Gideon the Ninth

Chapter 17

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

Six necromancers had tried to raise them, singly or in concert, simultaneously or sequentially. Gideon had squatted in a corner and watched the parade. In the beginning a group of them had opened their own veins in a bid to tempt the early hunger of the ghosts. That period ended only when the teens, mad with rage at the inadequacy of only Isaac’s blood, both started stabbing at Jeannemary’s arm. They stood screaming at each other wordlessly, corseting belts above each other’s elbows to make the veins stand out, until Camilla took the knives from their hands and began dispensing rubber bandages. Then they held each other, knelt, and wept.

Harrow did not open herself up. She walked the perimeter like a wraith, measuring her steps for Palamedes to draw by, swaying minutely with what Gideon knew was exhaustion. Nor did Coronabeth spill her blood: she only drew close to the work to pull Ianthe’s hair away from her face, or to take a tiny knife from the twins’ bags to replace the one her sister was using. They had both come from their beds without bothering to dress, and hence were wearing astonishingly flimsy nightgowns, the only solace of the night. The air was full of chalk and ink and blood and strong light from the electric torches that the Sixth had rigged up.

The Sixth had been painfully useful. Palamedes, wearing a scruffy bedrobe, had put up lights and marked the ladder with bits of tape at obscure places. He had stained the fluff on his dowdy old slippers pink as he walked quietly among the bodies, saying excuse me once when he stepped too close to Abigail’s arm. He held the light up for Camilla as she sketched the whole unlovely scene on a big sheet of white flimsy, from the side, from the top, from their feet. He shed his scruffy bedrobe to reveal button-up pyjamas when Dulcinea drifted in wearing only a short shirt and trousers too big for her, and wrapped the robe around her shoulders without prompting. Then he went back to work.

A tableau of magicians and their guardians revolved around the corpses. Books were hauled out of pockets or the insides of coats, read, abandoned. People would go in, work, leave, be replaced, return, stay, leave as more of the inhabitants of Canaan House arrived. Harrowhark worked for nearly two hours before fainting abruptly into a puddle of congealing blood, at which point Gideon had removed her from the scene: upon waking she shadowed the Sixth instead, much to the ill-concealed annoyance of Camilla, who seemed to regard all incursions on Palamedes’s personal space as probable assassination attempts. For his part, Palamedes talked quietly and briskly to Harrow as though to a colleague he had known all his life.

The Third princesses worked like musicians who couldn’t help but return for the encore: a spell, retirement, another, another. They knelt side by side, holding hands, and for all that Ianthe had made fun of her sister’s intellect Corona never broke a sweat. It was Ianthe who ran wet with blood and perspiration. At one point she beckoned Naberius forward and, in a feat that nearly brought up Gideon’s dinner (again), ate him: she bit off a hunk of his hair, she chewed off a nail, she brought her incisors down on the heel of his hand. He submitted to all this without noise. Then she lowered her head and got back to work, sparks skittering off her hands like fire off a newly beaten sword, every so often spitting out a stray hair. Gideon had to stare pretty hard at skimpy nighties to get over that one.

The horrid Isaac worked, but Gideon didn’t like to look at him. He was sobbing with his entire sad teen face, mouth, eyes, nose. Dulcinea reached out as though to join the fray until Protesilaus drew her back with a hand as inexorable as it was meaty. The revolving parade of necromancer after necromancer went on, until just Palamedes was left; then he slumped as though his strings had been cut, blindly reaching for the bottle of water Camilla held out, pulling long gasps of liquid.

“Coming down,” said a voice from the top of the ladder.

Down the ladder came the jaundiced, faded cavalier of the Eighth House, dressed in his leathers with his sword at his hip; he helped his uncle, who was white and silver and alight with distaste, to the bottom. The Eighth adept primly rolled up his alabaster sleeves and skirted the corpses, considering, licking two fingers as though to turn a page.

“I will try to find them,” he said, in his strangely deep and sorrowful voice.

Harrow said, “Don’t waste your time, Octakiseron. They’re gone.”

The Eighth necromancer inclined his head. The hair that fell over his shoulders was the funny, ashy white you got when a fire burned away; a headband kept it scraped back and away from his sharp and spiritual face.

“You will pardon me,” he said, “if I do not take advice on spirits from a bone magician.”

Harrow’s face slammed shut. “I pardon you,” she said.

“Good. Now we need not speak again,” said the Eighth necromancer. “Brother Colum.”

“Ready, Brother Silas,” said the scarred nephew immediately, and stepped in closer to the younger man, so that they were near enough to touch.

For a moment Gideon thought they were going to pray in front of the corpses. Or they might share an emotional moment. They were close enough to hug it out. But they did neither: the necromancer laid his hand on one of Colum’s brawny shoulders, having to stretch up somewhat, and closed his eyes.

For a moment nothing seemed to happen. Then Gideon saw the colour begin draining from Colum the Eighth as though he were covered with cheap dye: leaching as shadow leached hue in the nighttime, more horrible and more obvious in the unforgiving light of the electric torches and underfloor lamps. As he faded, the pale Silas incandesced. He glowed with an irradiated shimmer, iridescent white, and the air began to taste of lightning.

Someone close by said softly, “So it’s real,” just as someone else said, “What is he doing?”

It was Harrow who said, without rancour but also without joy: “Silas Octakiseron is a soul siphoner.”

By this point Colum the Eighth looked greyscale. He was still standing, but he was breathing more shallowly. By contrast the adept of the Eighth was putting on a light show, but not much else happened. The furrow deepened in the ghostly boy’s brow; he wrung his hands together, and his lips soundlessly began to move.

Gideon felt an internal tug, like a blanket being pulled off in the cold. It was a little bit like the sensation back in Response (which was, what, a thousand years ago?)—something deep inside her being prodded in its tender spot. But it also wasn’t, because it hurt like hell. It was like having a headache inside her teeth. The torchlights gave an asthmatic gurk and dimmed as though their batteries were being sucked dry, and when Gideon looked at her hands through bleary eyes they were deepening grey.

There was something pale blue sparking within the corpse of Abigail Pent, and suddenly and horribly the body shuddered. The world grew heavy and black around the edges, and Gideon felt cold all the way to her marrow. Someone screamed, and she recognised the voice as Dulcinea’s.

Abigail’s body shivered once. It shivered again. Silas opened his mouth and let out a guttural sound like a man who had eaten hot iron—one of the torches exploded—and out of the corners of her eyes Gideon saw him stretch out his arms. Gideon moved thickly through the grey-lipped crowd, watching Dulcinea collapse in what felt like slow motion, reaching out to the rumpled figure in the big dressing gown. Gideon slung Dulcinea’s arm over her shoulder and pulled her limp body upright, teeth chattering so hard she was worried about biting the insides of her cheeks. Protesilaus stalked forward, and he did not even bother to draw his sword: he simply punched Silas in the face.

Dulcinea wailed out from Gideon’s arms, weak and shrill: “Pro!” but it was too late. The Eighth necromancer went down like a sack of dropped potatoes and twitched on the floor. Now Protesilaus drew his rapier with an oily click of metal on scabbard: the lights crackled, then blazed back to life. The cold receded as though someone had closed a door against a howling wind. Strangely enough, Colum the Eighth did not even react. He just waited greyly next to Protesilaus like concrete, as Protesilaus stood over Colum’s floored uncle, sword held at the ready. They both looked like crude sculptures of men.

“Children!” cried a voice high from the hatch: “Children, stop!”

It was Teacher. He had descended the first few staples of the ladder, but this was all he could apparently bear. For the first time since Gideon had met him, he seemed real and old and frail: the serene and frankly impenetrable good cheer had been replaced by wild terror. His eyes were bulging, and he was huddled against the top of the ladder like it was a life raft. “You mustn’t!” he said. “He cannot empty anybody here, lest they become a nest for something else! Bring Abigail and Magnus the Fifth upstairs—do it quickly—”

Palamedes said, “Teacher, we should leave the bodies where they are if we want to know anything about what happened.”

“I dare not,” he called back. “And I daren’t come down there to remove them. You must bring them up. Use stretchers—or magic, Reverend Daughter, use skeletons—use anything. But you must get them out of there immediately, and come up with them.”

Maybe they were all still slothful from what had just gone on; maybe it was just the fact that it was the very small hours of the morning, and they were all very tired. The numb hesitation was palpable. It was a surprise when Camilla raised her voice to say: “Teacher. This is an active investigation. We’re safe down here.”

“You are absolutely wrong,” said Teacher. “Poor Abigail and Magnus are dead already. I cannot guarantee the safety of any of you who remain down there another minute.”

Chapter 18

“Bring them up” was easier said than done. It took nearly an hour to remove the bodies and to store them safely—there was a freezer room, and Palamedes reluctantly allowed them to be interred there—and to get the Houses up and crowded into the dining hall. Harrowhark’s skeletons could climb a ladder, even bearing wrapped corpses, but Colum the Eighth did not respond to pleas, threats, or physical stimulus. He was slightly less grey than previous, but he had to be hauled up bodily by Corona and Gideon. The moment he saw Colum, Teacher cried out in horror. Getting him up had been the hardest part. He now rested at the end of the table with a bowl of unidentifiable herbs burning under his chin, the smoke curling around his face and eyelashes. Currently everyone not stretched out on the floor of the dining room, lying in state in the freezer room, or huffing herbs was sitting around miserably clutching cups of tea. It was weirdly like their first day in Canaan House, in both suspicion and dullness, just with a bigger body count.

The only ones who seemed even vaguely compos mentis were the Second House. As it turned out, they had been the ones to call Teacher to the access hatch, and now they sat ramrod-straight and resplendent in their Second-styled Cohort uniforms, all scarlet and white. They both affected the same tightly braided hairstyle and abundance of gilt braid, and also the same serious-business expression. They were only distinct because one wore a rapier and the other quite a lot of pips at her collar. Teacher sat a little way away from them, his naked fear replaced by a deep and weary sadness. He sat close to the wheezy little heater taking off the morning chill, and the other two Canaan House priests shrouded themselves in their robes and refilled everybody’s cups.

The necromancer of the Second House cleared her throat.

“Teacher,” she said, in a cultured and resonant voice, “I would like to repeat that the best course of action is to inform the Cohort and bring military enforcers.”

“I will repeat, Captain Deuteros,” he said sadly, “that we cannot. It is the sacred rule.”

“You must understand that this is nonnegotiable. The Fifth House must be informed. They of all houses would want an investigation carried out immediately.”

“A murder investigation,” added Jeannemary, who had not touched her tea.

“Murder,” said Teacher, “oh, murder … we cannot assume that it was murder.”

Whispers began to cross the room. The Second cavalier said, rather more heatedly: “Are you suggesting that it was an accident?”

“I would be very surprised if it were, Lieutenant Dyas,” said Teacher. “Not Magnus and Lady Abigail. A seasoned necromancer and her cavalier, and sensible adults in their own right. I do not think it was an unhappy misadventure. I think they were killed.”

“Then—”

“Murder is done by the living,” said Teacher. “They were found entering the facility … I cannot begin to explain how grave a threat that is to anyone’s safety. I will not bother trying to keep it secret now. I told each of you who asked my permission to enter that place that it would mean your death. I did not say that figuratively. I told all of you that you were walking into the most dangerous place in the system of Dominicus, and I meant it. There are monsters here.”

Naberius said, “So why aren’t they coming for you? You’ve lived here years.”

Teacher said, “Years and years … and years. They are not coming for the guardians of Canaan House … yet. But I live in fear of the day they do. I believe Abigail and Magnus have run tragically afoul of them … I cannot countenance the idea that whatever grief they came to was orchestrated by someone in this room.”

Silence rippled outward to the four corners of the dining hall. Captain Deuteros broke it by saying repressively: “This is still a case for the proper authorities.”

Teacher said, “I cannot and will not call them. Lines of communication off-planet are forbidden here. For pity’s sake, Captain Deuteros, where is the motive? Who would harm the Fifth House? A good man and a good woman.”

The necromancer steepled her gloved fingers together and leaned forward. “I cannot speculate about motive or intent,” she said. “I hardly want it to be murder. But if you don’t comply with me, I have reasonable grounds to stop this trial. I will take command if you cannot.”

Someone thumped their tea mug down on the table, hard. It was Coronabeth, who even with her violet eyes full of sleep and her hair in burnished tangles around her face would still have caused tourist traffic to wherever she was standing. “Don’t be silly, Judith,” she said impatiently. “You don’t have that kind of authority.”

“Where no other authority exists to ensure the safety of a House, the Cohort is authorized to take command—”

“In a combat zone—”

“The Fifth are dead. I take authority for the Fifth. I say we need military intervention, and we need it right now. As the highest-ranked Cohort officer present, that decision falls to me.”

“A Cohort captain,” said Naberius, “don’t rank higher than a Third official.”

“I’m very much afraid that it does, Tern.”

“Prince Tern, if you please,” said Ianthe.

“Judith!” said Corona, more coaxingly, before an interhousal war kicked off. “This is us. You’ve come to all our birthday parties. Teacher’s right. Who would have killed Magnus and Abigail? Neither of them would have ever hurt a fly. Isn’t it possible that the hatch was left up, and something happened, and it’s such a long fall … Who was in there? Ninth, wasn’t it you?”

With marked frostiness, Harrow said: “We locked the hatch before continuing in.”

“You’re sure?”

Gideon, who had been the one to turn the key, was oddly grateful that Harrowhark did not even bother looking in her direction: she simply said, “I am certain.”

“How many people had these hatch keys other than the Ninth?” said Corona. “We had no idea the basement was even there.”

“The Sixth,” said Camilla and Palamedes as one.

Dulcinea said, small and tired: “Pro and I have one,” which made Gideon’s eyebrows raise right to her hairline.

“Colum has the copy given to the Eighth House,” said a voice from the floor.

It was Silas. He had sat up and was now mopping his face with a very white piece of cambric. His eye was red and shiny and swollen, and he dabbed carefully around it: Corona gallantly offered him her arm but he refused, pulling himself to stand heavily against a chair. “He has the key,” he said. “And I told Lady Pent of the existence of a facility beneath this floor, after the party.”

It was Harrow who said, “Why?”

“Because she asked,” he said, “and because I do not lie. And because I’m not interested in the Ninth House ascending to Lyctorhood alone … simply because they guessed a childish riddle.”

Harrowhark closed herself up like a folding chair, and her voice was like cinders: “Your hatred of us is superstition, Octakiseron.”

“Is it?” He folded the dirty handkerchief neatly and tucked it inside his chain mail. “Who was in the facility when Lady Pent and Sir Magnus died? Who was conveniently first on the scene to discover them—”

“You have one black eye already, courtesy of the Seventh House,” said Harrow, “and you seem to yearn for symmetry.”

“That was the Seventh, then?” The Eighth necromancer did not seem particularly displeased. “I see … it happened so swiftly I wasn’t sure.”

Gideon had thought Dulcinea asleep again, she was so limp and prone in Protesilaus’s arms, but she opened her big blue eyes and struggled to raise her head. “Master Silas,” she said thickly, “the Seventh House begs forgiveness of the merciful Eighth. Please grant it … this would be such an embarrassment to the House. Pro reacts quicker than I do. You wouldn’t duel me, would you?”

“Never,” said Silas gently. “That would be heartless. Colum will face the cavalier of the Seventh.”

Gideon felt her fingers clench into fists as Dulcinea took a deep, wobbly breath and said quietly, “Oh, but please—”

“Stop this now,” said Coronabeth. “This is madness.”

The laughing golden butterfly was gone. She stood now, hands on her hips, chilly amber. Her voice rang out like a trumpet. “We must make a pact,” she said. “We can’t leave this room suspecting one another. We’re meant to be working for a higher power. We knew it was dangerous—we agreed—and I can’t believe that any of us here would have meant harm to Magnus and Abigail. We need to trust one another, or this’ll devolve into madness.”

The Captain of the Second rose too. Her intensely dark eyes settled on each of them in turn before ending on Teacher.

“Then what must we logically assume?” she said. “That, as Teacher has said, there is a malevolent or obstructive force within the First House? Vengeful ghosts, or monsters born of some necromantic act?”

The awful necromantic teen rose to stand now. His eyes were raw and red, and his fists were dirty with blood. The numb agony on his face was like an animal in pain: when he spoke one expected only tortured baying.

But he said, “If there is a monster—it’s got to be hunted. If there’s a haunting—it’s got to be banished. Whatever was strong enough to kill Abigail and Magnus, it can’t be left alone.” Then, more wildly: “I can’t go home until whatever killed Abigail and Magnus is dead.”

Jeannemary said instantly, “I’m with Isaac. I say we hunt it.”

“No,” said Palamedes.

He had taken off his glasses to polish them, huffing once on one lens, then on the other. Everyone’s eyes were on him by the time he put his spectacles back on his beaky nose. Camilla perched on the table behind him like a grey-coated crow, haunting his shoulder. “No,” he repeated. “We’ll proceed scientifically. Nothing can be assumed until we have a better sense of how they both died. With everyone’s permission, I’ll examine the bodies; anyone who wants to join me can do so. Once we ascertain the facts we may plan a course of action, but until then, no conclusions. No monsters, no murder, no accidents.”

Coronabeth said warmly, “Hear, hear.”

“Obliged, Princess. We now all know about the existence of the facility,” he continued. “I imagine this will lead to it being explored freely. We should all keep an eye out for—unusual danger, and agree that information is the best gift we can give one another.”

Harrowhark said, “I have no intention of collaborating.”

“You won’t be forced to, Reverend Daughter. But it’s not orthogonal to the Lyctor experiment to warn your colleagues if you think there’s something out of place,” said Palamedes, leaning his chair back. “Exempli gratia, a horde of vengeful ghosts.”

“There is one final matter of keys,” said Teacher.

Everyone, now probably getting neck strain, looked back to him. They waited for a punchline, but there was none. Then they followed his line of sight: he was looking straight at Princess Ianthe in her clinging nightgown, pallid hair falling in two smooth braids down to bloodless shoulders, staring back with eyes like violets on dialysis.

“I am also in possession of one,” she said, unruffled.

“What?”

She did not lose composure. “Don’t act the jilted lover, Babs.”

“You never said a damned word!”

“You didn’t keep your eyes on your key ring.”

“Ianthe Tridentarius,” said her cavalier, “you are—you’re—Corona, why didn’t you tell me?”

Corona stopped him, one slender hand on his shoulder. She was looking at her twin, who calmly avoided her gaze. “Because I didn’t know,” she said lightly, chair scraping as she rose to stand. “I didn’t know either, Babs. I’m going to bed now—I think—I’m somewhat overwrought.”

Courteously, Palamedes stood too: “Cam and I want a look at the bodies,” he said. “If Captain Deuteros and Lieutenant Dyas would like to accompany us—as I assume you’re going to?”

“Yes,” said Judith. “I’d like a closer look.”

“Cam, you go on ahead,” Palamedes said. “I want a quick word.”

The scene broke up after that. The salt-and-pepper priest was talking to Isaac very quietly, and Isaac’s shoulders were shaking as he tucked himself into his seat. The Third left with dislocated proximity and the clenched jaws of three people on their way to have an enormous tiff. Dulcinea was whispering quietly to her cavalier, and they surprised Gideon by following the mob to the freezer. Maybe not that surprising. Dulcinea Septimus could out-morbid the Ninth.

