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.”

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[we_do_bones]

"Oh shit," says Gideon, blinking in surprise. "This is it. It's go time."

Even after holding a shaking Harrowhark Nonagesimus in the library, she never really thought they'd ever come to this.

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"This is go time," Harrow agrees solemnly. The water is up to her shoulders, and her breath is coming slow and deep; when she wipes a sleeve over her face, half her painted skull comes with it.

"I have intended to tell you for some time. I prepared myself here. Tried telling others, to whom it was only a ghost story. But it was always you. Only you. And then you came here, from too early... and everything went to hell."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon sweeps both of her hands through her hair, trickles going down the back of her neck and into her sodden collar, trying to contemplate a world where Harrowhark can say, with a straight face and all signs of sincerity, it was always you.

Eventually, all she says is, “Why?”

[we_bring_hell]

"Because if I had been open with you from the start... if I had told you about Protesilaus the Seventh on the first day, everything would have been different."

[we_do_bones]

She's ready for almost anything – she thinks – but not for that.

"The first day?"

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"Griddle," she says wearily. "I have not puppeted my own parents around for all these years without learning anything."

"I knew it the moment she pointed a sword at your neck while you held her." Does she sound crazy jealous? She doesn't sound crazy jealous, does she?

[we_do_bones]

Gideon wants to respond to Harrow's second statement, but anger is seeping into her the way saltwater crept beneath her clothes.

"Why the hell didn't you tell me then? Or, better question, why the hell didn't you tell me when you killed him?"

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"I didn't kill him!" Harrow protests. "Don't you understand? He arrived here dead. I tested the theorem, and the body collapsed. It appears he had been stabbed through the chest, but I didn't have long to examine him. Someone was coming; I took the head and ran."

"It was the night we completed the entropy field challenge."

[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.

[we_do_bones]

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 –"

[we_bring_hell]

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."

[we_do_bones]

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

[we_bring_hell]

"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..."

[we_do_bones]

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."

[we_do_bones]

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?"

[we_bring_hell]

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."

[we_do_bones]

"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.

[we_do_bones]

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.”