Gideon the Ninth

Chapter 9

Gideon woke to an unfamiliar ceiling, a fuzzy taste on her tongue, and the exciting smell of mould. The light blazed in red slashes even through her eyelids, and it made her come to all at once. For long moments she just lay back in her nest of old bedding and looked around.

The Ninth quarters had low ceilings and wide, sweeping rooms, decaying away in magnificence before enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. The dock above their quarters cast a long shadow outside, cooling and dimming the light, which gleamed quietly off the chandeliers of festooned black crystals on wire. It would have been muted and peaceful to someone used to it, but to Gideon, on her first First morning, it was like looking at a headache. Someone had, a very long time ago, dressed these apartments lavishly in dead jewel colours: dark ruby, dark sapphire, dark emerald. The doors were set above the main level and reached by sloping stone ramps. There was not a great deal of furniture that wasn’t sighing apart. The meanest stick of it still outclassed the most exquisite Ninth heirlooms back home. Gideon took a particular fancy to the long, low table in the centre of their living room, inset with black glass.

The first thing she did was roll away and reach for her sword. Aiglamene had spent half of training simply convincing Gideon to reach for her rapier hilt rather than her two-hander, to the point where she’d been sleeping with her fingers on the thing to try to get used to it. There was a note crumpled between her hand and the basket—

“Guess I won’t talk to … any body,” said Gideon, but then read on:

“Harrow,” Gideon bellowed, impotently, and slapped her hands down into her pockets. The ring was gone. There was no mistake greater or stupider than to let Harrowhark Nonagesimus at you when you were in any way vulnerable; she should have booby-trapped the threshold. It wasn’t like she even cared about the ring: it was just the cut, again and again, of Harrow considering all of Gideon’s property her property in common. She tried to cheer herself up with the thought that this at least meant Harrow wasn’t around, a thought that would have cheered up anyone.

Gideon shrugged off her robe and wrestled out of her trousers and shirt, all of which had hot and damp insides from her sweat. She opened doors until she found the largest bathroom she had ever seen. It was so big she could walk around in it. She stretched out her arms on either side and still couldn’t touch the walls, which were of slippery stone, glowing like coals where they were whole and scored and dull where they weren’t. Maybe this pretending to be a cavalier gig wasn’t so bad after all. The floor was marble tile, sheen marred by only a few spots of black mould. There was a bowl with taps that Gideon knew to be a sink only because she’d read a lot of comics, and an enormous person-sized recess in the ground that she didn’t know what to do with at all. The sonic cleaner was set, gleaming gently, at either side of a rectangular chamber with a weird nozzle.

Gideon pulled a lever next to the tap. Water gushed from the nozzle, and she yelped and skittered away before she got over the sight and turned it off. Her survey identified a chubby cake of soap next to the sink (but Ninth soap had been made of human fat so no thanks) and a tub of antibac gel. She decided eventually to take a sonic and to use the gel to scrape the blurred paint off her face. Newly clean, with fresh clothes and her robe shaken out in the sonic, she was feeling good about herself until she espied another note stuck tersely on the autodoor:

There was another note atop the paint box, which some skeletal servant had helpfully placed on one of the less precarious sideboards:

Another note was stuck beneath, belatedly:

Inside the box, yet another:

Gideon said aloud, “Your parents must have been so relieved to die.”

Back in the bathroom, she smeared cold wads of alabaster on her face. The nun’s-paint went on in pale greys and blacks, swabbed over the lips and the hollows of her eyes and cheeks. Gideon comforted herself by recoiling at her reflection in the cracked mirror: a grinning death’s-head with a crop of incongruously red hair and a couple of zits. She pulled her sunglasses out of the pocket of her robe and eased them on, which completed the effect, if the effect you wanted was “horrible.”

Feeling slightly more at ease with life, rapier bobbing at her hip, it was the cavalier of the Ninth who stalked down the dilapidated corridors of Canaan House. It was pleasantly quiet. She heard the far-off sounds of a lived-in place—footsteps, blurry moans from the autocooler, the unmistakable pitter-pat of foot bones on tattered rugs—and she retraced her steps to the original atrium. From there, she followed her nose.

Her nose led her to a hot, glass-topped hall, modern conveniences haphazardly pasted atop ancient riches, out of place among the tapestries and gone-black filigree. There was netting spread all over the rafters to keep out the birds, because the glass-topped roof had holes in it that you could jump through. A fountain of fresh water burbled at the wall, ringed in old concrete, with a filtration tank snuggled beside. And there were many long, worn tables—wooden slabs that had been freshened up with antibac and had legs that must have come from eight table sacrifices. The place could have seated fifty. The early light flooded down in electric yellow blasts, green where it touched the living plants and brown where it touched the dead ones, and she was grateful that she’d worn her glasses.

The room was nearly empty, but a couple of the others were there, finishing their meals. Gideon sat down three tables away and spied on them shamelessly. There was a man sitting close to a pair of ghastly teens: younger than Gideon, still in the midst of losing their fight with puberty. The boy wore trim navy robes and the girl had a jewelled scabbard on her back, and when Gideon entered they had looked up at the cultist of the Ninth with unabashed interest close to awe. The man close to this horrible pair had a kind, jovial face and curly hair, with clothes of excellent cut and a gorgeously wrought rapier at his side. Gideon reckoned him well into his thirties. He had the guts to raise his hand to her in a tentative greeting. Before she could do anything in return, a skeleton placed a steaming bowl of sour green soup and a massive hunk of lardy yeast bread on the table, and she got busy eating.

These were sophisticated skeletons. Hers returned with a cup of hot tea on a tray and waited until she took it to retreat. Gideon had noticed that their fine motor control would have been the envy of any necromancer, that they moved with perfect concert and awareness. She was in a position of some expertise here. You couldn’t spend any time in the Ninth House without coming away with an unwholesome knowledge of skeletons. She could’ve easily filled in for Doctor Skelebone without practising a single theorem. The sheer amount of complex programming each skeleton followed would have taken all of the oldest and most gnarled necromancers of the Locked Tomb months and months to put together. Gideon would have been impressed, but she was too hungry.

The awful teens were muttering to each other, giving Gideon looks, giving each other looks, then muttering again. The wholesome older man leaned over and gave them some bracing rebuke. They subsided reluctantly, only casting the occasional dark glance her way over their soup and bread, not knowing that she was physically immune. Back in the Ninth she had endured each meal under Crux’s fantastically dismal stare, which had turned gruel into ash in her mouth.

A waiting white-robed bone servant relieved her of her bowl and her plate almost sooner than she was done. She was quietly sucking tea through her teeth, trying not to drink half a pint of face paint with it, when a hand was stuck out in front of her.

It was the hand of the kind-faced older man. Up close he had a strong jaw, the expression of the terminally jolly, and nice eyes. Gideon was genuinely surprised to find that she was shy, and more still to find she was relieved by Harrow’s diktat against talking. Gideon Nav, absolutely goddamn starved of any contact with people who didn’t have dark missals and advanced osteoporosis, should’ve yearned to talk. But she found that she couldn’t imagine a single thing to say.

“Magnus the Fifth,” he said. “Sir Magnus Quinn, cavalier primary and seneschal of Koniortos Court.”

From three tables over, the loathsome teens greeted his audacity with low moans: they lost all appearance of restrained respectability and instead chorused his name in slow, hurt-animal noises, lowing “Magnus! Maaaaagnus,” which he ignored. Gideon had hesitated too long in taking his hand, and with the very soul of manners he mistook her reluctance for refusal, and rapped his knuckles on the table instead.

“Do forgive us,” he said. “We’re a bit short on black priests in the Fourth and the Fifth, and my valiant Fourth companions are, er, a bit overcome.”

(“Nooooo, Magnus, don’t say we’re overcome,” moaned the nasty girl, sotto voce.

“Don’t mention us, Magnus,” moaned the other.)

Gideon clattered her chair back to stand. Magnus Quinn, Magnus of the Fifth, was too old and too well schooled to do anything so stupid as flinch, but some reputation of the Ninth House that Gideon had only barely begun to comprehend widened his eyes, just a bit. His clothes were so restrained and so beautifully made; he looked trim and tasteful without being intimidating. She hated herself for hearing Harrow’s voice, low and urgent, in her hindbrain: We are not becoming an appendix of the Third or Fifth Houses!

She nodded to him, somewhat awkwardly, and he was so relieved that he pumped his chin up and down twice in response before he caught himself. “Health to the Ninth,” he said firmly, and then jerked his head in what was so transparently a Come on! Clear off! motion that even the bad teens couldn’t ignore it. They pushed their bowls away to two waiting, hunched skeletons, and tiptoed out in the older man’s wake, leaving Gideon amused and alone.

She stood there until their voices died away (“Really, chaps,” she caught Magnus saying repressively, “anyone would think you’d both been raised in a barn—”) before she twitched her sunglasses up her nose and left, sticking her hands in the pockets of her robes and heading out in the opposite direction from where Magnus and the crap Fourth House youths had gone, down a short flight of stairs. Gideon had nowhere to go and nothing to be, and no orders and no goals: her black robe flapping at her ankles and the light getting stronger all the time, she decided to wander.

Canaan House was a nest of rooms and corridors, of sudden courtyards and staircases that dripped down into lightless gloom and terminated in big, rusting doors beneath overhangs, ones that looked as though they would go clang no matter how quietly you tried to shut them. More than once Gideon turned a corner and found she was back at some landing she thought she had travelled miles and miles away from. Once she paused on a blasted terrace outside, gazing at the rusting, hulking pillars that stuck up in a ring around the tower. The sea on one side was broken up with flat concrete landings like stepping-stones, set wet and geometric in the water, mummified in seaweed: the sea had covered up more structures long, long ago, and they looked like square heads with long, sticky hair, peering up suspiciously through the waves. Being outside made her feel dizzy, so she headed back inside.

There were doors—a multiplicity of doors—a veritable warehouse of doors: cupboard doors, metal autodoors, barred doors to dimly lit passageways beyond, doors half her height with no handles, doors half-rotted so you could voyeuristically look through their nakedness to the rooms they didn’t hide. All these doors must have been beautiful, even the ones that led only to broom cupboards. Whoever had lived in the First House had lived in beauty once. The ceilings were still high and gracious, the plaster mouldings still graceful ornaments; but the whole thing creaked and at one point Gideon’s boot went clean through a particularly soft bit of floorboard to empty space below. It was a death trap.

She went down a short flight of cramped metal stairs. The house often seemed to split its level without letting her travel very far, but this was farther down and darker than any steps had taken her before. They led to a tiled vestibule where the lights fizzed disconsolately and refused to come on all the way; she pushed open two enormous, groaning doors, which led into an echoing chamber that made her nostrils flare. It smelled badly of chemicals, and most of the smell came from the huge, filthy, perfectly rectangular pit that dominated the centre of the room. The pit was lined with dull tile, and it gave the filthiest and oldest parts of the Ninth House a run for their money. There were metal ladders going down into the pit, but why would you though.

Gideon abandoned the pit and peered through a set of grubby glass double doors. From the other side of the room beyond, a hunched, cloaked figure peered back at her, and she reflexively went for her rapier: the hunched figure swiftly—identically—went for its own.

Good going, dickhead! thought Gideon, straightening up. It’s a mirror.

It was a mirror, an enormous one that covered the far wall. She pressed her face closer to the glass door. The room beyond had a flagstone floor, stones worn smooth from years and years of feet. There was a rusting basin and tap, where one love-abandoned towel had sat for God only knew how long, decayed to a waterfall of spiderous threads. Corroded swords were bolted to corroded panels on the wall. Through a window somewhere high up, the sunbeams poured down dust in golden torrents. Gideon would have dearly loved this training room in its prime, but she wouldn’t touch those rusted blades now if you paid her.

Going back to the vestibule with the spitting lights, she noticed another door, set close to the staircase. She hadn’t seen it before because a tapestry covered it almost entirely, but one of the corners had slipped and hinted at the frame beneath. She pushed the mouldering old tapestry aside to find a dark wooden door; she tried its handle, pulled it open, and stared. A long tiled corridor stared back, windowless, a succession of square lights in the ceiling whirring to life with a clunk … clunk … clunk … and tracing a path to an enormous door at the other end, totally out of place. Bracketed by heavy pillars, set with forbidding stone supports, the overall effect was not exactly welcoming. The door itself was a crossbar of black stone set in a bevelled frame of the same. A weird relief was carved above the lintel, set within a moulded panel. Gideon’s boots echoed down the shiny stone tiles as she came closer to see. The relief was five little circles joined with lines, in no pattern that Gideon recognised. Below this sat a solid stone beam with carved leaves swagged horizontally from one end to the other. At the apex of each swag was carved an animal’s skull with long horns, which curved inward into wicked points that almost met. Slim columns reached up to support this weird stone bunting, and wound around each column was something carved to seem writhing and alive—a fat, slithering thing, bulging and animal. Gideon reached out to touch the intricately carved marble and felt tiny overlapping scales, touched the seam where its ridged underbelly met its back. It was very cold.

There was no handle, no knocker, no knob: just a dark keyhole, for teeth that would have been as long as Gideon’s thumb. She peered through the keyhole and saw—jack shit. Suffice to say, all pushing, gripping, finger-inserting and pressing was in vain. It was locked as damn.

Curious, thought Gideon.

She went back to the claustrophobic little vestibule and, out of a complete sense of perversity, tacked the tapestry back up so that the door was totally covered. In the shadows, the effect was very good. Nobody’d be finding that one any time soon. It was a stupid, secretive Ninth thing to do, done out of habit, and Gideon hated how comforting it felt.

Voices were fading into the edge of her hearing from the top of the landing that led to the stairs. Another Ninth instinct had Gideon flatten herself back into the bottom of the stairwell: done a million times before to avoid the Marshal of Drearburh, or Harrowhark, or one of the godawful great-aunts or members of the Locked Tomb cloister. Gideon had no idea whom she was avoiding, but she avoided them anyway because it was such an easy thing to do. A conversation, conducted in low, rich, peevish tones, drifted down.

“—mystical, oblique claptrap,” someone was saying, “and I have half a mind to write to your father and complain—”

“—what,” drawled another, “that the First House isn’t treating us fairly—”

“—a lateral puzzle isn’t a trial, and, now that I think about it, the idea that the old fogey doesn’t know a thing about it is beyond belief! Some geriatric playing mind games, or worse, and this is my theory, wanting to see who breaks—”

“Ever the conspiracy theorist,” said the second voice.

The first voice was aggrieved. “Why’re the shuttles gone? Why is this place such a tip? Why the secrecy? Why is the food so bad? QED, it’s a conspiracy.”

There was a thoughtful pause.

“I didn’t think the food was that bad,” said a third voice.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” continued the first voice. “It’s a cheap, Cohort-style enlisted man’s hazing. They’re waiting to see who’s stupid enough to take the bait. Who falls for it, you see. Well, I shan’t.”

“Unless,” said the second voice—which now that Gideon was hearing it, was very like the third voice in pitch and tone, differentiated only by affect—“the challenge is one of protocol: we have to provide a valid response to a necessarily vague question in order to authenticate ourselves. Making meaning from the meaningless. Et cetera.”

The first voice had taken on a tinge of whine when it said, “Oh, for God’s sake.”

Scuffle. Movement. The stairs echoed with footsteps: they were coming down.

“I do wonder where that funny old man hid the shuttles,” mused the third voice.

The second: “Dropped them off the side of the dock, I expect.”

“Don’t be mad,” said the first, “those things cost a fortune.”

At the bottom of the stairs, deep in the shadows, Gideon got her first good glimpse of the speakers. The strange twin-scions of the Third House were looking around, attended to by their sulky, slightly bouffant cavalier. Up close, Gideon was more impressed than ever. The golden Third twin was probably the best-looking person she’d ever seen in her life. She was tall and regal, with some radiant, butterfly quality—her shirt was haphazardly tucked into her trousers, which were haphazardly tucked into her boots, but she was all topaz and shine and lustre. Necromancers affected robes in the same way cavaliers affected swords, but she hadn’t tucked her arms into hers, and it was a gauzy, gold-shot, transparent thing floating out around her like wings. There were about five rings on each hand and her earrings would’ve put chandeliers to shame, but she had an air of wild and innocent overdecoration, of having put on the prettiest things in her jewellery box and then forgotten to take them off. Her buttery hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat, and she kept tangling a curl of it in one finger and artlessly letting it go.

The second twin was as though the first had been taken to pieces and put back together without any genius. She wore a robe of the same cloth and colour, but on her it was a beautiful shroud on a mummy. The cavalier had lots of hair, an aquiline face, and a self-satisfied little jacket.

“I think,” the bright twin was saying, “that it’s a hell of a lot better than sticking us in a room and playing who’s the best necromancer? Or worse—loading us up with old scrolls and having us translate rituals for hours and hours on end.”

“Yes, it would have been unfortunate,” agreed her sister placidly, “considering it would have demonstrated within the first five minutes that you’re completely thick.”

A curl was wound about one finger. “Oh, shut it, Ianthe.”

“We should be celebrating, if we’re being honest with ourselves,” the pallid girl continued, warming to her subject, “since the already poorly hidden fact of you being a great big bimbo would have come to light so quickly that it would have broken the sound barrier.”

The curl was let go with a visual sproing. “Ianthe, don’t make me cross.”

“Please don’t be cross,” said her sister. “You know your brain can only deal with one emotion at a time.”

Their cavalier’s expression got ugly.

“You’re sore, Ianthe,” he said sharply. “You can’t show off with books ad infinitum, and so you’re invisible, isn’t that it?”

Both girls rounded on him at once. The pallid twin simply stared, eyes closed to pale-lashed slits, but the lovely twin took one of his ears between a thumb and forefinger and tweaked it unmercifully. He was not a short young man, but she had half a head on him, and a whole head if you counted her hair. Her sister watched from the side, impassive—though Gideon swore that she was smiling, very slightly.

“If you talk like that to her again, Babs,” said the golden twin, “I’ll destroy you. Beg her forgiveness.”

He was shocked and defensive. “C’mon, you know I didn’t—it was for you—I was meeting the insult for you—”

“She can insult me as she likes. You’re insubordinate. Say you’re sorry.”

“Princess, I live to serve—”

“Naberius!” she said, and pulled his ear forward so that he had to come with it, like an animal being led by a bit. Two bright red spots of outrage had formed in his cheeks. The lovely twin waggled his ear gently, so that his head shook with it. “Grovel, Babs. As soon as possible, please.”

“Leave it, Corona,” said the other girl, suddenly. “This isn’t the time to horse around. Drop him and let’s keep going.”

The bright twin—Corona—hesitated, but then dropped the ear of the unfortunate cavalier. He rubbed it fretfully. Gideon could only see the back of his head, but he kept looking at the girl who’d basically clouted him like a whipped dog, the arrogant line of his head and shoulders drooping. Suddenly, impetuously, Corona slung one arm around him and perambulated forward, giving his other ear a tweak—he jerked sullenly away—before wheeling him through the doors to the pit room. The pale twin held the door open for them both.

