Gideon the Ninth

Their stares met for a single hot second. This single second felt like so long and stretched a pause that her overwound nerves very nearly went ping like elastic and fired her clean across the room. Then Colum seemed to make a decision.

“Once upon a time you would’ve taken everything I said as gospel,” he said, in a very different voice. “I used to think that was worse than now … but I was wrong.”

The hand faltered. Silas snapped his head around to stare at the older man. It was the first time he’d looked anywhere but at Gideon since she entered the room. “I urge you to recall yourself,” he said shortly.

“I recall myself perfectly,” said Colum. “You don’t. You did, once. When you and I started this, when you weren’t even twelve. When you thought I knew everything.”

The fingers curled inward, just slightly, before straightening out again as though some inner resolve had stiffened. “This is not the time.”

Colum said: “I respected the child. At times I can’t stand the man, Si.”

Silas’s voice had sunk to a dead whisper: “You made an oath—”

“Oath?

Ten years of training, before you were even born. Oath? Three brothers with different blood types, because we couldn’t tell what you’d be and which of us you’d need. Ten years of antigens, antibodies, and waiting—for you. I am the oath. I was engineered into a man who doesn’t—pick and choose his decencies!”

His voice had risen to fill the room. This left Silas Octakiseron perfectly white and still. Colum jerked his chin hard toward Gideon, and she noticed dimly that it was just another version of the elfin, fork-tine chin on Silas. He turned and strode toward the door. Gideon, completely out of her depth but sensing escape on some automatic rodent-brain level, started out of her chair and followed. Silas stayed where he was.

When Colum reached the sword, he picked it up, and Gideon had just a second to worry that he was now going to exploit some insane religious loophole and kill her with her own weapon. But this was beneath her. When Colum held her sword out to her, horizontally in one hand, it was as cavalier to cavalier. His expression was perfectly calm now, as though the anger had never even surfaced: maybe it hadn’t. And his eyes were the eyes of a man who had just tied his own noose.

She took her blade. She now owed him very badly, which sucked.

“The next time we meet,” he said beneath his breath, as monolithic and impassive as when she’d arrived, “I think it’s likely one of us will die.”

“Yeah,” Gideon said, “yeah,” instead of “I’m sorry.”

Colum picked up the knuckle-knife and handed that to her as well. “Get away from here,” he said, and it sounded more warning than command.

He moved away from her again. Gideon was sorely tempted to take him with

her and away from Silas, sitting still and pale in his great white room, but she felt that probably that wasn’t going to happen. She also thought about skidding off a couple middle fingers to Silas around Colum’s shoulders, but concluded the moral high ground was sometimes worth holding on to. So she left.

As she walked away, she braced for a sudden burst of angry voices, yelling, recriminations, maybe even a cry of pain. But there was only silence.

Chapter 29

In a welter of stupefaction Gideon wandered the halls of Canaan House, unwilling to go home. She walked down the neglected halls and dimly realised she could no longer smell the mould, having smelled it for so long that it had become indistinguishable from the air around her. She stood in the cool shadows of putrefied doorways, trailing her fingers over the porous bumps and splinters of very old wood. Skeleton servitors rattled past her, holding baskets or ancient watering cans, and when she looked out through a filth-streaked window she saw a couple of them standing on the battlements, lit up by white sunshine, holding long poles over the side. Her brain registered this as making total sense. Their ancient finger bones gleamed on the reels, and as she watched one pulled a jerking, flapping fish to the apex of its extreme journey from ocean to phalange. The construct carefully put it in a bucket.

She passed the great atrium with the dry, dubious fountain, and she found Teacher there. He was sitting in front of the fountain, in a chair with a ruptured cushion, praying, or thinking, or both. His shining head was drooping, but he gave her a weary smile.

“How I hate the water,” he said, as though this conversation was one they’d had before and he was simply continuing it. “I’m not sorry that this has dried up. Ponds … rivers … waterfalls … I loathe them all. I wish they had not filled the pool downstairs. It’s a terrible portent, I said.”

“But you’re surrounded by sea,” said Gideon.

“Yes,” said Teacher unexpectedly, “it is a bit of a pisser.”

Gideon laughed—slightly hysterical—and he joined in, but his eyes filled with tears.

“Poor child,” he said, “we’re all sorry. We never intended this to happen, none of us. The poor child.”