The word Palamedes wanted turned out to be with Harrow; he plucked her sleeve and beckoned her off to the corner of the room, and she went without a cavil. Gideon was left alone, watching Teacher join the whey-faced Silas as he knelt before his cavalier. His lips moved in silent prayer. Colum was now greyish all over, and his eyes had the thousand-yard stare of a man in a stupor. Silas did not appear to be worried. He had clasped one of those big hard-bitten hands between his own and murmured to him, and Gideon caught some of the words: I bid you return.

Teacher was saying: “He’ll have a hard fight to come back, Master Octakiseron … harder than he may have anticipated. Is he used to the journey?”

“Brother Colum has fought harder and in colder climes,” said Silas calmly. “He has come back to me through stranger ghosts. He has never once let his body become corrupted, and he never shall.” Then he went back to the mantra: I bid … I bid …

For some reason that image stayed with her: the mayonnaise magician and his thickset nephew, older than him by far, staring out of empty eyes as Teacher watched with the air of a man with front-row seats to back-alley dental surgery. Gideon watched too, fascinated by an act she couldn’t understand, when a hand closed around her wrist.

It was Jeannemary Chatur, her eyes red-rimmed, sticky and stained, her hair in a frizz. There was no sign of pluck in her now, except maybe a wild hardness around the eyes as she looked at Gideon.

“Ninth,” she said hoarsely, “if you know anything, tell me now. If you—if you know anything, I’ve got to— They meant too much to us, so if you know—”

Gideon felt very sad. She put her hand on the bad teen’s shoulder, and Jeannemary flinched away. She shook her head no, and when Jeannemary’s big eyes—lashes clumped with last night’s makeup, irises an inky brown—filled with tears she tried to furiously blink away, Gideon stopped being able to even slightly deal. She put her hand on top of the other cavalier’s head, which was damp and curly like a sad puppy’s, and said: “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“I believe you,” said Jeannemary thickly, not seeming to register the fact that the Ninth had spoken. “Magnus likes you … liked … He wouldn’t have let anything happen to Abigail,” she added all in a rush. “She hated heights. She never would’ve risked falling. And she was a spirit magician. If it was ghosts, why couldn’t she—”

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

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

“You okay?”

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

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

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

Chapter 19

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

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

“Look,” said Harrowhark.

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

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

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

“You mean—X-203?”

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

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

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

“Unlock it,” she said.

“Don’t you want the honours?”

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

“That’s what she said,” said Gideon, and she took the ring from Harrow’s gloved fingers. She did not put her own hood up, but she slipped her glasses back on to her nose: now that she’d adjusted she really only needed them for the midday light, but they’d become something of a comfort. She drummed her fingers on the bevelled frame of lightless stone, and then she slid the red Response key into the lock.

It fit. The lock clicked open as easily as if it had been kept oiled for the last ten thousand years. Without the slightest creak or groan of hinge, the door swung inward at a push. Gideon slipped her rapier from her belt and her knuckle-knives onto her left hand, and she walked into the darkness.

It was dark. She did not dare go farther into the quiet and shadowy stillness, thrown into deeper quiet by her necromancer slipping in behind and pushing the massive door shut. They stood in the room and smelled the age of it: the dust, the chemicals hanging in the air. You could almost smell the darkness.

Harrow’s voice, almost a whisper: “A light, Nav.”

“What?”

“You did bring a torch.”

“This is a service I was unaware I was meant to provide,” said Gideon.

There followed soft cursing. She felt Harrow turn back toward the door, measure its width with her hands, grope blindly along the doorframe in order to find a lantern: she found something, and from the wall there came a loud click. Electric lights blared to life overhead, throwing the dark and lonely room into knife-sharp relief.

Gideon didn’t know what she’d expected. She stood, rooted to the ground, and so did Harrow; and for long moments they just got their fill of looking.

It was a study, left crystallised by someone who had one day stood up and never come back to the place where they must have worked for years. It was a long, square, spacious apartment, windowless, but beautifully lit. A long rail of electric lamps threw spotlights on important points in the room’s geography. One end of the room was occupied by a laboratory: stained, scoured-laminate benches, and shelves and shelves of notes in leather-bound books or ring binders. The big metal sink and the scrubbing-up brush looked strange against the walls, which were inlaid with bones. A pot was still full of fat chalk sticks to draw diagrams, and the flasks of preserved blood were still full and very red. Tacked up over one bench were thick sheaves of flimsy, dark with graphs and models: one of the flimsies was a rough drawing of a familiar chimera, many armed, armour ribbed, squat skulled. There were jewelled tools. There were epoxy spatulas that had been melted in some experiment. There was a blown-up picture on the wall—a lithograph, or a polymer photograph—of a group of people clustered around a table. Their faces had all been scribbled out with a thick black marker pen.

Harrowhark had already drifted to the laboratory. She hadn’t drawn breath yet. She was going to have to, Gideon thought distantly, or she’d be out on the floor. The room had been split into three main parts—there was the laboratory, and then a broad space where the furniture had been moved out of the way for an empty stone floor. The wall had a sword rack, and the sword rack still held two lonely rapiers, gleaming as though they’d been filed and whetted an hour before. A training floor. Leant up against the wall was a hideous collection of oblong metal shapes and stocks. It took Gideon a long time to realise that she was looking at something goddamn ancient: it was a blowback carbine gun. She’d only ever seen pictures.

The third part of the room was a raised platform with polished wooden stairs. The wood here was not so degraded as in the rest of Canaan House—this lightless, shut-off room must have preserved it, or otherwise somehow been stopped in time. The hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck had risen when the lights came on, and they hadn’t gone back down, as if her intrusion might well tempt time back to claim its grave goods. She found herself climbing the stairs and staring at a sweetly banal and domestic sight: a bookcase, a low table, a squashy armchair, and two beds. On the table was a teapot and two cups that lay abandoned forever.

The two beds were close to each other—if you lay in one, you could stretch out and touch whoever was sleeping in the other, provided you had a long arm—separated only by a nightstand. Much like the grotesque cradle tacked to the end of the enormous four-poster back in Harrow’s bedroom, the two people here would have been in proximity to wake if the other one sneezed. On the nightstand was another lamp, and debris that people had never cleared up. A very old watch. An empty glass. A filament-fine silver bracelet with no clasp. A shallow, greasy glass dish full of grey stuff like ashes. Gideon could tell they weren’t cremains, and when she touched them a strong scent clung to her fingers. The pillows had been smoothed out on the carved wooden cots, and the beds had been made. Someone had left a pair of extremely worn slippers beneath one, a crumpled piece of flimsy next to the nightstand. Gideon picked up the latter.

Harrow let out a cry of triumph. Gideon turned away from the beds and put the flimsy in her pocket, then stretched over the stair railing to see what her necromancer was delighted about. She was by the workbench staring at two great stone tablets that had been fused to the stone, shot through with pale green filaments glowing beneath Harrow’s touch. The writing was small and cramped and the diagrams totally impenetrable in their obtuseness. Harrow was already pulling out her journal.

“It’s the theorem from the trial room,” she called out. “It’s the completed methodology for transference—for the utilisation of a living soul. It’s the whole experiment.”

“Is this an exciting necromancer thing?”

“Yes, Nav, it is an exciting necromancer thing. I need to copy this down, I can’t lift the stone. Whoever did this was a genius—”

Gideon let Harrow have at it, and opened the first drawer of the nightstand. Sitting there, offensively ordinary, were three pencils, a finger bone, a coarse sharpening stone—bones and whetstones were beginning to feed her growing suspicion about who’d lived there—and an old, worn-down seal. She stared at the seal awhile: it was the crimson-and-white emblem of the Second House.

She sat down carefully on one of the beds, and the sprung mattress squeaked. She took the piece of crumpled-up flimsy out of her pocket and began trying to uncrumple it. It was part of a note that had—at some long-ago point—been ripped up, and this was just one scrunched corner.

“I’m done,” said Harrow, from below. “Tell me anything of import.”

Gideon stuffed the piece of flimsy back into her pocket and had a quick scan through the other drawers. A lost sock. A scalpel. Oilcloth. A tin with nothing in it but the vague waft of peppermints. This was all the stuff you’d find in anyone’s bedside drawers—though then again, not quite anyone’s; a particular pair of people. She descended the stairs and tipped her dark glasses high on her head. “A cav and their necro lived here,” she said.

“I drew the same conclusion,” said Harrowhark, shuffling her papers. She put one of her diagrams close to the one inscribed on the stone tablet to compare them for accuracy. “Here. Come and take a look at this.”

Harrow’s cramped handwriting was just as bad as the etching on the tablet. At the very end of a long list of exquisitely boring notes was a line on its own:

The Ninth necromancer said, “Now there’s a helpful postscript if ever I saw one.”

“Yeah, and the fact that there are two beds upstairs and a bunch of swords also help,” said Gideon. “They were living in each other’s pockets. They studied weird Lyctoral theorems. There’s a seriously old Second House sign in one of the top drawers.”

They both took the time to roam around the room. Harrow flicked through notebooks and narrowed her eyes over the contents. Gideon picked up another book and squinted at the faded message on the flyleaf, written in black ink forever ago and frozen in time:

They combed over the detritus of two strangers’ lives; inside a forgotten tin Gideon found two expired toothbrushes. They were electronic ones, with revolving heads and push buttons.

“These aren’t just seriously old, they’re super unbelievably seriously old,” she said.

“Yes,” said Harrow. “Sextus could tell us how old, but I’ve no desire to ask him. Something has been done to preserve this room. It has not wasted away into a natural death. We’re probably the first people to step inside since its previous occupants left.”

It didn’t seem to be a proper bedroom; more like a place to stay overnight while doing something else. More lab than living space. Gideon ended up staring at the photo-lithograph, elbows pressed into the countertop, studying faceless bodies gathered primly in their chairs. A rainbow of arms and robes; low-resolution hands clasping low-resolution knees. The hands without faces seemed solemnly posed, almost anxious.

“All I know,” said Harrowhark eventually, “is that they created the theorem, and were responsible for the experiment downstairs. I wish I knew more. I yearn to know more … But I don’t. I’m going to study this spell, Griddle, and learn it, and then I will be one step closer to knowing. We cannot suffer the same fate as Quinn and Pent.”

Gideon was amazed at how badly it hurt, all of a sudden.

“He’s really dead,” she said aloud.

“Yes. I will be more upset if he suddenly changes condition,” said Harrow. “He was a stranger, Nav. Why does it affect you so much?”

“He was nice to me,” she found herself saying. She was very tired. She tried to wake herself up by stretching, dropping down to touch her toes and feeling the blood rush into her head. “Because he was a stranger, I think … He didn’t have to bother with me, to make time for me or remember my name, but he did. Hell, you treat me more like a stranger than Magnus Quinn did and I’ve known you all my life. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Harrow’s hand, peeled and naked without a glove and stained with ink all the way up to her cuticles, appeared in front of her. Gideon found her shoulder drawn back so that she had to look Harrow square in the face. The necromancer regarded her with a strangely fierce eye: mouth a worn-down line of indecision, forehead puckered as though she was thinking her entire face into a wrinkle. There was still blood flaking out of her eyebrows, which was gross.

“I must no longer accept,” she said slowly, “being a stranger to you.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Gideon, sudden sweat prickling the back of her neck, “yes you can, you once told me to dig myself an ice grave. Stop before this gets weird.”

“Quinn’s death proves that this is not a game,” said Harrow, moistening her ashy lips with her tongue. “The trials are meant to winnow out the wheat from the chaff, and it is going to be exceptionally dangerous. We are all the sons and daughters that the House of the Ninth possesses, Nav.”

“I’m not anybody’s son or daughter,” said Gideon firmly, now in no small panic.

“I need you to trust me.”

“I need you to be trustworthy.”

In the thick dimness of the room she watched the black-garbed girl in front of her struggle around a thing that had settled over them like a net; a thing that had fused between them like a badly broken limb, shattered numerous times, healing gnarled and awful. Gideon recognised these strictures all of a sudden: the rope tying her to Harrow and back to the bars of the House of the Ninth. They stared at each other with shared panic.

Harrow said finally, “In what way can I earn your trust?”

“Let us sleep for eight bloody hours and never talk like this again,” said Gideon, and her necromancer relaxed, very minutely. Her eyes were so lightlessly black that it was hard to see the pupil; her mouth was thin and waspish and unsure. She remembered when Harrow was nine, when she had walked in at just the wrong moment. She remembered that nine-year-old Harrow’s mouth falling slightly slack. There was something curious about Harrow’s face when it was not fixed into the bland church mask of the Reverend Daughter: something thin and desperate and quite young about it, something not totally removed from Jeannemary’s desperation.

“Eight and a half,” Harrow said, “if we start again immediately in the morning.”

“Done.”

“Done.”

Several hours later, Gideon turned over in her bed, chilled by the realisation that Harrow had not promised to never talk like that again. Too much of this shit, and they’d end up friends.

As they walked back, the halls were as lonely as they ever had been—emptier, somehow, as though with the Fifth’s untimely end Canaan House had managed to expunge what little self it had. There was only one exception. A quiet pattering of steps drew both of them pressed flat into an alcove, staring out at the thin grey pre-morning light: on very nearly silent feet, the Fourth teens passed before them, rapidly crossing an empty and dilapidated hall on some mission. Jeannemary led with her rapier drawn, and her necromancer stumbled behind, head bent, blue hood over his hair, looking like a penitent. Another second and they were gone. Gideon found herself thinking: poor little buggers.

In her nest of blankets, the light comingb in yellow and unwelcome from the cracks around the curtains, Gideon was too tired to take off her clothes and almost too tired to sleep. She kept rustling when she turned over, trying to find a comfortable spot, and then she remembered the crinkled note in her pocket. In the dim light she smoothed it open and stared at it, blearily, pillow still sticky with bits of the cold cream she used to take off her paint.

Chapter 20

An inauspicious nine hours later Gideon and Harrow were making their way down the long, cold staples of the facility ladder, the air thick with last night’s blood. Having been woken up just thirty-five minutes previous (Harrow always lied), Gideon climbed down into the dark with the distinct sensation that she was still asleep: somewhere in a dream, a dream she’d had a long time ago and suddenly remembered. She had mechanically downed the mug of cooling tea and the bowl of congealing porridge that Harrow had brought her that morning—Harrow arranging her breakfast was a concept so disagreeable there was no space left in her head for it—and now it sat leadenly in her stomach. The crumpled note lay hastily interred at the very bottom of Gideon’s pocket.

Everything felt dark and strange and incorrect, right down to the still-drying paint her adept had applied to her face. Gideon had not even murmured dissent at this incursion, just got on with spooning porridge into her mouth. It was testament to Harrow being Harrow that none of Gideon’s wooden submission had even perturbed her, seemingly.

“What the hell are we meant to be doing down there?” she’d asked plaintively, as Harrow led the way back to the dim lobby and the stairs to the hatch. Her voice sounded odd in her mouth. “More bone men?”

“I doubt it,” Harrow had said briskly, without looking around. “That was one challenge. There’d be no point doing the same thing for the next one.”

“The next one?”

“For God’s sake pay attention, Griddle. The hatch key is the first step—the warm-up challenge, if you like.”

“That wasn’t a challenge,” Gideon had objected, stepping over a taut strand of yellow tape. “You just asked Teacher for it.”

“Yes, and as we discovered, some of our so-called rivals hadn’t even cleared that pitiable hurdle. The hatch key grants access to the facility complex, which contains a number of testing rooms set up to replicate particular necromantic experiments. Anyone who can accurately carry out an experiment to its intended conclusion—as we did by dismantling that construct—gets the reward.”

“A key.”

“One assumes.”

“And then the key—what, lets you into a room where you can rub your face all over ye olde necro’s olde notebooks?”

Harrow still didn’t turn round, but Gideon knew innately that her eyes were rolling. “The Second House study contained a full and perfect explanation of the theorem which had been used to articulate the construct. Having studied that theorem, any halfway competent necromancer would be able to reproduce its effects. I now possess the competencies required to ride another living soul. I’m perhaps even more interested in what I’ve learned from the theorem behind the construct.”

“Making big shitty bone hunks.” Gideon preferred not to think about riding another living soul.

At that, Harrow had stopped—almost at the head of the staircase—and finally looked around. “Nav,” she’d said. “I could already make bone hunks. But now I can make them regenerate.”

The outcome literally nobody wanted.

Now here they both were at the bottom of the ladder, staring at the angular outlines on the floor. Someone had immortalised Abigail and Magnus’s descent with tape, carefully laid: it looked particularly weird given that none of the blood had been cleaned up. Accusatory splotches of it lay skeletonised on the floor.

“Sextus,” said Harrow, having dropped lightly down next to her. “The Sixth is always too enamoured of the body.”

Gideon said nothing. Harrow continued: “Investigating the scene of death is barely useful, compared to discovering the motives of the living. Compared to why, the question of who killed Pent and Quinn is almost an aside.”

“‘Who,’” said a voice, “or ‘what.’ I love the idea of what.”

Limned by the greenish light from the grille, Dulcinea Septimus limped into view. In the sulphide lamps she looked transparent, and she was leaning heavily on crutches; her heavy curls had been tied up on top of her head, revealing a neck that looked ready to snap in a strong wind. Behind her hulked Protesilaus, who in the darkness looked like a mannequin with abs.

Next to Gideon, Harrowhark stiffened, very slightly.

“Ghosts and monsters,” the lady of the Seventh continued enthusiastically, “remnants and the dead … the disturbed dead. The idea that someone is still here and furious … or that something has been lurking here forever. Maybe it’s that I find the idea comforting … that thousands of years after you’re gone … is when you really live. That your echo is louder than your voice.”

Harrow said, “A spirit comes at invitation. It cannot sustain itself.”

“But what if one could?” cried Dulcinea. “That’s so much more interesting than plain murder.”

This time neither of the Ninth answered. Dulcinea moved forward, pressing her forearms into the clutches of her two metal poles, and blinked soft brown lashes at them. Gideon noticed that she looked tired, still: that the veins at her temples stood out, that her hands shook just a little bit on each crutch. She was wrapped up in a robe of some pale blue stuff, embroidered with flowers, but still shivered with the chill.

“Greetings, Ninth! You’re brave to come down here after what Teacher said.”

“One might,” said Harrow, “say the same of you.”

“Oh, by all rights I ought to have been the first one to die,” said Dulcinea, giggling a bit fretfully, “but once one accepts that, one stops worrying quite so much. It would be so predictable to bump me off. Hullo, Gideon! It’s nice to see you again. I mean, I saw you last night … but you know what I mean. Oh no, now I sound like a dope. Still vowing silence?”

Before that line of conversation could be pursued, the dark-hooded necromancer of the Ninth said in her most sepulchrous and forbidding tones: “We have business down here, Lady Septimus. Excuse us.”

“But that’s just what I came to talk to you about,” said the other necromancer earnestly. “I think we four should team up.”

Gideon could not hide an explosive snort of disbelief. There were maybe less likely targets for Harrow to team up with—Silas Octakiseron, maybe, or Teacher, or the dead body of Magnus Quinn. In fact, Teacher would be a far better candidate. But Dulcinea’s dreamy blue eyes were turned on Harrow, and she said:

“I’ve already completed one of the theorem labs. I think I’m on the path to cracking another. If we both worked together—why, then, there’s the key in half the time with just a few hours’ work.”

“This is not intended to be collaborative.”

Dulcinea said, smilingly: “Why does everybody think that?”

The women sized each other up. Dulcinea, leaning into her metal braces, looked like a brittle doll: Harrow, hooded and swathed in miles of black fabric, like a wraith. When she pulled away the hood the older necromancer did not flinch, even though it was a deliberately chilling sight; the dark-cropped head, the stark paint on the face, the bone studs punched halfway up each ear. Harrow said coolly: “What would be in it for the Ninth House?”

