Gideon the Ninth полностью

She realised she was being followed somewhere down the long, sweeping staircase that led to the atrium. A peripheral blur huddled in doorways, still when she was still, making tiny movements when she was in motion. The mouldering floorboards creaked wetly underfoot. At last, Gideon spun around, her rapier drawn in one long fluid line forward and her gauntlet already half-snapped onto her fingers, and was presented with the wild young face of Isaac.

“Stop,” he said. “Jeanne wants you.”

He looked ghastly. His hands were sooty, the metallic thread on his embroidered robe soiled, and somewhere along the way he’d lost at least three earrings. Previously he had contrived to brush his hair up in that bleached avian crest on the top of his head, but now everything was crumpled flat. His mouth and eyes seemed emptied out, and his pupils were dilated with an amount of cortisol that said: I’ve been on edge for three days. The sweet puppy fat at his cheeks only served to make him a more awful sight.

Gideon cocked her head. “Jeanne wants you,” he repeated. “Someone’s dead. You’ve got to come with me.”

For a moment Gideon hoped that this was a terrifically misplaced cry for attention, but Isaac had already turned away from her, dark eyes like stones. She had no choice but to follow in his wake.

Isaac led her down through the dilapidated great hall, and then down the stairs to the vestibule that led through to the sparring room, and he flinched at the sight of every white-belted skeleton that crossed their path. The tapestry was still securely in place, the door still hidden. He shouldered through the other door—it must have given his elbow a hell of a bang—and pushed into the room where electric lights poured down on what had previously been a filthy, reeking pit. It was now a square of glimmering water. Gideon had seen skeletons unrolling great tracts of rubber hose into the pit room and even beheld them slowly glurking sea-smelling liquid into the cavity, but the end result was extraordinary. The tiles gleamed with spray as Naberius the Third and Coronabeth—both wearing light singlets and trunks—did laps up and down the pool.

If she’d thought the bath was mad, this blew her mind. Gideon had never seen anyone swim before. Both bodies cut through the liquid with efficient, practised strokes: she focused on the long golden arms of Corona Tridentarius as she sliced through water, propelling her as she hit the wall and pushed off hard with her feet. Beyond the glass doors in the sparring room, Colum the Eighth sat on a bench, polishing his targe with a soft cloth while Lieutenant Dyas knelt into a perfect lunge, over and over.

Isaac made a beeline for the water. He stood in front of where the Crown Princess of Ida was churning her way through the water. She slowed her pace and bobbed up to the edge of the pool, shaking water out of her ears quizzically, hair a wet and leaden amber.

“Princess Corona,” he said, “someone’s dead.”

The lovely face of the Princess of Ida made the exact same expression Gideon’s had wanted to, which was: What?? “What??” she said.

“Jeanne wants you,” he said dully, “specifically.”

Naberius had finished his length of the pool, too, and had struck through the water to come and see them. His swimming shirt was a lot tighter than Coronabeth’s, and his fifty-seven abdominal muscles rippled under it importantly. He gave a long and rather obvious stretch, but stopped when he realised nobody was looking. “What’s the holdup?” he said, rather pettishly.

“You’d better hurry up,” Isaac said. “I promised I’d only leave her for five minutes. She’s with the remains.”

“Isaac, slow down!” Corona had vaulted herself out of the water in a flash of warm golden skin and her exceedingly long legs, and Gideon made her first and only devout prayer to the Locked Tomb of thankfulness and joy. Corona wrapped herself in a white towel, still dripping feverishly. “Who’s dead? Isaac Tettares, what does this mean?”

“It means someone’s dead,” Isaac said curtly. “If you’re not coming, I’m out of here in the next ten seconds. I’m not leaving Jeanne by herself.”

Corona dashed over to the training room, sticking her dripping head through the door. Her cavalier was wrapping his body and head in his own white towels, sticking wet feet in his shoes. Coronabeth bothered with neither of these. By now she was being followed by Lieutenant Dyas, whose only nod to training kit involved undoing the top button of her military jacket, and by the scuffed wiriness of Colum the Eighth close behind.