As they went through, exclaiming at the smell, the pale twin paused. She did not follow them. She looked straight into the darkness instead, the deep shadows around the stairwell. Gideon knew that she was completely hidden—hooded—invisible, but she felt herself pressing backward anyway: away from that pale, washed-out gaze, which was staring with discomfiting accuracy straight at her.

“This is not a clever path to start down,” she said softly. “I would not attract attention from the necromancer of the Third House.”

The pale twin stepped through and closed the door behind her. Gideon was left alone.

Chapter 10

Harrowhark did not appear for a midday meal. Gideon, still unused to the concept of midday meal or honestly midday, appeared a good hour earlier than anyone else would have. Either everyone had an appropriate circadian pattern of hunger or they were being too Housely and well bred not to follow one. Gideon sat in the hot, scrubbed room where she had eaten breakfast, and was given a meal of pallid white meat and a bunch of leaves. It was good that she was alone. She had no clue what to do with it. She ate the meat with a fork—you didn’t need a knife; it was so tender that it flaked away if you touched it—and ate the leaves one by one with her fingers. She realised partway through that it was probably a salad. Raw vegetables in the Ninth came in the form of pitiable cairns of grated snow leek, stained through with as much salty black sauce as it would absorb. She filled up on the bread, which was really very good, and stuck a piece in her robe for later.

A skeleton had brought her food; a skeleton had taken it away, with the same pinpoint accuracy the others had shown. There were no cheap tricks with them, she noticed—nobody had jammed pins through the joints so that they’d stick together easier, or slabbed on big gobs of tendon. No, whoever had raised them had been extraordinarily talented. She suspected it was Teacher. Harrow wouldn’t like that. The House of the Ninth was meant to have cornered the market on perfect reconstruction, and here were a whole bunch of them probably made by a little man who clapped his hands together unironically.

Just as Gideon had shaken the crumbs off her lap and was rising to leave, two more novitiates entered. When they saw Gideon, both they and she stopped dead.

One of the pair was a wan, knife-faced kid dressed in antiseptic whites and chain mail you could cut with a fork, it was so delicate. He was draped in it even down to a kilt, which was strange: necromancers didn’t normally wear that type of armour, and he was definitely the necromancer. He had a necromancer build. Pale silk fluttered from his slim shoulders. He gave the impression of being the guy fun sought out for death. He was prim and ascetic-looking, and his companion—who was older, a fair bit older than Gideon herself—had the air of the perpetually disgruntled. He was rather more robust, nuggety, and dressed in chipped bleached leathers that looked as though they’d seen genuine use. At least one finger on his left hand was a gross-looking stump, which she admired.

The reason why they had stopped dead was unclear. She had stopped dead because the necromancer was staring at her with an expression of naked hostility. He looked at her as though he had finally come face-to-face with the murderer of a beloved family pet.

Gideon had spent too long in the depths of Drearburh not to know when to, put scientifically, get outie. It was not the first time she had received that look. Sister Lachrimorta had looked at her that way almost exclusively, and Sister Lachrimorta was blind. The only difference in the way that Crux had looked at her was that Crux had managed also to encapsulate a complete lack of surprise, as though she already had managed to disappoint his lowest expectations. And a very long time ago—painfully folded in the back of her amygdala—the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father had also looked at her like that, though in their case, their diffidence had been cut through with a phobic flinch: the way you’d look at an unexpected maggot.

“Please deal with the shadow cultist,” said the whey-faced boy, who had the deepest, weariest, most repressive voice she had ever heard in her life.

“Yes, Uncle,” said the bigger man.

Gideon was raw for a fight. She wanted nothing more than for the cross-faced man in boiled leather to draw on her. He was strong-boned and weathered, deeply creased, yellow-brown and yellow-coarse all over. Next to his almost daintily dressed necromancer in white, he looked dusty and ferocious. He looked tough. Thank God. She wanted to fight bloody. She wanted to fight until bone adepts had to be called to put people’s feet back on. She knew the price—waking up mummified in aggressive notes, or maybe dying—but didn’t care anymore. Gideon was measuring, in her mind’s eye, the length of her rapier to the collarbones of the cavalier opposite.

He disappointed her viscerally by standing a few steps away, putting his hands together, and bowing over them to her. It was polite, though not apologetic. He had a lighter, rougher voice than his necromancer, somewhat hoarse, like he suffered from a lifelong cold or a smoker’s cough.

“My uncle can’t eat with your kind around,” he said. “Please leave.”

Gideon had a million questions. Like: Your kind? And: Why do you have such a baby uncle, one the colour of mayonnaise? And: Is “your kind” people who aren’t nephews and who have middle fingers? But she said nothing. She stared him down for a few seconds; he stared back—his face did not hold the same brand of hate, but it held a bullish, deadened expression that seemed to go right through her. If it had been Crux she would have given him the finger. As it was, she nodded and pushed past with her mind an indignant whirl.

Gideon felt awfully suckered by the whole thing. She had longed for the Cohort, in part, due to being heartily sick of her time alone in the dark; she’d wanted to be a part of something bigger than encroaching dementia and snow-leek husbandry. What was she now? An unwelcome spectre roaming the halls without a necro to pursue—the stinging slap in the face that she didn’t even have Harrow—still alone, just in better lighting. She had cherished the tiny delusion that the Lyctor trials would see her being useful for more than spying on conversations and spoiling breakfasts. Even Swords II would have been a sweet reprieve from idleness. It was in this frame of mind, reckless with disappointment, that she pushed her way at random through a collection of dark, empty antechambers and up a flight of damp brick steps; and then suddenly she found herself outside, in a terraced garden.

The sun blazed down through a canopy of glass or some thick, transparent plex. It was admittedly a garden only in a very sad sense of the word. Wherever the First House grew its food leaves, they didn’t grow them here. The salt was thick on each metal strut. The planters were full of shrubby, stunted green things, with long stems and drooping blossoms, bleached from the thick white light overhead. Weird fragrances rose like heat above them, heavy smells, strange smells. Nothing that grew on the Ninth had a real scent: not the moss and spores in its caves, and not the dried-out vegetables cultivated in its fields. The plex ended in a genuinely open area where the wind ruffled the wrinkled leaves of some wrinkled old trees, and there—under an awning in the undulating sun, looking like a long-stemmed, drooping blossom herself—was Dulcinea.

She was entirely alone. Her man-hulk was nowhere to be seen. Lying in a chair, she looked flimsy and tired: fine lines marked the corners of the eyes and the mouth, and she was wearing a fashionable and inane hat. She was dressed in something light and clingy that she had not yet hawked blood upon. It looked as though she were sleeping, and Gideon, not for the first time, felt a spike of pity; she tried to backtrack, but it was too late.

“Don’t go,” said the figure, her eyes fluttering open. “Thought so. Hello, Gideon the Ninth! Can you come and put this chair’s back up straight for me? I’d do it myself, but you know by now that I’m not well and some days I don’t feel entirely up to it. Can I beg you that favour?”

There was a fine sheen of sweat on the translucent brow under the frivolous hat, and a certain shortness of breath. Gideon went to the chair and fiddled with the fastening, immediately emasculated by the difficulty of working out a simple chair-latch. The Lady Septimus waited passively for Gideon to pull it flush, smiling at her with those big gentian eyes.

“Thank you,” she said, once she had been propped up. She took the silly hat off her damp, fawn-coloured curls and set it in her lap, and her expression was somewhat conspiratorial. “I know that you’re doing penance and can’t talk, so you don’t have to figure out how to tell me through charades.”

Gideon’s eyebrows shot up over her sunglasses’ rims before she could stop them. “Oh, yes,” said the girl, dimpling. “You’re not the first Ninth nun I’ve ever met. I’ve often thought it must be so hard being a brother or sister of the Locked Tomb. I actually dreamed of being one … when I was young. It seemed such a romantic way to die. I must have been about thirteen … You see, I knew I was going to die then. I didn’t want anyone to look at me, and the Ninth House was so far away. I thought I could just have some time to myself and then expire very beautifully, alone, in a black robe, with everyone praying over me and being solemn. But then I found out about the face paint you all have to wear,” she added fretfully, “and that wasn’t my aesthetic. You can’t drape yourself over your cell and fade away beautifully in face paint— Does this count as a conversation? Am I breaking your penance? Shake for no and nod for yes.”

“Good!” she said, when Gideon mutely shook her head no, sucked completely under this mad, bubbling riptide. “I love a captive listener. I know you’re only doing this because you feel bad for me. And you do look like a nice kid. Sorry,” she added hastily, “you’re not a child. But I feel so old right now. Did you see the pair from the Fourth House? Babies. They have contributed to me feeling ancient. Tomorrow I might feel youthful, but today’s a bad day … and I feel like a gimp. Take off your glasses, please, Gideon the Ninth. I’d like to see your eyes.”

At the juxtaposition of Gideon with obedient many people would have rocked with laughter and gone on chuckling and gurgling for quite some time. But she was helpless now in the face of this extraordinary request; she was helpless at the thin arms and rosebud smile of the woman-girl in front of her; she was utterly helpless at the word gimp. She slid her sunglasses off her nose and obligingly presented her face for inspection.

And she was inspected, thoroughly and immediately. The eyes narrowed with intent, and for a moment the face was all business. There was something swift and cool in the blueness of those eyes, some deep intelligence, some sheer shameless depth and breadth of looking. It made Gideon’s cheeks flare, despite her mental reproach to Slow down, Nav, slow down.

“Oh, singular,” said Dulcinea quietly, more to herself than to Gideon. “Lipochrome … recessive. I like looking at people’s eyes,” she explained suddenly, smiling now. “They tell you such a lot. I couldn’t tell you much about your Reverend Daughter … but you have eyes like gold coins. Am I embarrassing you? Am I being a creep?”

At the head-shake no, she settled back more into her chair, tilting her head to the seat back and fanning herself with the frivolous hat. “Good,” she said, with satisfaction. “It’s bad enough that we’re stuck in this burnt-out old hovel without me scaring you. Isn’t it fantastically abandoned? Imagine all the ghosts of everyone who must have lived here … worked here … still waiting to be called, if we could figure out how. The Seventh doesn’t do well with ghosts, you know. We offend them. We’re worrisome. The old division between body and spirit. We deal too much with the body … crystallising it in time … trapping it unnaturally. The opposite of your House, don’t you think, Gideon the Ninth? You take empty things and build with them … We press down the hand of a clock, to try to stop it from ticking the last second.”

This was all so far over Gideon’s head that it sat somewhere out in space, but there was something soothing about it anyway. Gideon had only ever been clotheslined this way with Harrowhark, who explained herself seldom and as you would only to a very stupid child. Dulcinea had the dreamy, confiding manner of someone who, despite spouting grade-A horseshit, was confident you would understand everything she was saying. Also, as she talked she smiled widely and prettily, and moved her lashes up and down.

Thus hypnotised, Gideon could only watch with a mouth full of teeth as the blue-eyed necromancer laid one slight, narrow hand on her arm; her skin stretched thin over very marked metacarpals, and wrist bones like knots in a rope. “Stand up for me,” said Dulcinea. “Indulge me. Lots of people do … but I want you to.”

Gideon pulled away and stood. The sunlight dappled over the hem of her robe in rusty splotches. Dulcinea said, “Draw your sword, Gideon of the Ninth.”

Grasping the smooth black grip beneath the black nest of the knuckle bow, Gideon drew. It seemed as though she had drawn this damn thing a thousand times—that Aiglamene’s voice had taken permanent residence in her head now, just to keep up the charade. Draw. Lean on the right foot. Arm bent, not collapsed, naked blade angled at your opponent’s face or chest. You’re guarding the outer side of your body, Nav, you’re on your right foot, and you’re not weighting forward like a goddamned piece of freight—you’re centred, you can move backward or forward at will. The rapier blade, away from its black home in Drearburh, burned a lightless, opaque metal colour, a long slender absence of hue. Gideon acknowledged its beauty, grudgingly—how it looked like a needle, an ebon ribbon. Offhand up and high. She relaxed into position, triumphant in the new body memory that her teacher had beaten into her, and wanted to fight again.

“Oh, very good!” said Dulcinea, and she clapped like a child seeing a firework. “Perfect … just like a picture of Nonius. People say that all Ninth cavaliers are good for is pulling around baskets of bones. Before I met you I imagined that you might be some wizened thing with a yoke and panniers of cartilage … half skeleton already.”

This was bigoted, assumptive, and completely true. Gideon relaxed her sword and her stance, at her ease—and saw that the fragile girl engulfed by her chair had stopped playing with her frivolous hat. Her mouth was quirked in a quizzical little smile, and her eyes said that she had calculated two plus two and ended up with a very final four.

“Gideon the Ninth,” said Dulcinea, slowly, “are you used to a heavier sword?”

Gideon looked down. She looked at her rapier, pointed skyward like a black arrow, her off hand cupped and supporting what should have been more grip but now was the long knob of pommel, the way you’d hold—a fucking longsword.

She sheathed it immediately, sliding it home to its scabbard in a tight iron whisper. A cold sweat had broken out beneath her clothes. The expression on Dulcinea’s face was simply bright-eyed, mischievous interest, but to Gideon it was the Secundarius Bell chiding a child already ten minutes late for prayer. For a moment a lot of stupid stuff felt very ready to happen. She nearly confessed everything to Dulcinea’s mild and denim-coloured gaze: she nearly opened her mouth and begged wholeheartedly for the woman’s mercy.

It was in this moment of charged stupidity that Protesilaus turned up, saving her bacon by dint of being very large and ignoring her. He stood with his muddy hair and bleary skin and blocked the shaft of sunlight that was pattering over his adept’s hands, and he said to her in his dreary, rumbling voice: “It’s shut.”

No time to figure out that one. As Dulcinea’s eyes flickered between her cavalier and the cavalier of the Ninth, Gideon took the opportunity to turn tail and—not run, but slope extremely fast in the direction of anywhere but there. There were cracks in the plex and the wind was coming in hot and salty, rippling her robes and her hood, and she had nearly escaped when Dulcinea called—“Gideon the Ninth!”

She half-turned her head back to them, dark glasses crooking down over her eyebrows. Protesilaus the Seventh stared at her with the empty eyes of someone who would watch with equal heavy disinterest if part of the wall were kicked out and she were punted down into the sea, but his adept was looking at her—wistfully. Gideon hesitated by the door for that look, in the shadows of the archway, buffeted by the wind from the water.

Dulcinea said: “I hope we talk again soon.”

Hell! thought Gideon, taking the stairs blindly two at a time. She didn’t. She had said too much already, and all without speaking a single word.

Chapter 11

Those early days at Canaan House spaced themselves out like beads on a prayer string, dilated. They consisted of big, empty hours, of eating meals in unoccupied rooms, of being alone amid very strange strangers. Gideon couldn’t even rely on the familiarity of the dead. The skeletons of the First were too good, too capable, too watchful—and Gideon didn’t feel truly at her ease anywhere except shut up in the dim rooms that the Ninth had been given, doing drills.

After nearly giving everything away she spent two days almost entirely cloistered, working with her rapier until the sweat had smeared her face paint to a leering, staved-in mask. She stacked a rusting stool on top of the sagging ebon dresser and did chin-ups into the iron wedge that ran across the rafters. She did press-ups in front of the windows until Dominicus limned her with bloody light, completing its sprint around the watery planet.

Both nights she went to bed sore and furious with loneliness. Crux always had said that she was at her most unbearable after confinement. She fell into a deep, black sleep and woke up only once, the second night, when—in the very early morning when the night outside seemed more like the lightless Ninth—Harrowhark Nonagesimus shut the door behind herself, very nearly silently. She kept her eyes mostly closed as the Reverend Daughter paused before the makeshift bed, and as she watched the robed black figure drifted over to the bedroom. Then there was no more noise; and Harrow was gone again, in the morning, when Gideon awoke. She didn’t even leave rude notes.

It was in this abandoned state that the cavalier of the Ninth House ate two breakfasts, starved of both protein and attention, dark glasses slipping on her nose as she drank another bowl of soup. She would have killed to see a couple of haggard nuns tottering around the place, and was therefore 100 percent vulnerable when she looked up to see a Third House twin stride into the room like a lion. It was the lovely one; she had the sleeves of her gauzy robe haphazardly rolled up to each golden shoulder and her hair tied back in a tawny cloud, and she looked at Gideon with an expression like an artillery shell midflight.

“The Ninth!” she said.

She sauntered over. Gideon had risen to stand, remembering the pale eyes of her pissed-off twin, but instead found a beringed hand proffered in her direction: “Lady Coronabeth Tridentarius,” she was told, “Princess of Ida, heir of the Third House.”

Gideon did not know what to do with the hand, which was offered to her fingers out, palm upward. She touched her fingers to it in the hope that she could grip it briefly and get out that way, but Coronabeth Tridentarius, Princess of Ida, took her hand and roguishly kissed the backs of Gideon’s knuckles. 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.

“I’ve organised sparring matches for the cavaliers of all the Houses,” she said. “It’s my hope that even the Ninth will accept my invitation. Will it?”

If Gideon had not been so lonely; if Gideon had not been so used to having a fighting partner, even one more used these days to battling rheumatism; if Coronabeth Tridentarius had not been so astonishingly hot. All these ifs she contemplated wearily, led by the Third House necromancer down the poky, confined little staircase immediately familiar to her as the one she’d explored before; down to the dark, tiled vestibule with the flickering lights, and through to the room with the foul-smelling chemical pit.

This room was now alive with activity. There were three skeletons down in the pit with hairy mops and buckets, cleaning the slime out of it; a fourth was wiping down the streaked glass double doors through to the mirror room beyond. The fug of rot was overlaid with the equally pervasive fug of surfactants and wood polish. Old age still had the place in a chokehold, but in the hot light of the early morning, two figures danced around each other on the outspread flagstone dais of the mirror room. The urgent metal scrape of sword on sword filled the space up to the rafters.

A skeleton in the corner wound a long pole into a network of cobwebs, displacing showers of dust; a couple of others sat about, watching the fight. The cavalier of the Third she recognised even without his smug little jacket, which he had hung over a peg as he struck a fatigued attitude to clean his sword. She could not mistake the cavalier of the Second in her intense Cohort officer whites, contrasted with a jacket of blazing red. She was watching the two in the centre: facing each other on the flagstones, swords and long knives throwing up bevelled yellow reflections on the walls, were Magnus and the abominable girl teen, stripped down to their shirtsleeves. Everyone looked up as the Princess of Ida glowed into sight, because you couldn’t do anything else.

“Sir Magnus, behold my coup!” she said, and she gestured to Gideon.

This did not produce a susurrus of respectful murmurs, as she had obviously hoped. The dress-uniform cavalier stood to attention, but her gaze was blank and cool. The Fourth girl dropped form and rocked backward on her heels, whistling noisily in fascinated horror. The cavalier of the Third raised his eyebrows and took on an expression of dismay, as though his necromancer had just presented them with a leper. Only Magnus gave her a genial, if slightly bewildered, smile.

