Gideon the Ninth

“I didn’t bring you here to remove it,” Sextus said. “I just brought you here to confirm, which you’ve done nicely, thank you.”

“Excuse me. I never said I couldn’t remove it.”

One eyebrow went up above the thick spectacles. “You don’t think…?”

It was the Harrowhark of old who responded, the one who walked down dusty Ninth House halls as though crushing purple silk beneath her feet. “Sextus,” she said blandly, “I am embarrassed for you that you can’t.”

She clapped her hand over the gall of bone matter welted over the lock. Then she drew it back, and—with all the self-affinity of chewing gum or glue—it travelled

back with her hand, a gummy web of about a finger’s length, the point of origin vibrating madly as a bead of sweat appeared at her temple. Palamedes Sextus sucked in a breath—and then the stuff snapped back, like flexible plastic, rubbering together sullenly in an immovable lump. Harrow tried again. Her fingers kept flexing in and out impotently, kneading, and she turned her head away and closed her eyes. She stretched the stuff away a whole hand’s length—and then it broke, re-formed, scattered back like a reverse explosion. She tried again. And again; and again after that.

The paint on Harrow’s forehead was shiny with blood sweat now. It bubbled up in greyish-pink rivulets. It shone around each nostril. Before she knew what she was doing, Gideon found that she had moved in to flank her: hiding what she was doing from Sextus’s impassive gaze, rolling up the long black sleeve of her Ninth cloak, mouth moving before her brain did. “Battery up,” she muttered.

It was the first thing Gideon had said to her since Harrow had stalked from the Sixth House quarters, taut with what had seemed to be the world’s most dismissive disappointment, a disdainful black crow of a girl. Her adept opened one baleful black eye.

“Pardon?”

“I said saddle up, sunshine.

Come on. You know what to do.”

“I manifestly don’t, and never tell me to saddle up, sunshine ever again.”

“I’m saying to you: siphon me.”

“Nav—”

“Sixth are watching,” said Gideon, brutally.

At the last remark—which was a sledgehammer of a statement, not a stiletto—Harrowhark fell silent. Her expression was resentful in a way that her cavalier could not understand, except to parse it as grim hatefulness that—once again—the only path open to her was that of using her cavalier, a girl who had screwed up so badly as to provide the universe at large with a new understanding of screwup.

All she said was, “You don’t have to roll up your sleeve, you nincompoop,” and then the leaching, squirming feeling of siphoning began.

It was just as bad as the first time, but unquestionably shorter than Harrow’s long and awful walk from one side of the avulsion room to the other; and now Gideon knew what to expect. The pain was a familiar brand of terrible. She did not cry out, though that probably would have been more dignified: instead she toned it down to a series of wheezes and grunts as her necromancer took something from her that sandpapered her soul. Her blood boiled in her veins, then froze abruptly and grazed her innards with each pump of her heart.

Harrowhark curved her fingers, and she pulled. At the end of a very long moment she held an inert sphere of compressed ash and bone, grey and pockmarked, tamed to submission. The lock was as clear and as clean as though the obstruction had never existed. The pair from the Sixth stared at them. Eventually, Palamedes leaned down to squint through the newly cleared keyhole.

“Don’t get used to using her that way, Nonagesimus,” he said, and disapproval had crept into his voice. “It’s not good theory and it’s not good morals.”

It was Gideon who said, “You’re sounding more and more like Silas Octakiseron.”

“Ouch,” said Palamedes, sincerely. Then he straightened up. “Well. It’s off, for good or for ill. Maybe we should’ve left it on, but I want to make it—them—whatever—nervous. Even a supernatural force is vulnerable.” He let his finger rest on the lock. “Did you hide the last key too?” he asked it quietly. “Or are we racing you to it? Well, move faster, dickhead.”

Camilla cleared her throat, maybe because her necromancer was talking to a door. He dropped his hand. “Owe you another one, Ninth,” he said to her skull-faced necromancer. “You get a free question.”

“It’s unattractive to set yourself up as the repository of all knowledge, Sextus.”

“‘Set up’ nothing.”

“How many keys are in play now?”