"Gideon the Ninth"

[fiefoe]

I can easily see why Tamsyn Muir's swashbucklingly gothic tale is so well reviewed -- Gideon's irreverant voice alone is a wonderful tonic. Too bad with the large cast and the even larger body count (if that's possible) the story is a muddle to follow.

• This late in the equinox no light would make it here for months, in any case; you could tell the season by how hard the heating vents were creaking.
• “You hate me, I hate you. Just let me go without a fight and you can retire in peace. Take up a hobby. Write your memoirs.” <> “You wrong this house. You misuse its goods. You steal its stock.” Crux loved verbs.
• One day we will use your parts for paper. One day the sisters of the Locked Tomb will brush the oss with your bristles. One day your obedient bones will dust all places you disdain, and make the stones there shine with your fat.
• She snatched the paper from the ground, pulled a fountain pen from her pocket, and slid it between her lips to stab it deeply into her cheek. It came out thick with blood—one of her party tricks, Gideon thought numbly—and signed:
• The enthroned Lord and Lady should have taken charge of the sacred ritual, but they couldn’t, because they were mega-dead. Harrowhark had handily gotten around this by giving them a vow of silence. Every year she added to their penitents’ vows—of fasting, of daily contemplation, of seclusion—so blandly and barefacedly that it seemed inevitable that someone would eventually say hang on a minute, this sounds like … A LOAD OF HOT GARBAGE,
• Gideon had never confronted a broken heart before. She had never gotten far enough to have her heart broken. She knelt on the landing field, knees in the grit, arms clutched around herself... Every pulse seemed to be the space between insensibility and knives. For some moments she was awake, and she was filled with a slow-burning mine fire, the kind that never went out and crumbled everything from the inside; for all the other moments, it was as though she had gone somewhere else.
• She got the depression. She lay in her cell, picking at life like it was a meal she didn’t want to eat.
• Harrowhark Nonagesimus swung open the door, haloed faintly in the electric lights from the tier, her acerbic little face as welcome as a knee to the groin.
• “Oh, nonsense!” said Harrow languorously. “She’s a genius. With the proper motivation, Griddle could wield two swords in each hand and one in her mouth. While we were developing common sense, she studied the blade.
• “I would have thought you would be happy that I needed you,” she admitted. “That I showed you my girlish and vulnerable heart.” <> “Your heart is a party for five thousand nails,” said Gideon.
• If there was one thing Gideon knew about necromancers, it was that they needed power. Thanergy—death juice—was abundant wherever things had died or were dying. Deep space was a necro’s nightmare, because nothing had ever been alive out there, so there were no big puddles of death lying around for Harrow and her ilk to suck up with a straw.
• “I don’t have ten thousand years of tradition, bitch,” said Gideon, “I have ten years of two-hander training and a minor allergy to face paint. I’m worth so much less to you with pizza face and a toothpick.”
• “God, no!” said Harrow. “All you need to know is that you’ll do what I say, or I’ll mix bone meal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut.” <ch6-11>
• It was the first time she had looked at Gideon without the flat, stony aggression of a retaining wall, which was nice.
  If I have to wander around faking a vow of silence and scowling for one more day I will just open all my veins on top of Teacher. Don’t go down there solo. Don’t die in a bone. I am your creature, gloom mistress. I serve you with fidelity as big as a mountain, penumbral lady.”
  “Surprise, my tenebrous overlord!” said Gideon. “Ghosts and you might die is my middle name.”
• But her brain had only seen the one thing, and her palms were damp with the sweat that came when you were both scared and dying of anticipation. So she said, “The arms kind of looked like swords. I want to fight it.”
  “You want to fight it.”
  “Yep.”
  “Because it looked … a little like swords.”
  “Yop.”
• “Harrow,” said Gideon, finding her tongue, “don’t say these things to me. I still have a million reasons to be mad at you. It’s hard to do that and worry that you got brain injured.”
  “I’m merely saying you’re an incredible swordswoman,” said the necromancer briskly. “You’re still a dreadful human being.”
  “Okay, cool, thanks,” said Gideon. “Damage done though. What now?”
• They looked worn down to stubs, like ground-down teeth, greyed out of their obnoxious vitality and youth.
• She did not say “You’ll be fine,” as Dulcinea lacked the lung capacity to spend on platitudes
• “Life is a tragedy,” said Dulcinea. “Left behind by those who pass away, not able to change anything at all. It’s the total lack of control … Once somebody dies, their spirit’s free forever, even if we snatch at it or try to stopper it or use the energy it creates. Oh, I know sometimes they come back … or we can call them, in the manner of the Fifth … but even that exception to the rule shows their mastery of us. They only come when we beg. Once someone dies, we can’t grasp at them anymore, thank God!—except for one person, and he’s very far from here, I think. Gideon, don’t be sorry for the dead. I think death must be an absolute triumph.”