“Princess Corona, trust you to nab Gideon the Ninth!” he said, and to his dreadful teen: “See, now you can have a duel with someone else, and not bore everyone by how soundly Jeannemary the Fourth can thrash me.”

(“Nooooo, Magnus, don’t mention me,” hissed that dreadful teen.)

“I’d be ashamed to admit to that,” said the Third cavalier significantly.

The unfortunate Jeannemary the Fourth was going red in the face. She drew herself up to say something obviously unwise, but her sparring partner clapped her on the back with an unsinkable smile.

“Ashamed, Prince Naberius? To lose to a Chatur?” he said heartily. “Goodness me, no. Cavalier family since the time of the Resurrection. Should feel ashamed if she lost to me. I’ve known her since she was a child—she knows I’m absolutely no good. You should have seen her when she was five—”

(“Magnus, do not talk about me being five.”)

“Now, let me tell you this story—”

(“Magnus, do not tell anyone this story.”)

“Challenged me to a duel during a reception, said I’d insulted her—think it was a matter of propping her up with cushions, and to be honest, she would’ve had me if she hadn’t been using a bread knife as her offhand—”

Disgusted beyond all tolerance, the much-tried Jeannemary let out a primal yell and escaped to the benches on the other side of the room, far away from them. Now that she wasn’t looking, Magnus gave Naberius a look of frank reproof. The Third’s cavalier coloured and looked away.

“I want to see a match,” said Princess Corona. “Come—Gideon the Ninth, right?—why don’t you try Sir Magnus instead? Don’t believe him when he says he’s rubbish. The Fifth House is meant to turn out very fine cavaliers.”

Magnus inclined his head.

“Of course I’m willing, and the princess is gracious,” he said, “but I didn’t get to be cavalier primary due to being the best with a rapier. I’m cavalier primary only because my adept is also my wife. I suppose you could say that I—ha, ha—cavalier primarried!”

From the other side of the room, Jeannemary let out a long noise like a death rattle. Princess Corona laughed outright; Magnus looked extremely pleased with himself. The faces of the other two were patiently blank. Gideon made a mental note to write down the joke so that she could use it herself later.

Corona inclined her bright head in toward Gideon. She smelled nice, like how Gideon imagined soap was meant to smell.

“Will the Ninth honour us?” she murmured prettily.

Stronger women than Gideon could not have said no to an up-close-and-personal Corona Tridentarius. She stepped up to the dais, her boots ringing out on the stone: the older man opposite’s eyes widened when he saw that she was not going to take off her robe, nor her hood, nor her glasses. The air in the room thrilled, all except for the dreary scrape, scrape, scrape of the skeleton removing cobwebs. Even Jeannemary sat up from her posture of premature death to watch. There was a low murmur of amazement from Corona when Gideon twitched open her robe to reveal the knuckles latched to her belt; they glittered blackly in the sunlight as she slipped them onto her hand.

“Knuckle-knives?” said the Third’s cavalier in outright disbelief. “The Ninth uses knuckle-knives?”

“Not traditionally.”

That was the cavalier in the Cohort uniform, who had a voice as crisp as her collar. Naberius said with forced languor: “I simply can’t remember ever thinking knuckle-knives were a viable option.”

“They’re tremendously nasty.” (Gideon admitted to herself that the way Corona said it was kind of hot.)

Naberius sniffed.

“They’re a brawler’s weapon.”

The Cohort cav said, “Well. We’ll see.”

That was the strange thing about keeping mute, thought Gideon. Everyone seemed to talk at you, rather than to you. Only her erstwhile sparring partner was looking her dead in the eye—as much as he could through dark glasses, anyway.

“Does the Ninth, er—” Magnus was gesturing in a rather general way to Gideon’s robes, her glasses, her hood, which she translated to Are you going to take those off? When she shook her head no he shrugged in wonder: “All right!” and added the slightly bewildering, “Well done.”

Corona said, “I’ll arbitrate,” and they moved into position. Once again Gideon was back down in the half-lit depths of Drearburh, in the cement-poured tomb of a soldier’s hall. Cavalier duels worked the same way Aiglamene had taught her they would, which was very much the same way they did back home, just with more folderol. You stood in front of each other and laid your offhand arm across your chest, showing which main-gauche weapon you intended to use: her knuckle-knives were laid, fat and black, against her collarbone. Magnus’s sword—a beautiful dagger of ivory-coloured steel, the handle a twist of creamy leather—touched his.

“To the first touch,” said their arbiter, badly hiding her rising excitement. “Clavicle to sacrum, arms exception. Call.”

First touch? In Drearburh it was to the floor, but there was no time to contemplate that one: Magnus was smiling at her with the boyish, teacherly enthusiasm of a man about to play a ball game with a younger sibling. But beneath that excellent mask there was a note of doubt about his eyes, a tugging of his mouth, and something in Gideon rose as well: he was a little afraid of her.

“Magnus the Fifth!” he said, and: “Er—go easy!”

Gideon looked over at Corona and shook her head. The necromancer-princess of Ida was too well bred to query and too quick to mistake, and simply said: “I call for Gideon the Ninth. Seven paces back—turn—begin…”

There were four pairs of hungry eyes watching that fight, but they all blurred into the background of a dream: the lines one’s brain filled in to abbreviate a place, a time, a memory. Gideon Nav knew in the first half second that Magnus was going to lose: after that she stopped thinking with her brain and started thinking with her arms, which were frankly where the best of her cerebral matter lay.

What happened next was like closing your eyes in a warm and stuffy room. The first feint from the Fifth House was the heavy drowsiness that filled the back of her head, all the way down to her toes; the second the weightless loll of the skull to the chest. Gideon tucked her offhand behind her back, said to herself: Stop blocking every blow! and did not even bother to parry. She pivoted away each syrup-slow thrust without meeting it, bent back from the follow-up with the dagger like they had agreed beforehand where it would fall: he pressed his quarter, trying to force her, and she very gently folded his sword to the side with hers, contraparried. The point of her black rapier flickered like paper touched with a flame and came to rest, a quarter-inch away from his heart, making him stutter to a halt. She bumped the tip of her sword into his chest, very gently.

It was over in three moves. A mental haptic jolt bunted Gideon awake, and there she was: rapier held still to Magnus’s chest; Magnus with the good-natured but poleaxed expression of a man caught mid–practical joke; four sets of staring, equally blank expressions. Their very good-looking arbiter’s mouth was even hanging very slightly open, lips parting over white teeth, gaping dumbly until she caught up—

“Match to the Ninth!”

“Goodness me,” said Magnus.

The room let out a collective breath. Jeannemary said: “Oh my days,” and the Cohort cav of the Second sat up at least two inches taller than before, thumb pressed furiously hard into the soft part under her chin in thought. Gideon was busy sheathing her sword a heartbeat after Magnus had sheathed his, jerky with lag time in returning his bow, turning away. Her sweat had turned to adrenaline; her adrenaline was singing through her as fine, hot fuel, but her brain and heart had not caught up with the result. The only emotion she was feeling was a slow-to-saturate relief. She had won. She had won even though moving in a robe and dark glasses was so stupid. Aiglamene’s honour could go another day intact, and Gideon’s ass could go spiritually unkicked.

Conversations were happening around her, not to her:

A bit plaintively: “I’m not quite that out of form, am I?—”

(“Magnus! Maaaaagnus. Three moves, Magnus.”)

“—Am I getting old? Should Abigail and I divorce?—”

“I didn’t even see her move.” Corona was breathing hard. “God, she’s fast.”

Because they were in closest proximity, her first gaze after the fight fell on the overgroomed cavalier of the Third, Naberius: his eyes were taut, and his smile was unnerved. His eyes were blue, but this close she could see that they were stained through in places with a light, insipid brown that made Gideon think of oily water.

“Next match to me,” said Naberius.

“Don’t be greedy,” said his princess, good-naturedly and a trifle distractedly. “The Ninth just fought. Why don’t you go toe-to-toe with Jeannemary?”

But it was clear that he did not want to go toe-to-toe with Jeannemary, and judging by the look on her face she was no keener on the idea. Naberius shrugged his shoulders back, rolling up the sleeves of his fine cotton shirt to each elbow. He did not drop his gaze from Gideon. “You didn’t even break a sweat, did you?” he said. “No, you’re ready to go again. Try me.”

“Oh, Babs.”

“Come on.” His voice was much softer, more coaxing and appealing, when he was speaking to Corona. “Let the Third show what it can do, my lady. I know you’d rather watch your own.” There was a peculiarly nasal lilt to his voice, a sort of posh elongated vowel that made it rathah. “Put me in. Dyas can get another look at me.” (Next to him, the Cohort cavalier who was obviously hight Dyas raised her eyebrows the exact one-eighth of an inch to indicate how much she wanted to get another look at him.)

“The Ninth?”

Gideon’s heart was still ricocheting around her chest. She raised her shoulders in an expression that the brethren of the Locked Tomb would have recognised immediately as the precursor of Gideon about to do something particularly daft, but Corona took it as acceptance, and said mock-indulgently to her cav: “Well, then, my dear, go off and make yourself happy.”

He beamed as though he had just been bought a new pair of shoes. Gideon thought: Shit.

The Cohort cavalier, Dyas, was saying: “Your Highness. The adept shouldn’t officiate for their cavalier.”

“Oh, pff! Surely just this once can’t harm, Lieutenant.”

“You can’t call yourself a disinterested arbitrator, Princess,” Magnus was saying.

“Nonsense: I’m harder on him than anyone else. To the touch; call!”

In a very short space of time she was standing face to face with another cavalier, and there was a juddering in her ears that she recognised as the beating of her own heart. The glass of her knuckle-knives felt black and cold and silky all the way through a layer of robe and her shirt, and her tongue felt thick in her mouth. She hadn’t been this overstimulated since that one time when training had consisted of Crux, a repeating crossbow, and two skeletons with machetes. The Third’s main-gauche dagger was as gorgeously wrought as his hair: chased silver and Imperial violet, the arms of the hilt curved and hugging inward in a way that tugged on her memory but did not grasp the right file. The blade was thin and bright and flared at the top. She was so busy looking at it that she barely heard Naberius say:

“Naberius the Third.”

And very, very quietly, just for her:

“Ninth cavs are necro suitcases. Who’re you?”

It was good that she had already practised how to be quiet, because the traditional Nav response would have been one of any number of pieces of crude backchat. She resented the contempt with which his mouth rounded over Ninth; she resented suitcases; she resented his hair. But Coronabeth was singing out, “I call for Gideon the Ninth!” and they were marking five paces—six—seven.

She had only a moment to size Naberius up. He was about an inch shorter than her, with a frame that had been whipped within an inch of its life into perfectly sculpted muscle. He was narrow shouldered with long, long arms, and she was beginning to believe that he was not simply a douchebag who used lip balm, but a douchebag who used lip balm and had a very long reach. He stood perfectly: more perfectly even than her teacher, who had partially fused her spine with standing to attention. His rapier was a froth of silver wire and tracery at the loop of the hilt, and the blade shone notchless, perfect as the line made from his shoulder to its tip: her answering stance felt slouchy and half-assed, and the black knuckle-knives brutish, unsurgical. The hard moue of his mouth told her that he was used to making people feel that way, but also that he definitely used lip balm. Her heart sped up: slowed: renewed, arrhythmic with anticipation.

“Begin!” called Corona.

In the first ten seconds, Gideon had known that the fight with the Fifth House was hers to lose. It took her twenty seconds to come to a very important discovery about the House of the Third: it valued cleanliness. Each twitch of the sword was a masterpiece of technique. He fought like clockwork: inevitable, bloodless, perfect, with absolute economy of movement. The first time the black sword of the Ninth flicked into action, the line of his rapier slicing hers to the side—a simple semicircle arc with the blade, bored, contemptuous, exact—would have brought an expert to tears. His advance and retreat were like lines from a manual, fed directly into his feet.

Stop blocking every blow, her brain told her. Her arm ignored her brain, and sparks glittered as Naberius’s sword clanked against the obsidian glass of her defending knuckle-knives; the force of the blow reverberated up Gideon’s arm and shuddered into her spine. Her sword sang forward in what she knew to be a perfect thrust, aimed true and hard at his side; she heard an oily shnk!, and then another blow quaked its way into her elbow and up to the base of her skull. The blade she had taken for a dagger had separated into three, trapping hers neatly: a trident knife, which was so hopelessly obvious that she probably had to offer to save time and kick her own ass for him. Naberius smiled at her, blandly.

It was the most irritating fight she’d ever had. He wasn’t as fast as she was, but he wasn’t wearing robes, and anyway he didn’t have to be as fast as she was. He just had to keep her at arm’s length, and he was a master at it. This to the touch nonsense was pissing her off. If she had been wielding her longsword she would have simply smashed through him like a brick through a windowpane. But she had a needle in one hand and a handful of black glass in the other, and had to skip and hop around like he was wielding poison; and he had been a cavalier probably since the day he was born. At some points he could stand there completely still, completely bored, his sword held in perfect form as though he were doing dressage. The light beat down on her robes and her head. She couldn’t believe she was being held at bay by someone who had eaten every cavalier manual and chewed dutifully twenty-five times.

Naberius toyed with her languidly—he had a trick where his sword licked out like a cat’s claw, immediate, before pulling back again with a measured half step—and he kept her at sword’s length, never letting her enter his space. He kept up his litany of parry; quick attack for space; pressure the sword with the offhand until she was sick to death of it.

Gideon ran her rapier down the length of his—lightless black on silver—with a shrill squeal, but he circled it deftly down and away. She thrust again, high, and found that the upper breadth of her blade was caught neatly within the fork of that goddamned trident knife: he used the leverage to push her down.… down … and she found that his rapier was sliding forward, over her arm, through the tuck of her elbow. Aiglamene had taught her to anticipate a death blow. She flinched to the side immediately, letting it press tight against her, swearing mentally all the way: in a real fight he’d be able to slice a hot ribbon over her chest and shoulder, but couldn’t kill her either way. And he couldn’t touch her with the point, just the edge. She was still in the duel.

But then he did something perfect. It was probably recorded in some shitty Seventh-style swordplay book as TWO CROWS DRINKING WATER or THE BOY STRANGLES THE GOOSE. He pivoted her sword downward with his three-bladed knife, jerked the wrist of his rapier-hand forward, and flicked the black blade of the Ninth from her grip. It clattered to the worn-out flagstones and was still. Jeannemary gulped off a yelp in the background. Her heart trickled like prayer beads sliding down a string.

Naberius stepped out of his lunge and smiled that irritating smile again.

“You cut too much,” he said.

He did not smile when Gideon unwound her sword-arm from his rapier in a swift wheel of movement, ducked forward, and punched him in the solar plexus. The breath wheezed from his lungs like he was an open airlock. Naberius crumpled backward, and she kicked her robes aside to touch one booted foot to the place beneath his knee: he staggered, spat, and fell. She dropped for her sword and backpedalled for space, as he thrashed like a fallen animal trying to rise. Gideon fell into stance, raised her sword, and let it come to rest at his collarbone.

“Match to the Third,” said Coronabeth, which startled her.

Her sword was shrugged away; Naberius, furious and wobbly, was finally up on both feet.

“Babs,” his princess said hurriedly, “are you all right?”

He was coughing throatily. His face was a dark, velvety red as he sheathed his sword and squeezed down on his knife, causing some mechanism to snockt the side blades back into place. When he bowed to her, it was amazingly scornful. Gideon slid her own sword back into her scabbard, somewhat discombobulated, and bowed in return; he tossed his head back haughtily and coughed again, which somewhat ruined the effect.

“She’s not some Nonius come-again, she’s just a brawler,” he said in throaty disgust. “Look, idiot, when I disarm you, match is over, you bow, all right? You don’t keep going.”

The sharply dressed Cohort cavalier said: “You let your guard down, Tern.”

“The match was over the moment I got her sword!”

“Yes,” she said, “technically.”

“Technically?” He was getting even redder-faced now. “Everything’s the technicals! And that’s Prince Tern to you, Lieutenant! What are you playing at, Dyas? I held her at bay the whole time, I won, and the cultist fouled the match. Admit it.”

“Yes,” said Dyas, who had relaxed into an arms-behind-the-back at ease position. It looked more at home in a military parade line-up than at an informal fitness match. She had a neat, mellifluous voice. “You won the bout. The Ninth is the less able duellist. I say she is the better fighter: she fought to win. But, Ninth,” she said, “he’s right. You cut too much.”

The cavalier from the Third looked like he was very close to violence: this, for some reason, had made his eyes bulge with sheer resentment. He looked as though he were about to unsheathe his sword and demand a rematch, and backed down only when one golden arm was slung about his shoulders and he was pulled into a half embrace from his necromancer. He submitted to a hair ruffle. Corona said, “The Third showed its stuff, Babs—that’s all I care about.”

“It was a convincing win.” He sounded like a huffy child.

“You were brilliant. I wish Ianthe had seen you.”

Jeannemary had risen to stand. She was a brown, bricklike young thing, Gideon had noticed, seemingly all corners: her eyes were alight, and her voice was piercing when she said:

“That’s how I want to fight. I don’t want to spend all my time in show bouts. I want to fight like a real cavalier, as though my life’s on the line.”

Naberius’s expression shuttered over again. His gaze met Gideon’s briefly, and it was somewhere beyond hostile: it was contempt for an animal that had crapped indelicately in the corner. But before any more could be said, Magnus coughed lightly into his hand.

“Perhaps,” he said, “we should fall to exercises, or paired work, or—something that will make me feel like I’m practising to be fighting fit. How about it? Sparring may be the meat of a fighter’s training, but you’ve got to have some—well—vegetables and potatoes?”

(“Magnus. Potatoes are a vegetable, Magnus.”)

Gideon stepped from the dais, unbuckling the knuckle-knives from her wrist, easing her fingers out of the grips. She wondered what Aiglamene would have thought of the fight; she almost wanted to see that disarm again. If Naberius hadn’t looked at her like she had personally taken a whiz on his nicest jacket, she would have asked him about it. It was sleight of hand rather than brute force, and she had to admit that she’d never even thought about a defence, which was stupid—

Some sixth sense made her look upward, beyond the skeleton still swabbing industriously at the glass door, out past the pit where centuries of old chemicals were being wiped away. In the aperture before the tiled room, a cloaked figure stood: skull-painted, a veil pushed down to the neck, a hood obscuring the face. Gideon stood in the centre of the training room, and for a second that emasculated minutes, she and Harrowhark looked at each other. Then the Reverend Daughter turned in a dramatic swish of black and disappeared into the flickering vestibule.

Chapter 12

“Excellent to have you with us,” said Teacher one morning, “excellent to see the Ninth fitting in so well! How beautiful to have all the Houses commingled!”

Teacher was a fucking comedian. He often sat with Gideon if he caught her at table for later meals—he never showed up to breakfast; she suspected he had his much earlier than anyone else at Canaan House—with the jovial, I find vows of silence very restful! Constant questions were still being asked of Teacher and the Canaan House priests, some coaxing, some curt, all in varying stages of desperation. He was implacably ignorant.

“I do enjoy all this bustle,” Teacher said. (Only he and Gideon were in the room.)

