Gideon the Ninth полностью

From before them, Colum gave such a racking and explosive cough that it made both Jeannemary and Gideon jump. His eyes rolled back in his head as he choked, staccato gasps, pulling in reeking smoke, while his adept said merely: “Fifteen minutes. You’re getting tardy,” and nothing more.

Gideon would have liked Jeannemary to finish her sentence, but Harrow was limping over with an expression like trouble. She had the distant, brow-puckered frown of a woman untying gruesomely knotted shoelaces. Gideon watched the cavalier of the Fourth walk away with hunched shoulders and a hand clasped around the grip of her rapier, and she fell into Harrow’s wake, a half step behind her.

“You okay?”

“I’m sick of these people,” said Harrowhark, ducking down a passageway and away from the central atrium. “I am sick of their slowness … sick to death. I can’t wait here for one of them to grasp the implications of everything they have been told”—Gideon couldn’t wait to grasp those implications either, but it didn’t seem likely anytime soon—“because we will be far ahead of them by then. We have a door to open.”

“Yes, tomorrow morning after at least eight hours’ sleep,” Gideon suggested without hope.

“An admirable attempt at comedy in these trying times,” said Harrowhark. “Let’s go.”

The key they had purchased so dearly from the construct gave very little away, other than its unusual colour. It was big; the shaft was as long as Gideon’s middle finger, and the clover head satisfactorily heavy to hold, but it had no helpful tag saying, e.g., FIRST FLOOR. This did not seem to give Harrowhark pause. She whipped out her stained journal and brooded over her maps, hiding in a dark alcove and making her cavalier keep watch. Considering that there were exactly zero people around, this seemed stupid.

Then again, the idea that there might not be zero people around—that there was something horrible infesting Canaan House, something that had killed Abigail and Magnus for a perceived slight—well, Gideon did not stand there as easily as she might have yesterday. The First House was no longer a beautiful and empty shell, buffeted by the erosion of time. Now it seemed more like the blocked-up labyrinths beneath the Ninth House, kept sealed in case something became restless. When she was young she used to have nightmares about being on the wrong side of the door of the Locked Tomb. Especially after what Harrow had done.

“Look,” said Harrowhark.

No murder, sorrow, or fear could ever touch Harrow Nonagesimus. Her tired eyes were alight. A lot of her paint had peeled away or been sweated off down in the facility, and the whole left side of her jaw was just grey-tinted skin. A hint of her humanity peeked through. She had such a peculiarly pointed little face, high browed and tippy everywhere, and a slanted and vicious mouth. She said irascibly, “At the key, moron, not at me.”

The moron looked at the key, but did give her the middle finger. Harrow was holding the thing upside down for inspection. At the butt end, where the teeth terminated, a tiny carving had been made in the metal. It was a collection of dots joined together with a line and two half circles.

“It’s the sign on my door,” said Gideon.

“You mean—X-203?”

“Yeah, I mean that, if you’re talking in moonspeak,” said Gideon. “It’s definitely the symbol on my door.”

Harrow nearly trembled with eagerness. It took them a while to sneak down the curling route from the atrium to the corridor to the foyer leading to the pit; she was paranoid, and her paranoia had infected Gideon. They kept waiting before turning corners and then stopping to hear if they were being followed. By the time they reached the airless little vestibule, and had slipped the tapestry aside from the door frame and ducked through, Gideon’s stomach wanted breakfast.

Nonetheless, her palms were slick with anticipation as they stood in front of the enormous black door. The animal skulls were as eerie and unwelcoming as they had been the first time; the writhing fat figure curled around each column as creepy and as cold. Harrowhark set her hands on the black stone crossbar of the door almost reverently, and pressed her ear to the rock as though she could hear what was going on inside. She stroked her thumbpad over the deep-set keyhole and pulled her hood over her head.

“Unlock it,” she said.

“Don’t you want the honours?”

“It’s your key ring,” said Harrow unexpectedly, and: “We will do this by the book. If Teacher’s correct, there is something around here that is fairly hot on etiquette, and etiquette is cheap. The key ring is yours … I have to admit it. So you must admit us.” She held out the key to Gideon. “Put it in the hole, Griddle.”