closing on you before you could even see it, and you’d only know when she turned the key. But then—

That evening, it was funny to see Harrow fuss. She put on her best and most senescent Ninth robes, and became a skinny black stick swallowed by night-coloured layers of Locked Tomb lace. She fiddled with long earrings of bone in front of the mirror and repainted her face twice. Gideon realised with no small amount of amusement and curiosity that Harrowhark was very frightened. She got more snappish as the evening wore on, and moved from languid postures of affected boredom with a book to a tense, rolled-up curl with hunched shoulders and knees. Harrow kept staring at the clock and wanted to go a full twenty minutes early. Gideon had just thrown on a clean robe and her tinted glasses, and noted that the necromancer was too tetchy even to veto those.

Why on earth was she scared? She had headed up function after dreary, overembroidered Ninth function, ornate in its rules and strict in its regulations, since she was a kid. Now she was all jitters. Maybe it was about being denied her dark necromantic needs down past the access hatch. In any case, both she and Harrowhark turned up, gorgeously gowned in their Locked Tomb vestments, painted like living skulls, looking like douchebags. Harrow clinked when she walked with the sheer multiplicity of bonely accoutrement.

“You came!” said Magnus Quinn when he saw them; he was too well bred to double-take at two horrible examples of Drearburh clergy on the loose. “I’m so pleased you’re wearing your, ah, glad rags; I was convinced I’d be the only one dressed up, and would have to sit resplendently among you all, feeling a bit of an idiot. Reverend Daughter,” he said, and he bowed very deeply to Harrow. “Thank you for coming.”

He himself was immensely trim in a pale brown, long-coated suit that had probably cost more than the Ninth House had in its coffers. The Ninth was high on ancient, shitty treasures but low on liquid assets. In a lower and chillier voice than Harrow usually ever affected, she said: “Blessings on the cavalier of the Fifth. Congratulations on the eleventh year of your espousal.”

Espousal. But Magnus said, “Indeed! Yes! Thank you! It was actually yesterday. By happy accident I remembered and Abigail forgot, so in her resulting angst she wanted to make me dinner. I suggested we all benefit. Come in, please—let me introduce you.”

The dining room off the atrium looked as it ever did, but with certain festive additions. The napkins had all been folded very carefully and some mildly yellowing tablecloth had come out of deep storage. There were correctly articulated place cards by each bright white plate. They were both led to the little kitchen and introduced to the slightly stressed Fifth necromancer whom Gideon had only ever seen in passing: she proved to have more or less the same easy, unaffected manner as Magnus, the type you only got when you came from a house like the Fifth. She looked Gideon very straight in the eye and shook her hand very firmly. Unlike Magnus, she also had the manner some necromancers and librarians developed when they had been working on dead spells for the last fifteen years and no longer worried too much about the living: her stare was far too intense. But she was wearing an apron and it was hard to feel intimidated by her. Her very correct pleasantries with a po-faced Harrow were interrupted with the appearance in the doorway of the wretched teens, who were wearing around a million earrings each. The Ninth moved back to the hall.

It was a strange evening. Harrow nearly vibrated with tension. Teacher, perennially pleased to see them for no reason Gideon ever knew, cornered them immediately. He and the other priests were there already and each had a birthday expression of glee: for his part, Teacher was twinkling with a magnitude usually reserved for dying stars.