By the end of that week, Gideon had met nearly all of the adepts and their cavaliers. This did not break down barriers and form new friendships. They nearly all gave her wide berths in the dim Canaan House corridors—only Coronabeth would greet her breezily according to Coronabeth’s whims, which were capricious, and Magnus was always good for a cordial Good morning! Er, excellent weather! Or Good evening! Weather still excellent! He tried pathetically hard. But most of them still looked at her as though she were something that could only be killed with a stake through the heart at midnight, a half-tame monster on a dubious leash. Naberius Tern often sneered at her so hard that he was due a lip injury.

But you got a lot of information by being silent and watching. The Second House acted like soldiers on unwilling leave. The Third revolved around Corona like two chunks of ice about a golden star. The Fourth clustered by the Fifth’s skirts like ducklings—the Fifth necromancer turned out to be a fresh-faced woman in her mid-thirties with thick glasses and a mild smile, who looked about as much the part as a farmer’s wife. The Sixth and Seventh were perennially absent, ghosts. The Eighth’s creepy uncle–creepy nephew duo she saw seldom, but even seldom was more than enough: the Eighth necromancer prayed intensely and fervidly before each meal, and if they passed in the corridor both flattened themselves to the furthest wall as though she were contagious.

Small wonder. The way to the Ninth’s living quarters—the corridor that led to their front door, and all about their front door, like ghoulish wreaths—was now draped in bones. Spinal cords bracketed the door frame; finger bones hung down attached to thin, nearly-invisible wires, and they clinked together cheerlessly in the wind when you passed. She had left Harrowhark a note on her vastly underused pillow—

and received only a terse—

Well, ambiance meant that even Magnus the Fifth hesitated before saying Good morning, so fuck ambiance in the ear.

As far as Gideon could tell, Dulcinea Septimus spent 100 percent of the time on the terraces, reading romance novels, being perfectly happy. If she was trying to psych out the competition, she was doing so with flair. It was also very difficult to avoid her. The Ninth’s cavalier elect would walk past an open doorway, and a light voice would call out Gideon—Gideon! And then she would go, and no mention of her sword would be made: just a pillow to be moved, or the plot of a romance novel to be related, or—once—a woman seemingly lighter than a rapier to be picked up and very carefully transferred to another seat, out of the sun. Gideon did not resent this. She had the sinking feeling that Dulcinea was doing her a favour. Lady Septimus was, delicately, showing she did not care that Gideon was Gideon the Ninth, a paint-faced shadow cultist, a Locked Tomb nun apparent: or at least, if she cared, she viewed it as the delight of her days.

“Do you ever think it’s funny, you being here with me?” she asked once, when Gideon sat, black-hooded, holding a ball of wool for Dulcinea’s crocheting. When Gideon shook her head, she said: “No … and I like it. I send Protesilaus away a good deal. I give him things to do: that’s what suits him best. But I like to see you and make you pick up my blankets and be my scullion. I think I’m the only person in eternity to make a Ninth House cavalier slave away for me … who’s not their adept. And I’d like to hear your voice again … one day.”

Fat chance. The one half-glimpsed vision of Harrow Nonagesimus was all that Gideon had seen, after that first spar. She didn’t appear again, in the training room or at the Ninth quarters. Her pillow was rumpled in a different way each morning, and black clothes heaped themselves untidily in the laundry basket that the skeletons took away at intervals, but she did not darken Gideon’s door.

Gideon went back to the training room regularly—and so did the cavaliers of Fourth and Fifth, and Second and Third—but the Sixth and Seventh cavaliers avoided it, even now that it was laminated to a high shine and smelled of seed oils. The skeletons had moved their efforts to cleaning the floors now. The burly Eighth cavalier had come in once when she was there, but on seeing Gideon, bowed politely and left posthaste.

Gideon still preferred to train by herself. It was her habit of long years to wake and wedge her feet under some piece of furniture, and do sit-ups until she had counted them out in their hundreds, and then press-ups: a hundred normal, a hundred clapping. Standing upside down, on her arms with her feet in the air. Sitting on the heels of her hands with her legs extended, testing to what degree she could stretch her toes. You didn’t need half of what she’d done to gain medical entry to the Cohort, but she had fed her entire life into the meat grinder of hope that, one day, she’d blitz through Trentham and get sent to the front attached to a necromancer’s legion. Not for Gideon a security detail on one of the holding planets, either on a lonely outpost on an empty world or in some foreign city babysitting some Third governor. Gideon wanted a drop ship—first on the ground—a fat shiny medal saying INVASION FORCE ON WHATEVER, securing the initial bloom of thanergy without which the finest necromancer of the Nine Houses could not fight worth a damn. The front line of the Cohort facilitated glory. In her comic books, necromancers kissed the gloved palms of their front-liner comrades in blessed thanks for all that they did. In the comic books none of these adepts had heart disease, and a lot of them had necromantically uncharacteristic cleavage.

This had all played out in Gideon’s imagination on many solitary nights, and often she had indulged in a wilder flight of fancy where Harrowhark would open an envelope galaxies and galaxies away, and read the news that Gideon Nav had won a bunch of medals and a huge percentage of prize money for her role in the initial strike, a battle in which she was both outstanding and very hot. Harrow’s lip would curl, and she would drawl something like, Turns out Griddle could swing a sword after all. This fantasy often got her through a hundred reps.

Back in the Ninth she would have ended the day with a jog around the planting fields, as the photochemical lamps dimmed for the end of their cycle, running through the fine moisture mist spritzed out at even times to wet the soil. The mist was recyc water and smelled ureal. It was a before-bedtime smell to her. Now the scent was old wood, and the sulfide reek of the sea, and water on stone.

But not even Gideon could train all the time. She amused herself by exploring the huge, sinuous complex of Canaan House, often getting profoundly lost. That you could only explore so far was her first discovery. There must have been floors beneath floors all the way down, many hundreds of feet of building, but as you descended the prevalence of *** CAUTION *** printed on yellow plastic tape and crosses spray-painted onto big iron blast doors only grew. You could only get about fifty metres below the dock layer before all ways were closed. You could only go up so far too, about an equivalent hundred metres up: there was a broken lift you could walk into, and there was a staircase up the tower that branched off in two directions. To the left was where Teacher and the other two priests of Canaan House slept, in a whitewashed network of corridors where potted succulent plants grew lasciviously in long tendrils. She had not yet tried the right.

After two silent, ironed-out days of exploring and squats, Gideon did not exactly get bored. It took a hell of a lot more to bore a denizen of the House of the Ninth. It was a lack of change at the microscopic level that made her suspicious: one morning she realised that the rumples on Harrow’s bed and the top layer of black clothes in the laundry hamper had not changed for over twenty-four hours. Two nights had passed without Harrow sleeping in the Ninth quarters, or changing out of dirty clothes, or refreshing her paint. Gideon cogitated:

1.   Harrow had been prevented from coming home for reasons, e.g., that

(i)   She was dead;

(ii)   She was too impaired;

(iii)   She was busy.

2.   Harrow had chosen to live elsewhere, leaving Gideon free to put her shoes on Harrow’s bed and indiscriminately rifle through all her things.

3.   Harrow had run away.

#3 could be discounted. If Harrow were the type, Gideon’s childhood would have been a hell of a lot smoother. #2 was an exciting prospect in that Gideon longed to put her shoes on Harrow’s bed and to indiscriminately rifle through all Harrow’s things, but given that those things were still there, this seemed unlikely. Given twenty-four hours to break a bone ward, Gideon would have immediately made plans to get into Harrow’s wardrobe and do up all the buttons on her shirts, making sure that each button went into the hole above the one it was meant to go into. It was an inevitability that the Reverend Daughter never would have allowed for.

This left #1. (iii) relied on Harrow being so busy doing whatever she was doing that she’d forgotten to come back, though given previous reasoning and the sheer availability of buttons to be tampered with this was a nonstarter. (i) was contingent on either the world’s happiest accident or murder, and if it was murder, what if the murderer was, like, weird, which would make their subsequent marriage to Gideon pretty awkward? Maybe they could just swap friendship bracelets.

In the end, (ii) had the most traction. The paint supplies were all here. She had never seen Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s naked face. With a deep resentment of heart and weariness of soul, Gideon threw on her robe and embarked upon a long, disconsolate day of searching.

Harrow was not in the central atrium, or in the dining room, or in the increasingly clean pit full of industriously scrubbing skeletons. Magnus the Fifth was standing watch over them with a furrowed expression of good-natured bewilderment, right next to his trig and glossy-haired adept, and he managed an “Er—Ninth! Hope you’re enjoying the … room!” before she bolted out of it.

Harrow was not on the long and sun-swept docking bay, its concrete an eye-sizzling white in the sweltering light of morning. Gideon tracked all across it—standing next to the weathered magnetic locks, listening to the churning water far below where the shuttles rested somewhere. Harrow was not on the terrace where Dulcinea Septimus often read, and neither was Dulcinea Septimus, though a few novels sat abandoned beneath a chair. It was lunchtime by the time she had walked the whole eastern wing leading up from a glorious, rotten old staircase to the left of the atrium, terminating in a door with a freshly chiselled plaque marked EIGHTH HOUSE that she backed away from in record time. Gideon went back to the dining hall and brooded over her cheese and bread and decided to give up.

Leave Harrow to her two broken legs and shattered pelvis. Finding her was an impossibly futile task, in an impossibly large and complex area where you could search all day every day for weeks and not exhaust the floor. It was stupid and it made her feel stupid. And it was Nonagesimus’s own fault for being controlling and secretive about every aspect of her whole ghastly little life. She would not thank Gideon even if she had sat her flat ass in a puddle of molten lava, especially not as Gideon would religiously mark each anniversary of the day Harrow destroyed her butt with magma. She washed her hands of the entire scenario.

After she had choked down food and drunk half a jug of water in quick succession, Gideon gave up and resumed the search. She decided on a whim to go bang on the doors of the lift that didn’t work, and then found that the neighbouring water-swollen door could be opened if you applied force. This revealed a cramped staircase, which she followed down until she burst out into a corridor she’d only once explored. It was a broad, low-ceilinged shaft with *** CAUTION *** tape hollering from every door and surface, but there was one door at the end where people had obviously passed: the tape had snapped and fell in limp ribbons to both sides. The door led to another corridor that was cut off midway by a huge old tarpaulin, which someone had tacked to the rafters to serve as a half-hearted barrier. Gideon ducked under the tarpaulin, turned right, and opened a narrow iron door out to a terrace.

She’d been here once before. Fully half of this terrace had crumbled off into the sea. The first time Gideon had seen it, the whole looked so precarious she had consequently gone down with a fit of acrophobia and beat hasty retreat to somewhere less insane. The sky had seemed too wide; the horizon too open; the terrace too much like a total death trap. The landing dock loomed overhead, and so did the opaque, sweeping windows where the Ninth was housed. Looking up was fine. Looking down, still hundreds and hundreds of metres above the sea, made her want to lose her lunch.

Fuelled by the reminder that the only difference between the drillshaft of Drearburh and the broken terrace was that one was fenced and one wasn’t, she ventured up there again. The wind screamed her into the side of the tower. It was crumbled only at the far end, and the part closest to the trunk of Canaan House seemed intact. Stone windbreakers and dry-soiled, extinct gardens trailed off as far as the eye could see around to the other side, rugged with long stretches of empty planter bed and trellis. Gideon took this path. It was not at all clear—some of the big boxy stone structures had collapsed and the rubble never cleared, and there was really not enough structure still left to distract the eye from the bitten-off terrace that had fallen away to its death—but if you travelled around enough, there was a spiralling staircase of wrought iron and brick clasped to the tower’s bosom.

This was also a bitch to travel up, as the more you climbed, the more of the dead terrace you saw—the sea creaked below, changeful in its colour, a deep grey-blue today and whitecapped with wind—but Gideon readjusted her sunglasses, took a deep breath through her nose, and climbed. The first autodoor she saw, she took, and had to hammer five full times before it silently slid open and gave her entry. Gideon ducked in and pressed against the wall as it slid reproachfully shut, and had to take a minute to collect herself.

It was dark here. She found herself in a long hall that terminated in a left-hand corner. It was very quiet, and very cool. The floor was of pale, cream-and-black tile, set in a starry pattern that repeated itself all the way down the corridor; the paler tiles seemed to float, luminous, as the darker melted into the shadows. Great panes of smoked glass had been set into the walls, lit by dark yellow lamps: sconces held dribbles of mummified candle. It was a wide, shady space, and had something of the inner sanctum of Drearburh about it, just with fewer bones. In fact, there was almost no decoration here. The hall seemed strangely closed in, smaller than the space ought to have been, shrugging inward. The floor was beautiful, and so were the doors—they were wood-inlaid with tiny squares of smoked glass, set smoothly in metal frames. There was a single statue at the end of the corridor where it turned left. It must have once been a person, but the head and arms had been lopped off, leaving only a torso with beseeching stumps. It took her a while to realise that she was in a lobby, and that the doors were elevator lifts: each had a dead screen overhead that must have once shown the floor number.

Gideon folded her sunglasses into a pocket of her robe. Quiet echoes caromed off the walls, up and down, then clarified. Voices floating upward. The stairs at the corner of the hallway led down two short flights, the landing visible below, and Gideon crept down them with careful and noiseless steps.

The indeterminate murmurs thinned into sound—

“—s impossible, Warden.”

“Nonsense.”

“Improbable, Warden.”

“Granted. But still—relative to what, exactly?”

There was some shuffling. Two voices: the first probably female, the second probably male. Gideon risked another step down.

“Six readings,” the second voice continued. “Oldest is nine thou. Youngest is, well, fiftyish. Emphasis ish. But the old stuff here is really very old.”

“The upper bound for scrying is ten thousand, Warden.” Yes, it was a woman’s voice, and not one Gideon had heard: low and calm, stating the obvious.

“The point is here, and you are far over there. Nine thousand. Fiftyish. Building.”

“Ah.”

“Fiat lux! If you want to talk improbable, let’s talk about this”—a scrape of stone on stone—“being three thousand and some years older than this.” A heavy clunk.

“Inexplicable, Warden.”

“Certainly not. Like everything else in this ridiculous conglomeration of cooling gas, it’s perfectly explicable, I just need to explic-it.”

“Indubitable, Warden.”

“Stop that. I need you listening, not racking your brain for rare negatives. Either this entire building was scavenged from a garbage hopper, or I am being systematically lied to on a molecular level.”

“Maybe the building’s shy.”

“That is just tough shit for the building. No; there’s a wrong thing here. There’s a trick. Remember my fourth circle exams?”

“When the Masters shut down the entire core?”

“No, that was third circle. Fourth circle they seeded the core with a couple of thousand fake records. Beautiful stuff, exquisite, even the timestamps, and all of it obviously wrong. Drivel. No one could have believed a word of it. So why bother?”

“I recall you said they were ‘being a pack of assholes.’”

“W—yes. Well, in substance, yes. They were teaching us a particularly annoying lesson, which is that you cannot rely on anything, because anything can lie to you.”

“Swords,” said the woman with a trace of satisfaction, “don’t lie.”

The necromancer—because Gideon had never been so sure in her life that she was listening to a damn necromancer—snorted. “No. But they don’t tell the truth either.”

By now she was almost at the foot of the stairs, and she could see into the room below. The only light came from its centre; the walls were splashed with long shadows, but seemed to be generic concrete, split in places by peeling lines of caution tape. In the centre, lit by a flashlight, was an enormous shut-up metal hatch, the kind Gideon associated with hazard shafts and accident shelters.

Crouching in front of the hatch was a rangy, underfed young man: he was wrapped in a grey cloak and the light glinted on the spectacles slipping down his nose. Standing next to him holding a big wedge of broken sculpture and the flashlight was a tall, equally grey-wrapped figure with a scabbard outlined at her hip. She had hair of an indeterminate darkness, cut blunt at her chin. She was restless as a bird, stepping from one foot to the other, quirking her elbows, rocking from the balls of her feet to the heel. The boy had one hand pressed to the heavy corner of the hatch, brooding over it like a seer with a piece of ritual intestine, lineated weirdly by the half-light. He was using his own tiny pocket torch to investigate the place where the seam of the floor met the metal of the hatch frame.

Both were filthy. Dust caked their hems. There were odd, still-wet smears on their clothes and hands. It looked as though they’d both been wrestling in some long-forgotten Ninth catacomb.

Gideon had moved too close: even in the darkness, hooded and cloaked, they were both nervy. The young man in glasses jerked up his chin, staring blindly back to the stairwell: at his sudden switch in focus, the young woman with the sword whirled around and saw Gideon on the stairs.

It was probably not a comforting sight to see a penitent of the Locked Tomb in the half dark, swathed in black, skull-painted. The cavalier narrowed her hooded eyes, fidgets gone and absolutely still; then she exploded into action. She dropped the wedge of sculpture with a clonk, drew her sword from its shabby scabbard before the wedge had bounced once, and advanced. Gideon, neurons blaring, drew her own. She slid her hand into her ebon gauntlet—the grey-cloaked girl let the flashlight fall, drew a knife with a liquid whisper from a holder across one shoulder—and their blades met high above their heads as the cavalier leapt, metal on metal ringing all around the chamber.

Holy shit. Here was a warrior, not just a cavalier. Gideon was suddenly fighting for her life and exhilarated by it. Blow after lightning blow rattled her defences, each one coming down like an industrial crush press, the short offhand knife targeting the guard of Gideon’s blade. Even with the advantage of higher ground she was forced to mount the steps backward. They were fighting in close, cramped quarters, and Gideon was getting pinned. She smashed the other girl’s offhand out of the way and into the wall, scattering loose glass tiles in its wake as it fell: her opponent dropped as though shot, crouched, kicked her dagger up into her hand, and did a handspring backward down the stairs. Gideon descended like an avenging necrosaint as she rose—slicing down in a winging cut that would have destroyed the blade given a longsword and the right footing, just for the pleasure of seeing her partner duck, huff between her teeth with exertion. Her sword met the other cavalier’s dagger and she pressed, both leaning hard into the blow. The cav in grey’s eyes were only mildly surprised.

“Camilla!” She only distantly registered the call. Gideon was stronger; the girl’s arm was buckling—she brought up her rapier to harass Gideon’s blocking arm, stabbing at the ebon cuff of the knuckle-knife, the tiny torch spotlight wavering drunkenly from face to face, turning their pupils into big black wells—“Camilla the Sixth, disengage!”

“Camilla” brought her elbow forward, sliding her sword down Gideon’s, jabbing it away with the hilt. Momentarily discombobulated, Gideon backed into the stairs and reset her stance; by then the cavalier in grey was already backing off, sword held high, offhand held low. The necromancer in matching grey was standing; the darkness in the small room was banded with hot shimmers, as though with heat. She thrust her arm forward—

—and stumbled back. Her heart was panicking in her chest, seized as though in the midst of a cardiac arrest, and her hand seemed to wither around the hilt of her sword—the flesh melting before her eyes, the fingernails going black and curling close to the skin as though burnt. She snatched her fist back and found that, clutched close, it was whole and unaffected again, but she did not press onward. She wasn’t a total goon. She backed away from the necromantic seal and sheathed her sword instead, hands held out in the universal ceasefire! gesture. The necromancer in grey, torch hand outstretched, exhaled: he wiped faintly pinkish sweat from his face.

