Gideon the Ninth

“—the juicy part is the sarcotesta. Good, aren’t they? There’s a red seed apple growing in the greenhouse. Have you seen the greenhouses?—”

“—in keeping with Ottavian custom for a necromancer’s fast until evening, which includes—”

“—which failed to fix the drive, which failed to get her back to the system in time, which meant I spent the first nine months wrapped in house dirt—”

“—interesting question,” Palamedes was saying at Gideon’s right. “You might say that Scholar recognises the specialist, and Warden recognises the duty, which is why Master Warden is the higher rank. Taken in the sense of the supervisor and, if you think about it another way, the sense of the prison. D’you know what we call the internal jaws of a lock?—”

Opposite, Dulcinea murmured to Abigail: “I think that is a perfect shame.”

“Thank you. We’re over it; it simply wasn’t in our cards,” the necromancer said, a bit bracingly. “My younger brother’s the next in line. He’ll do well. It gives me more time to collate the manuscript, which I’ve been married to longer than I have to Magnus.”

“So keep in mind I’m the kind of pity case you bring out at parties to make other people feel better about themselves,” the other woman said smilingly, ignoring the Fifth’s polite protests to the contrary, “but I would love you to explain your work, just so long as you pretend I am five and go from there.”

“If I can’t explain this clearly, then the fault is mine, not yours. It’s not so complex. We have so little that survived from the period post-Resurrection, pre-sovereignty and pre-Cohort, except in secondhand records. We have transcripts of those from the Sixth, though they’re keeping the originals.”

“They’re kept in a box full of helium so they’ll outlast the heat death of Dominicus, Lady Pent,” said Palamedes.

“Your Masters won’t even let me look at them through the glass.”

“Light is the paper-killer,” he said. “Sorry. It’s nothing against you. It’s not in our particular interest to hoard Lyctoral records.”

“They’re good copies, at least—and I spend my time studying those. Writing commentary, naturally. But being here meant almost more to me than the idea of serving the Emperor. Canaan House is a holy grail! What we know about the Lyctors is tremendously antiseptic. I’ve actually found what I think are unencrypted communiqués between—”

Even with Dulcinea Septimus making the intense eyelash bat of What you are doing and saying is so fascinating to me, Dulcinea Septimus, Gideon knew a boring conversation when she heard one. She took cautious sips of the purple, slightly chewy wine and was trying not to cough as she swung her attention over to her own shadowy marchioness of bones: Harrow was picking at the food, sandwiched between the stony cavaliers of the Seventh and Second. Every so often she would say something terse to Protesilaus, who would take sixty seconds to think about it before making replies so uninflected and curt that they made Harrow sparkle by comparison.

The mayonnaise uncle was talking to the anaemic twin, his probable future bride. “I was removed by … surgical means,” Ianthe was saying calmly, her long fingers toying with the stem of her glass. “My sister is a few minutes older.”

The white-kirtled young uncle was not eating. He had taken a few priggish sips of wine, but spent most of his time with his hands folded quietly over each other and staring. He had the posture of a metre ruler. “Your parents,” he said, in his unexpectedly deep and sonorous voice, “risked intervention?”

“Yes. Corona, you see, had removed my source of oxygen.”

“A wasted opportunity, I’d think.”

“I don’t live alternate histories. Corona’s birth put my survivability somewhere around definite nil.”

“It wasn’t on purpose, mark you,” drawled her cavalier from across the table. His hair was so perfect that Gideon kept staring at it, mesmerised, hoping some specific bit of the ceiling would break down and squash it flat.

Ianthe affected shock. “Why, Babs, are you part of this conversation?”

“I’m just saying, Princess, you don’t have to be so down on her like that—”

“You don’t have to contradict me in public, and yet—and yet.”

Naberius flicked his eyes very obviously over to the other end of the table, but Coronabeth was busy with Magnus: probably swapping new jokes, Gideon thought. He said, “Stop being a pill.”

“I repeat, Babs, are you part of this conversation?”

“Thank God, no,” said the hapless Babs sourly, and turned back to his previous conversation partner: the thickset nephew cavalier, stolidly refilling his bowl. He did not look thrilled to repossess the Third’s undivided attention. Next to the spruce Naberius Tern, he looked shabbier and more worn-out than ever. “Now, look, Eighth, here’s why you’re wrong about the buckler…”