“All my knowledge of the theory and the demonstration—and first use of the key,” said Dulcinea, eagerly.

“Generous. What would be in it for the Seventh?”

“The key once you’re done. You see, I don’t think I can physically do this one.”

“Stupidity, then, not generosity. You just told me you can’t complete it. Nothing would stop my House from completing it without you.”

“It took me a long time to work out the theoretical parameters,” said Dulcinea, “so I wish you the best of luck. Because even though I’m dying—there’s nothing wrong with my brain.”

Harrow pulled the hood back over her head, returning her to a wraith, a piece of smoke. She swept past the frail necromancer of the Seventh, who followed her with the wistful, somewhat hungry expression that Dulcinea reserved for the shadowy nuns of the Ninth—for the black robes whispering on the metal floor, the green light reflecting off dark fabric.

Harrowhark turned around and said, curtly: “Well? Are we doing this or not, Lady Septimus?”

“Oh, thank you—thank you,” Dulcinea said.

Gideon was stupefied. Too many shocks in twenty-four hours shut down her thought processes. As Dulcinea stumped along the corridor, crutches clanging unharmoniously on the grille, and as Protesilaus hovered behind her a half step away as though desperate to just scoop her up and carry her, Gideon strode to catch up with her necromancer.

Only to find her swearing under her breath. Harrow whispered a lot of fuck-words before muttering: “Thank God we got to her first.”

“I never thought you’d actually help out,” said Gideon, grudgingly admiring.

“Are you dim,” hissed Harrow. “If we didn’t agree, that bleeding heart Sextus would, and he’d have the key.”

“Oh, whoops, my bad,” said Gideon. “For a moment I thought you weren’t a huge bitch.”

They followed the mismatched pair from the Seventh House to the dusty facility hub, filled with its dusty panelling and its whiteboard gleaming sadly beneath big white lights. Dulcinea turned abruptly down the passageway marked LABORATORY SEVEN–TEN, a tunnel identical to the one they had taken to LABORATORY ONE–THREE. This time the creaks and ancient moans of the building seemed very loud, their footsteps a huge addition to the cacophony.

In the middle of a passage past the first laboratory rooms the grille on the floor had been staved in, cracked right down the middle to come to rest on hissing pipes. Protesilaus picked up his adept and stepped her over this pit as lightly as thistledown. Gideon jumped the gap, and turned back to see her necromancer hesitating on the edge, stranded. Why she did it Gideon didn’t know—Harrow could have built herself a bridge of bones any second—but she grasped a railing, leaned over, and proffered her hand. Why Harrow took it was an even bigger mystery. After being helped across, Harrow spent a few moments officiously dusting herself off and muttering inarticulately. Then she strode off to catch up with—of all people—Protesilaus, apparently with the aim of engaging him in conversation. Dulcinea, who had taken a moment to fit herself back into her crutches, slipped one arm into Gideon’s instead. She nodded at the broad span of her cavalier’s back.

“Colum the Eighth is fixing to fight him tomorrow,” she said to Gideon, beneath her breath. “I wish Master Silas had just fought me. Not much can hurt me anymore … it would be an interesting sensation, is what I mean.”

In response Gideon’s grip tightened around the languid arm tucked in her own. Dulcinea sighed, which sounded like air being pushed through whistly sponges. (Up this close her hair was very soft, Gideon noted dimly.) “I know. I was an idiot to let it happen. But the Eighth are so touchy in their own way … and Pro was unpardonably bad. They couldn’t let the insult pass. I just let my worst instincts get the better of me … and yelped.”

The curly-haired necromancer paused to cough, as though simply remembering how she’d yelped was enough to send her into spasms. Gideon instinctively put an arm around her shoulders, steadying her so that the crutches did not give way, and found herself looking down where the edge of Dulcinea’s shirt met her bulging collarbones. A fine chain around her neck supported a rather less delicate bundle hanging tucked into her camisole: Gideon only saw them for a second, but she knew immediately what they were. The key ring was snapped around the chain, and on the key ring were two keys: the saw-toothed hatch key, and a thick grey key with unpretentious teeth, the kind you’d lock a cabinet with.

She made herself look anywhere else. By now they had reached the very end of the corridor, which terminated in a single door marked LABORATORY EIGHT. Wriggling free of Gideon’s arm, Dulcinea opened it onto a little foyer alike in indignity to LABORATORY TWO. There were hooks on the walls here, and a bunch of old, crumpled boxes made of thin metal, the type you might carry files in; these were dented and empty. Someone had taken the time and effort to affix a beautiful swirl of human teeth above the door in a widening spiral of size: in the centre, the neat little shovels of incisors, tessellated with arched canines and ringed all around with the long, racine tusks of molars. In neat print the label on the door read: #14–8 DIVERSION. PROCEDURAL CHAMBER.

Beneath the neat print, a more elaborate hand had written in fainter ink: AVULSION!

“Here we are,” said Dulcinea. “Before we go through, please give me a little bit of your blood. I have warded the place up and down and I’m dreadfully afraid you won’t be able to go through the door without giving me a shock.”

This little nod to paranoia made Harrow’s shoulders relax minutely. Gideon looked to her, and Harrowhark nodded. In the dim and dusty foyer both offered up their hands to be pricked: the necromancer of the Seventh tilted her head, beautiful brown ringlets spilling over her shoulders, and took blood from their thumbs and their ring fingers. Then she pressed the blood into her palm and spat delicately with what Gideon noticed was pink-tinged spittle; she pressed her thin hand to the door.

“It’s not a hold ward,” Dulcinea explained, “but it’s not just physical. The ward will alert me if the immaterial try to pass … if they’ve instantiated, I mean, if they’ve crossed over. I don’t want to stop them,” she added, when Harrowhark started fidgeting with a bone fragment from her pocket. “I want to see whatever would try to sneak in on us … I want to know what it looks like. Let’s go.”

Rather than the neatly sectional space that had constituted Laboratory Two, with its Imaging and Response chambers and orderly empty shelves, Laboratory Eight opened up on an enormous grate. A lattice of thick black steel barred the first part of the room from the second, which—espied through the holes—proved to be a long space with a claustrophobic ceiling. It was like stepping into a pipe. The door led to a metal platform on struts and a short flight of stairs leading down into the space, barred by the huge grate. The Seventh necromancer went to the wall and flicked a switch, and with a low vibrating moan, the grate slowly began to tuck itself up into the ceiling.

With the removal of the grate, the room seemed enormously grey and empty. Only two things broke up the vast monotony of grey metal and white light: far off at the other end of the chamber was a metal plinth, boxed on top with what looked like clear glass or plex; and at the bottom of the stairs, about a metre away from its base, was a yellow-and-black-striped line that had been painted horizontally from wall to wall.

It was easily a hundred metres from the stripe to the plinth: a long way to walk. It looked simple enough, which was how Gideon knew it was probably a huge pain in the ass.

And yet her adept was already gliding down the stairs, standing before the yellow-and-black-emblazoned line as though at the edge of a fire. Dulcinea came after, leaning more heavily on her crutches as she swung herself down the stairs. Protesilaus came last.

“If you put your hand through,” she said, “you’ll see—there.” Harrow had bitten off a cry of pain. She had stuck her gloved fingers tentatively over the line, and now she was yanking off her glove to see the damage. Gideon had been the victim of this once before, through Palamedes Sextus, but it was still a disquieting sight. Harrow’s fingertips had shrivelled: the nails had split horribly, and the moisture looked as though it had been siphoned forcibly out, wrinkling the skin like paper. Her adept shook her hand in the air like you would with a burn; the wrinkles smoothed out, slowly, and the nails knit themselves back together.

“Hardly insurmountable,” said Harrow, having regained her composure.

“Very hopeful! What would you use?”

“A corporeal ward; skin-bound, tight focus.”

“Try it.”

Harrowhark flexed her fingers slowly. Gideon watched as she narrowed her eyes into obsidian slits, fringed thickly with blunt black lashes, and then extended her hand beyond the line again. There was a brief shower of blue sparks; Harrow snatched her hand back, amazed and furious. The fingers had withered into puckered twigs; her little nail had fallen off entirely. The edges of her sleeve had holed and frayed as though assaulted by moths. Gideon lunged out of a sheer desire to do something, but Harrow held her back with her healthy hand, staring fixedly at the hurt one as it slowly mended. Dulcinea watched with eager eyes: Protesilaus hulked next to the stairs.

Harrow shook a bracelet over her hurt hand, and bands of spongy osseous matter wrapped around her knuckles before forming thick plaques of bone. Gauntleted, she reached her hand out again—

“It won’t work,” said Dulcinea, dimpling.

—The gauntlet exploded into fragments of bone. Those that passed the yellow line fragmented further, and those bits degraded into dust and that into powder. The glove fell away in hunks, dwindling into fine sand before it even hit the ground, and Harrow yanked her hand back to stare at its sad puckered appearance a third time. She sat heavily on the stairs, and a bead of blood sweat trickled down one temple as, away from the barrier, her hand relaxed back into wholeness. Gideon longed to say: What the fuck?

“It’s two spells, overlaying each other,” said Dulcinea.

“You can’t have two spells with coterminous bounds. It’s impossible.”

“But true. They’re really coterminous—not just interwoven or spliced. It’s truly delicious work. The people who set it in place were geniuses.”

“Then one half is senescence—”

“And the other half is an entropy field,” said Dulcinea simply.

Gideon followed Harrow’s gaze over the long, dully gleaming field of corrugated metal, and the plinth shining at the end like a beacon. She saw Harrow suck in and bite the inside of one cheek, always a sign of furious thinking, flexing her fingers all the while as though still worried about their integrity. She took an old, ivory-coloured knuckle from her pocket, and she passed it to Gideon. “Throw,” she commanded.

Gideon obligingly threw. It was a good toss—the knuckle hit the field high and travelled for about half a metre before fragmenting into a rain of grey particles. Harrow’s gaze fixed on the crumbling shards: more tiny spikes and spurs of bone burst out of them and shrivelled, stillborn—another burst as Harrow curled her fist into a ball—then nothing. There was no more bone left.

Dulcinea breathed in admiration: “It’s awful quick.”

“Then,” said the adept of the House of the Ninth, “it is—and I don’t say this lightly—impossible. This is the most efficient death trap I’ve ever seen. The senescence decays anything before it can cross, and the entropy field—God knows how it’s holding—disperses any magical attempt to control the rate of decay. But why hasn’t the whole room collapsed? The walls should be so much dust.”

“The field and the flooring are a few micrometres apart—maybe the Ninth could make a very very weeny construct to go through that gap,” said the Seventh helpfully.

Harrow said, in bottom-of-the-ocean tones: “The Ninth House has not practised its art on—weeny—constructs.”

“Before you ask, it’s not a lateral puzzle either,” said Dulcinea. “You can’t go through the floor because it’s solid steel, and you can’t go through the ceiling because that’s also solid steel, and there’s no other access. And Palamedes Sextus estimated you could walk for probably three seconds before you died.”

Harrow got very focused very suddenly. “Sextus has seen this?”

“I asked him first,” said Dulcinea, “and when I told him the method, he said he’d never do it. I thought that was fascinating. I’d love to get to know him better.”

That got every particle of Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s attention. Dulcinea absently tossed her crutches to Protesilaus one by one, and he caught them out of the air as though he didn’t even have to think about it, which Gideon had to admit was cool. She sat down heavily on the stairs quite close to Harrow, and she said: “There is one way of doing it … and he wouldn’t. I’m sorry that I didn’t admit it … but you were my second choice. If black vestals won’t cross this line, I don’t think anyone will. And I can’t, because I physically can’t walk the whole way unassisted. If I faint or go funny halfway there it will mean my timely death.”

“And what is it,” said Harrow, in a voice that meant trouble, “that even Palamedes Sextus won’t do?”

“He won’t siphon,” said Dulcinea.

The shutters on Harrow’s face were pulled shut. “And nor will I,” she said.

“I don’t mean soul siphoning … not quite. When Master Octakiseron siphons his cavalier, he sends the soul elsewhere and then exploits the space it leaves behind. The power that rushes in to fill that space will keep refilling, for as long as either of them can survive. You wouldn’t have to send anyone anywhere. But the entropy field will drain your own reserves of thanergy as soon as you cross the line, so you need to draw on a power source on this side of the line, where the field can’t touch it. Do you understand?”

“Don’t patronize me, Lady Septimus. Of course I understand. Understanding a problem is nowhere near the same as implementing a solution. You should have asked Octakiseron and his human vein.”

“I probably would have,” said Dulcinea candidly, “if Pro hadn’t blacked his eye for him.”

“So technically,” said Harrow, acid as a battery, “we’re your third choice.”

“Well, Abigail Pent was a very talented spirit magician,” said Dulcinea, and relented when she saw Harrow’s expression. “I’m sorry! I’m teasing! No, I don’t think I would have asked the Eighth House, Reverend Daughter. There is something cold and white and inflexible about the Eighth. They could have done this with ease … maybe that’s why. And now Abigail Pent is dead. What am I to do? If you were to ask Sextus for me, do you think he’d do it? You seem to know him better than me.”

Harrow pushed herself up from the stairs. She had not seemed to notice that Dulcinea was leaning with her flowerlike face in her hands and drinking in her every movement, nor her expression of carefully studied innocence. Gideon was undergoing complicated feelings about not being the centre of the Seventh’s attention.

With a flourish of inky skirts, Harrowhark turned back to the stairs, staring through Dulcinea rather than at her. “Let’s say I agree with your theory,” she said. “To maintain enough thanergy for my wards inside the field, I’d need to fix a siphon point outside it. The most reasonable source of thanergy would be—you.”

“You can’t move thanergy from place to place like that,” said the Seventh, with very careful gentleness. “It has to be life to death.… or death to a sort of life, like the Second do. You’d have to take my thalergy.” She raised a wasted hand, and then let it flutter back to her face like a drifting paper plane. “Me? I could get you maybe—ten metres.”

“We adjourn,” said Harrowhark.

Harrow grasped Gideon hard around the arm and practically dragged her back up the stairs, out past the foyer and into the hallway. The noise of the door slamming behind them echoed around the corridor. Gideon found herself staring straight down the barrel of a loaded Harrowhark Nonagesimus, hood shaken back to reveal blazing black eyes in a painted white face.

“‘Avulsion’,” she said bitterly. “Of course. Nav, I’m going to bear down hard on your trust again.”

“Why are you so into this?” asked Gideon. “I know you’re not doing it for Dulcinea.”

“Let me make my business plain. I have no interest in Septimus’s woes,” Harrow said. “The Seventh House is not our friend. You’re making yourself an utter fool over Dulcinea. And I dislike her cavalier even more—” (“Massive slam on Protesilaus out of nowhere,” said Gideon.) “—but I would finish the challenge that sickened Sextus. Not for the high ground. But because he must learn to stare these things in the face. Do you know what I’d have to do?”

“Yeah,” said Gideon. “You’re going to suck out my life energy in order to get to the box on the other side.”

“A ham-fisted summary, but yes. How did you come to that conclusion?”

“Because it’s something Palamedes wouldn’t do,” she said, “and he’s a perfect moron over Camilla the Sixth. Okay.”

“What do you mean, ‘okay’—”

“I mean okay, I’ll do it,” said Gideon, although most of her brain was trying to give the part of her brain saying that a nipple-gripple. She chewed at a damp fleck of lip paint and took off her dark glasses, then popped them into her pocket. Now she could look Harrow dead in the eye. “I’d rather be your battery than feel you rummaging around in my head. You want my juice? I’ll give you juice.”

“Under no circumstances will I ever desire your juice,” said her necromancer, mouth getting more desperate. “Nav, you don’t know precisely what this is asking. I will be draining you dry in order to get to the other side. If at any point you throw me off—if you fail to submit—I die. I have never done this before. The process will be imperfect. You will be in … pain.”

“How do you know?”

Harrowhark said, “The Second House is famed for something similar, in reverse. The Second necromancer’s gift is to drain her dying foes to strengthen and augment her cavalier—”

“Rad—”

“It’s said they all die screaming,” said Harrow.

“Nice to know that the other Houses are also creeps,” said Gideon.

“Nav.”

She said, “I’ll still do it.”

Harrowhark chewed on the insides of her cheeks so hard that they looked close to staving in. She steepled her fingers together, squeezed her eyelids shut. When she spoke again, she made her voice quite calm and normal: “Why?”

“Probably because you asked.”

The heavy eyelids shuttered open, revealing baleful black irises. “That’s all it takes, Griddle? That’s all you demand? This is the complex mystery that lies in the pit of your psyche?”

Gideon slid her glasses back onto her face, obscuring feelings with tint. She found herself saying, “That’s all I ever demanded,” and to maintain face suffixed it with, “you asswipe.”

When they returned, Dulcinea was still sitting on the stairs and talking very quietly to her big cavalier, who had dropped to his haunches and was listening to her as silently as a microphone might listen to its speaker. When she saw that the Ninth House pair were back in the room, she staggered to rise—Protesilaus rose with her, silently offering her an arm of support—as Harrowhark said, “We’ll make our attempt.”

“You could practise, if you wanted,” said Dulcinea. “This won’t be easy for you.”

“I wonder why you make that assumption?” said Harrowhark.

Dulcinea dimpled. “I oughtn’t to, ought I?” she said. “Well, I can at least look after Gideon the Ninth while you’re over there.”

Gideon still saw no reason why she would need looking after. She stood in front of the stairs feeling like a useless appendage, hand gripping the hilt of her sword as though through sheer effort she could still use it. It seemed dumb to be a cavalier primary with no more use than a big battery. Her necromancer stood in front of her with much the same nonplussedness, hands working over each other as though wondering what to do with them. Then she swept one gloved hand over the side of Gideon’s neck, fingers resting on her pulse, and breathed an impatient breath.

It felt like nothing, at first. Besides Harrow touching her neck, which was a one-way trip to No Town. But it was just Harrow, touching her neck. She felt the blood pump through the artery. She felt herself swallow, and that swallow go down past the flat of Harrow’s hand. Maybe there was a little twinge—a shudder around the skull, a tactual twitch—but it was not the pressure and the jolt she remembered from Response and Imaging. Her adept took a step back, thoughtful, fingers curling in and out of her palms.

Then she turned and plunged through the barrier, and there was the jolt. It started in Gideon’s jaw: starbursts of pain rattling all the way from mandible to molars, electricity blasting over her scalp. She was Harrow, walking into no-man’s-land; she was Gideon, skull juddering behind the line. She sat down on the stairs very abruptly and did not pay attention to Dulcinea, reaching out for her before drawing back. It was like Harrow had tied a rope to all her pain receptors and was rappelling down a very long drop. She dimly watched her necromancer take step after painstakingly slow step across the empty metal expanse. There was a strange fogging around her. It took Gideon a moment to realise that the spell was eating through Harrow’s black robes of office, grinding them into dust around her body.

Another lightning flash went through her head. Her immediate instinct was to reject it, to push against awareness of Harrow—the sense of crushing pressure—the blood-transfusion feel of loss. Bright lights danced in her vision. She fell to the side and became disjointedly aware of Dulcinea, her head on Dulcinea’s thin thigh, the glasses slipping off her nose and rattling down onto the next step. She watched Harrow walk as though against a wind, blurred with particles of black—then she found herself snorting out big hideous fountains of blood. Her vision blurred again greyly, and her breath stuttered in her throat.