“It’s the other one,” he said tersely, not sounding at all as though he’d just raised a massive thanergetic barrier and broken out in minor blood sweat. She was amazed it was only minor: the whole space before her shimmered like the oily surface of a bubble, fully three bodies high and three wide. “We don’t want an interhouse incident—not that it wouldn’t give our policy wonks back on the Sixth something to think about. You too”—this was to Gideon, a little more formally—“I offer apology that my cavalier engaged you in an unscheduled bout, Niner, but I don’t apologise for her drawing on someone sneaking around dressed all in black. Be reasonable.”

Gideon peeled the knuckle-knife off her hand and latched it back to her belt, and she surveyed the scene before her. Both cavalier and necromancer stood before the black hulk of the trapdoor, robes charcoal in the dimness, both of their eyes and hair mellowed to no colour in the thin light from the hallway. The little torch was quickly flicked off, plunging the whole into further gloom. She yearned to talk, beginning with: How did you do a little flip like that? but the necro brought her up short with:

“You’re here about Nonagesimus, aren’t you?”

The stupefied blankness on Gideon’s face must have been mistaken for something else. Face paint was good for masking. The necromancer scrubbed his hands together in sudden, fretful activity, wringing his fingers together hard. “Assumed she’d just—well. Have you seen her since the night before last?”

Gideon shook her head so emphatically no that she was surprised her hood didn’t fall off. The cavalier’s face was turned toward him, expressionless, waiting. The young man strummed his fingers together before coming to some unknown decision.

“Well, you’re cutting it fine,” he said abruptly. He pulled his thick, nerdy spectacles off his long nose and shook them as though wicking them free of something. “She was down there last night too and, if I’m correct, never surfaced. Her blood’s on the floor down there.” Because necromancers lived bad lives, he added: “To clarify. Her intravenous blood. Her intravenous blood.”

At this clarification, a very strange thing happened to Gideon Nav. She had already exhausted neurons, cortisol, and adrenaline, and now her body started moving before her head or her heart did; she strode past the boy and yanked so hard on the top of the hatch that it damn near broke her wrists. It was shut tighter than Crux’s ass. At this embarrassing heaving, the boy sighed explosively and threw his zipped-up bag to Camilla, who caught it out of midair.

“Cavaliers,” he said.

Camilla said, “I wouldn’t have left you alone for twenty-seven hours.”

“Of course not. I’d be dead. Look, you simpleton, it’s not going to open,” he told Gideon, swinging his sights on her like a man levelling a blade. “She’s got your key.”

Up close, he was gaunt and ordinary looking, except for the eyes. His spectacles were set with lenses of spaceflight-grade thickness, and through these his eyes were a perfectly lambent grey: unflecked, unmurked, even and clear. He had the eyes of a very beautiful person, trapped in resting bitch face.

Gideon hauled again at the hatch, as though offering up the universe’s most useless act might endear her to the physics of a locked door. His sigh grew sadder and more explosive as he watched her. “You’re winners, you and Nonagesimus both. Hang on—Cam, do a perimeter, please—Ninth, listen. It’s well above freezing down there. That means blood stays wet for an hour, let’s say an hour and a half. Hers hadn’t skeletonised altogether. You with me? She might have spilt it deliberately—although, she’s an osseo, she’s not going to do blood ritual on herself—right, you’re not even pretending to pay attention.”

Gideon had stopped paying attention somewhere around wet and was now bracing both feet to pull: she was pressing down the frame with a foot, distantly taking in every fifth word. Blood. Skeletonised. Osseo. The necro called out, “Camilla, any sign she left while—”

Camilla was on the stairs.

“No, Warden.”

He said to Gideon, gruffly: “Odds are she’s still down there.”

“Then get off your ass and help me,” said Gideon Nav.

This did not surprise or alarm him. In fact, his tightly-wound shoulders relaxed a fraction from black-hole stress fracture to pressure at the bottom of the ocean. He sounded almost relieved when he said, “Sure.”

A jangling object sailed through the air, visible more as sound and movement than as thing. The necromancer failed to catch it: it banged him hard on his long, scrabbling hands. Gideon recognised it as the iron loop that she had been given on the very first day in Canaan House. As he squatted beside her, smelling like dust and mould, she could see that a long key had been put through the loop and was clanking there untidily. There was another, smaller key dangling off to one side, gleaming golden, with an elaborately carved shank and deep pockmarks instead of cuts in the shaft. A key ring? They’d all been given key rings?

Inserted into the keyhole, the first key opened the trap door with a low, hard snap, and together the boy and Gideon threw it open. It revealed a ladder of metal staples down a long, unbelievably dark hole: light shaded in at the bottom, throwing into relief the fact that one slip meant a broken neck along with your broken ass-bones.

A pointing finger appeared in front of her like a spear tip: Camilla’s. The Sixth cavalier had reclaimed the flashlight, and by its glow she could see that Camilla’s eyes were much darker than her necromancer’s: his were like clear stone or water, and hers were the unreflective, fathomless colour of overturned Ninth House sod, neither grey nor brown. “You go first, Ninth,” she said. “Palamedes follows. I bring up the rear.”

It took a full minute to descend that long, claustrophobic tube, staring at the rungs of the ladder with her robes tucked between her knees, sword clanking on metal all the way down—and at the bottom, Gideon was utterly nonplussed.

What lay beneath the trapdoor was a retro installation. A six-sided tunnel lined with dusty, perforated panels stretched out before them. The ceiling was merely a grille that air coolers pumped through and the floor a grille with visible pressure pumps beneath, and the lights were electric bulbs beneath luminous white plastic. There were exposed pipes. The supporting archways contained bulky, square autodoor sidings. This rhapsody of greys and sterile blacks was interrupted over the nearest arch, where, twisting in the dry breeze of the climate cooler, hung a bundle of old bones. Ancient prayer wrappers were ringed around it, and it was the only human, normal touch.

“Follow me,” said the young man called Palamedes.

He strode forward, filthy hem whispering on the dusty-ass tiles. This place ate sound. There were no echoes: they were squashed and absorbed into the panelling. The three of them clanked unmusically down the tunnel until it opened into a big nonagonal room, with passageways radiating out like bronchiae. Letters of brushed steel were set beside each passage:

Light wells above made the panelling white; lights from below—little blinking lights attached to huge machines that went down metres beneath the grille, a huge deep way beneath their feet—made the floors softly green. The walls were unadorned, except for an enormous old whiteboard rimmed in metal, printed with lines for a timetable that had not been used in a very, very, very long time. The lines had blurred; the board was stained. Here and there meaningless bits of letters survived: the loop of what might be O or C; the arch of an M; a line-suffixed curve that could be G or Q. But in one bottom corner lingered the ghost of a message, drawn thickly in black ink once, now faded but still quite clear:

It is finished!

The atmosphere down here was oppressive. The air was so dry it made her eyes and mouth prickle. Camilla had one hand on her sword, and Palamedes kept wringing his together, rocking from foot to foot as he moved in a long, slow, 360-degree sweep of the room. At some stimulus, or lack of stimulus, he took a sharp turn toward Sanitiser. Gideon followed.

The short hallway to Sanitiser was floored with panels rather than grille, covered in a powdery build-up like salt, scuffed underfoot and heaped in little drifts. These dunes dissolved like an exhaled breath if kicked.

Quite abruptly there was blood. Palamedes thumbed his tiny flashlight out of his pocket and the liquid gleamed redly beneath the beam. Blood had been spilt, in some quantity, and then smeared heavily away down the hall, leaving a long dark scrape of drying gore. Smaller splatters had dried on the surrounding walls.

The door at the end of the hallway—a huge blast door, metal, with a glass panel set in its centre that was so grimy you could no longer see through it—opened with a touchpad that was also smudged with curls of dried blood. Dried, and drying. Gideon pressed it so hard that the doors twanged open like they were startled.

The first room of Sanitiser stretched before them as a huge, low-ceilinged, white-panelled maze of cubicles: long steel tables beneath the upside-down metal mushrooms of spray heads, and narrow boxes a human could stand upright in. It was fully as big as the grand, destroyed hall of Canaan House. The lights whirred overhead. A panel on the wall blinked furiously as some mechanism in it tried to wake up—it looked like a screen—but eventually it decided better, went blank, and the room was resubmerged in shadow. Gideon was hunting with a dog’s mindless, preternatural panic for a scent, trying to find—

Spatters of blood led her to a big ridged lump in one of the cubicles. This cocoon-looking thing was about the size of a person, if that person wasn’t particularly tall. Before Palamedes and Camilla could stop her, Gideon strode up to it and gave it an enormous kick. Osseous matter showered one side of the cubicle, tinkling away as the spell broke into the oily grey ash of cremains. Curled up inside—hands bloodied, paint smeared, the skin beneath it the same oily grey as the cremains—was Harrowhark Nonagesimus.

Gideon, who had spent the morning planning the wild, abandoned dance of joy with which she would greet Harrow’s dead body, turned back to Camilla and Palamedes.

“I can take it from here,” she said.

Ignoring her, Palamedes pushed past to the broken-bone chrysalis and fished around in its awful contents. He pulled a bit of Harrow’s black robe aside, then the collar of her shirt, past three necklaces of bone chips strung on thread, revealing a startling patch of bare skin—yikes—and pressed two fingers to her neck; he held a hand over her mouth; he said sharply, “Cam,” and she dropped to her knees beside him. She pulled a wallet from somewhere inside her shirt and removed, of all things, a wire. The outer insulation had been stripped from each end, revealing sharp metal tips, and one of these he jabbed into the fleshy part between his thumb and forefinger. It drew blood. The other end he pressed to Harrow’s neck where his fingers had been.

There followed a rapid conversation, high-speed, totally obtuse:

“High dilation rate. Blood loss not from outside injury. Hypovolemia. Breathing’s okay. Honestly—dehydration more than anything.”

“Saline?”

“Nah. She can refill herself when she’s awake.”

Gideon couldn’t help herself. She could understand finding Harrow with her legs on backward and an exploded skull, but she was only following about half of this. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.

Palamedes rocked back on his haunches. He was pinching the edge of the bone cocoon, testing it, flexing it this way and that. “She hasn’t eaten or taken water for a while,” he said. “That’s all. She would have pushed too hard and experienced a rapid drop in blood pressure and heart rate. Likely fainted, woke up, made this—this is incredible, I can’t even … then she fell asleep. It’s all one piece, no wonder she’s out. Is this normal for her?”

“You can tell all that with Sixth necromancy?”

Shockingly, both he and Camilla laughed. They had gruff, barking little laughs, and Camilla took this opportunity to roll the wire back up into its wallet, pinching Harrow’s blood off one end. “Medical necromancy,” said her adept drily, “there’s an oxymoron for you. No. Being a necromancer helps, but no. It’s curative science. Don’t you have that on the Ninth? Don’t answer, I was joking. You can move her now.”

The Reverend Daughter was very light as Gideon folded her (both Palamedes and Camilla winced) into an over-shoulder lift. Air wheezed out of Harrow’s lungs, and the bone cocoon dissolved into a shower of chips and pebbles pattering onto the floor like hail. This seemed to be the one thing to really unnerve the Sixth House necromancer. He swore under his breath and then actually whipped a ruler out of his pocket, measuring one of the chips on the floor.

Gideon shifted, so that the weight and heft of Harrow was more evenly distributed. Her brain had not come back online enough to register that weight, or to save it for later detail in her fantasies where she dropped the Ninth House scion off the side of the docking bay. Her necromancer smelled like sweat and blood and old, burnt bone; her corselet of ribs poked painfully into Gideon’s shoulders. Ascending a staple-wall ladder with a body in tow was a hell of a lot more difficult than descending without one. Palamedes ascended first, then she did, each rung a fight with her awkward load; Camilla followed, and by the time they got to the top Gideon’s jaw hurt from clenching.

The cavalier of the Sixth took Harrow’s shoulders when she reached the top so that Gideon could get out, which was decent of her. Maybe it was just so they could hurry up and close the huge metal trapdoor, turning the key in the lock with a satisfying click. She sat down next to the unconscious figure and rolled one shoulder in its socket, then the other.

Palamedes was shouldering the zip-up bag and saying, “Give her water and food when she wakes up. She’ll take care of the rest. Probably. She needs eight hours of sleep—in a bed, not a library. When she asks how I knew she was in the library, tell her Cam says she clinks when she walks.”

Gideon reached down to take her burden up again, slinging Harrow’s limp and speechless body to occupy her other shoulder. She paused at the foot of the stairs, measuring in her mind’s eye the distance back down the corridor, to the terrace, down the zigzag flights of steps and back through to the Ninth House quarters. Plenty of corners to concuss Harrow with, on the way.

“I owe you one,” she said.

It was Camilla who said, in her quiet, curiously deep voice, “He did it for free.” It was the first time she had looked at Gideon without the flat, stony aggression of a retaining wall, which was nice.

Palamedes said, “What Cam said. Just—look, take a word of advice, here.”

As she waited, he pressed the pads of his fingertips together. His cavalier was looking at him dead on, tense, waiting. In the end, he said: “It’s unbelievably dangerous down there, Ninth. Stop splitting your forces.”

“Dangerous how?”

“If I knew,” said Palamedes, “it’d be a hell of a lot less dangerous.”

Gideon was impatient with vagaries. She wasn’t in Drearburh now. “How do you figure?”

The Sixth House necromancer walked forward and paused before her in the stairwell. He was washed in dilute light from above and behind Gideon, and it showed that he really was thin—the kind of thin made thinner by his grey, shapeless robe, the thinness of trousers cinched too tight to hips. Camilla hovered a perfect half step behind—the half step Aiglamene had trepanned into Gideon—as though suspicious even of the steps.

He said coolly: “Because I’m the greatest necromancer of my generation.”

The unconscious figure sacked across Gideon’s shoulder muttered, “Like hell you are.”

“Thought that would wake her up,” said Palamedes, with no small amount of satisfaction. “Well—I’m off. Like I said, liquids and rest. Good luck.”

Chapter 13

Either Harrowhark fell back unconscious, having used her last remaining energy to spite Palamedes, or she was just already such a dick she could spite him in her sleep. Or maybe she was playing dead. Gideon didn’t care. Her necromancer remained heavy and unmoving all the way back to their rooms. Nobody saw them on the way, for which she was grateful, and she was heartily glad by the end of it to dump her prone and black-wrapped burden on the bed.

Nonagesimus had looked like crap in the darkness of the weird facility. In the comfortable gloom of their quarters she looked worse. Unwrapping her hood and veil revealed torn lips and cracked face paint, flaking off in big brown-glazed smears at one temple. The veil had slipped down with the trip up the ladder. Gideon could see that her nostrils were ringed with a thick black rime of blood, and her hairline was also smeared with thin, crusty traces of it. There were no other signs of blood on the rest of her clothes or her robes, just sweat patches. Gideon had checked for injuries and been traumatised by the experience.

She went to the bathroom and filled up a glass of water from the tap, and she left it next to Harrow, then hesitated hard. How to rehydrate? Was she meant to—wash her mouth, or something? Did she need to clean off the tusks of dried blood at each nostril? Gideon popped each shoulder twice in indecision, grabbed the water glass, and reached toward Harrow.

“Touch me again and I’ll kill you,” said Harrow, scratch-throated, without opening her eyes. “I really will.”

Gideon pulled her fingers back as though from a flame, and exhaled.

“Good luck with that, bucko,” she said. “You look all mummification and no meat.”

Harrow did not move. There was a bruise peeking out behind her ear, already deep purple. “I’m not saying it wouldn’t hurt me, Griddle,” she murmured. “I am just saying you’d be dead.”

Gideon leant back heavily against the bedside table and took a long, malicious pull from Harrow’s glass of water. She felt tight and jangly, and the sweat had cooled to both an itch and a shiver inside her robes. She threw back the hood and shrugged herself out of the robe, feeling like a sleep-deprived child. “‘Thanks, Gideon,’” she said aloud. “‘I was in a pickle and you saved me, which I had no reasonable expectation of, since I’m an asshole who got stuck in a bone in a basement.’ Is that what you’ve been doing without me, all this time? Dicking around in a basement?”

The adept’s lips curled back, showing little slashes of swollen pink through the grey. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I was dicking around in the basement. You didn’t need to get involved. You did just what I was afraid you would do, which was to remove me from a situation that I didn’t need to be removed from.”

“Didn’t need—? What, you were having a nap of your own free will?”

“I was recuperating—”

“Balls you were.”

Harrow opened her eyes. Her voice rose, cracking with tension: “The Sixth House, Griddle! Do you know how difficult it is to stay ahead of Palamedes Sextus? Didn’t I tell you to keep your pneumatic mouth shut? I would have been fine; I’d fainted; I was resting.”

“And how I’m meant to know that,” said Gideon heavily, “I’ve got no idea. I want answers, and I want them yesterday.”

The whites around Harrow’s eyes were pink and inflamed, probably from too little rest and too much fainting. She closed them again and her head came down, heavy, back to the bed. Her dead black hair fell in lank and tangled hanks on the pillow. She looked flat and tired.

“I’m not having this conversation with you,” she said finally.

“Yeah, you are,” said Gideon. “I took my key ring back, so if you ever want to dick around in that basement again you’ll have a hell of a time getting back in there.”

The necromancer’s lips pursed in a sour, thin line that was obviously meant to show iron resolve but simply showed a bunch of mouth scabs. “That’s easily contrived. You can’t stay awake forever.”

“Quit bluffing, Nonagesimus! Quit acting like I was the one who messed up here! You haven’t spoken more than twenty words to me since we arrived, you’ve kept me totally in the dark, and yet I’ve done every single thing you ever goddamned asked of me no matter what it was—okay, I did come to find you, nearly every single thing—but I kept my head down and I didn’t start shit. So if you could see your way to being even ten percent less salty with me, that’d be just terrific.”

Silence spread between them. The iron resolve on that scabrous mouth seemed to waver, just a little bit. Gideon added, “And don’t push me. The places where I can and would stick this thing for safekeeping would astonish you.”

“Puke,” murmured Harrow. And: “Give me the water, Griddle.”

She could barely drink it. She lifted her head for a few spluttering sips, then lay back down, eyelashes brushing eyelids again. For a couple of moments Gideon thought she had gone back to sleep: but then Harrow stirred and said colourlessly: “I’d hardly call sucker-punching the Third cavalier keeping your head down.”

“You disapprove?”

“What? Hardly,” said Harrow, unexpectedly. “You should have finished the job. On the other hand, dallying with the Seventh House is the act of the naif or the fool, or both. What part of Don’t talk to anybody did you not register—”

“Dulcinea Septimus is dying,” said Gideon. “Give me a break.”

Harrow said, “She picked an interesting place to die.”

“What are you doing, where are you doing it, why are you doing it? Start talking, Reverend Daughter.”

