# Gideon the Ninth  Author:: Tamsyn Muir ## AI-Generated Summary None ## Highlights > “You talk so loudly for chattel, Nav,” said the marshal. “You chatter so much for a debt. I hate you, and yet you are my wares and inventory. I have written up your lungs as lungs for the Ninth. I have measured your gall as gall for the Ninth. Your brain is a base and shrivelled sponge, but it too is for the Ninth. Come here, and I’ll black your eyes for you and knock you dead.” ([Location 173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=173)) > They regarded each other for long moments until the absolute chill of the monument made Gideon’s teeth involuntarily chatter, and then Harrow’s mouth twisted, fleetingly, indulgently. “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. “That’s not a ‘no.’ Help Aiglamene find you a sword, Griddle. I’ll leave the door unlocked.” ([Location 824](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=824)) > “Isn’t this the part where you give me intel,” Gideon said, standing up and flexing her stiff muscles, “tell me all you know of the tasks ahead, who we’re with, what to expect?” “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.” Which was, Gideon had to admit, entirely plausible. ([Location 942](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=942)) > 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. ([Location 1213](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=1213)) > Her smile was sparklingly pleased with her own gall; her eyes were a deep, liquid violet, and she spoke with the casual effrontery of someone who expected her every command of jump! to be followed by a rave. ([Location 1761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=1761)) > “Down there resides the sum of all necromantic transgression,” she said, in the singsong way of a child repeating a poem. “The unperceivable howl of ten thousand million unfed ghosts who will hear each echoed footstep as defilement. They would not even be satisfied if they tore you apart. The space beyond that door is profoundly haunted in ways I cannot say, and by means you won’t understand; and you may die by violence, or you may simply lose your soul.” ([Location 2517](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=2517)) > Because she had spent her whole life in the darkest hole of the darkest planet in the darkest part of the system, Gideon could make out the etiolated profile of the repellent Third twin, Ianthe. ([Location 2538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=2538)) > She put on her best and most senescent Ninth robes, and became a skinny black stick swallowed by night-coloured layers of Locked Tomb lace. ([Location 2791](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=2791)) > “I need you to be trustworthy.” In the thick dimness of the room she watched the black-garbed girl in front of her struggle around a thing that had settled over them like a net; a thing that had fused between them like a badly broken limb, shattered numerous times, healing gnarled and awful. Gideon recognised these strictures all of a sudden: the rope tying her to Harrow and back to the bars of the House of the Ninth. They stared at each other with shared panic. ([Location 3475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=3475)) > The shutters on Harrow’s face were pulled shut. “And nor will I,” she said. ([Location 3698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=3698)) > She said, “I’ll still do it.” Harrowhark chewed on the insides of her cheeks so hard that they looked close to staving in. She steepled her fingers together, squeezed her eyelids shut. When she spoke again, she made her voice quite calm and normal: “Why?” “Probably because you asked.” The heavy eyelids shuttered open, revealing baleful black irises. “That’s all it takes, Griddle? That’s all you demand? This is the complex mystery that lies in the pit of your psyche?” Gideon slid her glasses back onto her face, obscuring feelings with tint. She found herself saying, “That’s all I ever demanded,” and to maintain face suffixed it with, “you asswipe.” ([Location 3747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=3747)) > Jeannemary put her arm around his shoulder and pressed her sweat-streaked brown forehead to his, and both sighed defeated sighs in concert. The solace they were taking in each other was the bruising, private solace between necromancer and cavalier, and Gideon was embarrassed to be audience to it. ([Location 4289](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=4289)) > “Why leave me, though?” she demanded. “They murdered the rest of the House, but they left me off the list?” There was a pause. “We didn’t,” said Harrow. “What?” “You were meant to die, Griddle, along with all the others. You inhaled nerve gas for ten full minutes. My great-aunts went blind just from releasing it and you weren’t affected, even though you were just two cots away from the vent. You just didn’t die. My parents were terrified of you for the rest of their lives.” The Reverend Father and Mother hadn’t found her unnatural because of how she’d been born: they’d found her unnatural because of how she hadn’t died. ([Location 6021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=6021)) > “You apologise to me?” she bellowed. “You apologise to me now? You say that you’re sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second’s goddamned thought! I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren’t dead, all because—I regretted I wasn’t! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re sorry?” ([Location 6084](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=6084)) > “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.” ([Location 6089](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07J6HWLPR&location=6089))