“No,” said Dulcinea. “Oh, no no no. Stay awake.”

Gideon couldn’t say anything but blearrghhh, mainly because blood was coming enthusiastically out of every hole in her face. Then all of a sudden it wasn’t—drying up, parching, leaving her with a waterless and arid tongue. The pain moved down to her heart and massaged it, electrifying her left arm and her left fingers, her left leg and her left toes. It was beyond pain. It was as though her insides were being sucked out through a gigantic straw. In her dimming vision she saw Harrowhark, walking away; no longer haloed by fragments but limned with a great yellow light that flickered and ate at her heels and her shoulders. Tears filled Gideon’s eyes unbidden, and then they gummed away. It all blurred grey and gold, then just grey.

“Oh, Gideon,” someone was saying, “you poor baby.”

The pain went down her right leg, and to her right toes, and then up her spine in zigzags. She dry-heaved. There was still that pressure—the pressure of Harrow—and the sense that if she pushed at it, if she just went and fucking knocked at it, it would go away. She was sorely tempted. Gideon was in the type of pain where consciousness disappeared and only the animal remained: bucking, yelping an idiot yelp, butting and bleating. Throw Harrowhark off, or slip into sleep, anything for release. If there had been any sense that she had to try to hold the connection, she would have lost it already; Gideon was just overwhelmed with how badly she wanted to shove against it, not huddle in a corner and scream. Was she screaming? Oh, shit, she was screaming.

“It’s all right,” someone was saying, over the noise. “You’re all right. Gideon, Gideon … you’re so young. Don’t give yourself away. Do you know, it’s not worth it … none of this is worth it, at all. It’s cruel. It’s so cruel. You are so young—and vital—and alive. Gideon, you’re all right … remember this, and don’t let anyone do it to you ever again. I’m sorry. We take so much. I’m so sorry.”

She would remember each word later, loud and clear.

Her forehead and face were being mopped. Touch did not register. She had lost control of her limbs, and each was flailing independently of the others, a roiling mass of nerves and panic. Her hair was being stroked—softly—and she did not want to be touched, but she was terribly afraid that if it stopped she would roll away into the field and dissolve just to get away. She held on to the sound of talking, so that she didn’t go mad.

“She’s all the way across,” said the voice. “She’s made it to the box … can you see the trick of it, Reverend Daughter? There is a trick, isn’t there? Gideon, I am going to put my hand over your mouth. She needs to think.” A hand went over her mouth, and Gideon bit it. “Ow, you feral. There she goes … perhaps they thought that if it was easy to obtain, someone could finish the demonstration some other way. It’s got to be foolproof, Gideon … I know that. I wish it were me. I wish I were up there. She’s got the box open … I wonder … yes, she’s worked it out! I was afraid she’d break the key…”

Clutched in the thin lap, Gideon could make no response that was not retching, gurgling or clamouring, silenced only by one rather skinny hand. “Good girl,” the voice was saying. “Oh, good girl. She’s got it, Gideon! And I’ve got you … Gideon of the golden eyes. I’m so sorry. This is all my fault … I’m so sorry. Stay with me,” the voice said more urgently, “stay with me.”

Gideon was suddenly aware that she was very cold. Something had changed. It was getting harder to suck in each breath. “She’s stumbled,” said the voice, detached, and Gideon heaved: not against the connection, but into it. The consequent pain was so intense that she was afraid she might wet herself, but the spike of cold faded. “She’s up … Gideon, Gideon, she’s up. Just a little bit more. Darling, you’re fine. Poor baby…”

Now Gideon was scared. Her body had the soft, drunken feeling you got just before fainting away, and it was very hard to stay conscious. Three seconds before you die, Palamedes had calculated. Anything less than Harrow crossing the threshold would make the struggle meaningless. The hand touched her face, her mouth, her eyebrows, smoothed her temples. As if knowing her thoughts by her face, the voice whispered: “Don’t. It’s very easy to die, Gideon the Ninth … you just let it happen. It’s so much worse when it doesn’t. But come on, chicken. Not right now, and not yet.”

It felt like all the pressure in her ears was popping loose. The voice said, musical and distant: “Gideon, you magnificent creature, keep going … feed it to her … she’s nearly made it. Gideon? Gideon, eyes open. Stay put. Stay with me.”

It took an infinity amount of seconds for her to stay put: for her to crack her eyes open. When her eyes opened Gideon was distantly worried to discover that she was blind. Colours swam in front of her vision in a melange of muted hues. Something black moved—it took her a moment to realise that it was moving very quickly: it was sprinting. Mildly startled, Gideon realised that she was starting to die. The colours wobbled before her face. The world revolved, then revolved the other way, aimlessly spinning. The air stopped coming. It would have been peaceful, only it sucked.

A new voice said: “Gideon?… Gideon!”

When she opened her eyes again there was a dazzling moment of clarity and sharpness. Harrow Nonagesimus was kneeling by her side, naked as the day she was spawned. Her hair was shorn a full inch shorter, the tips of her eyelashes were gone, and—most horrifyingly—she was absolutely nude of face paint. It was as though someone had taken a hot washcloth to her. Without paint she was a point-chinned, narrow-jawed, ferrety person, with high hard cheekbones and a tall forehead. There was a little divot in her top lip at the philtrum, which gave a bowlike aspect to her otherwise hard and fearless mouth. The world rocked, but it was mainly because Harrow was shaking her shoulders.

“Ha-ha,” said Gideon, “first time you didn’t call me Griddle,” and died.

Well, passed out. But it felt a hell of a lot like dying. Waking up had an air of resurrection, of having spent a winter as a dried-out shell and coming back to the world as a new green shoot. A new green shoot with problems. Her whole body felt like one traumatised nerve. She was lying within the cradle of thin and wasted arms; she looked up into the soft and weary face of Dulcinea, whose eyes were still the dusty blue of blueberries. When she saw that Gideon was awake, she sparkled to life.

“You big baby,” she said, and shamelessly kissed her on the forehead.

Harrowhark was sitting on the cold ground opposite. She was wrapped in chilly dignity and Gideon’s overcloak. Even the bone studs in her ears had disappeared, leaving little pockmarks where they ought to have been. “Lady Septimus,” she said, “unhand my cavalier. Nav, are you able to stand?”

“Oh, Reverend Daughter, no … give her a minute,” Dulcinea begged. “Pro, help her … don’t let her stand alone.”

“I do not want you or your cavalier to touch her,” said Harrow. Gideon wanted to say, Nonagesimus, quit the sacred-bat-black-vestal act, but found she couldn’t say anything. Her mouth felt like a dried-out sponge. Her adept rummaged around in her overcloak pockets and emerged with a few bone chips, which gave rise to the horrible idea that she had stashed them there. “Again … unhand her.”

Dulcinea ignored Harrow totally. “You were incredible,” she told Gideon, “astonishing.”

“Lady Septimus,” the other necromancer repeated, “I will not ask thrice.”

Gideon could not manage anything better than a very feeble thumbs-up in Dulcinea’s direction. Dulcinea unwound herself, which was a shame; she was warm, and the room was colder than ten witches’ tits. She reached out one last time to skim a hand over Gideon’s forehead. She whispered archly: “Nice hair.”

Harrow said, “Septimus.”

Dulcinea scooted herself back to the stairs. Gideon watched with dim interest as Harrow cracked her knuckles and sucked in a breath: nothing loath, her necromancer leant down and heaved one of Gideon’s arms around her skinny shoulders. Before Gideon could even think Oh shit, she had been pulled to stand as Harrowhark’s knees buckled beneath her. There was a bad moment when she wanted to puke, a good moment when she didn’t, and a bad moment again when she realised that she only hadn’t because she couldn’t.

The lady of the Seventh was saying, “Reverend Daughter … I’m terribly grateful for what you just did. I’m sorry for the cost.”

“Don’t. It was a business decision. You’ll get your key when I’m done.”

“But Gideon—”

“Is not your business.”

Dulcinea’s hands came to rest in her lap, and she tilted her head. “I see,” she said, smiling and somewhat crestfallen.

A barefoot Harrow grunted under her breath as she continued to try to haul Gideon up the short flight of stairs, panting for breath by the top step. Gideon could only watch, willing herself to come to full consciousness, astonished by the unreceptivity of her body. It was all she could do to not deliquesce out of Harrow’s grip. At the top of the stairs they stopped, and the Reverend Daughter looked back searchingly.

She said abruptly, “Why did you want to be a Lyctor?”

Gideon mumbled, “Harrow, you can’t just ask someone why they want to be a Lyctor,” but was roundly ignored.

The older woman was leaning against Protesilaus’s arm. She looked extraordinarily sad, even regretful; when she caught Gideon’s eye, a tiny smile tugged on the corners of her mouth, then drooped again. Eventually, she said: “I didn’t want to die.”

Walking back through the chilly foyer out to the corridor was bad: Gideon had to break away from Harrow and rest her cheek on the cold metal panelling next to the door. Her necromancer waited with uncharacteristic patience for her to regain some semblance of consciousness, and they stumbled onward—Gideon drunken, Harrow flinching her bare feet away from the grille.

“You didn’t have to be a dick,” she found herself saying, thickly. “I like her.”

“I don’t like her,” said Harrowhark. “I don’t like her cavalier.”

“I still don’t get why you’re all up in arms against what is a very basic man hulk. Did you get the key?”

The key appeared in Harrow’s other hand, shining silvery white, austerely plain with a single loop for a head and three simple teeth on the shaft. “Nice,” said Gideon. She rummaged in an inner pocket and removed the ring; the key slid next to the hatch key and red Response key with an untidy musical tinkle. Then she said: “Sorry your clothes melted.”

“Nav,” said Harrow, with the slow deliberation of someone close to screaming, “stay quiet. You’re not—you’re not … entirely well. I underestimated how long it would take me. The field was vicious, much more so than Septimus communicated. It had started to strip the moisture from my eyeballs before I refined on the fly.”

“By which point it had eaten your underwear,” said Gideon.

“Nav.”

“I just had a near-death experience,” she said, “let me have my little moment.”

How they got all the way up the ladder, Gideon later had no idea; it was with strange, dreamlike precision that Harrowhark bullied and bolstered her down the long, winding halls of Canaan House and back to the quarters that the Ninth House occupied, without a flicker of magic, Harrow wearing nothing but a big black overcloak. Every so often she wondered if she had, in fact, kicked the bucket and this was her afterlife: wandering empty halls with a half-naked, chastened Harrowhark Nonagesimus who had no recourse but to be gentle with her, handling her as though at any moment she would explode into wet confetti giblets.

She even let Harrow steer her toward the blankets that constituted her bed. Gideon was too exhausted to do anything but lie down and sneeze three times in quick succession, each sneeze a migraine gong through sinus and skull bone.

“Quit looking at me like that,” she eventually commanded Harrow, wiping bloody muck onto her hanky. “I’m alive.”

“You nearly weren’t,” said Harrow soberly, “and you’re not even aggrieved about it. Don’t price your life so cheaply, Griddle. I have absolutely no interest in you losing your sense of self-preservation. What are these theorems for?” she suddenly exploded. “What did we gain from that? What was the point? I should have walked away, like Sextus—but I don’t have the luxury! I need to become Lyctor now, before—”

She bit off her words like meat from a bone. Gideon waited to know before what, but no more was forthcoming. She closed her eyes and waited, but opened them when she panicked and realised that she had forgotten how long it had been since she had shut them. Harrowhark was sitting there with that same curious expression on her paintless face, looking thoroughly unlike herself.

“Get some rest,” she said imperiously.

For the first time, Gideon obeyed her without compunction.

Chapter 21

When Gideon woke up later, Dominicus had made the room wet and orange with evening light. She was cramped from hunger. When she rolled over, she was assaulted with a series of increasingly aggressive notes.

This was plainly unfair, even if the delights locked behind a Lyctoral door could only really be enjoyed by someone who gurgled over necromantic theorems, but anyway–

Willingly go to Palamedes? Harrow must have had a hell of a fright. Gideon reflexively checked her pulse in case she was still dead.

Yum.

“I’m not eating your nasty drawer food,” said Gideon, and rolled out of bed.

She felt terrible—like she hadn’t slept for days and days—then remembered that she hadn’t, really, excepting last night. She felt feeble as a kitten. It took all her strength just to get to the bathroom, wash her scabrously painted face, and lap at the tap like an animal. The mirror reflected a haggard girl whose blood probably resembled fruit juice, with anaemia all the way up to her ears. She combed through her hair with her fingers, and thought of Dulcinea, and for some reason blushed deeply.

The water was fortifying. The bread in the drawer—which she ate, ravenously, like a wraith—was not. Gideon searched around in her pockets just in case she had left something there—an apple, or some nuts—and found herself startled when she found the note, and then wondered why she was startled. Her memory caught up a laggard step behind her comprehension: the piece of flimsy was still there, though the piece of flimsy had been there all the time, so there was a horrible possibility inherent.

There was a knock on the door. Nonplussed, unpainted, and hungry, she opened it. Nonplussed, much-tried, and impatient, Camilla the Sixth stared back.

She sighed, obviously tired of Gideon’s bullshit already, and raised a hand with three digits bent. “How many fingers?” she demanded.

Gideon blinked. “How many bent, or how many you’re showing, and do I count the thumb?”

“Vision’s fine,” said Camilla to herself, and retracted the hand. She elbowed into the room as though she had licence, and let a heavy bag drop to the floor with a thud, kneeling down to riffle through it. “Language is fine. Where are we? What did we come here for? What’s your name?”

“What’s your mum’s name,” said Gideon. “Why are you here?”

The compact, grey-clad cav of the Sixth did not even look up at this question. It was interesting to see her in the light: her fine sheets of slate-brown hair were cut sharply below her chin, giving a general air of scissor blades. She glanced up at Gideon without seeming very perturbed. “Your necromancer talked to my necromancer,” she said. “My necromancer said you should be a corpse. You breathing?”

“Yes?”

“Passing blood? In your piss?”

“Look, this conversation is all I’ve ever dreamed about,” said Gideon, “but I’m fine. H— My necromancer overreacted.” (This, at least, seemed to strike a chord with Camilla, whose glance softened with the understanding of someone whose necromancer was also prone to gross overreaction.) “I’m just hungry. Do I or do I not seem totally fine to you?”

“You do,” said Camilla, who had pulled a frankly upsetting bulbous glass object out of her bag. “That’s what I’m worried about. Warden said you’d be in a coma. Put this in.”

The bulb, thankfully, went in the mouth. Another one tucked up into her armpit. Gideon submitted to this treatment because she had gone a round with Camilla the Sixth before and had a healthy fear of her. The other cavalier looked at her toes and fingertips, and inside her ears. Whatever she found—plus her pulse, which the other cavalier took carefully—was noted down in a fat notebook with a stub of lead pencil. These numbers were scanned with due diligence, and then Camilla shook her head.

“You’re fine,” she said. “Shouldn’t be. But you’re fine.”

Gideon said bluntly, “Why didn’t Sextus want to do the spell?”

The tools were wiped and put back in the bag. For a moment, the other cavalier didn’t answer. Then she pushed a strand of hair away from her grim, oval painting of a face, and said: “Warden did the calculations. He and I could have—completed it, but. With caveats.”

“Caveats like?”

“My permanent brain damage,” said Camilla shortly, “if he didn’t get it right immediately.”

“But I’m healthy.”

“Didn’t say your brain was.”

“I’m taking that as a very witty joke and want it to be known that I laughed,” said Gideon. “Hey—Septimus said the Eighth could have done it easily.”

“The Eighth doesn’t train cavaliers,” said Camilla, even more shortly than before. “The Eighth breeds batteries. Genetic match for the necromancer. He’s been accessing his cavalier since he was a child. The Eighth probably does have brain damage. It’s not his brain they need. And Lady Septimus … is too willing to believe in fairy stories. Same as always.”

This was probably the longest speech she had ever heard Camilla give, and Gideon was deeply interested. “Are you two friends?”

The look in response wasn’t quite withering, but it would suck all the moisture out of anyone it was aimed at. Camilla said, “Lady Septimus and I have never met. Look, you should eat.”

This turned out to be an invitation. Camilla—obviously used to being someone’s cav-of-all-work—helped her sling on her rapier, and waited as she applied a very cursory amount of face paint. She wouldn’t have passed muster with a glaucomic nun in a room with the lights shot out, but it was enough to get on with. She didn’t quite have to lean on Camilla’s arm, but every so often was the recipient of a brusque shoulder press to get her standing straight. They kept mutual and pleasant silence, and the sunset bled through all the windows and gaps of the House of the First and made puddles of red and orange before them.

Every so often a white-belted skeleton crossed their path with an easy, arm-swinging gait. Each time a bonely figure appeared from a corner or clattered through a doorway, Gideon noticed Camilla’s fingers close on her rapier out of pure reflex. When they stopped at the threshold of the dining hall, the cavalier of the Sixth was poised like a waiting shrike: there were voices within.

“—Princess Ianthe has one. It’s not at all the same thing,” someone was saying.

A tall and golden figure was standing before the tables, her saffron hair unbrushed and sleep in her eyes. Her clothes looked as though she had slept in them. Coronabeth was still magnificent.

She was talking to Teacher, who was sitting at one of the long polished tables—there was Palamedes next to him with an uneaten meal and a piece of paper scribbled almost to holes, and some of the sizzling tautness surrounding Camilla went off the boil. Her shoulders relaxed, just a fragment.

Teacher said gently: “Ah, ah, that is also not correct. The owner is Naberius the Third. If it is being held for him by Princess Ianthe—it’s still his. One key for the Third House and one only, I am afraid.”

“Then the Fifth’s key should be given to me. Magnus wouldn’t mind—wouldn’t have minded.”

“Magnus the Fifth had asked for his own facility key, and I do not know where it is,” said Teacher.

Scalded by the bright orange light of the setting sun coming down through the great ceiling windows, Corona looked like a grief-stricken king: her lovely chin and shoulders were thrust out defiantly, and her mouth was hard and remorseless as glass. Her violet eyes looked as though she had been crying, though perhaps from anger.

Palamedes’s chair clattered as he rose, saying courteously to this vision: “Princess, if you wish it, I’ll escort you down to the facility right now.”

Gideon caught Camilla’s low “The hell you will.”

More chairs scraped on the tiled floor. Gideon hadn’t noticed the duo from the Second House at the table farthest away, drinking hot coffee and looking, as they ever did, as though they had just trimly stepped from the pages of a military magazine. Captain Deuteros said: “I am surprised that the Warden of the Sixth House would break compact like this. You’ve said yourself that this can’t be solved communally.”

“And I was right, Captain,” said Palamedes, “but this is harmless.”

Coronabeth had crossed the floor to Palamedes, and though he was tall she towered a full half a head over him if you included the hair. Camilla had edged around the room to stand half a step behind her necromancer, Gideon sloping helplessly behind, but war was not on the Third’s mind. Corona was not smiling, but her mouth was fine and frank and eager, and she rested her hand on his shoulder: “Do this for me,” she said, “and the Third House will owe the Sixth House a favour. Help me get the same keys as my sister—and the Third House will go down on its knees for the Sixth House.”

Captain Deuteros said, icily: “‘Harmless.’”

“Princess,” said Palamedes, who had had to blink his extremely lambent grey eyes under this assault, “I can’t. What you’re asking is impossible.”