They stared each other down, both similarly mulish. Harrow had taken another swig of water and was slowly swilling it around in her cheeks, apparently thinking hard. Gideon dropped back to sit on the gently sagging dresser, and she waited. Her necromancer’s mouth was still puckered up with a sourness that would’ve impressed a lemon, but she asked abruptly:

“What did the priest specify was the only rule, the first day we were here?”

“You’re not very good at I’m Asking the Questions Now, Bitch, are you,” said Gideon.

“This is going somewhere. Answer me.”

Gideon resented the answer me, but she begrudgingly cast her mind back through a montage of rotting furniture, assholes, and astringent tea. “Teacher?” she said. “Uh—the door thing. We weren’t to go through any locked door.”

“More specifically, we weren’t to go through a locked door without permission. The old man’s a pain in the neck, but he was giving us a clue—take a look at this.”

Harrow appeared to be thawing to her subject. She thrashed feebly trying to sit up, but before this could soften Gideon’s concrete heart she got cross and snapped two bone chips out of her sleeve. Harrow pressed them against the dank arm of the four-poster bed, and out sprung bony arms that hauled her up into a sitting position. They dragged her flush with the headboard, and a shower of dust trickled down from the enormous cloth drapes. Harrow sneezed fretfully, half of it blood.

She searched about in her robes and came up with a thick little book bound in cracked, blackened stuff, with the awful orange tone of tanned human leather. The book was a thousand pages thick, maybe a million. “Light,” she demanded, and Gideon nudged the lamp forward. “Good. Look here.”

Harrow flicked through pages with scabby fingers until she had opened the squat book midway, showing three sets of angular diagrams. They appeared to be numerous overlapping squares, with lines coming out at odd angles and a scrawl of notes or numbers bumping up against the lines. The writing was minute and spidery: the squares mazelike and innumerable. Gideon realised after a moment that she was looking at an architectural drawing, and that it was an architectural drawing of Canaan House. It was scribbled thickly with cross marks.

“I’ve divided Canaan House into its three most significant levels, but that’s not quite accurate. The central floor is more of a mezzanine providing access to the top and bottom floors. The terraces are sections in and of themselves, but they’re not important for what I’m identifying here. Each X denotes a door. Current count is seven hundred and seventy-five, and Griddle—only six are locked. The first two hundred doors I identified—”

“You spent this whole time counting doors?”

“This calls for rigor, Nav.”

“Maybe rigor … mortis,” said Gideon, who assumed that puns were funny automatically.

“The first two hundred doors I identified,” Harrow repeated, through gritted teeth, “included the access hatch to the lower area of Canaan House. My method was to start at the bottom and go up as far as I could from a static starting point. There are two lock-points here, at X-22 and X-155. X-155 is the hatch, X-22 is another door. I went to Teacher and asked permission to enter both. He agreed to let me through the hatch if I could provide a safe place for the key, but said that X-22 didn’t belong to him and that he couldn’t in good conscience give permission. All the while he was winking at me so hard that I thought he had suffered a stroke.”

Despite everything, Gideon was starting to get interested. “Okay. Then what?”

“Then in the morning I retrieved the key ring,” said Harrow.

“Hold up, hold up. My key ring, more correctly, but let’s be clear here, you’d counted two hundred doors before the first morning?”

“A head start,” said her necromancer, “is the only advantage one can claim by choice. My other advantage is in workforce. In this case I’m fairly sure that Sextus started a mere two hours after me, and that Eighth House zealot not long after.”

All of this said a lot about the psyche of Harrowhark Nonagesimus, something about Palamedes Sextus, and a little about the mayonnaise uncle, but Gideon was given no time to interrupt. Harrow was continuing, “And I’m not at all sure about the Third. Never mind. Anyway, I’ve spent the majority of my time down the access hatch in the facility. Here.”

Another dry, crackly page was turned. This one was stained with unmentionable fluids and brown patches, which could have been tea and could have been blood. The diagram was much less detailed than the three for the upper levels. In a fat-leaded pencil Harrow had drawn a network of question marks, and some of the rooms were vague sketches rather than the perfectly ruled mazes of the first maps.

Here there were familiar labels: LABORATORY ONE through to LABORATORY TEN. PRESSURE ROOM. PRESERVATION. MORT. WORK ROOM ONE through to WORK ROOM FIVE. And SANITISER, though also: CONTROL ROOM?, CONSOLE? and DUMP ROOM?. It was set out neatly, with corridors all the same width and doors in expected places. It reminded Gideon of some of the oldest parts of the Ninth House, the bits secluded deep below the more modern twisty little hallways and crooked walls with squints.

“It’s very old,” Harrow said, quietly, more to herself than to Gideon. “Considerably older than the rest of Canaan House. It’s pre-Resurrection—or made to look pre-Resurrection, which is just as curious. I know Sextus is obsessed with dating the structure, but as usual, he’s getting caught up in the details. What’s important is the function.”

“So what was it for?”

Harrow said, “If I knew that, I’d be a Lyctor already.”

“Do you know who used it?”

“That’s a much better question, Nav.”

“And why,” said Gideon, “were you down there with your ass kicked to hell, hiding in a bone?”

The Reverend Daughter sighed heavily, then had a fit of coughing, which served her right. “Whoever left the facility also left the majority of their work behind and intact. No theorems or tomes, unless they’ve been removed—and I doubt Teacher removed them—but, as I’ve discovered, it’s possible to trigger … tests. Theorem models that they would have used. Most of the chambers down there were used to prepare for something, and they were left in a state where anyone who comes across it can re-enact the setup. Someone left—challenges—down there for any necromancer talented enough to understand what they were doing.”

“Stop being opaque, Nonagesimus. What do you mean by challenges?”

“I mean,” said Harrowhark, “that I have lost one hundred and sixty-three skeletons to a single laboratory construct.”

“What.”

“I’m prevented from seeing whatever destroys the skeletons I raise,” came the terse answer. “I haven’t worked out how to properly outfit them yet. If the priests have managed to engineer a scaffolded skeleton of the type they use as servants—my God, Nav, have you seen the bonework on them?—then I surely can, but I haven’t worked out how to disassemble one of the First House corpus yet and I can’t do enough just by looking. Don’t get me wrong; I will. I get closer every day. You found me when I’d exhausted myself, that’s all.”

“But what the hell’s it all for?”

“As I have repeated to excess, Griddle, I’m still working on the theory. Nonetheless—look back at the maps.”

The necromancer fell to brooding, staring through swollen eyelids down at the journal. Somewhat astonished still, Gideon leaned over and, ignoring her adept’s dumb mystic despond, flipped the pages back to the three-level plan for Canaan House. A few of the X-marked doors were circled with scratchy black ink and marked with crabbed symbols that she did not recognise. These seemed to be distantly distributed throughout the First House building, tucked away or secreted.

Gideon flipped another page. There was a pencil sketch of an animal’s skull with long horns. The horns curved inward into points that almost touched but not quite, and the sockets were deep holes of black pencil lead. An electric thrill of recognition ran through her.

“I’ve seen this before,” she said.

Harrow bestirred herself. Her eyes narrowed. “Where?”

“Hang on. Let me look at the map again.” Gideon flipped back and found the atrium; she traced with her finger the twisty route from there to the corridor and stairs that led to the cavalier’s dais. She found the staircase, and jabbed with her thumbnail: “You haven’t got it—way ahead of you, Nonagesimus. There’s a hidden hallway here, with a locked door.”

“Are you certain?” Now Harrow was well and truly awake. At the answering nod she rummaged in her robes for a long iron needle and jabbed it inside her mouth—Gideon winced—before the bones at the bedhead unceremoniously shoved her up to a ninety-degree angle, weapon held ready, end shining with red blood. She said, “Show me, Nav.”

Thoroughly satisfied with herself, Gideon placed her finger next to the enormous door of black stone she’d hidden behind the tapestry. Harrow marked the place with a bloody red cross and blew on the ink: it skeletonised immediately into a tarry, dry brown. X-203. The necromancer could not hide a triumphant smile. It stretched her mouth and made her split lips bleed. The sight was incomparably creepy. “If you’re correct,” she said, “and if I’m correct—well.”

Exhausted by all the effort, Harrow closed the journal and tucked it back inside her robe. She sank back down into the dusty embrace of the bones, wrist joints clacking as they lowered her onto the dark slippery material of the duvet. She groped blindly for the water and spilled half of the remnants down her front as she took gulping, greedy sips. She dropped the empty glass onto the bed next to her, and then she closed her eyes. Gideon found herself gripping the slender rapier at her hip and feeling the heft of its basket hilt.

“You could’ve died today,” she said conversationally.

For a long time the girl on the bed was supine and silent. Her chest rose and fell slightly, evenly, as though in sleep. Then Harrow said without opening her eyes, “You could attempt to finish me right now, if you liked. You might even win.”

“Shut up,” said Gideon, flat and grim. “I mean that you’re making me look like a disloyal buffoon. I mean it’s your fault that I can’t take being your bodyguard seriously. I mean that all this sacred duty do exactly as I say blah blah blah shit does not matter in the least if you die of dehydration in a bone.”

“I wasn’t about to—”

“Baseline standard of a cavalier,” said Gideon, “is you not dying in a bone.”

“There was no—”

“No. It’s Gideon Nav Talking Time. I want to get out of here and you want to be a Lyctor,” she said. “We need to get in formation if that’s going to happen. If you don’t want me to ditch the paint, this sword, and the cover story, you’re taking me down there with you.”

“Griddle—”

“Gideon Nav Talking Time. The Sixth must think we’re absolutely full of horseshit. I’m going down there with you because I am sick of doing nothing. 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.”

Harrow’s eyes flickered open. “Stop.”

“I am your sworn sword, night boss.”

“Fine,” said Harrow heavily.

Gideon’s mouth was about to round out the words “bone empress” before she realised what had been said. The expression on the other girl’s face was now all resignation: resignation and exhaustion and also something else, but mostly resignation. “I acknowledge your argument,” she said. “I disagree with it, but I see the margin of error. Fine.”

It would have been pushing her luck to point out that there was no real way Harrowhark could have denied her; she had the key, the upper hand, and significantly more blood. So all she said was, “Okay. Great. Fine.”

“And you had better stop it with all this twilit princess garbage,” said Harrow, “because I may start to enjoy it. Helping me will be achingly dull, Nav. I need patience. I need obedience. I need to know that you are going to act as though giving me devotion is your new favourite pastime, even though it galls us both senseless.”

Gideon, dizzy with success, crossed one leg around the other and leant back on the dresser in a posture of triumph. “Come on. How bad could it be?”

Harrow’s lips curled. They showed her teeth, stained slightly pink with blood. She smiled again—slower than before, just as terrible, just as strange.

“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.”

Gideon rolled her eyes so hard that she felt in danger of twisting the optic nerve.

“Knock it off. We’re not in chapel now.”

But Harrow said: “It’s not one of mine, Griddle. I’m repeating exactly—to the word—what Teacher said to me.”

“Teacher said that the facility was chocka with ghosts and you might die?”

“Correct.”

“Surprise, my tenebrous overlord!” said Gideon. “Ghosts and you might die is my middle name.”

Chapter 14

This lapse of Harrowhark’s did not make her one bit nicer to live with. Very early next morning, despite all logic and sense, she forced Gideon to put on the robe and paint on the paint like every morning since they’d arrived at Canaan House: she was impatient with what Gideon saw as the necessities of life, i.e., eating breakfast and stealing lunch. Gideon won the breakfast argument, but lost the right not to stare wretchedly at the mirror as she stippled black paint over her cheekbones.

At Harrow’s behest, the Ninth House moved through the silent grey corridors like spies. There were many times when the necromancer would stop in the shadow of a doorway and wait there for fully five minutes before she would allow them both to carry on, to creep noiselessly down the shabby staircases and down to the bowels of the First. They only met one person on the way: in the light before sunrise, Harrow and Gideon pressed themselves up into the shadow of an archway and watched a figure with a book clenched in one hand cross a dusty hall, silent and shadowed, littered with sagging chairs. 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. She disappeared out of sight and Harrow remained, silently waiting, far longer than Gideon thought necessary before she gestured for them to move.

They made it to the dismal hole with the access hatch without incident, though it was dark enough there that Gideon had to pocket her glasses and Harrow had to tug down her veil. Harrow was breathing impatiently through her nose as Gideon slid the key into the lock, and flung herself down the hole as though being chased. They descended the long, frigid ladder, and Harrow brushed herself off at the bottom.

“Good,” was the first thing she said since they’d left the room. “I’m relatively sure we’re alone. Follow me.”

Dogging her adept’s rapid steps, rapier bumping against her hip, Gideon was interested to see that they did not traverse the mazelike corridors to Sanitiser. They instead passed down a long, broad hallway, buzzing quietly with the sound of electric light, until after a few corners they reached a door marked LABORATORY TWO. Harrow pushed this open.

The little foyer beyond was cupboard sized. There were hooks on the walls, and on one what Gideon took to be some ugly, partly dissolved tapestry, until she realised it was the remains of somebody’s abandoned coat. On the door ahead was a dilapidated folder behind a piece of plex, with a scribbled and pale title in a faded, haphazard hand: #1–2. TRANSFERENCE/WINNOWING. DATACENTER.

Above the sterile metal door was the more familiar sight of a mounted skull, probably once painted red but now tarry brown. It had lost its jaw at some point and seemed all front teeth. Harrow fussily crammed minuscule chips of phalange in and around the entryway. It was an unusual experience to be crossing, rather than barred from, a Nonagesimus bone ward, but Gideon didn’t get the time to enjoy it: Harrow pushed through the door and led Gideon through to another room.

This room—more spacious, more elongated—gave the distinct impression of having been ransacked. It was ringed with broad metal desks, and the walls were pockmarked with empty electrical sockets. There were shelves and shelves that must once have contained books and files and folders, but now only contained a lot of dust; there were discoloured places on the walls where things must have been tacked up and had since been taken down. It was a naked and empty room. One wall was windowed all along its length to let you see into the chamber ahead, and that wall had a door in it marked with two things: one, a sign on the front saying RESPONSE, and two, a little plaque on the top marked OCCUPIED. This had a bleary glow of a green light next to it, indicating that Response was probably not occupied. Looking through to Response—a bleak, featureless chamber, characterised only by a couple of vents on the far side of the square—the floor was an absolute shitshow of bits of broken bone.

The other wall—filled with brackets to prop up books that had long since been removed—had a door too, and this one was labelled: IMAGING. The Imaging door had the same plaque as Response, but with a little red light instead. Imaging also had a little plex window whose outside was smeared with old bloody handprints.

“Someone’s been having fun in here,” said Gideon.

Harrow shot her a look but did not enforce the vow of silence. “Yes,” she said. “Me.”

Her cavalier tried the door marked Response, but it wouldn’t move and there didn’t seem to be a conventional touchpad. Harrow said, “It won’t open like that, Nav. Come with me, and don’t touch anything.”

Gideon went with Harrow and did not touch anything. The autodoor to Imaging obligingly opened at their approach, revealing a dismal cupboard of a room with a huge array of old mechanical equipment, lightless and dead. A single ceiling panel fuzzed its way to life, white and pallid and not revealing much but more shadow. The long desk still had what she realised was a rusted old clipboard, to which a thin, nearly transparent piece of paper was attached. Gideon at last gave in to the urge to touch something, and the paper dissolved as though it were ash. It left a grey stain on her fingertips.

“Fucking yuck,” she said, wiping them on her front.

Harrow said curtly, “Have some care, you dolt, everything here is impossibly old.”

In the centre of the room was a tall metal pedestal. Atop the pedestal was a strange, flat panel of weirdly reflective glass—beautiful, with a dichromatic black fleck. The black-robed necromancer, painted brow furrowed with concentration, passed her hand over the top of the glass: it buzzed at her proximity, sending shivering green sparks jumping over the pedestal. Harrow peeled off her glove and placed one long-fingered hand directly on the glass. Two things happened: the glass folded over her hand like a cage, and the Imaging door shut with a heavy whunk. Gideon pressed into it, but it did not open again.

“What happens now?”

Harrow said, “Look through the window.”

Through the smeary little window Gideon could see that Response had opened up. Harrow continued, joylessly: “The door shuts in response to—as far as I can tell—weight and motion. I didn’t test precisely how much weight, but it’s around thirty moving kilograms. I have, at this point, sent around ninety kilos’ worth of bone matter into that room.”

The things Harrow could pull off with the tip of someone’s toe bone were astonishing. Three kilos of osseo for Harrow could have been anything. A thousand skeletons, crammed and interlocked within Response. Seas of spines. An edifice of cranium and coccyx. Gideon just said, “Why?”

Harrow said, stiffly: “Every single construct I’ve put into that room has been pulverised.”

“By what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “If I take my hand off the pedestal, the door unlocks and the room reverts. I can’t see it. I only hear it.”

At hear it the hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck rose, and she shook off her hood. Harrow jerked her wrist away from the pedestal and the glass neatly unfolded itself from her hand. The Imaging door opened with another automatic whunk, spilling light in from the anterior room.

Harrow worked each finger gently within its socket, and said, this time more brightly: “So, Griddle, this is where you are to be my shining star. You’re going out there to be my eyes.”

“What?”

“My skeletons don’t have photoreceptors, Nav,” the necromancer said calmly. “I know they’re being destroyed with blunt force. I have no idea what by, and I need to keep my hand on the thanergetic lock. You have perfectly functional eye jelly; you have a dubious but capable brain; you’re going to stand out there and look through the window. Got it?”

There was nothing objectionable to this role, which was why Gideon was automatically suspicious of it. But she said, “As you wish, my lamentable queen,” and ducked out the Imaging door. Her adept followed close behind her, rummaging in her pockets. She brought out a whole knuckle, which was telling. Harrow threw it down and, with an awful grinding sound, it sprang into a burly skeleton: she flicked her wrist at it impatiently and it lumbered toward Response, standing, waiting. Then Harrow ducked back inside Imaging.

This is dumb, thought Gideon. The Imaging door wheezed shut, presumably as Harrow placed her hand upon the pedestal, and the Response door ground open: the skeleton stepped forward, bone feet crunching on a carpet of other bones. As it stepped through, the door plunged shut behind it, and the little light next to Occupied turned red.

Whatever happened next happened pretty goddamn fast. The lights in Response flared as the vents started choking out cloudy puffs, obscuring the far wall: she pressed herself so close to the glass that her breath made it misty and wet. There was no sound from within, and there should have been (it must have all been soundproofed) which simply made it all the more absurd when something enormous and misshapen came raging out of the fog.

It was a bone construct, she could tell that much. Grey tendons strapped a dozen weirdly malformed humeri to horribly abbreviated forearms. The rib cage was banded straps of thick, knobbly bone, spurred all around with sharp points, the skull—was it a skull?—a huge knobble of brainpan. Two great green lights foamed within the darkness there, like eyes. It had way too many legs and a spine like a load-bearing pillar, and it had to crouch forward on two of its heavyset arms, fledged all over with tibial spines. The exterior arms were thrust back high, and she could see now that they did not have hands: just long slender blades, each formed from a sharpened radius, held at the ready like a scorpion’s tail. It rampaged forward; Harrow’s skeleton patiently waited; the construct fell on it like a hot meal, and it disintegrated under the second blow.