• Ortus would never rhyme melancholy with my mortal folly again.
• But cause by itself is an empty concept. The choice to get up in the morning—the choice to have a hot breakfast or a cold one—the choice to do something thirty seconds faster, or thirty seconds slower—those choices cause all sorts of things to happen. That doesn’t make you responsible.
• Captain Deuteros cleared her throat over the fresh internecine squabbling. “Does anyone else want to take this opportunity to admit that they’re already dead, or a flesh construct, or other relevant object? Anyone?”
• There was another pause, and Harrow looked down into the water. Limned by electric light, her pupils and her irises appeared the same colour.
  “I was tired of being two hundred corpses,” she said simply. “I was old enough to know how monstrous I was. I had decided to go and look at the tomb—and if I didn’t think it was worth it—to go up the stairs … all the flights of the Ninth House … open up an air lock, and walk … and walk.”
• The smile transformed her face into an affliction of beauty that Gideon had heretofore managed to ignore.
• The skeletons aren’t reanimations, Ninth, they’re revenants: ghosts inhabiting a physical shell. They simply lack a true revenant’s ability to move itself along a thanergetic link. The beguiling corpse is a remnant of spirit attached to a perfect and incorruptible body—that’s the idea, anyway—where what I’ll term the hideous corpse is a fully intact spirit attached permanently to a rotting body. Not that someone hasn’t preserved those bones beautifully.”
• “The problem of necromancy,” said Palamedes, “is that the acts themselves, if understood, aren’t difficult to do. But maintaining anything … we’re glass cannons.
• As she did she appeared blurry and indistinct before them—rocking out of her edges, somehow, unreal. Gideon’s skin had already been crawling, but now it was trying to sprint.
• The neck snapped. Her fingertips dipped inside the skin; the eye-mouths shrilled, and the tongue around Gideon’s neck flopped away, and both those mouths dissolved into brackish fluid. The body dropped to the floor— <> —and it was Colum again, face disfigured, neck on the wrong way, sprawled over the pierced shell of his young dead uncle. There was no solace in that big, beat-up body, clutched around his necromancer’s in morbid imitation of the whole of their lives.
• Five people had died that day; it was weird how the small things ballooned out in importance, comparatively. The tragedy saturated the stiffening bones and static hearts lying in state at Canaan House, but there was also deep tragedy in the flawed beams holding up their lives. An eight-year-old writing love letters to a terminally ill teenager. A girl falling in love with the beautiful stiff she’d been conceived solely to look after. A foundling chasing the approval of a House disappointed with her immunity to foundling-killing gas.
• Harrow’s voice was surprisingly strong, considering she appeared to be all black robes and wounds.
• “Harrowhark,” said Gideon the Ninth. “Someday you’ll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then. For now—I can’t say you’ll be fine. I can’t say we did the right thing. I can’t tell you shit. I’m basically a hallucination produced by your brain chemistry while coping with the massive trauma of splicing in my brain chemistry.
• “I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”
• “Maybe it's that I find the idea comforting...that thousands of years after you're gone...is when you really live. That your echo is louder than your voice is.”
• She had left Harrowhark a note on her vastly underused pillow— WHATS WITH THE SKULLS? and received only a terse— Ambiance.
• Gideon marvelled that someone could live in the universe only seventeen years and yet wear black and sneer with such ancient self-assurance.
• Gideon rolled her eyes so hard that she felt in danger of twisting the optic nerve.
• “Now we kick her ass until candy comes out,” said Gideon. “Oh, damn, Nonagesimus, don’t cry, we can’t fight her if you’re crying.”
• “Abigail Pent has been interfered with and opened up.” “Please elaborate opened up, because my imagination is better than your description and I am not having a lot of fun here,” said Gideon.”
• The man who'd put the sword to her neck was uncomfortably buff. He had upsetting biceps. He didn't look healthy; he looked like a collection of lemons in a sack.
• “just had a near-death experience,” she said, “let me have my little moment.”
• “She couldn't believe she was being held at bay by someone who had eaten every cavalier manual and chewed dutifully twenty-five times.”
• Harrowhark smiled. This smile was unusual too: it betokened conspiracy, which was normal, except that this one invited Gideon to be part of it. Her eyes glowed like coals with sheer collusion. Gideon didn't know if she could handle all these new expressions on Harrow: she needed a lie down.
• “This calls for rigor, Nav.’
  ‘Maybe rigor…mortis,’ said Gideon, who assumed that puns were funny automatically.”
• Harrow said, with some difficulty: "I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it."
  "Yes you can, it's just less great and less hot," said Gideon.