“I mean it. Wealth—military prizes—research materials,” she said, intent on encroaching into Palamedes’s personal space. Gideon was in awe of the Sixth at this point, as under the same treatment she would have breathed so hard that she fainted. “The Third’s thanks will be as gracious as you need them to be.”

“Corona. This is rank bribery. The Second won’t stand for it, and the Sixth is too wise to buy into it.”

“Oh, shut up, Judith,” she said. “Your House would give bribes in a heartbeat if you had any money.”

Judith said slowly, “You insult the Second.”

“Don’t toss the gauntlet at me,” said Corona, “Naberius would just treat it as an early birthday present— Sixth, believe me, I’m good for it.”

“It’s not that I don’t want what you’re offering. It’s that you’re asking for the impossible,” said Palamedes, with a touch more impatience in his voice. “You can’t get the keys your sister has. Each key is unique. Frankly, there are only one or two left in all Canaan House that haven’t been claimed already.”

The room fell silent. The Second’s carefully placid faces were frozen. Corona had gone still. Gideon’s own face must have been doing something, because the rangy necromancer of the Sixth looked at her, and then looked at the Second, and said: “You must have realised this.”

Gideon wondered why she hadn’t realised this: she wondered why she had assumed that—that maybe there were infinity keys, or enough for a full set each. She sat down hard on the closest chair at the closest table, counting the keys mentally—the red and white keys that she and Harrow had won, the second of them half Dulcinea’s by right. At another look at everyone’s faces, Palamedes said, more irascibly: “You must have realised this.”

The golden hand had not dropped from his shoulder, but instead fisted in his shirt. “But that means—that means the challenge must be communal,” said Corona, with an exquisite furrow of her brow. “If we’re all only given pieces of this puzzle, refusing to share the knowledge means that nobody can solve it. We need to pool everything, or none of us will be ever be Lyctor. That has to be it, hasn’t it, Teacher?”

Teacher had sat with his hands around his cup of tea as though enjoying the heat, breathing in its curls of fragrant steam. “There is no law,” he said.

“Against teaming up?”

“No,” said Teacher. “What I mean is, there is no law. You could join forces. You could tell each other anything. You could tell each other nothing. You could hold all keys and knowledge in common. I have given you your rule, and there are no others. Some things may take you swiftly down the road to Lyctorhood. Some things may make the row harder to plough.”

“We still come under Imperial law,” said Marta the Second.

“All of us come under the sway of Imperial law,” agreed her necromancer, whose expression was now a shade doubtful. “Rules exist. Like I’ve said before, the First House falls under Cohort jurisdiction.”

“Where you got that idea from,” said Teacher tartly, and it was the first time Gideon had heard him give even a little reproof, “I do not know. We are in a sacred space. Imperial law is based on the writ of the Emperor, and here the Emperor is the only law. No writ, no interpretation. I gave you his rule. There is no other.”

“But natural law—the laws against murder and theft. What prevents us from stealing one another’s keys through intimidation, blackmail, or deception? What would stop someone from waiting for another necromancer and their cavalier to gather a sufficient number of keys, then taking them by force?”

Teacher said, “Nothing.”

Coronabeth had finally dropped her hand from Palamedes’s shoulder. She looked over at the Second House—a sombre understanding was dawning on Captain Deuteros’s face, and Lieutenant Dyas’s was as inscrutable as ever—and then she looked at Palamedes, whose expression was that of a soldier who had just heard the call to the front. There was a shields-up twist to his mouth and eyes.

Corona breathed, “Ianthe has to know,” and fled from the room. Her leaving was a little like an eclipse: the evening sun seemed to cool with her, and the duller electric lights vibrated to life with her passing.

In an almost inexcusably banal act, a white-belted skeleton appeared from the kitchen with two steaming plates of the poached pale meat and root vegetables. One of these was put in front of Gideon, and she remembered that she was ravenous. She ignored the knife and fork that the skeleton carefully laid at either side of the plate, as nicely as anyone with a soul would have, and started cramming food into her mouth with her hands.

Teacher was still bracing his hands around his cup, his expression more final than troubled: too serene to be worried, but still somehow thoughtful, a little woebegone.

“Teacher,” said Palamedes, “when did Magnus the Fifth ask you for a facility key?”

“Why, the night he died,” said Teacher, “he and little Jeannemary. After the dinner. But she didn’t take hers. Magnus asked me to hold on to it … for safekeeping. She was not happy. I thought perhaps the Fourth would come and ask for it today. Then again—if I could prevent either of those two children from going down to that place, I would.”

He looked up through the skylight at the deepening dusk, the curls of steam from his mug slowly thinning away.

“Oh, Emperor of the Nine Houses,” he said to the night, “Necrolord Prime, God who became man and man who became God—we have loved you these long days. The sixteen gave themselves freely to you. Lord, let nothing happen that you did not anticipate.”

There came the noisy clatter of bowls. It was the Second, who—instead of sitting back down—were collating their cutlery and pushing in their chairs. They left in taut silence, single file, without a glance back at anyone remaining. Camilla sat down opposite Gideon as the skeleton put the second plate in front of her, and she used her knife and fork, though not with any great elegance.

The necromancer of the Sixth was rubbing at his temples. His cavalier looked at him, and he offhandedly took a few bites of his meat and his vegetables, but then he stopped pretending and put down his fork.

“Cam,” he said. “Ninth. When you’re finished, come with me.”

It didn’t take long for Gideon to finish, as in any case she hadn’t much bothered to chew. She stared with glassy eyes at Camilla the Sixth’s plate—Camilla, who had finished most of hers, rolled her eyes and pushed her leftovers to Gideon. This was an act for which she was fond of Camilla forever after. Then they both followed a stoop-shouldered Palamedes as he pushed through the door that the Second had left from—down a corridor and a short flight of steps—turning a wheel on an iron door, its glass window rimed thickly with frost.

This appeared to be where the priests stored anything perishable. Strings of startle-eyed, frozen fish with their scales and tails intact hung like laundry on lines above steel countertops, bewildering Gideon with the reality of what she had been eating. Other, even weirder meats were stacked in alcoves to one side of the room, expiration dates labelled with spidery handwriting. A fan blasted the area with toe-curlingly cold air as Gideon wrapped her cloak more thickly around her. Barrels lined some of the other walls: fresh vegetables, obviously just picked for tonight’s chopping, lay on a granite board. A skeleton was packing linen-wrapped wheels of some waxy white substance into a box. A door led away from this fridge—it opened, and the Second emerged. They did not look happy to see the newcomers.

Captain Deuteros said heavily, “You’re a fool, Sextus.”

“I don’t deserve that,” said Palamedes. “You’re the one who just found nothing for the second time.”

“The Sixth House is welcome to succeed where the Second has failed.” She tugged her already perfect gloves into even glassier unwrinkled smoothness, and flakes of ice settled on her braided head. “The community needs this over and done with,” she said. “It needs someone who can take command, end this, and send everyone back in one piece. Will you consider working with me?”

“No,” said Palamedes.

“I’m not bribing you with goods and services. I’m asking you to choose stability.”

“I can’t be bribed with goods and services,” said Palamedes, “but I can’t be bribed with moral platitudes, either. My conscience doesn’t permit me to help anyone do what we have all embarked upon.”

“You don’t understand—”

Palamedes said savagely, “Captain, God help you when you understand. My only consolation is that you won’t be able to put any responsibility on my head.”

The Cohort necromancer closed her eyes and seemed to count slowly to five. Then she said: “I’m not interested in veiled threats or vagaries. Will you answer honestly, if I ask you how many keys you have?”

“I would be a fool to answer,” he said, “but I can tell you that I have fewer than you think. I am not the only one who came here wanting to be a Lyctor, Captain. You’ve just been too damned slow on the uptake.”

Lieutenant Dyas’s fingers closed slowly and deliberately around the hilt of her functional rapier. Camilla’s fingers were already on hers; her other hand was on the hilt she kept at her left hip, the unembossed grip of her dagger. Gideon, who had just eaten one and a quarter dinners, felt unbelievably unready for whatever was about to go down. She was relieved when the necromancer of the Second said, “Leave it. The die is cast,” and both women pushed past them.

Palamedes led the other two cavaliers through the nondescript door to another nondescript room past the cooling larder. This room held big shelves at one end, stacked one atop the other; a few tables with wheels from which the rubber was peeling off in big strips were parked in a corner. These tables were high and long enough to hold a whole person, lying flat. It was the morgue, though a more impersonal and featureless morgue Gideon could not imagine.

Gideon said, “How long have you known about the keys?”

“Long enough,” said Palamedes, hooking his fingers underneath the lid of a morgue shelf. “Your Nonagesimus confirmed it with me after the Fifth were killed. Yes, I know you’ve known the whole time.”

Oh, exquisite! Harrowhark had kept Palamedes Sextus in a loop that didn’t include Gideon. She felt angry; then she felt bereft; then she felt angry again. This felt like being hot and cold at once. Totally heedless of her, the Sixth necromancer continued: “I meant what I said though. There are precious few keys left. The faeces hits the fan starting now. Cam, did you bring the box?”

Gideon said, “What do you mean?”

Camilla had dropped her heavy bag next to her necromancer, and he was riffling through it with one hand, pulling the shelf out with the other. Well-greased struts smoothly produced a body covered with a thin white sheet, murmuring into view feetfirst. Palamedes pulled the sheet up from the feet all the way to the abdomen and started carefully feeling the legs through the clothes. It was Magnus, and he had not improved since Gideon had last seen him. She regretted again eating one and a quarter dinners.

“Put it this way,” he said eventually, palpating a hip. “Up till now I’d assumed everyone was being remarkably civil. If the initial method of obtaining keys was cleverness and hard work, the way forward from here will be either what you just saw—heavy-handed alliance attempts—or worse. Why do you think the Eighth picked a fight with the Seventh?”

“Because he’s a prig and a nasty weirdo,” said Gideon.

“Intriguingly put,” said Palamedes, “but although he is a prig and a nasty weirdo, Dulcinea Septimus has two keys. Silas has made her a target.”

This was all getting unreal: a weird mathematics that she hadn’t even been counting. But she was still Ninth enough to hold her tongue. She said instead: “No offense, but what the hell are you doing?”

He had taken a fingerful of jelly out of a little tub Camilla had proffered. He was rubbing it over, bizarrely enough, the dull gold hoop of Magnus Quinn’s wedding ring. With a stick of grease he made two marks above and below the band of metal, and then held his hand over it like someone cupping a flame. Palamedes closed his eyes, and—after a pregnant pause—steam began to curl above his knuckles.

All at once, he muttered crossly to himself and took his hand away. This time the grease went beneath the ring, and he started to ease it off the sad dead finger.

“I need more contact,” he said to his cavalier. “This touched the key ring, but there’s too much jumble.” And to Gideon: “Our reputation doesn’t precede us, I see. Thanergy attaches to more than just the body, Ninth. Psychometry can track the thanergy lingering in objects—when you get to it early and when there’s a strong association. Give me the scissors, I’m going to take some of his pockets.”

“What are you—”

“Quinn’s key ring, Ninth,” said Palamedes, as though her question was really hopelessly obvious. “There was nothing on the bodies yesterday. The Second came to look, but they haven’t got my resources.”

“That or they took the evidence,” said his cavalier gloomily, but her adept countered: “Not their style. Anyway, if I couldn’t find anything after yesterday’s examination, they wouldn’t.”

“Don’t get cocky, Warden.”

“I won’t. But I’m fairly sure, here.”

Gideon said, “But—hold up. Magnus had only just picked up his facility key the night—you know. He hadn’t reached any challenge labs. The facility key was all he had. Who’d take that?”

“That’s precisely what I want to know,” said Palamedes. He dropped the wedding ring into a small bleached pouch that Camilla was holding open, and then took a tiny pair of scissors and started clipping at the dead man’s trousers. “Your vow of silence is conveniently variable, Ninth, I’m very grateful.”

“Turns out I’m variably penitent. Hey, you should be talking to Nonagesimus.”

“If I wanted to talk to Nonagesimus, I’d talk to Nonagesimus,” he said, “or I’d talk to a brick wall, because honestly, your necromancer is a walking Ninth House cliché. You’re at least only half as a bad.”

Palamedes glanced up at her. His eyes really were extraordinary: like cut grey rock, or deep weather atmosphere. He cleared his throat, and he said: “How much would you do for the Lady Septimus?”

Gideon was glad of the paint; she was thrown off balance, unsure of her footing. She said, “Uh—she’s been kind to me. What’s your interest in Lady Septimus?”

“She’s—been kind to me,” said Palamedes. They stared at each other with a kind of commingled weariness and embarrassed suspicion, skirting around something juvenile and terrible. “The Eighth is both determined and dangerous.”

“Protesilaus the Seventh is uncomfortably hench, though. She’s not alone.”

Camilla spoke up: “The man’s a glorified orderly. His hand’s never on his rapier. First instinct’s to punch, and he moves like a sleepwalker.”

“Just bear witness,” said Palamedes. “Just—keep her in mind.”

The scissors went snip, snip and tiny squares of fabric were added to a new linen bag. With more reverence than she’d given him credit for—he had just given a corpse an invasive massage and stolen its jewellery—Palamedes softly pulled the sheet back over the abdomen and legs of Magnus the Fifth. He said, quite gently: “We’ll get to the bottom of this one, if you give us a little time,” and Gideon realised he was speaking to the body.

Gideon suddenly ached to hear one of the Fifth’s terrible jokes, if only because it would be a refreshing trip back to the status quo. She had to leave—her hand was on the door—but something in her made her look back and say: “What happened to them, Sextus?”

“Violent head and body trauma,” he said. For a moment he seemed to hesitate, and then he turned his laser-sharp gaze on her. “What I do know is—it wasn’t just a fall.”

His cavalier said lowly, warningly: “Warden.”

“What good is silence now?” he said to her. And then, to Gideon: “Their wounds contained extraordinarily tiny bone fragments. The fragments weren’t homogenous—they were samples from many different osseous sources, which is indicative of—”

What it was indicative of was interrupted by a small sound from beyond the door. The noise of skeletons packing things away had disappeared a long time ago: this was the noise of the door wheel being quietly spun. Gideon threw open the door to the cooling room, which Camilla burst into with her sidearm drawn: a hemline was escaping through the wheel-operated portal to the cooler, which had been left open in haste. Gideon and Palamedes stood, watching the door creak forlornly in the cold air. The hemline had been blue embroidery, and the pattering feet around the size of a crappy teen’s.

“Poor dumb kids,” Gideon said, all of four years their elder.

“Do you think so?” said Palamedes, surprising her. “I don’t. I often find myself wondering how dangerous they really are.”

Chapter 22

That evening, Harrowhark had still not returned. Gideon busied herself with catching up on her training exercises, frustrated by her sore muscles, which wanted to pack it in after the first hundred push-ups. She spent a long time doing her solo drills—the automatic litany of grip and guard, flexing into hand positions while staring out the window into the drooping black night—and then, pretty certain that Harrow wasn’t returning, she got out her longsword and did it all again. Having two hands on the grip was precisely the thing that Aiglamene had told her not to do, but it felt so good that by the end she was happy as a child.

Harrow never came back. Gideon was used to this by now. Seized with sudden experimental courage, she filled up the uncanny tub in the bathroom from the hot-liquid tap. When nothing jumped out at her, Gideon sat there in it with water all the way up to her chin. It was incredible—the strangest thing she’d ever felt in her life; like being buoyed on a warm current, like being slowly boiled—and she worried, irrationally, whether water could get inside you and make you sick. All her paint came off and floated in long, dirty flecks in the water. When she put soap in the water oily rainbow slicks shone across the top. In the end—suspicious of how clean it really got you—she went and stood in the sonic for twenty seconds, but she smelled incredible. When her hair dried it stood up on end, and it took a lot of effort to get it flat again.

The bath was soporific. For the first time since she’d come to Canaan House, Gideon was truly content to lie down in her nest, get out a magazine and do absolutely nothing for half an hour. Nine dreamless hours later she woke up with the pages stuck to her face via a thin sealant of drool.

“Ffppppp,” she said, peeling it off her face, and: “Harrow?”

As it turned out, in the next room Harrow was curled up in bed with the pillows over her head and her arms sticking out. Haphazardly flung laundry was piled next to the wardrobe door. The sight filled Gideon with a sensation that she had to admit was relief.

She said, “Wake up, assmunch, I want to yell at you about keys,” but this imperative did not have the desired effect.

“The white key is now with your precious Septimus, as per the agreement,” snapped Harrow, then pulled the covers over her head. “Now go away and shrivel.”

“This does not satisfy me. Nonagesimus.”

Harrow slithered more deeply underneath the covers like a bad black snake, and refused to get up. It was hopeless pushing further. This freed Gideon to dress in relative peace and quiet, paint without critique, and leave their quarters feeling unusual amounts of peace with the world.

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

“Stop,” he said. “Jeanne wants you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This baffled gaggle was led outside to another broad terrace, though this one had not been built with beauty in mind. They weren’t far from the edge of the dock terrace. This place had possibly shared that function, once—there was room for maybe one shuttle—but it was now focused on a huge steel chimney, metal flue standing up like a flagpole. It was bricked and supported all about with big stone tiles, and there were buckets of old vegetation and filthy cloths. The latter looked as though they’d been used to clean out the pool: they were emerald with verdigris and black where they weren’t green. The chimney had a huge metal grate, about two metres tall, where you could shovel in rubbish. This grate was open, and the contents inside were still lightly smoking.

Isaac came to rest in front of the incinerator, beside Jeannemary the Fourth. He had looked stolid and dead, as though what was going on inside him had built up a thick crust, like a volcano; Jeannemary looked like a malfunctioning electric wire. You could practically see the sparks. Her rapier was naked, and she was pacing between the incinerator and the edge, every so often whirling around in a fit as though someone might attack her from behind. Gideon was beginning to admire her sheer animal readiness. When she saw the gang of idiots that her necromancer had brought her, she was intensely displeased.

“I wanted the Ninth and Princess Coronabeth,” she said. Her voice cracked.

“Everyone tagged along,” said Isaac. “I didn’t want to leave you—I didn’t want to leave you alone.”

Careless of her bare feet and her sodden clothes, Corona marched over to the first maladjusted teen. “Sword at ease, Sir Chatur,” she said kindly. “You’re fine.” (It was testament to Corona that the sword was lowered and slid away into the scabbard, though Jeannemary did not take her hand off the pommel.) “What’s happened? What have you found?”

The Fourth said bitterly: “The body.”

Everyone clustered around. With a piece of old flagstone, Jeannemary knocked the still-smoking grate aside so that they could all peer through: down a short shunt, embers still glowing sooty red, there was a heap of ashes.

The cavalier of the Second picked up an iron poker from beside the incinerator and nudged the pile. The ashes were all soft and even, crumbling to a powdery white, the red lumps breaking up under pressure. There was an expectant pause as she stuck the poker into the far corners of the big expanse, and then drew it away.

“It’s just ashes,” said Lieutenant Dyas.

“A body was burnt in there,” said Jeannemary.

Colum the Eighth had gotten hold of a worn rake and was using that to pull some of the stuff closer. He stuck his hand into the boiling air and scooped out hot ashes, which showed that he either cared very little for his own pain or had a supremely good poker face. He held them out for inspection: whatever had burnt, had burnt down to a sandy grey-white stuff that left grease marks on the Eighth’s yellowed palms.

The necromancer teen was saying listlessly: “I can tell fresh human cremains. Can’t you, Princess?”

Corona hesitated. The Second butted in: “What if they were burning bones? One of the servants may have fallen apart.”

