Gideon the Ninth, Chapter 31

[we_bring_hell]

Harrowhark stands in the hallway and watches the Third retreat, her brow furrowing a wrinkle into her paint. She has an uncomfortable feeling she's been underestimating Ianthe Tridentarius all along, and her head whirls with being suddenly hurled back into the unforgiving meatgrinder of House politics.

But the secret is out and she is vindicated; she did not kill Protesilaus Ebdoma, and Dulcinea Septimus is a liar.

She hears the unmistakable footsteps of Gideon Nav joining her, and forgets all that. She turns in a swish of black cloth and says, “Follow me.”

Comments

[we_do_bones]

“No, you monster’s ass,” says Gideon coldly. “I mean, why didn’t you tell me you’d killed him before you sent me and the Fourth down to the facility to look for the guy who was in a box in your closet? Why didn’t you take the moment to say, I don’t know, hey, maybe we shouldn't send two children downstairs to get fucked up by a huge bone creature.”

But there's something else that's niggling at her, too, stoking her fury, and her stomach goes cold. "Wait. Fuck. Did you know? You said you were ahead of me, that I came in from before you –

"Harrow. Did you know?"

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She swallows, and looks down into the water. "Yes," she whispers.

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Something horrible is happening to Gideon's face. Beneath what's left of her paint, she's gone paper-pale right to the lips, and her eyes are wide and hurt. She looks, more than anything, like she's about to cry.



"Could I have changed it?" she whispers, after a long moment. "If you'd told me. Could I have saved them?"

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"No," she says. She sounds sure. She wishes she was as sure she sounds. But it has to be true. The people who know told her it was. It has to be.

"There are--I did the research. There are different ways it could go. But they died. It happened. I saw the bodies. It can't be undone. I'm not the Emperor, Griddle."

"It happened once because of me," she says, her voice wavering. "I thought... I thought it was a blind tunnel and nothing would happen. So if Septimus made her move you would be safe." She's pleading, almost. "The Ninth is deep in the blood-debt of the Fourth... and then I did it again. I had to do it again."

She wipes furiously at her eyes.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon swallows hard against a painful lump in her throat and nods because she has to believe it. She has to believe Harrow in this, because if it isn't true, if there had been a way...

But it happened. It happened again. "All you had to do was tell me," she says, and her voice sounds funny but it's no longer either the raw whisper or the ramping fury of before. "All you had to do was say you were freaking out, that the Seventh was a mummy man –"

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Harrow looks up, her face an open wound. "I had reason to believe," she says in a low voice, "you would trust her more than you trusted me."

"I played it all wrong from the start. By the time I dismantled the puppet, I... I thought you were compromised. I thought you would go straight for the Seventh if I told you. I had to have proof, proof she did it and proof of why."

"I didn't want to hurt you unnecessarily, Griddle. I didn't want to disturb your--equilibrium."

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"Harrow," says Gideon, hurting keenly despite – apparently? – her adept's efforts, "if my heart had a dick, you would kick it."

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"I did not want to alienate you more than I already had. And then it seemed as though—we were on a more even footing," says Harrow. She is fumbling for words, she knows, but she hasn't rehearsed this part of the apology.

"Our—we— It was too tenuous to risk. And then..."

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Harrow is shuffling for words like they're grains of rice that she dropped on the floor.

"If I hadn’t gone to Palamedes — and I nearly didn’t go to Palamedes —"

Gideon can't take her eyes off her adept, can barely comprehend how close they came to disaster. "I would have waited for you in our rooms, with my sword drawn, and I would have gone for you. I was so convinced you were behind everything. That you’d killed Jeannemary and Isaac. Magnus and Abigail.”

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"I didn’t--I don’t--I never have," said Harrow says. She's stung, but it's hardly unfair, is it? Some things run in the family.

"And--I know. If you had killed me... you may still kill me before this conversation is over, Nav."

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This surprises her into silence. Too overwhelmed to process everything being laid at her feet, Gideon treads water for a long moment.

She thinks about Jeannemary the Fourth – not huddled and sobbing with a broken heart, but vivacious, annoying, trim in navy and white, the very picture of fidelity. She thinks of Magnus Quinn and his pretty wife who Gideon had barely known.

"Okay," she says finally. "Question time. Who did all the murders? Who – what – killed the Fourth and Fifth?"

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Harrow settles into the water, floating. "I don't know," she says glumly. "I can't say. I'm sorry. If it's not one of the tests or revenants running out of control, it's one of the people in Canaan House. The murders may be connected, or may be two separate events."

"We have analyzed the bone fragments found in the bodies; they don't match each other, any of them, so it must be some kind of construct, perhaps of perpetual bone, assembled from a variety of sources."