This late in the equinox no light would make it here for months, in any case; you could tell the season by how hard the heating vents were creaking.
“You hate me, I hate you. Just let me go without a fight and you can retire in peace. Take up a hobby. Write your memoirs.” <> “You wrong this house. You misuse its goods. You steal its stock.” Crux loved verbs.
One day we will use your parts for paper. One day the sisters of the Locked Tomb will brush the oss with your bristles. One day your obedient bones will dust all places you disdain, and make the stones there shine with your fat.
She snatched the paper from the ground, pulled a fountain pen from her pocket, and slid it between her lips to stab it deeply into her cheek. It came out thick with blood—one of her party tricks, Gideon thought numbly—and signed:
The enthroned Lord and Lady should have taken charge of the sacred ritual, but they couldn’t, because they were mega-dead. Harrowhark had handily gotten around this by giving them a vow of silence. Every year she added to their penitents’ vows—of fasting, of daily contemplation, of seclusion—so blandly and barefacedly that it seemed inevitable that someone would eventually say hang on a minute, this sounds like … A LOAD OF HOT GARBAGE,
Gideon had never confronted a broken heart before. She had never gotten far enough to have her heart broken. She knelt on the landing field, knees in the grit, arms clutched around herself... Every pulse seemed to be the space between insensibility and knives. For some moments she was awake, and she was filled with a slow-burning mine fire, the kind that never went out and crumbled everything from the inside; for all the other moments, it was as though she had gone somewhere else.
She got the depression. She lay in her cell, picking at life like it was a meal she didn’t want to eat.
Harrowhark Nonagesimus swung open the door, haloed faintly in the electric lights from the tier, her acerbic little face as welcome as a knee to the groin.
“Oh, nonsense!” said Harrow languorously. “She’s a genius. With the proper motivation, Griddle could wield two swords in each hand and one in her mouth. While we were developing common sense, she studied the blade.
“I would have thought you would be happy that I needed you,” she admitted. “That I showed you my girlish and vulnerable heart.” <> “Your heart is a party for five thousand nails,” said Gideon.
If there was one thing Gideon knew about necromancers, it was that they needed power. Thanergy—death juice—was abundant wherever things had died or were dying. Deep space was a necro’s nightmare, because nothing had ever been alive out there, so there were no big puddles of death lying around for Harrow and her ilk to suck up with a straw.
“I don’t have ten thousand years of tradition, bitch,” said Gideon, “I have ten years of two-hander training and a minor allergy to face paint. I’m worth so much less to you with pizza face and a toothpick.”
“God, no!” said Harrow. “All you need to know is that you’ll do what I say, or I’ll mix bone meal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut.”

It was the first time she had looked at Gideon without the flat, stony aggression of a retaining wall, which was nice.
If I have to wander around faking a vow of silence and scowling for one more day I will just open all my veins on top of Teacher. Don’t go down there solo. Don’t die in a bone. I am your creature, gloom mistress. I serve you with fidelity as big as a mountain, penumbral lady.”
“Surprise, my tenebrous overlord!” said Gideon. “Ghosts and you might die is my middle name.”

But her brain had only seen the one thing, and her palms were damp with the sweat that came when you were both scared and dying of anticipation. So she said, “The arms kind of looked like swords. I want to fight it.”
“You want to fight it.”
“Yep.”
“Because it looked … a little like swords.”
“Yop.”

“Harrow,” said Gideon, finding her tongue, “don’t say these things to me. I still have a million reasons to be mad at you. It’s hard to do that and worry that you got brain injured.”
“I’m merely saying you’re an incredible swordswoman,” said the necromancer briskly. “You’re still a dreadful human being.”
“Okay, cool, thanks,” said Gideon. “Damage done though. What now?”

They looked worn down to stubs, like ground-down teeth, greyed out of their obnoxious vitality and youth.
She did not say “You’ll be fine,” as Dulcinea lacked the lung capacity to spend on platitudes
“Life is a tragedy,” said Dulcinea. “Left behind by those who pass away, not able to change anything at all. It’s the total lack of control … Once somebody dies, their spirit’s free forever, even if we snatch at it or try to stopper it or use the energy it creates. Oh, I know sometimes they come back … or we can call them, in the manner of the Fifth … but even that exception to the rule shows their mastery of us. They only come when we beg. Once someone dies, we can’t grasp at them anymore, thank God!—except for one person, and he’s very far from here, I think. Gideon, don’t be sorry for the dead. I think death must be an absolute triumph.”
Ortus would never rhyme melancholy with my mortal folly again.
But cause by itself is an empty concept. The choice to get up in the morning—the choice to have a hot breakfast or a cold one—the choice to do something thirty seconds faster, or thirty seconds slower—those choices cause all sorts of things to happen. That doesn’t make you responsible.
Captain Deuteros cleared her throat over the fresh internecine squabbling. “Does anyone else want to take this opportunity to admit that they’re already dead, or a flesh construct, or other relevant object? Anyone?”