The construct turned its awful head toward the window, fixed its burning green gaze on Gideon, and got very still. It lumbered toward her, gaining speed, when the red light for Occupied turned green: there was a low and doleful parp from some klaxon, and then the construct dissolved. It became soup, not bones, and it moved as though sucked into some small grating toward the centre of the room. It was totally gone, along with all the fog, when Imaging sprang open and Harrow found her cavalier with her jaw dropped open.

It took a few moments of explanation. Harrow cross-questioned the measurements and looked disgusted with all her answers. Before Gideon had finished, Harrow was pacing back and forth, robes swishing around her ankles like black foam.

“Why can’t I see it?” she raged. “Is it testing the skeleton’s autonomy, or is it testing my control? How much multidexterity does it want?”

“Put me in there,” said Gideon.

That brought Harrow up short, and her eyebrows shot to the top of her hairline. She fretted at the veil around her neck, and she said slowly: “Why?”

Gideon knew at this point that some really intelligent answer was the way to go; something that would have impressed the Reverend Daughter with her mechanical insight and cunning. A necromantic answer, with some shadowy magical interpretation of what she had just seen. 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 massaged her temples with one hand and said, “I’m not yet so desperate for a new cavalier that I’m willing to recycle you. No. I’ll send in three this time, and you’re to tell me how it handles that—exactly how it responds; I’m not yet convinced that this isn’t testing my multidexterity…”

The next time she sent a skeleton in, it was clutching a crinkly bundle of phalanges in each bony fist. Gideon watched dutifully as the light turned green, and as Harrow sightlessly raised two identical skeletons next to her first. They were models of their kind: beautifully made, built to spec, animated and responsive. Harrow’s skeletons looked almost like First House servants now. When the construct flailed out of the mist, they moved with admirable poise and fluency, and got demolished in three moves. The last skeleton ran around in a sad little sprint before the monstrous construct raised one bladed arm and shattered it from sacrum to shoulder.

The second time Harrow emerged to get the blow-by-blow, one nostril was bleeding. The third time, both nostrils. The fifth time—the floor of Response carpeted with the remains of twenty skeletons—she was wiping blood off her eyelashes and her shoulders were drooping. She had listened to each playback with numb, blank-eyed thoughtfulness, too distracted even to needle Gideon, but this time she balled her hands into fists and pressed them into her skull.

“My mother and my father and my grandmother together could not do what I do,” she said softly, not speaking to Gideon. “My mother and my father and my grandmother together … and I’ve advanced so far beyond them. One construct or fifty—and it simply slows it down … for all of half an hour.”

She shook away frustration like an animal with a wet pelt, shivering all over before fixing dead black eyes on Gideon. “Right,” she said. “Right. Again. Keep watching, Nav.”

She staggered back, door whipping shut behind her. Gideon Nav could only put up with so much. She took off her robe, folded it up, and put it on a hook in the foyer. She stood next to a skeleton whose arms were so full with bits of bone and lengths of tibia that it trailed chips like breadcrumbs. It was easy enough to stand beside it politely until the door opened, then to trip it up, then to step over it. She unsheathed her rapier with a silver whisper, slipping the knuckles of her left hand through the obsidian bands. The Response door breathed shut behind her.

“Harrow,” she said, “if you wanted a cavalier you could replace with skeletons, you should’ve kept Ortus.”

From whining speakers set in each corner, Harrow cried out. It wasn’t a noise of annoyance, or even really a noise of surprise—it was more like pain; Gideon found her legs buckling a little bit and she had to stagger, shift herself upright, shake her head to clear the brief bout of dizziness away. She held her rapier in a perfect line and waited.

“What?” The necromancer sounded dazed, almost. “What, seriously?”

The vents breathed out huge sighs of fog. Now that she was in the room, Gideon could see that they were blasting moisture and liquid into the air, stale-smelling stuff; from within this cloud the construct was rising—leg to horrifying leg, to broad plates of pelvis, to thick trunk of spine—to the green motes of light that swung around, searching, settling on Gideon. Her stance shifted. From Imaging Harrow grunted explosively, which nearly got her cavalier knocked ass-over-tits.

Air was displaced. The construct rushed her, and it was only just in time that she deflected two heavy overhand blows onto the naked black blade of her sword. Harrow let out a yelp as though she had touched her hand to a flame.

“Nonagesimus!”

Gideon considered the good news and the bad news. The good news: the blows that rained down on her were not as heavy as she had expected from something so enormous. They came down hard and fast, but no harder than the hand of Naberius Tern; lighter, for the lack of muscle. Osseous matter never weighed as much as blood and flesh, which was one of the problems with pure construct magic.

The bad news: she couldn’t do jack shit to it. Her light sword could barely deflect the blows. She had some small hope with her obsidian knuckle-knives—one good strong backhand bash and she had knocked out part of one arm, snapping the blade off near the tip—but then watched with a sickening weight in her gut as the blade reformed.

“Nonagesimus,” she hollered again between attacks, “this shit is regenerating!”

There was nothing from the speakers. Gideon wondered if Harrow could hear her. She leapt to the side as the construct fell forward, slashing heavily—it slammed into a pile of bone that had built up from Harrow’s previous failures, and a chip careered out like a bullet and nicked Gideon’s arm. From the speakers, the girl cried out again.

“Nonagesimus!” she said, alarmed now. The construct wallowed in its nest of victims, then reared up again. “Hey—Harrow!”

The speakers crackled. “Stop thinking!”

“What?”

“I can’t—it’s too—damn it!”

She was about to tell Harrow to take her hand off the damn pedestal, but she was charged again in a lurching flurry of blades. The construct bounded forward on its hands and feet like a lopsided predatory animal. Gideon charged too, and she sliced her sword straight through the interosseous membrane on the arm coming down to spear her. Arm and construct flailed independently, and with her offhand she punched it hard in the pelvis. Bone splintered out explosively as half the ilium came away. The monster fell and thrashed, trying to rise, as the pelvis and the top of one femur knit themselves back together with unsavoury speed. Gideon fell back in a hurry, pulling her sword free and wiping bone matter off her face.

The speakers sizzled with heavy breathing. “Nav. Close one eye.”

She would question later why she did it, but she did it. Depth perception fled as she squinted an eye shut, backing away from the construct as it slithered around in useless circles, crippled. For a moment her gaze drunkenly slid into place, and she could see—something—at the very corners of her vision: some kind of peripheral mirage, a susurrus of light that moved in a way she’d never seen before. It was like a gel overlay across real life. It balled around various bits of the construct as though attracted to it, like iron filings to a magnet. She blinked hard. There was fresh panting over the speakers.

“All right,” came Harrow’s voice, “all right, all right—”

The construct reared up, centre of gravity restored. Gideon’s heart hammered. The speakers hissed again. Harrow said, “What’s on top of it?”

“What—the arms?”

“I can’t see,” said Harrow, “blurry—”

Gideon had to open both eyes again. She couldn’t not. She parried the first uppercut thrust from the construct as it bounded toward her, but it cracked her in the shoulder with another. She got it with her knives on the backswing—the sharpened arm cracked, bounced away, and hit the wall—but she had to fall back into a crouch and seethe with pain, worrying that her shoulder had popped out entirely. The speakers bellowed. The construct reared up, other blades at the ready, and—disassembled.

It turned to liquid and trickled toward the grate in the centre of the room as Gideon stared. The Response door slid open, and after a moment’s testing of her shoulder, she pulled herself to stand. She was working the muscles as she went through the doorway—it locked shut, Imaging opened—and she found herself face-to-face with Harrow, who was taut as death and trembling.

“The hell,” said Gideon, “was that?”

“It’s the test.” Harrow’s lips were pink where she had bitten off the paint. She seemed to be having trouble swallowing, and she was staring right through her cavalier. She said unsteadily, “You’re the test.”

“Um—”

“Frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital, hippocampus—I fought with them all inside you,” she said. “I’m not equipped to deal with a living spirit still attached to a nervous system. You’re so noisy. It took me five minutes to peel away the volume just to see. And the pain is so much worse than skeleton feedback—your spirit rendered me deaf! Your whole body makes noise when you fight! Your temporal lobe—God—I have such a headache!”

This entire speech was incoherent, but the bottom-line realisation was humiliating. Heat rose rapidly up Gideon’s neck. “You can control my body,” she said. “You can read my thoughts.”

“No. Not remotely.” That was a relief, until it was followed up with: “If only I could. The moment I get a handle on even one of your senses, I’m overwhelmed by another.”

“You are banned from squatting in my lobes and my hippocampus. I don’t want you pushing all the furniture around in there.”

Perhaps there was some tiny grain of sympathy in Harrow. She did not respond with a horrid laugh or a dark Ninth saying: she just flapped her hand. “Don’t have an aneurysm, Nav. I cannot and will not read your thoughts, control your body, or look at your most intimate memories. I don’t have the ability and I certainly don’t have the desire.”

“It’s for your protection, not mine,” said Gideon. “I imagined Crux’s butt once when I was twelve.”

Harrow ignored her. “Winnowing,” she said. “I’m a fool. It wants the wheat from among the chaff—or the signal from the noise, if you like. But why? Why can’t I just do it myself?”

She swayed lightly, and swabbed a pink line across her face with one sleeve. Her cultist paint was looking distinctly sepia, but she looked elated, grimly satisfied somehow.

“I now know how to complete this trial,” she said meditatively. “And we’ll do it—if I work out the connection and rethink what I know about possession theory, I can do it. Knowing what to work on was the battle, and now I know. But first, Griddle, I’m afraid I have to pass out.”

And she crumpled neatly back onto the floor. Pure sentiment found Gideon kicking out one leg to catch her. She ended up lightly punting her necromancer on the shoulder but assumed that it was the thought that counted.

Chapter 15

“I’d do a hell of a lot better with a longsword,” Gideon said.

A few hours after, Harrowhark had woken up from her floor nap and accompanied her cavalier back to their quarters. She’d been all for trying again then and there, but it took Gideon one look at her slightly crossing eyes and shaky hands to nix that plan. Now they were back in their main, dark-panelled room, the noonday light filtering through the blinds in hot slats of white, with Gideon galumphing down bread and Harrow picking at crusts. The necromancer had woken up just as sour as ever, which gave Gideon some hope that everything back there had been a passing fit of insanity.

“Insinuation denied,” said Harrowhark. “You don’t have one”—sweet, that meant Harrow hadn’t successfully been through all her stuff—“and more importantly, you should do without. I never liked that cursed thing anyway; I always felt like it was judging me. If you require a two-handed sword every time the chips are down you’re worth nothing as my cavalier.”

“I still don’t get how this whole test is meant to work.”

The Reverend Daughter gave this consideration, for once. “All right. Let me—hmm. You know that a bone construct is animated by a necromantic theorem.”

“No way! I assumed you just thought super hard about bones until they happened.”

Ignoring this, Harrow continued: “This particular construct is animated by multiple theorems, all—woven together, in a sense. That enables it to do things normal constructs can’t possibly.”

“Like regenerate.”

“Yes. The way to destroy it is to unpick that tapestry, Nav, to pull on each thread in turn—in order—until the web gives way. Which would take me ten seconds, if I only had it at arm’s length.”

“Huh,” said Gideon, unwillingly starting to get it. “So I unpick it for you.”

“Only with my assistance. You are not a necromancer. You cannot see thanergetic signatures. I have to find the weak points, but I have to do it through your eyes, which is made infinitely more difficult by you waving a sword around the whole time while your brain—yells at me.”

Gideon opened her mouth to say My brain is always yelling at you, but was interrupted by a sharp rap on the door. The necromancer froze as though she were under attack, but this knock was followed by guttural hysterics of the kind that Gideon had heard before. The sound drifted off down the corridor accompanied by the hurried footsteps of two semiterrified teenagers. Jeannemary and what’s-his-face had shoved something underneath the door, and left.

She went to see what it was. It was a plain, heavy envelope—real paper, creamy brown. “Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus,” she read out loud. “Gideon the Ninth. Fan mail.”

“Give it to me. It might be a trap.”

Gideon ignored this, as it was quite likely Harrow would toss the thing out the window rather than give it a chance. She also ignored Harrow’s lemon-pucker scowl as she withdrew a piece of flimsy—less impressive than the envelope, but who barring the Emperor would use real paper for a letter—and read aloud its contents.

Underneath in hasty but still beautifully-formed handwriting was another note:

Harrow said, “No.”

“I want to go,” said Gideon.

“This sounds impossibly vapid.”

“I want to eat a dessert.”

“It occurs to me,” said Harrow, drumming her fingers, “that during a single dinner the deaths of multiple House scions could be assured by one clever pair, a bottle of poison, and then—suddenly, the Fifth House’s primacy is assured. And all because you wanted a sweet.”

“This is a formal invitation to the Ninth House, not just you and me,” said Gideon, more cunningly, “and being dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists, shouldn’t we make a teeny weeny appearance? It’ll look rude if we don’t go. We can extrapolate heaps from whoever doesn’t come, and everyone will, to be polite. Politics. Diplomacy. I’ll eat yours if you don’t want it.”

The necromancer lapsed into brooding. “But this delays finishing the trial,” she complained finally, “and wastes an evening in which Sextus can get ahead of us at his leisure.”

“Bet you Palamedes will be there. We can do the trial afterward. And I’ll be so good. I’ll be silent and Ninth and melancholy. The sight will astound and stimulate you.”

“Nav, you are a hog.”

But that meant they were going to go. Gideon reflected on her unexpected victory as she stared in the mirror, idly counting the pimples cropping up as the result of repeated slathers of cult paint. The atmosphere was—relaxed, in this strange and waiting way, like the time she’d got a sedative and knew a nun was coming to whip out her tonsils. She and Nonagesimus were both waiting for the knife. She had never known Harrow to be so malleable, nor to go such a long time without raking her claws across Gideon’s internal tender spots. Maybe the Lyctor trials were having a mellowing effect on her.

No, that was too much to hope for. Harrowhark was pleased because everything was coming up Harrowhark—she was glutted on getting her own way, and the moment that glow wore off the knives would come out again. Gideon couldn’t trust Harrow. There was always some angle. There was always some shackle closing on you before you could even see it, and you’d only know when she turned the key. But then—

That evening, it was funny to see Harrow fuss. 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. She fiddled with long earrings of bone in front of the mirror and repainted her face twice. Gideon realised with no small amount of amusement and curiosity that Harrowhark was very frightened. She got more snappish as the evening wore on, and moved from languid postures of affected boredom with a book to a tense, rolled-up curl with hunched shoulders and knees. Harrow kept staring at the clock and wanted to go a full twenty minutes early. Gideon had just thrown on a clean robe and her tinted glasses, and noted that the necromancer was too tetchy even to veto those.

Why on earth was she scared? She had headed up function after dreary, overembroidered Ninth function, ornate in its rules and strict in its regulations, since she was a kid. Now she was all jitters. Maybe it was about being denied her dark necromantic needs down past the access hatch. In any case, both she and Harrowhark turned up, gorgeously gowned in their Locked Tomb vestments, painted like living skulls, looking like douchebags. Harrow clinked when she walked with the sheer multiplicity of bonely accoutrement.

“You came!” said Magnus Quinn when he saw them; he was too well bred to double-take at two horrible examples of Drearburh clergy on the loose. “I’m so pleased you’re wearing your, ah, glad rags; I was convinced I’d be the only one dressed up, and would have to sit resplendently among you all, feeling a bit of an idiot. Reverend Daughter,” he said, and he bowed very deeply to Harrow. “Thank you for coming.”

He himself was immensely trim in a pale brown, long-coated suit that had probably cost more than the Ninth House had in its coffers. The Ninth was high on ancient, shitty treasures but low on liquid assets. In a lower and chillier voice than Harrow usually ever affected, she said: “Blessings on the cavalier of the Fifth. Congratulations on the eleventh year of your espousal.”

Espousal. But Magnus said, “Indeed! Yes! Thank you! It was actually yesterday. By happy accident I remembered and Abigail forgot, so in her resulting angst she wanted to make me dinner. I suggested we all benefit. Come in, please—let me introduce you.”

The dining room off the atrium looked as it ever did, but with certain festive additions. The napkins had all been folded very carefully and some mildly yellowing tablecloth had come out of deep storage. There were correctly articulated place cards by each bright white plate. They were both led to the little kitchen and introduced to the slightly stressed Fifth necromancer whom Gideon had only ever seen in passing: she proved to have more or less the same easy, unaffected manner as Magnus, the type you only got when you came from a house like the Fifth. She looked Gideon very straight in the eye and shook her hand very firmly. Unlike Magnus, she also had the manner some necromancers and librarians developed when they had been working on dead spells for the last fifteen years and no longer worried too much about the living: her stare was far too intense. But she was wearing an apron and it was hard to feel intimidated by her. Her very correct pleasantries with a po-faced Harrow were interrupted with the appearance in the doorway of the wretched teens, who were wearing around a million earrings each. The Ninth moved back to the hall.

It was a strange evening. Harrow nearly vibrated with tension. Teacher, perennially pleased to see them for no reason Gideon ever knew, cornered them immediately. He and the other priests were there already and each had a birthday expression of glee: for his part, Teacher was twinkling with a magnitude usually reserved for dying stars.

“What do you think of Lady Abigail?” he said. “They do say she’s an extraordinarily clever necromancer—not so much in your line, Reverend Daughter, but a gifted summoner and spirit-talker. I have fielded many questions from her about Canaan House. I hope she and Magnus the Fifth are good cooks! We First have all hyped the occasion, I’m afraid, but priests who live plainly must get excited over food. Of course, the sombre Ninth must be similar.”

The sombre Ninth, in the form of its adept, said: “We prefer to live simply.”

“Of course, of course,” said Teacher, whose attention had already wandered to trashy gossip. His bright blue eyes had searched the room for other objects of interest, and finding them, leaned in confidingly. “Yes, and there’s young Jeannemary the Fourth and Isaac Tettares. Looking very pretty, the both of them. Isaac looks as though he has been studying too much.” (Isaac, the necromancer teen with brushed-up hair bleached orange, looked more like he was suffering an abundance of pituitary gland.) “Naturally he is Pent’s protégé. I hear the Fifth takes special pains with the Fourth … hegemonic pains, some may say. It must be difficult when they are both so young. But they all seem to get on well…”

“How do you know?”

“Reverend Daughter,” the priest said, smiling, “you miss out on important things spending all your time so usefully down in the dark. Now, Gideon the Ninth—she could tell you a great deal if she were not bound to her admirable vow of silence. Your penitence shames me.”

At this, Teacher gave Gideon a roguish wink, which was also the worst.

Movement in the doorway. The Third and Sixth Houses had arrived all at once, the drab moth of Palamedes making the golden butterfly of Coronabeth Tridentarius all the more aureate and fair. They were sizing each other up like prize fighters. Teacher said, “Now, the main event!”

