If the Ninth—enigmatic, uncanny Ninth, the House of the Sewn Tongue, the Anchorite’s House, the House of Heretical Secrets—was nonplussed at having an infant on their hands, they moved fast anyway. The Ninth had historically filled its halls with penitents from other houses, mystics and pilgrims who found the call of this dreary order more attractive than their own birthrights. In the antiquated rules of those supplicants who moved between the eight great households, she was taken as a very small bondswoman, not of the Ninth but beholden to it: What greater debt could be accrued than that of being brought up? What position more honourable than vassal to Drearburh? Let the baby grow up postulant. Push the child to be an oblate. They chipped her, surnamed her, and put her in the nursery. At that time, the tiny Ninth House boasted two hundred children between infancy and nineteen years of age, and Gideon was numbered two hundred and first.
Less than two years later, Gideon Nav would be one of only three children left: herself, a much older boy, and the infant heir of the Ninth House, daughter of its lord and lady. They knew by age five that she was not a necromancer, and suspected by eight that she would never be a nun. Certainly, they would have known by ten that she knew too much, and that she could never be allowed to go.
Gideon’s appeals to better natures, financial rewards, moral obligations, outlined plans, and simple attempts to run away numbered eighty-six by the time she was eighteen. She’d started when she was four.
Chapter 2
There were five minutes to go when Gideon’s eighty-seventh escape plan got messed up fantastically.
“I see that your genius strategy, Griddle,” said a final voice from the tierway, “was to order a shuttle and walk out the door.”
The Lady of the Ninth House stood before the drillshaft, wearing black and sneering. Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus had pretty much cornered the market on wearing black and sneering. It comprised 100 percent of her personality. Gideon marvelled that someone could live in the universe only seventeen years and yet wear black and sneer with such ancient self-assurance.
Gideon said, “Hey, what can I say? I’m a tactician.”
The ornate, slightly soiled robes of the House dragged in the dust as the Reverend Daughter approached. She’d brought her marshal along, and Aiglamene too. A few Sisters were behind her on the tier, having sunk down to their knees: the cloisterwomen painted their faces alabaster grey and drew black patterns on their cheeks and lips like death’s-heads. Dressed in breadths of rusty black cloth, they looked like a peanut gallery of sad old waist-high masks.
“It’s embarrassing that it had to come to this,” said the Lady of the Ninth, pulling back her hood. Her pale-painted face was a white blotch among all the black. Even her hands were gloved. “I don’t care that you run away. I care that you do it badly. Take your hand from your sword, you’re humiliating yourself.”
“In under ten minutes a shuttle’s going to come and take me to Trentham on the Second,” Gideon said, and did not take her hand from her sword. “I’m going to get on it. I’m going to close the door. I’m going to wave goodbye. There is literally nothing you can do anymore to stop me.”
Harrow put one gloved hand before her and massaged her fingers thoughtfully. The light fell on her painted face and black-daubed chin, and her short-cropped, dead-crow-coloured hair. “All right. Let’s play this one through for interest’s sake,” she said. “First objection: the Cohort won’t enlist an unreleased serf, you know.”
“I faked your signature on the release form,” said Gideon.
“But a single word from me and you’re brought back in cuffs.”
“You’ll say nothing.”
Harrowhark ringed two fingers around one wrist and slowly worked the hand up and down. “It’s a cute story, but badly characterised,” she said. “Why the sudden mercy on my part?”
“The moment you deny me leave to go,” said Gideon, hand unmoving on her scabbard, “the moment you call me back—the moment you give the Cohort cause, or, I don’t know, some list of trumped-up criminal charges…”
“Some of your magazines are very nasty,” admitted the Lady.
“That’s the moment I squeal,” said Gideon. “I squeal so long and so loud they hear me from the Eighth. I tell them everything. You know what I know. And I’ll tell them the numbers. They’d bring me home in cuffs, but I’d come back laughing my ass off.”
At that, Harrowhark stopped working her scaphoid and glanced at Gideon. She gave a rather brusque hand-wave to the geriatric fan club behind her and they scattered: tottering, kissing the floor and rattling both their prayer beads and their unlubricated knee joints, disappearing into the darkness and down the tier. Only Crux and Aiglamene stayed. Then Harrow cocked her head to the side like a quizzical bird and smiled a tiny, contemptuous smile.
“How coarse and ordinary,” she said. “How effective, how crass. My parents should have smothered you.”
“I’d like to see them try it now,” said Gideon, unmoved.
“You’d do it even if there was no ultimate gain,” the Lady said, and she even seemed to be marvelling at it. “Even though you know what you’d suffer. Even though you know what it means. And all because…?”
“All because,” said Gideon, checking her clock again, “I completely fucking hate you, because you are a hideous witch from hell. No offence.”
There was a pause.
“Oh, Griddle!” said Harrow pityingly, in the silence. “But I don’t even remember about you most of the time.”
They stared at each other. There was a lopsided smile tugging at Gideon’s mouth, unsuppressed, and looking at it made Harrowhark’s expression slide into something even moodier and more petulant. “You have me at an impasse,” she said, and she sounded grudgingly amazed by the fact. “Your ride will be here in five minutes. I don’t doubt you have all the documents and that they look good. It’d be master’s sin if I employed unwarranted violence. There is really nothing I can do.”
Gideon said nothing. Harrow said, “The muster call is real, you know. There’s important Ninth business afoot. Won’t you give a handful of minutes to take part in your House’s last muster?”
“Oh hell no,” said Gideon.
“Can I appeal to your deep sense of duty?”
“Nope,” said Gideon.
“Worth a try,” admitted Harrow. She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “What about a bribe?”
“This is going to be good,” said Gideon to nobody in particular. “‘Gideon, here’s some money. You can spend it right here, on bones.’ ‘Gideon, I’ll always be nice and not a dick to you if you come back. You can have Crux’s room.’ ‘Gideon, here’s a bed of writhing babes. It’s the cloisterites, though, so they’re ninety percent osteoporosis.’”
From out of her pocket, with no small amount of drama, Harrowhark drew a fresh piece of parchment. It was paper—real paper!—with the official letterhead of the House of the Ninth on the top. She must have raided the coffers for that one. The hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck prickled in warning. Harrow ostentatiously walked forward to leave it at a safe middle point between them both, and backed away with hands open in surrender.
“Or,” said the Lady, as Gideon slowly went to pick it up, “it could be an absolutely authentic purchase of your commission in the Cohort. You can’t forge this, Griddle, it’s to be signed in blood, so don’t stuff it down your trousers yet.”