There was another pause, and Harrow looked down into the water. Limned by electric light, her pupils and her irises appeared the same colour.
“I was tired of being two hundred corpses,” she said simply. “I was old enough to know how monstrous I was. I had decided to go and look at the tomb—and if I didn’t think it was worth it—to go up the stairs … all the flights of the Ninth House … open up an air lock, and walk … and walk.”

The smile transformed her face into an affliction of beauty that Gideon had heretofore managed to ignore.
The skeletons aren’t reanimations, Ninth, they’re revenants: ghosts inhabiting a physical shell. They simply lack a true revenant’s ability to move itself along a thanergetic link. The beguiling corpse is a remnant of spirit attached to a perfect and incorruptible body—that’s the idea, anyway—where what I’ll term the hideous corpse is a fully intact spirit attached permanently to a rotting body. Not that someone hasn’t preserved those bones beautifully.”
“The problem of necromancy,” said Palamedes, “is that the acts themselves, if understood, aren’t difficult to do. But maintaining anything … we’re glass cannons.
As she did she appeared blurry and indistinct before them—rocking out of her edges, somehow, unreal. Gideon’s skin had already been crawling, but now it was trying to sprint.
The neck snapped. Her fingertips dipped inside the skin; the eye-mouths shrilled, and the tongue around Gideon’s neck flopped away, and both those mouths dissolved into brackish fluid. The body dropped to the floor— <> —and it was Colum again, face disfigured, neck on the wrong way, sprawled over the pierced shell of his young dead uncle. There was no solace in that big, beat-up body, clutched around his necromancer’s in morbid imitation of the whole of their lives.
Five people had died that day; it was weird how the small things ballooned out in importance, comparatively. The tragedy saturated the stiffening bones and static hearts lying in state at Canaan House, but there was also deep tragedy in the flawed beams holding up their lives. An eight-year-old writing love letters to a terminally ill teenager. A girl falling in love with the beautiful stiff she’d been conceived solely to look after. A foundling chasing the approval of a House disappointed with her immunity to foundling-killing gas.
Harrow’s voice was surprisingly strong, considering she appeared to be all black robes and wounds.
“Harrowhark,” said Gideon the Ninth. “Someday you’ll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then. For now—I can’t say you’ll be fine. I can’t say we did the right thing. I can’t tell you shit. I’m basically a hallucination produced by your brain chemistry while coping with the massive trauma of splicing in my brain chemistry.

“I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”
“Maybe it's that I find the idea comforting...that thousands of years after you're gone...is when you really live. That your echo is louder than your voice is.”
She had left Harrowhark a note on her vastly underused pillow— WHATS WITH THE SKULLS? and received only a terse— Ambiance.
Gideon marvelled that someone could live in the universe only seventeen years and yet wear black and sneer with such ancient self-assurance.
Gideon rolled her eyes so hard that she felt in danger of twisting the optic nerve.
“Now we kick her ass until candy comes out,” said Gideon. “Oh, damn, Nonagesimus, don’t cry, we can’t fight her if you’re crying.”
“Abigail Pent has been interfered with and opened up.” “Please elaborate opened up, because my imagination is better than your description and I am not having a lot of fun here,” said Gideon.”
The man who'd put the sword to her neck was uncomfortably buff. He had upsetting biceps. He didn't look healthy; he looked like a collection of lemons in a sack.
“just had a near-death experience,” she said, “let me have my little moment.”
“She couldn't believe she was being held at bay by someone who had eaten every cavalier manual and chewed dutifully twenty-five times.”
Harrowhark smiled. This smile was unusual too: it betokened conspiracy, which was normal, except that this one invited Gideon to be part of it. Her eyes glowed like coals with sheer collusion. Gideon didn't know if she could handle all these new expressions on Harrow: she needed a lie down.

“This calls for rigor, Nav.’
‘Maybe rigor…mortis,’ said Gideon, who assumed that puns were funny automatically.”

Harrow said, with some difficulty: "I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it."
"Yes you can, it's just less great and less hot," said Gideon.