“Someone could … just go ask,” rumbled Colum the Eighth, shocking Gideon with an inherently sensible suggestion.

Isaac didn’t hear: “That’s rendered fat and flesh, not dry bone.”

“They didn’t— Are the Fifth still—”

“Magnus and Abigail are still where they ought to be,” said Jeannemary fiercely, “in the mortuary. Someone’s been killed and burnt up in the incinerator.”

There were long scratches down her face. She was even smudgier than her counterpart teen, if that was possible, and in that moment she looked feral. Her curls had frizzed up into a dark brown halo—one liberally streaked with blood and something else disreputable—and her eyes were welling up from the acrid smoke. She did not look like a stable witness to anyone.

Especially not to Naberius. He crossed his arms, shivered in the morning sun, and drawled: “These are ghost stories, doll. You’re both cracking up.”

“Shut it—”

“I’m not your doll, dickhead—”

“Princess, tell him—tell him those are remains—”

“Babs, shut your mouth and fix your hair,” said Corona. “Don’t discount this straight off the bat.”

As per usual, he looked wounded, and scruffed the towel around his damp hair. “Who’s discounting?” he said. “I’m not discounting. I’m just saying there’s no point. No need for all this Fourth House sound and fury. Anyone goes missing, we assume they’re having a nap in the incinerator.”

“You are being,” said the Second cavalier, “surprisingly blasé.”

“I hope you end up in the incinerator,” said Jeannemary. “I hope whatever killed Magnus and Abigail—and whoever we just found—comes after you. I’d love to see your face then. How will you look when we find you, Prince Naberius?”

Gideon pushed between them before Naberius could round on the ash-streaked, wet-eyed teenager. She stared into the incinerator. The cavalier of the Eighth was still poking around, and to her eye she had to admit there was nothing to find: whatever had been burnt here had been burnt down to greasy, bad-smelling smithereens. Particles of ash floated up from the grate like crumbling confetti, making smuts on their faces.

“Needs a bone magician,” said Colum, and dropped the rake. “I’m heading back.”

Naberius, who had been staring down Jeannemary, was distracted by this. He was more eager and jovial when he said: “You gearing up for your duel with the Seventh? The princess and I’ll ref you, naturally.”

“Yes,” said the other man without much enthusiasm.

“I’ll come with. Should be interesting to see the cav; he’s not remotely like his rep, is he? Ain’t ever matched him in a tournament, myself—”

At the exit of the Third and the Eighth cavaliers, the Eighth looking like he wished he were deaf, the Second went too: more silently, and wiping her hands on her scarlet neckerchief. Only the teens, Gideon, and Corona were left. Coronabeth was staring into the steaming ashes, brief singlet and shorts whipping in the wind, fine dry curls of gold escaping from the wet mass of her hair. She looked troubled, which made Gideon sad, but she was also soaked right through to the skin, which made Gideon need a lie-down.

“I keep seeing things,” said the necromantic teen, emptily. They turned to look at him. “Out of the corners of my eyes … when it’s nighttime. I keep waking up and hearing something moving … or someone standing outside our door.”

He trailed off. Jeannemary put her arm around his shoulder and pressed her sweat-streaked brown forehead to his, and both sighed defeated sighs in concert. The solace they were taking in each other was the bruising, private solace between necromancer and cavalier, and Gideon was embarrassed to be audience to it. It was only then that they seemed at all grown-up to her. They looked worn down to stubs, like ground-down teeth, greyed out of their obnoxious vitality and youth.

The cavalier of the Fourth House looked up at Gideon and Corona.

“I wanted you two because Magnus liked you both,” she said. “So you get the warning. Don’t say I didn’t tell you.”

Then she led Isaac away, him looking like an expectant prey animal, her like dynamite, ushering him back through the salt-warped door. Gideon was left alone with Coronabeth. The princess was closing the huge grate to the incinerator and sliding the handle down to lock it. They both beheld it silently: it did seem big enough to heave a person through, down into what—when set—would have been roaring flames. Clouds passed overhead, plunging what had been dazzling brightness into relative gloom. The clouds were fat and bluish, which Gideon had learned meant that they would soon explode into rain. She could taste it on the air, washing the prickle of smoke off her tongue. When the storm broke, it would break hard.

“This isn’t just Fourth House theatrics,” said Corona. “I don’t think they’re being reckless here. I think we’re actually in trouble … a lot of trouble.”

In the newfound dimness Gideon took off her glasses and nodded. Her hood fell back, sliding down in heavy folds of black to her shoulders. The exquisite eyes of the necromancer of the Third were upon her, and the doleful expression turned into a radiant smile, violet eyes crinkling up at the corners with the hugeness of the grin.

“Why, Gideon the Ninth!” she exclaimed, mourning banished. “You’re a ginger!”

The clouds broke later that afternoon. The rain beat at the windows like pellets, and the skeleton servants scurried around with buckets, catching the worst of the sleeting drips, putting matting down for the puddles. Apparently Canaan House was so used to this that their response was automatic. Gideon was familiar with rain by now, but the first time she couldn’t get over it. The constant pattering drove her mad all night, and she’d had no idea how anyone who lived in atmospheric weather could ever put up with it. Now it was only a murmurous distraction.

To the noise of the storm she had gone back to check on Harrowhark, suddenly paranoid—convinced that she had dreamt up the arms flapping out of the duvet, the short spikes of dark hair visible from under the pillow, that maybe the Reverend Daughter had made Gideon’s youthful dreams come true by spending all night in an incinerator—but Harrow hadn’t even woken up. Gideon ate lunch next to a skeleton servant carefully balancing a bucket on the table, into which fat drips fell from the windows, ploing … ploing … ploing.

The numinous dread hadn’t really left her since that morning. It was almost a relief to see the shadow of Camilla Hect fall over her bowl of soup and bread-and-butter. Camilla’s grey hood was wet with rain.

“Duel’s off,” she said, by way of hello. “Seventh never turned up, and they’re not in their quarters. Let’s move.”

They moved. Gideon’s heart hammered in her ears. Her rapier swung against her leg as persistently as the rain peppering the walls of Canaan House. By instinct Gideon led them through a row of dark, dismal antechambers, door handles slippery with rain, and out into the storm itself: the conservatory where Dulcinea liked to sit. It was stultifyingly hot and muggy in there: like walking into the jaws of a panting animal. Rain sleeted off the plex in sky-obscuring sheets. Beyond the conservatory door—under an awning that had long since tipped into the rain—was Dulcinea.

She was sprawled across the wet flagstones. Her crutches lay on either side of her, as though they had slipped from her grasp. Gideon’s insides interlaced, lungs into kidneys into bowels, then rubber-banded back with a twang. It was Camilla who first dropped to her knees beside her and rolled her over on her back. A bruise popped on her temple, and her clothes had soaked right through, as though she had been lying there for hours. There was a terrible bluish tinge to her face.

Dulcinea gave an enormous, tearing, terrible cough, pink spittle foaming from her mouth. Her chest jerked, staccato. It was not a pretty sight, but Gideon welcomed it with open arms.

“He never came back,” she said hopelessly, and fainted.

Chapter 23

Protesilaus the seventh was missing. Dulcinea Septimus was critically ill. Left stranded when her cavalier failed to return, then threatened by the rain, she had tried to walk by herself and slipped: now she was confined to bed with hot cloths on her chest and no good to anybody. Teacher moved her to one of the tiny rooms in the priest wing, and she had to be laid on her side so that whatever was choking her lungs could drain out of her mouth and into a basin. Teacher’s two nameless colleagues sat with her, replacing the basin and boiling noisy kettles.

Everyone else—the Second House with their brass buttons; the twins of the Third and their now-bouffant cavalier; the Fourth teenagers, gimlet eyed; and the Fifth asleep forever in the mortuary; the Sixth in grey and the mismatched Eighth; and the Ninth, with Harrow roused and tight lipped in her spare habit—was accounted for.

The ashes in the incinerator had been raked out and combed over, and the confirmation that they were human remains was not illuminating. The surviving necromancers had gathered around a bowl of them, and they had all pounced on it like a bowl of peanuts at a party. Only Coronabeth disdained fingering a bunch of smuts and crumblings.

“They’re much older than they ought to be,” said Ianthe Tridentarius, cool as a cucumber, which was the first sign of hope for Protesilaus. “I would have said these belonged to a corpse three months dead.”

“You’re out by about eight weeks,” said Palamedes, brow furrowed. “Which would still predate us significantly.”

“Well, in either case it’s not him. Has anyone else died? Teacher?”

“We have not held a funeral in a very long time,” said Teacher, a bit prissily. “And at any rate, we certainly would not have consigned them to the waste incinerator.”

“Interesting you should say them.”

Ianthe had two small fragments on her palms. One of them was recognisably part of a tooth. For some reason, this dental fact had Harrow looking at Ianthe’s palms, then Ianthe, then Ianthe’s palms again as though both were suddenly the most fascinating things in the world. Gideon recognised this sudden diamond focus: Harrowhark was reestimating a threat.

Ianthe said, idly: “You see? There’s at least two people in there.”

“But the time signature’s consistent throughout the remains—”

She tipped both fragments into the palms of Palamedes. “Happy birthday,” she said. “They must have died at the same time.”

Captain Deuteros said tersely: “The incinerator is a snare. I’m as curious as anyone to know what’s in there, but the fact remains that Protesilaus is evidently not, so where is he?”

“I have set the servants to find him,” said the First House priest. “They will search every nook and cranny, apart from your rooms … which I ask you to search yourselves, on the bizarre chance that Protesilaus the Seventh is there. I will not breach the facility, nor will my servants. If you want to go down there, you must go down there yourselves. And then there is the outside of the tower … but if he left the tower, the water is very deep.”

Corona turned her chair around and straddled the seat, crossing her slim ankles at the front. Gideon noticed that she and Ianthe had not entirely made up in the wake of whatever fight they must have had; their chairs were close together but their bodies were angled away from each other. Corona shook her head again, as though to clear it of cobwebs. “He must be alive. There’s no motive. He was— I mean, any time I met him, I thought—”

“I thought he was, perhaps, the most boring man alive,” supplied her twin, languidly, wiping her hands. Corona flinched. “And not even a classic Seventh House bore; he hasn’t subjected us to even one minimalist poem about cloud formations.”

“Consider this: maybe there’s no motive,” said Jeannemary Chatur, who refused to sheathe her rapier. She had positioned herself and Isaac nearly back-to-back, as though united they could take all comers. “Consider this: they went through the hatch, just like Magnus and Abigail, and now he’s dead and she’s about to kick the bucket.”

“Would the Fourth drop this insane monster theory—”

“Not insane,” said Teacher to Naberius, “oh, no, not insane.”

Captain Deuteros, who had been scribbling in her notepad, leant back in her chair and tossed down her pencil. “I’d like to supply a more human mens rea. Yes, the Duchess Septimus and her cavalier had accessed the facility. Did they have any keys?”

“Yes,” said a voice at the door.

Gideon hadn’t noticed the chain mail–skirted, whitewashed figure of Silas Octakiseron leave, but she noticed him come back in. He entered the eating-atrium from the kitchen side looking pallid and unruffled, his bladed face as pitiless as ever, free from a normal human emotion. “Yes, she does,” he repeated, “or rather, she did.”

“What the hell did you just do,” said Palamedes quietly.

“Your aggression is unseemly and unwarranted,” said Silas. “I went to see her. I felt a certain responsibility. I was the one who asked for satisfaction, and Brother Asht had been ready to duel her missing cavalier. I did not want bad blood between us. I feel nothing but pity for the Seventh House, Warden Sextus.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

Silas felt about in his pocket and raised his hand to display its contents. It was one of the iron key rings, and on it were two keys, one grey, one a familiar white.

“If foul play has befallen her cavalier,” he said, in his curiously deep voice, “then the culprit will get no joy of it. I found her conscious, keeping hold of this. She’s surrendered it to me for safekeeping.”

“That’s dubious in the extreme,” said Captain Deuteros. “Surrender them to me now in a show of good faith, Master Silas. If you please.”

“I cannot in good conscience, until I know the fate of Protesilaus the Seventh. Anyone here could be guilty. Brother Asht. Here.” The chain mail–kirtled boy tossed the ring to his cavalier, who caught it out of the air and fished his own heavy key ring out of his pocket. Gideon noticed that their ring held a facility key and one other, in black wrought iron with curlicues. Colum the Eighth locked the two rings together with a very final click. “I’ll keep these until such a time as she wants them. Judging by our conversation, that may well be never.”

This was received with a brief silence.

“You callous bastard,” shouted Naberius, “you just went and heavied a nearly dead girl for her keys.”

Jeannemary said, “You’re just sorry you didn’t think of it first.”

“Chatur, if you say one more bloody word I’ll make sure you never get through puberty—”

“Hold your tongue, Prince Tern,” said Captain Deuteros. “I have bigger fish to fry than listening to you abuse a child.”

She stood. She took them all in, with the face of a woman who had come to a final conclusion.

“This is where the tendon meets the bone. This—key hoarding—cannot continue. I told you before that the Second House would take responsibility if nobody else had the stomach for it. That begins now.”

The slender necromancer in his pure Eighth whites had slid into a chair proffered by his nephew, and he sat straight-backed and thoughtful.

“Is that a challenge to me, then, Captain?” he said sorrowfully.

“You’ll keep.” The Second adept thrust her chin toward Palamedes, who had been sitting with fingers steepled beneath his jaw, staring through the walls as though discord was so intensely distasteful that he could only distance himself from it. “Warden, the Sixth is the Emperor’s Reason. I asked you earlier, and I’m telling you now: hand over what keys you’ve won for my safekeeping.”

The Sixth, the Emperor’s Reason, blinked.

“With all respect,” he said, “piss off.”

“Let the record state that I was forced into a challenge,” said Lieutenant Dyas, and she peeled off one white glove. She threw it down on the table, looking Palamedes dead in the eye. “We duel. I name the time, you name the place. The time is now.”

“Duel the Sixth?” squawked Jeannemary. “That’s not fair!”

A perfect babel broke out. Teacher rose with a curious, resigned expression on his face: “I will not be party to this,” he said, as though that was going to stop anyone, and he left the room. In the vacuum of his exit, Corona slapped both of her hands down on the table: “Judith, you coward, pick on someone your own size—”

“This is what happens, isn’t it?” The bad necromancer teen was in a stupor, still: he sounded wondering, not angry. “This is what happens with Magnus and Abigail gone.”

“Yes, I’m sure Magnus the Fifth would have issued us a strongly worded memorandum—”

“Ianthe! Not helping!—Sixth, you mustn’t accept—the Third will represent the Sixth in this, if they’ll consent. At arms, Babs.”

Her twin sister’s voice was thin and soft as silk: “Don’t unsheathe that sword, Naberius.”

“Ianthe, what—are—you—doing.”

“I want to see how this plays out,” she said with a pallid shrug, heedless of the growing ire in her twin’s voice. “Alas. I have a bad personality and a stupefying deficit of attention.”

“Well, Babs, thank God, has much better sense than to listen to you—Babs?”

Naberius’s hand was hesitating hard on the hilt. He had not sprung into action as proposed, nor had he flanked the commanding twin. He was staring at her pale shadow, knuckles white, hand still, with a resentment very near hate. Corona’s smile flickered. “Babs?”

Through all this, Palamedes had slopped the weight of his head into one hand, then into the other, scrubbing his fingers down his long face. He had taken his glasses off and was tapping the thick frames against the table. His nail-grey stare had not left Judith Deuteros, whose own gaze was as resolute as concrete.

“Default, Warden,” said the captain. “You are a good man. Don’t put your cavalier through this.”

Palamedes seemed to snap out of it all at once, squeaking his chair legs horribly on the tiled floor as he scooted it backward and away from the table’s edge.

“No, we’re doing this,” he said abruptly. “I pick here.”

The captain said, “Sextus, you’re mad. Give her some dignity.”

He did not even stand; just crooked his fingers at his cavalier. Rather than tensing up in anticipation, as Gideon might have, Camilla had relaxed. She shook her dark fringe off her forehead, shivered out of her hood and her cloak, swung her neck back and forth like someone limbering up to dance.

“Oh, I am,” he said. “Cam?”

Camilla Hect stepped on to the wooden table with one long, lean movement. She wore a long grey shirt and grey slacks beneath her cloak, and she looked less like a cavalier than an off-duty librarian. Still, this startled her audience except for Lieutenant Dyas, who vaulted up to the opposite side of the table, which creaked crossly beneath the strain. Dyas had not bothered to take off her jacket. She slid her utilitarian and bone-sharp knife out of its cross-hip sheath and laid it there for display. With her main hand she drew her rapier, plain-hilted, polished until it hurt.

The Sixth stared at her for a moment as though she had no idea of the protocol—and then she drew both of her weapons at once in a way that nagged at the back of Gideon’s brain. The rapier looked, like Gideon’s, maybe a million years old. It was the first time she had seen it in a good light, and here it looked as though it had never been designed to take an edge blow; the blade was light and delicate as a cobweb. The offhand looked like Camilla’s whole House had gone searching down the back of the sofa for weapons. They had come up with what looked more like a long hunting or hacking knife than a duelling dagger: thick, meaty, cross-guarded, with a single sharpened edge. The whole effect was sadly amateurish.

The lovely and miserable Coronabeth had shouldered forward to stand at the table too, positioned in the space between them. She called to Judith and Palamedes: “Clav to sac—?”

“Hyoid down, disarm legal, necromancer’s mercy,” said the Second’s necromancer calmly. Coronabeth sucked a breath through her teeth. “Sextus. Do you agree to the terms?”

“I have no idea what any of that means,” said Palamedes.

Gideon drew forward to them, leaning in to hear Corona saying in an urgent whisper: “Warden—that means she can hit your cavalier anywhere below the neck, and it ends only when you give in. She’s being an absolute cad, and I’m not even slightly sorry for pantsing her when we were eight.”

“Nor should you be.”

“Don’t let her make an example of you,” said the princess. “She’s picking on you because you can’t fight back, like a bully kicking a dog. She’s given herself leeway to hurt your cavalier very badly, and she will, just to scare Octakiseron and Nonagesimus—no offense, Ninth.”

The Warden of the Sixth drummed his feet on the floor percussively. He said, “So you’re saying her cavalier can do more or less anything to my cavalier, all in the name of making me cry uncle?”

“Yes!”

From across the table, Captain Deuteros said sternly: “No more waiting. Default or fight. Corona, if you insist on arbitrating, arbitrate.”

Those exquisite eyes would have persuaded a stone to roll uphill, but finding no purchase with Palamedes, Corona raised her voice reluctantly: “To the mercy call. Hyoid down. The neck is no exception. Point, blade, ricasso, offhand. Call.”

“Marta the Second,” called Lieutenant Dyas.

Camilla did not call. She looked down at her necromancer and said, “Warden?”

“You can’t hit her in the head,” he said. “I think. I choose when you’re done.”

“Just tell me how to play it.” Camilla raised her voice: “Camilla the Sixth.”

Gideon had moved back to her necromancer. Everyone else in the room looked grave. For a moment she thought the Fourth were holding hands, but she realised Isaac was holding Jeannemary back: his hand around her wrist was a clamp, and her face the picture of outrage. There were bleakly hungry faces—the pale Ianthe, and Naberius licking his lips—and then there were the Eighth, who were filling their own bingo sheet by praying.

Harrowhark looked as taut and distant as a hangman’s rope, but something in Gideon’s face must have caught her attention: she went from distant to bemused, and from bemused to something even a little bit offended. Gideon couldn’t blame her. The general atmosphere was of a disapproving crowd before an execution, but she was trying and failing to smother a grin of savage anticipation.

