Gideon the Ninth полностью

“No, I’m just saying—that shouldn’t have been possible,” Harrow said. Her dark brows were furrowed so deeply that they looked like they were on a collision course. “I thought I knew what the experiment was doing, but—well. I cannot assume.”

Gideon, tucking the keys safely back into her bandeau and, wincing at the chill, readied a flip comment; but as she looked up Harrowhark was looking at her, dead in the eye. Her chin was set. Harrow always looked so aggressively. Her face was moist from the effort and there were starbursts of broken red capillaries tucked into the white of each eye, but she turned those pitch-black irises right on her cavalier. The expression on her face was completely alien. Harrowhark Nonagesimus was looking at her with unalloyed admiration.

“But for the love of the Emperor, Griddle,” she said gruffly, “you are something else with that sword.”

The blood all drained away from Gideon’s cheeks for some reason. The world spun off its axis. Bright spots sparked in her vision. She found herself saying, intelligently, “Mmf.”

“I was in the privileged position of feeling you fight,” Harrow continued, fingers nervously flexing. “And it took me a while to work out what you were doing. Longer still to appreciate it. But I don’t think I’d ever really watched you, not in context … Well, all I can say is thank the Tomb that nobody knows you’re not really one of ours. If I didn’t know that, I’d be saying that you were Matthias Nonius come again or something equally saccharine.”

“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?”

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.

“We have a key, Griddle,” she said exultantly. “Now for the door.”

Gideon was thinking about nothing in particular when they left #1–2. TRANSFERENCE/WINNOWING. DATACENTER., except that she was happy; buzzed with adrenaline and anticipation. She’d eaten a good meal. She’d won the game. The world seemed less maliciously unfriendly. She and Harrow left in companionable silence, both swaggering a little, though newly conscious of the cold and the dark. They hurried along the corridors, Harrowhark leading, Gideon following half a step behind.

There was nobody but them to trigger the motion sensors, and the lamps popped to life in rhythmic whumpk—whumpk—whumpk. They lit the way through the central room with the bronchial passages, and then down the short corridor to the access hatch ladder. At the beginning of that hall, Harrowhark stopped so abruptly that Gideon bumped into her in a flurry of robes and sword. She had gone absolutely still, and did not push back against her cavalier’s stumble.

For the first moment, following Harrow’s line of sight to the foot of the ladder, Gideon disbelieved her eyes. Her brain in an instant supplied all the information that her guts didn’t want to conceive, and then it was her, stuck, frozen, as Harrow sprinted to kneel alongside the tangle of wet laundry at the bottom of the ladder.

It wasn’t wet laundry. It was two people, so gruesomely entangled in each other’s broken limbs that they looked like they had died embracing. They hadn’t, of course: it was just the way their back-to-front limbs had arranged themselves in untidy death.

Hot bile rose in her mouth and made her tongue sticky. Her gaze drew away from the blood and exposed bone and fixed, inanely, on the empty wet scabbard by one busted wet hip: nearby was the sword, fallen point down in the flooring grille. The green lighting underfoot made its ivory steel glow a sickly lime. Gideon’s necromancer stonily flopped the top corpse to the side, exposing what remained of both faces, before rising to stand.

She’d known before Harrow had rolled him over that before them lay the sad, crumpled corpse of Magnus Quinn, jumbled up with the sad, crumpled corpse of Abigail Pent.

In the early morning, after hours and hours of trying, even Palamedes admitted defeat. He didn’t say so in as many words, but eventually his hand stilled on the fat marker pen that he had used to draw twenty different overlapping diagrams around the bodies of the Fifth, and he didn’t try to call them back anymore.