"Constructs need a controller. If it's not an experiment out of control, then it's a necromancer. The Tridentarii, Deuteros of the Second, Oktasiron... Septimus and Palamedes were with me when the Fourth died, but if Septimus can control a corpse through the emptiness of space and survive a severing of its link, maybe her giant bone monster can kill independently. And we can't really rule out Teacher and the other priests."

"You saw my chart, Nav. I don't understand anything. The tests, the theorems--why weren't you killed with the Fourth? Sextus and his cavalier are obviously the most competent, they could do it if they wished, but they have, as you would say, no fucking motive."



"I don't know. I am meant to be a genius, Nav, and I just don't know."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon slides down into the water, floats on her back. From here, with the water reflecting the diamond-tossed night sky, it looks and feels like she's floating in space. "I've been asking myself that same question ever since she died," she says, quiet. Her voice echos strangely in her ears, blocked as they are by the water.

She thinks again of the Fourth and the Fifth, of Protesilaus the Seventh, dead before this even started, and feels like she'll never stop being so fucking sad for them all.

She's not sure where the question comes from when it comes; something Silas Oktakiseron said must have stuck with her. She could have asked Harrow anything, strangely confident that her adept would answer and answer honestly, but finds herself asking: "What do you know about the conditioner pathogen that bumped off all the kids — the one that happened when I was little, before you were born?”

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"Ah," she says. "We come to it."

She's not surprised; this is what she came here to talk about.

She pulls up her legs and wraps her arms around them, bobbing in the surf.

Her voice sounds slightly strangled and entirely unlike herself: "It wasn't just before I was born. It was before I was even conceived."

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"That's unwholesomely specific," says Gideon, who would have been more than happy to never ever ever think about Priamhark and Pelleamena conceiving even something so sexless as an idea.

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"It's important," she says, her voice wavering.

"My parents were both necromancers... the culmination of the two ruling lines of the House. It was very hard for them to conceive... yet critically important. To have not just a child, but a necromantic heir, to take on the duty of Tombkeeper."

"Our foetal care technology was pathetic. They had tried and failed already. She had only one chance, and she couldn't leave it to chance."

She lets the implications sink in, like blood spreading through water.

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Gideon is one hundred percent sure she doesn't like where this is going, but she says it anyway: "You can’t just control whether or not you’re carrying a necro.”

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"Yes you can," Harrow says tonelessly. "If you have the resources. And you're willing to use them."

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Gideon can feel the hair on her neck rising. She puts her feet down without thinking about it, all her focus on her adept.

"Harrow," she says, disbelievingly. "By resources – you don't mean..."






But you can't grow up on the Ninth and not know the basics of necromancy. You need thanergy.

And for something like this, you'd need more than almost anyone would be willing to pay for.

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"Two hundred children," says Harrowhark. Now that the moment is here, she's exhausted.

"From the ages of six weeks to eighteen years. They needed to all die more or less simultaneously, for it to work. My great-aunts measured out the organophosphates after weeks of mathematics and pumped them through the cooling system."

The tide crashes on the shore. Hollowly: "The infants alone generated enough thanergy to take out the entire planet. Babies always do for some reason."

It's a grislier detail than she's given anyone else. Some things are for her cavalier alone.

[we_do_bones]

She can't – she can't hear this.

(She knows what it must be taking from Harrow to tell her, but she can't, she can't.)

She lets her feet come off the sandy bottom and exhales, letting herself sink. Fingers of water slide gently over her skin, through her hair. She exhales in a slow stream, only surfaces when her empty lungs are screaming. Her pulse explodes against her temples, her breath sounds like the shushing of the waves, and Harrowhark is still there.

"Gross," she says, dully. "Ew. Ick. The worst. What the fuck am I supposed to say to that?"

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"That's where I came from," she says. "That's how they got me. The supposed genius."

"They told me as soon as I could understood. I knew I had to be the best necromancer ever; that my parents had mortgaged our future to birth me. I had to find that future for myself. I am two hundred sons and daughters of my house; Wei Wuxian saw it the moment he set eyes on me. The sin seething under my skin."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon knows she's not processing this right – or maybe at all – but she's stuck on something else. "I don't get it," she mutters. "I mean, I get it, your mother and father decided to saddle you with the guilt trip of a thousand lifetimes – but why did they leave me?

"They murdered the rest of the House but decided to leave me off the list?"

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"They didn't," she says in a voice like a small creature dying. "You just... wouldn't die."

"They were terrified of you for the rest of their lives."

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"What?"

The world spins. If she hadn't been in water, she would have collapsed.

She remembers the way Pelleamena watched her, as if she was something nasty the Reverend Mother had stepped in, and refocuses the way it slid through and over her from contempt to dread. She thinks of the stentorious, short-changed breath when Priamhark saw her and breathes it again in horror instead of repugnance.

This was what she was to them. Their own worst nightmare, their own personal demon. One small kid who, to two adults, was a walking reminder of the day they had chosen to mortgage the future of their House.

"Do you think you're worth it?"