Corona was saying, “Two paces back—can’t turn, damn!—this is so hard to do on a table—”

“Cam,” Palamedes said. “Go loud.”

“—and begin,” said Coronabeth.

Gideon had to give Dyas her due; it took her much less time than it had taken Gideon, fighting Naberius Tern, for the Second to realise she was in trouble. Lieutenant Marta Dyas was in every line of her a smart, efficient fighter: not given to folderol or showboating, at the very peak of her fitness. Unlike the Third, she was a soldier, far more used to fighting people who weren’t moving to a playbook of legal duelling moves. She had trained her whole life with the front in mind, with veterans and bloodthirsty recruits. Her sword arm was balanced and light, her posture neat but not starchy. She was incredibly reactive, ready for any gambit her opponent could bring.

Camilla hit her like a hurricane. She exploded forward with her rapier wide and her butcher’s knife held close, knocking the lieutenant’s hurried parry out the way and sliding away from a belated lunge with the dagger. She sliced a red gouge down Dyas’s immaculate white jacket and shirt, bashed her across the knuckles with the hilt of her rapier, and kicked her in the knee for good measure.

The kick was Cam’s only mistake. The pain clearly set every neuron in Dyas’s body shrieking with adrenaline. Someone like Naberius would have been prone on the table from shock, probably bleating and shitting. But the Second kept her wits about her—she took the pain with a stagger, kept her footing and held her blade, and parried another sweeping blow from Camilla’s knife. She moved back for breathing space—Camilla harassing her with strike after strike to get back inside her guard—until she could move no more: she was, after all, fighting on a table. Camilla’s foot lashed out to her offhand, and the dagger clattered to the ground. The Second, with an honestly beautiful dodge and a perfect reaction, took her one opportunity and lunged.

Dyas was desperate, and Dyas was of the Second House. Cam fought like a grease fire, but she left herself too many openings. Dyas’s thrust would have pierced a lesser fighter right beneath the collarbone and run her through. It caught Camilla Hect low in the right forearm as she nearly dodged it—piercing the meat next to the ulna and making her snarl. She dropped her cobweb-light rapier, grabbed Marta’s wrist, and yanked. The arm dislocated with a bright pop.

Lieutenant Dyas didn’t quite scream, but she got most of the way there. She windmilled at the edge of the table. Still holding the wrist, Camilla stepped past her, kicked her legs out almost dismissively, and drove her down facefirst into the wooden boards with a crunch. This left Camilla standing over her opponent, one foot pressed into the back of her neck, the dislocated arm pinned up at an angle that looked seriously uncomfortable. Dyas made a strangled, agonised noise, and Judith Deuteros snapped: “Mercy!”

“Mercy called, match to the Sixth,” said Coronabeth, as though saying it faster would make it over sooner.

There was silence, except for Camilla’s ragged breathing and the lieutenant’s tiny, half-amazed gasps. Then Jeannemary said, “Hot dog.”

Both cavaliers were oozing blood. It dripped from Camilla’s wound where the sword had stuck her, and it was soaking through Lieutenant Dyas’s shirt and dribbling from her nose, the exact same colour as her neckerchief. She had her eyes screwed up tightly. Palamedes was already standing beside the table, and with another excruciating noise he set Marta’s arm back inside its joint. This time she really did scream. Captain Deuteros watched, face absolutely blank.

“Your keys,” he said.

“I don’t have—”

“Then your facility key. Hand it over.”

“You have its exact copy.”

Palamedes rounded on her with a sudden fury that made everyone jump, even Gideon. “Then maybe I’ll throw it out the fucking window,” he snarled. “Two good cavs hurt, yours and mine, all because the Second tried to beat up the weak kid first.” He jabbed a finger at Judith’s immaculate waistcoat with intent to impale; she didn’t flinch. “You have no idea how many keys we’re holding! You have no idea how many keys anybody’s holding, because you haven’t paid any damn attention since the shuttles landed! You picked on us because the Sixth aren’t fighters. You could have fought Gideon the Ninth, or Colum the Eighth. You fought Camilla because you wanted a quick win, and you didn’t even watch her first, you just assumed you could take her. And I can’t stand people who assume.”

“I had cause,” said the Second, doggedly.

“I don’t care,” said Palamedes. “Isn’t it funny how it took the Second, of all houses, to blow this whole thing open? You’ve stuck a target on the back of everyone toting a key. It’s a free-for-all now, and it’s your fault, and you’ll pay for it.”

“For God’s sake, Warden, you misunderstand my intention—”

“Give me your key, Captain!” roared the scion of the Sixth. “Or is the Second faithless, as well as dense?”

“Here,” said Lieutenant Dyas. She had mopped most of the blood away from her mouth and nose, although her once-white shirt was drenched with scarlet. She fumbled in her jacket pocket with her unhurt arm and held out a key ring, adorned with a single key. Palamedes gave her a curt nod, plucked it from her fingers, and turned his back on them both. Camilla was sitting on the edge of the table, her hand clapped over her wound, blood seeping freely from between her fingers.

“Missed the bone,” she said.

“Remember that you’re using a rapier, please.”

“I’m not making excuses, but she was quick as hell—”

A voice interrupted: “I challenge the Sixth for their keys. I name the time, and the time is now.”

Chapter 24

Everyone’s heads followed the sound—except for Ianthe Tridentarius, who was lounging in her chair with one eyebrow raised, and Naberius Tern, who had issued the challenge. He vaulted to the table in one lustrous movement, swinging himself up to stand on it, even as Judith Deuteros very carefully eased her cavalier down into an empty seat. He looked down at them all with a hard sneer and the one stupid curl that he always managed to get right in the middle of his forehead.

“No, you don’t,” said Coronabeth faintly.

“Yes, he does,” said Ianthe, rising to stand. “You need a facility key, don’t you? Here’s our chance. I suspect we won’t be given a better.”

There was an expression of grim alarm rising on Judith Deuteros’s face. She had both hands across the oozing slit on her cavalier’s chest, and she had paused in her work out of sheer annoyance.

“You have no cause,” she said.

“Neither did you, if we’re all being honest with ourselves. Sextus was perfectly right.”

“If you want to cast me as the villain, do it,” said the captain. “I’m trying to save our lives. You’re giving in to chaos. There are rules, Third.”

“On the contrary,” Ianthe said, “you’ve amply demonstrated that there are no rules whatsoever. There’s only the challenge … and how it’s answered.”

When she looked at her sister’s stricken face—Corona was somewhere beyond fury and shame now, and had lost every atom of her poise—she only said, quite softly: “This is for you, dear, don’t be picky. This may be the only chance we have. Don’t feel bad, sweetheart—what can you do?”

Corona’s face changed—the struggle gave way to exhaustion, but at the same time there was a weird relief in her. Her teeth were gritted, but one of her hands tangled in her sister’s long, thin, ivory-blond locks and she drew their heads close. “I can do nothing,” she said, and Gideon realised they’d just lost her, somehow.

“Then let’s do this together. I need you.”

“I need you,” echoed her twin, rather piteously.

Camilla hauled herself up to stand. She had taken Palamedes’s handkerchief and bound her arm, but the blood was already showing through and she held it in a funny way. Palamedes looked close to vibrating out of his skin from fear or anger. “Right,” she said laconically, “second round.”

But Gideon was experiencing one powerful emotion: being sick of everyone’s shit. She unsheathed her sword. She slid her gauntlet over her hand, and tightened the wrist straps with her teeth. And she looked over her shoulder at Harrowhark, who was apparently breaking out of a blue funk to experience her own dominant emotion of oh, not again. Gideon silently willed her necromancer to put her knucklebones where her mouth was and, for the first time in her life—for the first real time—do what Gideon needed her to do.

And Harrowhark rose to the occasion like an evening star.

“The Ninth House will represent the Sixth House,” she said, sounding cold and bored, as though this had been her plan all along. Gideon wanted to sing. Gideon wanted to dance her up and down the corridor. She broke out in a broad, unnervingly un-Ninth smile, and Naberius Tern—who had gone from greasy villainy to aggrieved caution—was having to force his smirk.

Ianthe just looked a little amused. “The plot congeals. Since when has the Ninth been bosom with the Sixth?”

“We’re not.”

“Then—”

Harrowhark said, in the exact sepulchral tones of Marshal Crux: “Death first to vultures and scavengers.”

Unable to bear it any longer, Jeannemary hopped up on the table too: she held her shining Fourth House rapier before her, the beautiful navy-and-silver fretwork of her dagger gripped in an altogether professional way at her hip. Although her puffy eyes and corrugated, unbrushed hair proved that she had not slept more than a few hours in the last few days, she looked intimidatingly ready. Gideon was coming to the conclusion that despite an overworked pituitary gland, there was really something in the Chatur name after all.

“Once you face her, you face the Fourth House,” she said ringingly. “Fidelity, and the Emperor!”

Naberius Tern sheathed his sword and his neat, gleaming knife, rolling his eyes so hard that they ought to have fallen backward into his sinuses. He sighed explosively and swung himself down from the table, wiping that stupid curl off his forehead with an airy head toss.

“I should’ve stayed home and gotten married,” he said resentfully.

“As though anyone was even offering,” snapped Ianthe.

“If you have all finished,” said Silas Octakiseron with his deep, tyrannically servile politeness, “Brother Asht and I are going to go and look for Protesilaus the Seventh. He is, after all, still missing.”

“Which will somehow involve trying those keys you’ve taken in doors you’ve never been able to open,” said Palamedes. “What a coincidence.”

“I have no interest in talking to you anymore,” said Silas. “The Warden of the Sixth House is an unfinished inbred who passed an examination. Your companion is a mad dog, and I doubt her legal claim to the title of cavalier primary. I would not even bother to thrash her. Enjoy the patronage of the shadow cult, while it lasts; I am sorry that it came to this. Brother Asht, we leave.”

When they dispersed, it was with the manner of people reluctantly turning their backs on their enemies. The Eighth Master swept out with his cavalier like a legion retreating from a battlefield. The Second—the unsteady cavalier supported by the captain’s arm—looked even more so, with something of the tattered refugee thrown in. The three Houses that were left looked at one another.

Palamedes rounded on Harrowhark, his hands bloody and his shining eyes a little wild. He had torn off his spectacles, and there were greasy red thumbprints over the lenses.

“There’s only one more key,” he said.

Harrow frowned. “One more to claim?”

“No, they’ve all been claimed. I’ve been through every challenge except the one I won’t play ball with.”

Harrow’s frown deepened fractionally, but Gideon was putting the pieces together. So too, apparently, was the necromantic teen Isaac. “If there’s only one of each key,” he said slowly, “what happens when you do a challenge someone else already completed?”

Palamedes shrugged. “Nothing. I mean, you can do the challenge, but you get nothing at the end of it.”

Jeannemary said, “So it’s just a huge waste of time,” and Gideon could not imagine how she’d have felt after the avulsion room if the plinth at the other end had been empty.

“Sort of. The challenge itself is still—instructional. It makes you think about things in a new way. Right, Nonagesimus?”

“The challenges so far,” said Harrow carefully, “have encouraged me to consider some … striking possibilities.”

“Right. But it’s like—imagine if someone showed you a new sword move, or whatever, but then you never actually got to sit down and read up on how it worked. It might give you ideas, but you wouldn’t really learn it. D’you follow?”

Jeannemary, Gideon, and Camilla all stared at him.

“What?” he said.

“The Sixth learns sword-fighting out of a book?” said Jeannemary, horrified.

“No,” put in Camilla, “the Warden just hasn’t been to Swordsman’s Spire since he was five and got lost—”

“Okay, okay!” Palamedes put his hands out. He was still holding the bloodstained spectacles. “That was clearly an inapposite comparison, but—”

“A challenge taken purely as a necromantic exercise,” said Harrow calmly, “suggests many things, but reveals none. Only the underlying theorem can lay bare the mystery.”

“And the theorems are behind the locked doors,” Isaac said meditatively, “aren’t they? You need the keys for the doors, or you’re screwed.”

Everyone’s attention was on the two shitty teens. They both looked back, with no small scorn, all grief, uncombed hair, and stud earrings. “We know about the doors,” said Jeannemary. “We’ve seen the doors … and people go through the doors … Well, what else could we do?” she added, somewhat defensively. “If we hadn’t been trailing everybody it would have been that creep Ianthe Tridentarius. And she’s stalking everyone. Believe me.”

(“And trailing differs from stalking how?”

“Because the Fourth doesn’t stalk?”)

“Nothing was preventing you from getting your facility key,” said Palamedes.

Isaac said emptily, “Abigail said—to wait for her.”

Gideon did not know how much the Sixth knew about the keys they’d amassed so far, or what they’d learned of the labs and the studies, how much they knew of the theorems. Palamedes was nodding, thoughtful. “Well, you’ve come to the right conclusion. Behind the doors there are studies, and all eight—there’s eight, obviously, one per House—contain notes on the relevant theorem. All eight theorems presumably add up to some kind of, ah…”

“Megatheorem,” supplied Isaac, who, after all, was like thirteen.

“Megatheorem,” he agreed. “The key to the secrets of Lyctorhood.”

Jeannemary Chatur’s brain had obviously ground forward, struggling past confusion and puberty hormones to some slowly formed conclusion. “Wait. Go back, Sixth House,” she demanded. “What did you mean by one more key?”

Palamedes drummed his fingers on the table. “Well. Forgive me the explanation, Ninth, I know you’ve been keeping track of the keys—” (Ha! Ha! Ha! thought Gideon. She hadn’t.) “—but I couldn’t work out how many keys Lady Septimus had. I knew she had at least one, but when Octakiseron convinced her to hand them over”—he freighted convinced with such heavy scorn it ought to have fallen through the floor—“he accidentally showed us her card. She had two. That means there’s one left that I haven’t accounted for, and we’ve got to account for it.”

“We need to find the Seventh cav,” added Camilla.

He nodded. “Yes, and we also have to work out who the hell’s in the incinerator. Ianthe Tridentarius was right—a sentence I don’t like saying—in that there’s more than one person in there.”

Isaac said: “I have a duty to find out who killed Magnus and Abigail, first and foremost.”

“You’re right, Baron Tettares,” said Palamedes warmly, “but trust me, I think answering those three questions will help us quite considerably in solving that mystery. Ninth, Protesilaus was still down in the facility as of last night.”

Harrow looked at him blankly. “How do you know?”

“We saw him go in,” said the Fourth as one. And Isaac added: “After we eavesdropped on you and the Sixth.”

“Good for you. But it makes sense, too. Lady Septimus said He didn’t come back, and when we saw her key ring just now it only had challenge keys—no hatch key. She must have given that to him so he could access the facility by himself—although why, I still don’t know. I bet you the whole of my library’s physical sciences section that he’s still down there. It would be impossible for someone to bring him up without being seen.”

“Then we need to go down and look,” said Jeannemary, visibly impatient at the lack of action. “Let’s go!”

“Don’t be so Fourth,” said Palamedes. “We should split up. We’re fighting a battle on two fronts here. Frankly—I would not leave Lady Septimus unguarded, sans cavalier, with just the First House to guard her.”

Harrowhark said, “Her keys are gone. What’s the attraction now?”

Camilla said, “Vulnerability.”

“Yes. It can’t just be a game of keys, Nonagesimus. Why did Magnus Quinn and Abigail Pent die, when they had nothing on them but a facility key and their own good selves? Why has Protesilaus gone missing, when the most he would have had was his facility key? Is he still down there? Who died before this challenge even began? And then there’s the issue of the other Houses. I do not know about you, Reverend Daughter, but until Cam’s healed up, I plan on wetting myself lavishly.”

Isaac gave a rather lame and high-pitched giggle. Camilla said gruffly: “Warden, it’s just my right hand—”

“Hark at her! Just your right hand. My right hand, more like. God, Cam, I’ve never been so scared in all my life.”

Harrowhark ignored this cavalier-necromancer banter and cleared her throat, pointedly. “Septimus wants guarding. Her cavalier should be found. What do you suggest?”

“The Fourth House stays with the Lady Dulcinea,” said Palamedes, slipping his glasses back over his long nose. “Gideon the Ninth stays with them as backup. You, I, and Camilla go down to the facility and see if we can locate Protesilaus.”

There was more than one bewildered stare aimed his way: his own cavalier looked at him as though he had taken leave of his senses, and Harrow yanked her hood off her head painfully as though to relieve her feelings. “Sextus,” she said, as though to a very stupid child, “your necromancer is wounded. I could kill the both of you and take your keys—or just take your keys, which would be worse. Why would you willingly put yourself in that position?”

“Because I am placing my trust in you,” said Palamedes. “Yes, even though you’re a black anchorite and loyal only to the numinous forces of the Locked Tomb. If you’d wanted my keys through chicanery you would have challenged me for them a long time ago. I don’t trust Silas Octakiseron, and I don’t trust Ianthe Tridentarius, but I trust the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus.”

Beneath the paint, Gideon could see that Harrow had changed colours a number of times through this little speech. She went from being a rather ashen skeleton to a skeleton who was improbably green around the gills. To an outsider, it would have just been a blank Ninth House mask twinging from darque mystery to cryptique mystery, giving nothing away, but to Gideon it was like watching fireworks go off.

Her necromancer said gruffly: “Fine. But we’ll watch over the Seventh House. I’m not going down the ladder with your invalid cavalier.”

Palamedes said, “Fine. Perhaps that’s better use of our talents, anyway. Fourth, are you all right to go with Gideon the Ninth? I realise I am presupposing that our motives all align—but all I can assure you is that they really do. Search the facility, and if you find him—or come up short—come back to us, and we’ll move from there. Get in and get out.”

The bleary necromantic teen looked to his bleary cavalier. Jeannemary said immediately, “We’ll go with the Ninth. She’s all right. The stories about the Ninth House seem probably bullshit, anyway.”

She’s all right? Gideon’s heart billowed, despite the fact that she had her own suspicions as to why her necromancer didn’t want her sitting with Dulcinea Septimus, and they were all extremely petty. The Sixth House adept adjusted his glasses again and said, “Sorry. Ninth cavalier, I should ask you your thoughts on all of this.”

She cracked the joints in the back of her neck as she considered the question, stretching out the ligaments, popping her knuckles. He urged again, “Thoughts?”

Gideon said, “Did you know that if you put the first three letters of your last name with the first three letters of your first name, you get ‘Sex Pal’?”

The dreadful teens both stared with eyes so wide you could have marched skeletons straight through them.

“You—do you talk?” said Isaac.

“You’ll wish she didn’t,” said Camilla.

Her wound had opened again. Palamedes was searching his pockets and the sleeves of his robe for more handkerchiefs to staunch it. As the Fourth conducted a quick conversation in what they thought were whispers, Harrow came to Gideon and unwillingly passed over the great iron ring that their keys jingled on, bodies almost pressing so that she could keep them out of sight of Palamedes.

“Come back with these or having choked on them,” she whispered, “and don’t get complacent around the Fourth. Never work with children, Griddle, their prefrontal cortexes aren’t developed. Now—”

Gideon put her arms around Harrowhark. She lifted her up off the ground just an inch and squeezed her in an enormous hug before either she or Harrow knew what she was about. Her necromancer felt absurdly light in her grip, like a bag of bird’s bones. She had always thought—when she bothered to think—that Harrow would feel cold, as everything in the Ninth felt cold. No, Harrow Nonagesimus was feverishly hot. Well, you couldn’t think that amount of ghastly thoughts without generating energy. Hang on, what the hell was she doing.

