Gideon the Ninth

The cavalier looked at her. She had obviously interrupted him in the middle of some domestic housekeeping, which would have been extremely funny at any other time. The flawless white leather and scale mail pauldrons were gone; he was in his white breeches and a slightly dingy undershirt and he was holding a very oily cloth. The shabbiness of the cloth and the undershirt looked even dingier against the scintillating Eighth whiteness of the trousers. She had never been alone with Colum the Eighth before. Outside his uncle’s shadow he was just as patchy and discoloured, as though he had a liver inflammation; he was still a leathery yellow-brown, and his hair was similar, which made him look the same all over. It was startling to realise that he was maybe a little younger than Magnus. He looked worn-out and secondhand.

“You came alone?” he said, in his perpetually scratchy voice.

“You’d know if my necromancer was here.”

“Yes,” said Colum. He looked as though he were on the verge of saying something, and then decided against it. Instead he said, “Sword and second, please.”

“What? I’m not disarming—”

“Look,” he said, “I’d be a fool not to make you. Bear with me.”

“That’s not part of the deal—”

“There’s nothing in here to hurt you,” said Colum. “I swear it by my honour. So—give over.”

There was nothing likeable about the wiry, rue-eyed man, but there was something sincere about him, and also he had maybe the worst job in the history of the world. Gideon did not trust him. But she handed over her rapier and she handed over her glove, and she trotted after him unwillingly.

The red fog was clearing a little, and now Gideon was regretting the rage that had taken her from Harrow to Teacher and from Teacher’s directions to the rooms that housed the Eighth House. They had been put in high-vaulted, squarish rooms with very high windows, airy and gracious; what furniture they had been given would remain a mystery, because they’d gotten rid of it all. The living space had been mopped until it hurt. It was baffling to see such cleanliness in Canaan House; someone had even given them a pot of furniture polish, and the wooden floorboards beneath Gideon’s feet smelled oiled and fresh. They had kept a writing desk and chair, and a table and two stools, and that was all. The table was covered with a white cloth. There was a book on the writing desk. The rest was prim and sparse.

The only splash of colour was an enormous portrait of the Emperor as Kindly Master, with an expression of beatific peace. It was placed directly opposite the table, so that anyone sitting there would have him as an unavoidable dinner guest. In one corner was a polished metal box with Colum’s targe sitting precariously on a nest of hand weights.

Her sword and glove were both placed carefully next to the door, which she appreciated. Colum disappeared into another room. He reappeared a few minutes later with Silas in tow, kitted out in his perpetual uniform of cornea-white silk and silver-white chain, and his long floating wings of a robe. Gideon must have caught him mid-ablutions, because his chalk-coloured hair was wet and tousled as though it had just been rubbed with a towel. It seemed frivolously long, and she realised she had never seen it except pinned back. He pulled over the chair from the writing desk and sat while his cavalier produced a comb from somewhere, sorting out the still-damp locks of thin white.

Silas looked as though he had not slept well lately. Shadows beneath the eyes made his sharp and relentless chin sharper and even more relentless.

“You must be aware that I would never suffer a shadow cultist in an Eighth sanctuary,” he said, “unless I thought it was of huge moral utility.”

“Thanks,” said Gideon. “Can I sit?”

“You may.”

“Give me a moment,” said Colum. “I’ll finish up, then make the tea.”

She squeaked a stool away from the table, wilfully working the back legs into the shining wood. The necromancer shut his eyes as though the sound hurt him. “I was never part of the Locked Tomb congregation,” she said, settling herself down. “If you had talked to Sister Glaurica, you would have known that.”

Having combed the hair to his satisfaction, Colum began separating sections at the back with the teeth of the comb. Silas ignored this treatment as though it happened so often it was not worth attention. Gideon once again thanked her lucky stars that she had not had a traditional cavalier’s training.

“A rock does not have to make a vow that it is a rock,” said Silas tiredly. “You are what you are. Take your hood off. Please.”

The please was second cousin to an afterthought. Gideon pulled back her hood a little unwillingly, letting it fall on her shoulders, with the now-strange feeling of a nude head. Silas’s eyes were not on her face, now fully exposed, but on her hair, which badly needed a trim.

“I wonder where you come from,” he remarked. “Your mother had the same hair phenotype. Unusual … perhaps she was Third.”

Gideon swallowed.