It turned out that the Fifth’s idea of a rollicking good time was a seating arrangement. This realisation caused Harrow’s carefully controlled mask to take on a distinct veer to the tragic. They were separated, and Gideon found herself elbow to elbow between Palamedes and the dreadful teen cavalier of the Fourth, who looked as though she regretted everything that had ever led up to this moment. Dulcinea, opposite, kissed her hand to Gideon twice before Gideon had even sat down.

At least Harrow wasn’t faring any better. She had been placed at the other end of the table diagonal to the mayonnaise uncle, who looked even more appalled than Jeannemary the Fourth. Opposite was Ianthe and to the other diagonal was Protesilaus, completing one of the worst tableaus in history; Naberius Tern was to Harrow’s left and was carrying on some long communication with Ianthe conducted entirely in arch eyebrow quirks. As Harrow smouldered with hatred, Gideon began to enjoy herself.

Magnus clinked his spoon against his water glass. The conversation, which was terminal to start with, convulsed to a halt.

“Before we begin,” he said, “a short speech.”

The three priests looked as though they had never wanted anything so much in their lives as a short speech. One of the teens, slumped out of Magnus’s sight, mimed putting their neck in a noose.

“I thought I’d, er,” he began, “say a few words to bring us all together. This must be the first time in—a very long time that the Houses have been together like this. We were reborn together but remain so remote. So I thought I’d point out our similarities, rather than our differences.

“What do Marta the Second, Naberius the Third, Jeannemary the Fourth, Magnus the Fifth, Camilla the Sixth, Protesilaus the Seventh, Colum the Eighth, and Gideon the Ninth all have in common?”

You could have heard a hair flutter to the floor. Everyone stared, poker-faced, in the thick ensuing silence.

Magnus looked pleased with himself.

“The same middle name,” he said.

Coronabeth laughed so hard that she had to honk her beautiful nose into a napkin. Someone was explaining the joke to the salt-and-pepper priest, who, when they got it, said “Oh, ‘the’!” which started Corona off again. The Second, entombed in dress uniforms so starched you could fold them like paper, wore the tiny smiles of two people who’d had to put up with Cohort formal dinners before.

The appearance of two skeletons bearing an enormous tureen of food broke the last tension. Under Abigail’s direction, they filled everyone’s bowl with good-smelling grain, white and fluffy, boiled in onion broth. Little drifts of chopped nuts or tiny tart red fruits were scattered throughout, and it was hot and spicy and good, which had completed Gideon’s requirements for a meal at hot. She put her head down and ate, insensible, until one of the white-robed skeletons stepped forward to give her seconds.

At that point she could tune in to the conversations around her, which had survived their first faltering encounters with the enemy and were now in full swing:

“—the juicy part is the sarcotesta. Good, aren’t they? There’s a red seed apple growing in the greenhouse. Have you seen the greenhouses?—”

“—in keeping with Ottavian custom for a necromancer’s fast until evening, which includes—”

“—which failed to fix the drive, which failed to get her back to the system in time, which meant I spent the first nine months wrapped in house dirt—”

“—interesting question,” Palamedes was saying at Gideon’s right. “You might say that Scholar recognises the specialist, and Warden recognises the duty, which is why Master Warden is the higher rank. Taken in the sense of the supervisor and, if you think about it another way, the sense of the prison. D’you know what we call the internal jaws of a lock?—”

Opposite, Dulcinea murmured to Abigail: “I think that is a perfect shame.”

“Thank you. We’re over it; it simply wasn’t in our cards,” the necromancer said, a bit bracingly. “My younger brother’s the next in line. He’ll do well. It gives me more time to collate the manuscript, which I’ve been married to longer than I have to Magnus.”

“So keep in mind I’m the kind of pity case you bring out at parties to make other people feel better about themselves,” the other woman said smilingly, ignoring the Fifth’s polite protests to the contrary, “but I would love you to explain your work, just so long as you pretend I am five and go from there.”

“If I can’t explain this clearly, then the fault is mine, not yours. It’s not so complex. We have so little that survived from the period post-Resurrection, pre-sovereignty and pre-Cohort, except in secondhand records. We have transcripts of those from the Sixth, though they’re keeping the originals.”

“They’re kept in a box full of helium so they’ll outlast the heat death of Dominicus, Lady Pent,” said Palamedes.

“Your Masters won’t even let me look at them through the glass.”

“Light is the paper-killer,” he said. “Sorry. It’s nothing against you. It’s not in our particular interest to hoard Lyctoral records.”

“They’re good copies, at least—and I spend my time studying those. Writing commentary, naturally. But being here meant almost more to me than the idea of serving the Emperor. Canaan House is a holy grail! What we know about the Lyctors is tremendously antiseptic. I’ve actually found what I think are unencrypted communiqués between—”

Even with Dulcinea Septimus making the intense eyelash bat of What you are doing and saying is so fascinating to me, Dulcinea Septimus, Gideon knew a boring conversation when she heard one. She took cautious sips of the purple, slightly chewy wine and was trying not to cough as she swung her attention over to her own shadowy marchioness of bones: Harrow was picking at the food, sandwiched between the stony cavaliers of the Seventh and Second. Every so often she would say something terse to Protesilaus, who would take sixty seconds to think about it before making replies so uninflected and curt that they made Harrow sparkle by comparison.

The mayonnaise uncle was talking to the anaemic twin, his probable future bride. “I was removed by … surgical means,” Ianthe was saying calmly, her long fingers toying with the stem of her glass. “My sister is a few minutes older.”

The white-kirtled young uncle was not eating. He had taken a few priggish sips of wine, but spent most of his time with his hands folded quietly over each other and staring. He had the posture of a metre ruler. “Your parents,” he said, in his unexpectedly deep and sonorous voice, “risked intervention?”

“Yes. Corona, you see, had removed my source of oxygen.”

“A wasted opportunity, I’d think.”

“I don’t live alternate histories. Corona’s birth put my survivability somewhere around definite nil.”

“It wasn’t on purpose, mark you,” drawled her cavalier from across the table. His hair was so perfect that Gideon kept staring at it, mesmerised, hoping some specific bit of the ceiling would break down and squash it flat.

Ianthe affected shock. “Why, Babs, are you part of this conversation?”

“I’m just saying, Princess, you don’t have to be so down on her like that—”

“You don’t have to contradict me in public, and yet—and yet.”

Naberius flicked his eyes very obviously over to the other end of the table, but Coronabeth was busy with Magnus: probably swapping new jokes, Gideon thought. He said, “Stop being a pill.”

“I repeat, Babs, are you part of this conversation?”

“Thank God, no,” said the hapless Babs sourly, and turned back to his previous conversation partner: the thickset nephew cavalier, stolidly refilling his bowl. He did not look thrilled to repossess the Third’s undivided attention. Next to the spruce Naberius Tern, he looked shabbier and more worn-out than ever. “Now, look, Eighth, here’s why you’re wrong about the buckler…”

Gideon would have liked to know what was wrong about the buckler; but as she reached over for her glass again, she felt a tug on her sleeve. It was the disagreeable teen who was sitting on her other side, looking at her with a particularly fierce expression, emphasised with near-Ninth quantities of black eye makeup. Jeannemary the Fourth screwed up her mouth as though expecting an injection, all the little corners of her face more angular in ferociousness, her jillion earrings jingling.

“This is going to be a weird question,” said Jeannemary.

Gideon dropped her arm and tilted her head quizzically. A little bit of blood drained from the teen’s face, and Gideon almost felt sorry for her: hood and paint and robes on the priesthood around her had put her off dinners at the same age. But the teen stuck her awful courage to its sticking place, breathed out hard through her teeth, and blurted very quietly:

“Ninth … how big are your biceps?”

It seemed to be long after Gideon was forced to supinate and flex at the whim of a teenage girl that their bowls were replaced with new ones, these filled with confections of cream and fruit, and mostly sugar; the Fifth had obviously been busy. Gideon ate three helpings and Magnus, not bothering to hide his amusement, pushed a fourth her way. Magnus was inarguably a much better cook than a duellist. Before she had come to Canaan House, Gideon had considered getting full a grim process of gruel and spoon and mouth that had to be done in order to maximise chances of not having her ass later kicked by Aiglamene in some dim room. It was one of the first times that she had felt full and fat and honestly happy about it.

Afterward there was a tray of the hot, grassy tea to clear the mouth, and the various Houses stood around with warm cups in their hands to watch the skeletons clear up.

Gideon looked around for Harrow. Her necromancer was ensconced in a corner with, of all people, Teacher: she was talking to him in low tones as he alternately nodded or shook his head, looking more thoughtful than giddy for once, his thumbs stuck in his gorgeous rainbow sash.

Someone touched Gideon’s hand, very lightly, as though afraid of startling her. It was Dulcinea, who had taken refuge in a chair; she was shifting her hips a little awkwardly in the hard wooden seat with the tiny, restless motions Gideon suspected she made when she was sore. She looked tired, and older than usual; but her pink mouth was still very pink, and her eyes alight with illicit amusement.

“Are your biceps huge,” she said, “or are they just enormous? Ninth, please tick the correct box.”

Gideon made sure her necromancer couldn’t see her, and then made a rude gesture. Dulcinea laughed her silvery laugh, but it was sleepy somehow, quiet. She pointed serenely to a spot next to her seat and Gideon obligingly squatted there on her haunches. Dulcinea was breathing a little harder. She was wearing a filmy, foam-coloured dress and Gideon could see her ribs expand beneath it, like a shocked animal’s. Her silky, chestnut-coloured ringlets, painstakingly curled, spread out over her shoulders.

“I liked that dinner,” said Lady Septimus, with deep satisfaction. “It was useful. Look at the children.”

Gideon looked. Isaac and Jeannemary were standing close to the table, Jeannemary’s sleeves pulled down to reveal her biceps. They were the muscles of an athletic and determined fourteen-year-old, which was to say, unripped but full of potential; her floppy-haired teen-in-crime was wearily measuring them with his hands as they carried on a conversation in whispers—

(“I told you so.”

“Yours are fine?”

“Isaac.”

“It’s not like this is a bicep competition?”

“Dumbest thing you ever said?”)

Their hisses carried. Abigail, who was standing nearby deep in conversation with one of the Second, reached out a hand to touch Isaac lightly on the shoulder in reproof. She did not even turn around or break off talking. The Fourth adept winced: his cavalier had a hard, resentful, told-off expression on her face.

Dulcinea murmured, “Oh, Gideon the Ninth, the Houses are arranged so badly … full of suspicion after a whole myriad of peaceable years. What do they compete for? The Emperor’s favour? What does that look like? What can they want? It’s not as though they haven’t all gotten fat off our Cohort prizes … mostly. I have been thinking about all that, lately, and the only conclusion I can come to is…”

She trailed off. They were both silent in that pause’s pregnant wake, listening to the polite and impolite after-dinner chatter all around them, the clatter of skeletons with used-up knives and forks. Into that white noise came Palamedes, who was, weirdly enough, bearing a full teacup on a tray: he proffered it to the weary lady of the Seventh, who looked at him with frank interest.

“Thank you awfully, Master Warden,” she said.

If she had looked at him with interest, he looked at her with—well. He looked at her thin and filmy dress and her swell-jointed fingers, and at her curls and the crest of her jaw, until Gideon felt hell of embarrassed being anywhere near that expression. It was a very intense and focused curiosity—there wasn’t a hint of smoulder in it, not really, but it was a look that peeled skin and looked through flesh. His eyes were like lustrous grey stone; Gideon didn’t know if she could be as completely composed as Dulcinea under that same look.

Palamedes said lightly: “I’m ever at your service, Lady Septimus.”

Then he gave a small trim bow like a waiter, adjusted his spectacles, and abruptly turned tail. Well! thought Gideon, watching him slide back into the crowd. Hell! Then she remembered that the Sixth had a weirdo fascination with medical science and probably found chronic illness as appealing as a pair of tight shorts, and then she thought: Well, hell!

Dulcinea was placidly sipping her tea. Gideon stared at her, waiting for the conclusion that had never come. Eventually the Seventh tore her gaze away from the small crowd of House scions and their cavalier primaries, and she said: “My conclusion? It’s— Oh, there’s your necromancer!”

Harrow had broken off from Teacher and was homing in on Gideon like iron to a lodestone. She offered Dulcinea only the most cursory glance; Dulcinea herself was smiling with what she obviously thought was infinite sweetness and what Gideon knew to be an expression of animal cunning; for Gideon not even a word, but a thrust of the pointy chin upward. Gideon propelled herself to stand and tried to ignore the Seventh’s eyebrows waggling in their direction, which thankfully her necromancer didn’t notice. Harrowhark was too busy storming out of the room with her robe billowing out behind her in the way Gideon suspected she had secretly practised. She heard Magnus the Fifth call out a gentle, “I am glad you came, Ninth!” but Harrow took no time to say goodbye, which hurt her feelings a little because Magnus was nice.

“Slow down, numbnuts,” she hissed, when she thought they were out of earshot of anyone. “Where’s the fire?”

“Nowhere—yet.” Harrow sounded breathless.

“I’ve eaten my own body weight. Don’t make me hurl.”

“As mentioned before, you’re a hog. Hurry up. We don’t have much time.”

“What?” There was a moment’s respite as Harrow hauled open one of the little escape-route staircase doors. The sun had set and the generator lights glowed a sad and disheartened green: the skeletons, busy with dinner, had apparently not lit the candles. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we need to make up time.”

“Hey, repeatedly, on what grounds?”

Harrow propped open the door with a bony hand. The expression on her face was resolute. “Because Abigail Pent asked that faithless Eighth prig if he knew about access down to the lower floors,” she said, “and he said yes. Pent is not stupid, and that’s another confirmed competitor on our hands. For God’s sake hurry up, Griddle, I give us five hours before she’s in the chamber herself.”

Chapter 16

Gideon nav held her sword parallel to her body, the grease-black glass of her knuckle-knives close to her chest, and bit her tongue bloody. As most bitten tongues did, it hurt like an absolute bitch. Over the speakers, Harrow heaved. In front of her, still wet with the hot reek of powdered bone, the construct opened its mouth in a soundless shriek. They were back in Response, and they’d failed once already.

It wasn’t as though Harrow’s necromantic inability to chisel her skull open was from some reluctance of Gideon’s (which would have been completely fucking understandable); she was trying as hard as she could. She was sleepy from the food and she was sore from earlier that morning, and being sleepy and sore meant there was so much more for Harrowhark to wade through. Gideon was forced to give her necromancer the first particle of credit in her life: Harrow did not yell at her. Harrow simply sank deeper and deeper into a morass of frustration and self-hatred, her fury at herself rising like bile.

The construct charged forward like a battering ram, and she leapt out the way and left half the skin of one knee on the ground for her pains. She still had a mouthful of blood as she began to holler, “Har—”

“Nearly,” crackled the speaker.

“—row, just let me take a whack at it—”

“Not yet. Nearly. The bitten tongue was good. Hold it off for a second, Nav! You could do this asleep!”

Not with a rapier. She might as well have chucked both knuckle and sword to the ground and started jogging for all the good her weapons were doing. Gideon wasn’t equipped for defence, and her head hurt. Her focus kept twitching in a migraine blur, dots and sparks coruscating in and out of her vision. A titanic blow from the construct bent her parry almost all the way back around to her head, and she moved with the blow rather than against as more of an afterthought.

“Three seconds. Two.” It almost sounded like begging.

Gideon was feeling more and more nauseous: there was an oily, warm feeling in the back of her throat and her tongue was running wet with spit. When she looked at the construct now it was through a hazy overlay, as though she were seeing double. There was a sharp pain between her eyes as it hauled back its centre of gravity, lurched—

“I can see it.”

Later on Gideon would think about how little triumph there was in Harrow’s voice: more awe. Her vision blurred, then spiked back abruptly into twenty-twenty colour. Everything was brighter and crisper and cleaner, the lights harder, the shadows colder. When she looked at the construct it smoked in the air like hot metal—pale, nearly transparent coronas wreathed its malformed body. They simmered in different colours, visible if you squinted this way or that, and in admiring them Gideon nearly got her leg broken.

“Nav,” hollered the speakers.

Gideon took a hard dive out of the way of a low stab, and then rolled away as the construct followed up by stomping hard where her foot had been. She hollered back: “Tell me what to do!”

“Hit these in order! Left lateral radius!”

Gideon focused on the nubbly, too-thick joint of the high left arm, and was surprised to find one of those mirage-like lights there: she sliced down and fell nearly off balance as her blade went through like a hot knife through fat. The long blade of the mutant arm clattered to the floor forlornly.

“Bottom-right tibia, lower quadrant, near the notch,” said Harrow. Now her triumph was barely held at bay. “Don’t make any other hits.”

Easier said than done. Gideon had to play grab-ass, snaking out of the construct’s remaining blades, before she disdained the rapier and slammed her booted foot down instead. It wasn’t hard: that part, just like the radius, was glowing like a flare. She got a square hit in and the construct’s leg shattered—it rocked to the side, trying to compensate, and the leg did not start regenerating.

The next was easy. Side of the mandible. The eighteenth rib. She peeled the construct apart, removing the unseen strut mechanisms that turned it from monster into pathetic, jaw-clattering fuckup, some kid’s first attempt at bone magic without ever having taken a look at an anatomy chart. When at last the Reverend Daughter said, “Sternum,” Gideon was already there—raising one gauntleted fist up where a slice of sternum glowed like a candleflame, and punching it into dust. The construct collapsed. Gideon felt dizzy for just a second, and then it left her. The whole world brightened and sharpened.

The only thing left of the monster was a big chunk of pelvis, atomizing slowly into sand. There was a pleasing overhead beep and the door to Response whooshed open—and remained open, letting through a Harrow so wet with sweat that her hood was stuck to her forehead. Gideon was distracted by the pelvis as the sand crumbled and parted to reveal a gleaming black box. Its lead-coloured screen ticked up—15 percent; 26 percent; 80 percent—until it swung open with a soft click to reveal nothing more interesting than—a key.

Harrow uttered a soft cry and swooped, but Gideon was quicker. She took it up and unsnapped the key ring she now kept down her shirt, and she looped it through one of the ornate clover-shaped holes on the handle. Two keys now dangled there in triumph: the upper hatch key, and their new prize. They both admired them for a long moment. The new key was chunky and solid, and dyed a deep, juicy scarlet.

Gideon found herself saying, “I saw—lights, when I was fighting it. Overlay. Bright spots, where you told me to hit, a glowing halo. Is that what you meant by thanergetic signature?”

She expected some dismissive You could not have comprehended the dark mysteries only my mascara’d eye doth espy, and was not prepared for Harrow’s open astonishment. Beneath the thick rivulets of blood and the smeared paint, she looked completely taken aback. “Do you mean,” her adept said slowly, “that there were things in the skeleton framework—mechanical lights, perhaps? Dyed segments?”

“No, they were just—googly areas of light. I couldn’t really see them properly,” she said. “I only saw them toward the end, when you were messing around.”

“That’s not possible.”

“I’m not lying.”

“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.