“Thanks for backing me up, my midnight hagette,” said Gideon, placing her back down. Harrow had not struggled, but gone limp, like a prey animal feigning death. She had the same glassy thousand-yard stare and stilled breathing. Gideon belatedly wished to be exploded, but reminded herself to act cool. “I appreciate it, my crepuscular queen. It was good. You were good.”

Harrow, at a total loss for words, eventually managed the rather pathetic: “Don’t make this weird, Nav!” and stalked off after Palamedes.

Jeannemary sidled up alongside Gideon, rather shyly. Isaac was parasitically drifting with her: he was in the process of braiding her curly hair safely up with a tatty blue ribbon. She said, “Have you two been paired a very long time?”

(“Don’t just ask them that,” her necromancer hissed. “It’s a weird thing to ask.”

“Shut up! It was just a question!”)

Gideon contemplated the growing braid, and the sight of Palamedes squeezing the noxious contents of a blue dropper into Camilla’s wound, and Camilla kneeing him with beautiful abruptness in the thigh. Harrowhark lurked next to them, pointedly not looking at Gideon, head hidden deep inside her second-best hood. She still didn’t understand what she was meant to do or think or say: what duty really meant, between a cavalier and a necromancer, between a necromancer and a cavalier.

“It feels like forever,” she said honestly. Gideon slipped her dark-tinted glasses out of her pocket and slid them on, and she felt better for it. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Chapter 25

Despite the fact that they now knew Gideon had a working pair of vocal reeds and the will to use them, the trip down to the facility was spent in silence. Any travel into the depths of the First House put both of the teens on high alert: they were so paranoid that they would have been welcomed into the dark bosom of the suspicious Ninth. Both startled at every shadow and watched the passing-by of creaking skeletons with no little hate and despair. They did not like the open terrace where the waves howled far below, nor the cool marble hallway, nor the marble stairwell that led down to the nondescript room with the hatch to the facility. They only spoke when Gideon slipped her facility key into the hatch and turned it with a sharp click. It was Jeannemary, and she was troubled.

“We still don’t have a key,” she said. “Maybe we—shouldn’t be here.”

“Abigail died, and she had permission,” said her counterpart sombrely. “Who cares?”

“I’m just saying—”

“I’ve been down without permission,” said Gideon, as she used one booted foot to ease the hatch open. Cold air wheezed out like a pent-up ghost. “The Sixth let me in once without a key, and I’m still breathing.”

Jeannemary seemed uncomforted and unconvinced. So she added, “Hey, look at it this way: you were down here just the other night, so if that’s the sticking point, you’re already totally boned.”

“You don’t talk like—how I thought you might talk,” said Isaac.

All three travelled down the cold, dark staple-ladder to the fluorescent lights and dead stillness of the landing. Gideon went first. The other two lagged behind a little, captivated by the increasingly old and bloody gobbets that still decorated the grille at the bottom. She had to herd them forward, down the tunnel that led to the radial room, to the ancient whiteboard and the signs above the warren of corridors.

She turned: Jeannemary and Isaac had not come with her. Jeannemary had stopped in the doorway, pressing herself flat against it, looking around at the strange, anachronistic tunnels of steel and plate metal and LED lighting.

“I thought I heard a noise,” she said, eyes darting back and forth.

“Coming from where?”

She didn’t answer. Isaac, who had pressed himself into the shadows where the side of the doorway met the wall, said: “Ninth, why were bone fragments found in Magnus’s body, and in Abigail’s?”

“Don’t know. It’s a good question.”

“At first I thought it meant the skeletons,” he said, in a sunken whisper, which made sense from the nonsense of why he and his cavalier had jumped at the creaking approach of each bone servant in the place. “There’s something unnatural about the constructs upstairs—like they’re listening to you…”

Gideon looked back at both of them. They had pressed themselves into either side of the corridor, not daring to come into the open space, pupils very dilated as though with adrenaline. They both looked at her: the young cavalier with her brown eyes muddy in the darkness, the young necromancer with his deep hazel eyes and spiderleggy mascara. Pressurized air from some cooling fan wheezed through a vent, making the ceiling creak.

“Come on, don’t just lurk there,” said Gideon impatiently. “Let’s find this guy. It shouldn’t be too hard, he’s massive.”

Neither wanted to be coaxed out. Their puff had seemed to leave them. They clustered close together, grave-faced and tense. Isaac raised a hand and faint, ghostlike flames appeared at his fingertips—bluish-greenish, giving off a sickly little light that did not do much to illuminate what was going on around them. He insisted on warding every single radiating doorway—daubing blood and his cavalier’s spit around the mouth of each corridor. He was nervous and crabby, and it was slow work applying teen gunge to every single exit. “His enclosures are good,” Jeannemary kept saying defensively.

“I thought the Fourth were meant to be all about headfirst dives and getting all crazy,” said Gideon, who stared hard into every shadow.

“It’s stupid to get killed if it doesn’t help,” said Isaac, tracing his thumb in curious shapes along the doorjamb. “The Fourth isn’t cannon fodder. If we’re first on the ground we need to stay alive … wards were the first thing I learned. When we get shipped out next year, we’ll get them scarified onto our backs.”

Next year. Gideon was taut with impatience, but still spent a couple of seconds grappling with the notion that the gawky teens in front of her would be facing the Empire’s foes at age fifteen-and-whatever. For all that she’d longed to be on the front lines from the age of eight up, it suddenly didn’t seem like such a great idea.

“We wanted to go this year,” said the cavalier, dolorously, “but Isaac got mumps a week before deployment.”

Remembrance of Isaac’s mumps threw them both into gloom, but at least that diluted their terror. In the end Gideon found herself leading them down the hallway marked SANITISER, the place where she had first found Harrow. Their three pairs of feet kicked up huge scuffs of white powder, glowing mixed colours under Isaac’s necrolight, settling down in silent sprays in the panel grouting, grinding to nothing beneath their footsteps. The doors moaned open to the panelled maze of stainless steel cubicles, and the vents moaned too in sympathy, creaking so much that the teens both gritted their molars.

Harrow’s old blood was still here, but Protesilaus wasn’t. They all split up to walk the maze of metal tables, checking beneath them to see if he had lain down for a swift nap, or something equally probable; they prowled rows of metal cubicles, all empty. They called out, “Hello!” and “Protesilaus!,” their voices reverberating thinly off the walls. As the echoes faded, they heard the scuttling noises of air being blown through the vents’ metal teeth. “There’s something here,” Isaac said.

They all listened. Gideon could hear nothing but the sounds of old machinery running in the same exhausted way it had run for thousands of years, kept alive by perfect mechanism and necromantic time. They were no different from the background noises of the Ninth House. She said, “I can’t hear it.”

“It’s not just hearing,” said Isaac, brow furrowing, “it’s more—what I’m feeling. There’s movement here.”

Jeannemary said, “Another House?”

“No.”

“Wards?”

“Nothing.”

She stalked the facility with her rapier drawn and her dagger clutched in her hand. Gideon, stranger to teamwork, worried that if she startled her by accident she’d end up with the Fourth’s offhand in her gut. Isaac said, “Bodies were brought into here—a long time ago. A lot of bone matter. The First feels like a graveyard all over, but this is worse. I’m not faking.”

“I believe you,” said Gideon. “Some of the stuff I’ve seen down here would ruin your eyelids. I don’t know what the hell they were researching, but I don’t like it. Only bright side is that it’s all pretty self-contained.”

“I’m … not super certain,” said the adept. Sweat was beading on his brow.

Jeannemary said, “He’s not in here. Let’s go somewhere else.”

They left the bright antiseptic room of Sanitiser. The lights went off with rhythmic boom, boom, booms as Gideon pressed down on the touchpad that still held little black whorls of Harrow’s blood, and they spilled out into the corridor. Sweat was openly dripping down the sides of Isaac’s temples now. His cavalier threw her arm over his shoulder, and he buried his hot wet face in her shoulder. Gideon again found this difficult to look at.

“Let’s bounce,” said Jeannemary.

As they turned the corner to where the Sanitiser corridor met the main artery, the rhythmic boom, boom, boom of lights shutting down caught up with them. The lights in the grille beneath them winked out of existence, and so did the dully glowing panels above, and so did the bright lights ringing the big square room ahead. They were left in total darkness, every nerve in Gideon’s body singing with fear. She ripped her glasses off to try to cope.

The necromancer was close to hyperventilating. His cavalier kept saying, with eerie calm: “Your wards aren’t tripped. It’s just the lights. Don’t freak out.”

“The wards…”

“Aren’t tripped. You’re good with wards. There’s nobody down here.”

One of the motion-sensor lights struggled back on behind them, a short way down the passage. A ceiling panel threw the metal siding into sharp white relief. It was daubed with words that had not been there a few seconds before, written in blood so fresh and red that there were little drips:

The light flickered off. After no sleep—after days of threat and grief and panic that would have floored a man twice his age—Isaac lost it completely. With a strangled cry he flared in a halo of blue and green. Jeannemary yelled, “Isaac, behind me—” but he was sizzling with light, too bright to see by, a sun and not a person. Gideon heard him flee into the room ahead of them, blinded by the running aurora.

When her eyes cleared, Gideon was confronted with the biggest skeletal construct she had ever seen. The room was full of it, bluely aflame with Isaac’s light, a massed hallucination of bones. It was bigger by far than the one in Response, bigger than anything recorded in a Ninth history textbook. It had assembled itself into the room by no visible means, since it never could have fit through one of the doors. It was just simply, suddenly there, like a nightmare—a squatting, vertiginous hulk; a nonsense of bones feathering into long, spidery legs, leaning back on them fearfully and daintily; trailing jellyfish stingers made up of millions and millions of teeth all set into each other like a jigsaw. It shivered its stingers, then stiffened all of them at once with a sound like a cracking whip. There was so much of it.

It was cringing away from Isaac Tettares, who had planted his feet wide in line with his hips and was screaming soundlessly in fear and anger. He had thrown his arms out wide as though in embrace, and there was a sodium explosion in the air between him and the room-cramping construct. It left a suction, like he was trying to drag something out of the unwilling creature. Bright blue points of contact appeared on it, and the mass of bone and energy began to lose form, drifting instead toward Isaac, tiny bones plinking down to the grille like rain.

Gideon woke from her confusion, drew her sword and ran. With a gauntleted hand she picked up the nearest stinger and yanked it, then smashed the back of her heavy glove into another, finding a naked shank of legbone and punching it as hard as she could. One of the tendrils of teeth wrapped around her ankle, but she found purchase and stamped it into a corona of molars. Gideon looked behind her to see Jeannemary whipped off her feet by another tendril, lashing out wildly with her feet and her blades. Everywhere she looked was filled with construct: everywhere Isaac’s light touched there was a veritable cancer of bone and tooth.

Gideon bellowed, voice deadened by a thousand million frigging bones:

“Run! Don’t fight it, RUN—”

But the enormous thing slapped another couple dozen tendrils down on the grille, sinuous, and flexed into long sharp wires. Isaac’s blue-green fire fell upon a giant trunk of bone, a skull terrifically mangled into the thing’s only coherent core: a simulacrum of a face with closed eyes and closed lips, as though locked perpetually in prayer. This vast mask loomed down from the ceiling and strained beneath Isaac’s pull. One of the tendrils gave in and was sucked into the vortex that the Fourth House was so valiantly creating. The spirit pinned to it was dissolving, the limb pattering into individual bits, one among hundreds.

Isaac did not stop and he did not run. It was one of the bravest and stupidest things Gideon had ever fucking seen. The construct teetered, getting its footing, cocking its great head as though in contemplation. The long straight spars of teeth hovered above the necromancer, bobbing and warping occasionally as though about to be sucked into his fiery gyre. Then at least fifty of them speared him through.

Blue fire and blood sprayed the room. Gideon sheathed her sword, set her shoulders, put one arm up above her eyes, and charged through the field like a rocket. It was like running through a landslide. A thousand fragments of bone ripped her robes to shreds and tore at every inch of exposed skin. She didn’t pay them any mind, but crashed into Jeannemary Chatur like the vengeance of the Emperor. Jeannemary had no intention of stopping: she was tearing into her unbeatable foe as though running away had never been in question. She barely seemed to notice that Gideon had grabbed her, her limbs thrashing, her throat one long howl that Gideon only translated later: Fidelity! Fidelity! Fidelity!

How she scrambled through that hallway, the other girl clutched to her bosom, long tendrils of bone snaking after them from the central room, she did not know. The fact that she shinnied up the ladder with Jeannemary attached, kicking and screaming, was even more unlikely. She tossed the cavalier down—she would have been surprised if the girl had even felt it—slammed the hatch lid, and turned the key so frantically that it made gouges in the metal.

Jeannemary rolled over on the cold black tiles, and she threw up. She pulled herself up on her bone-whipped, cut-up, bashed-in arms and legs, wobbling, and she began to shake. She sank back to her knees and screamed like a whistle. Gideon caught her up again—the grief-stricken teenager thrashed and bit—and started off on a jog away from the hatch.

Jeannemary kept kicking in her arms. “Put me down,” she wept. “Let me go back. He needs me. He could still be alive.”

“He’s seriously not,” said Gideon.

Jeannemary the Fourth screamed again. “I want to die,” she said afterward.

“Tough luck.”

She did, at least, stop kicking. The myriad cuts over Gideon’s hands and face were starting to really sting, but she paid them no mind. It was still a deep black night outside and the wind was howling around the side of Canaan House; she carried Jeannemary inside and down the big rotting staircase, and then she absolutely blanked on what to do next. The Fourth House cavalier couldn’t even stand: she was reduced to the small, disbelieving sobs of someone whose heart had broken forever. It was the second time Gideon had listened to Jeannemary really cry, and the second time was a lot worse than the first.

She had to get her to safety. Gideon wanted her longsword and she wanted Harrow. There were the Ninth quarters—but bone wards could be broken, even Harrow’s. She could march straight to where the others were guarding Dulcinea—but that was a long way to go with her catatonic cargo. And if she met an avaricious Naberius, or an overobedient Colum—she’d still prefer them to whatever was down there, in the facility, in the dark. Gideon’s hand was still gripping the key ring with the facility key she had just now so frantically used, and the red key on it—and lightning struck.

Jeannemary did not ask where they were going. Gideon ran down the soggy Canaan House staircase, and across silent nighttime corridors, and down the sloping little passage that led to the foyer for the training rooms. She pushed aside the tapestry and sprinted down the hall to the great black door that Harrow had called X-203. The door and the lock were so black in the night, and she was so slippery with fear, that for an excruciating minute she couldn’t seem to find the keyhole. And then she found it, and slid the red key home, and opened the door to the long-abandoned study.

The rail of spotlights all lit up, illuminating the clean laminate countertops of the laboratory and the still-shining wooden stairs to the living room. She slammed the door shut behind them and locked it so quickly that it ought to have broken the sound barrier. Gideon half-heaved, half-carried Jeannemary up the staircase and put her down on the squashy armchair, which wheezed with the sudden use. The sorrowful teen curled into a foetal position, bleeding and hiccupping. Gideon barrelled away and started taking stock of the room, wondering if she could haul the big wooden bookcases down as barricades.

“Where are we?” the Fourth eventually said, drearily.

“One of the key rooms. We’re safe, here. I’m the only one with a key.”

“What if it breaks down the door?”

Gideon said bracingly, “Are you kidding? That thing’s three-inch-thick iron.”

This neither comforted nor satisfied Jeannemary, who had possibly seen a makeshift blockade in the other girl’s eyes, but her crying diminished—every five seconds another sob would rack her, but she had swapped weeping for hysterical sucked-in breaths. Until she said: “It’s not fair,” and started up again with the great lung-filling fits of tears.

Gideon had moved before the aged gun, frightened into wondering whether or not it worked. Who knew? The swords still all held edges. “No. It’s not.”

“You d-don’t understand.” The cavalier was fighting for control, fierce eyes wet with hate and despair. She was shivering so hard that she was vibrating. “Isaac’s cautious. Not reckless. He’s not—he didn’t— He was always so careful, he shouldn’t have— I hated him when we were little, he wasn’t at all what I wanted—”

She gave in to crying again. When she could, she said, “It’s not fair! Why did he get stupid now?”

There was absolutely nothing Gideon could say to this. She needed more firepower than bookcases and antiques. What she badly needed was Harrow Nonagesimus, for whom a gigantic construction of bones would be more fun opportunity than hellish monstrosity, and she needed her longsword. But she couldn’t leave Jeannemary, and right now Jeannemary was a liability.

She mopped her hands over her bleeding face, demolishing her face paint and trying to get her thoughts straight, and settled on: “Look. We’ll stay in here until you’re fighting fit—don’t try to tell me you’re fit, you’re exhausted, you’re in shock, and you look like hot puke. Take half an hour, lie down, and I’ll get you some water.”

It took an enormous effort to get Jeannemary onto one of the dusty, mattress-squeaking beds, and much more effort to get her to take even tiny sips of the water that came out of the tap at the laboratory—the pipes rattled in shock that they were being used—in a little tin mug that had probably not had anybody’s lips near it since the Ninth House was young. The recalcitrant teen drank a little, rested her head on the spongy old pillow, and her shoulders shook for a long time. Gideon settled down in the overstuffed armchair and kept her rapier out over her knees.

“What was that thing?”

Gideon startled; she had been lulled into a fug of reverie, and Jeannemary’s voice was thick with weeping and the pillow.

“Dunno,” she said. “All I know is that I’m going to kick its ass for it.”

Another moment’s silence. Then: “This is the first time Isaac and me really left the House … I wanted him to sign us up to go out to the front ages ago, but Abigail said no … and he wouldn’t … I mean, he’s got three younger brothers and four younger sisters to look after. He had, I mean.”

It sounded as though she was going to burst into tears again. Gideon said, “That’s—a significant amount?”

“You need spares when you’re in the Fourth House,” said Jeannemary, sniffling. “I’ve got five sisters. Do you have a big family?”

“The Ninth doesn’t do big families. I think I’m an orphan.”

“Well, that’s pretty Fourth House too,” said the cav. “My mum jumped on a grenade during the Pioneer expedition, even though she wasn’t supposed to be out on post-colony planets beyond the rim. Isaac’s dad went out on a state visit to a hold planet and got blown up by insurgents.”

There was no more after that, not even tears. After a few minutes Gideon was not surprised to see that the poor bloodied girl had cried herself unconscious. She did not wake her. There would be time enough to wake her, and even a short rest would probably do her good. It sucked to be a teen, and it sucked more to be a teen whose best friend had just died in a horrible way, even if you were used to mothers jumping on grenades and fathers getting exploded. At least in the Ninth House, the way you usually went was pneumonia exacerbated by senility.

Gideon rested her head on the fat back of the armchair. She would not have said it was at all possible, but—watching the rise and fall of Jeannemary’s breath, a safe up-and-down rhythm, the drying tearstains on the sleeping teen’s cheeks—she promptly fell asleep.

It couldn’t have been long. Fifteen minutes at the very most. She startled awake with the sheer unconscious panic of someone realising they couldn’t afford to slip into deep REM, a haptic jerk flicking her awake. Her sword rattled off her knees and jangled to the floor. The only sound that could have woken her was a persistent drip she’d thought was coming from the tap.

Gideon did not understand what she was looking at when she awoke, and when she cleared her eyes and looked properly, she still didn’t understand.

Jeannemary was still lying prone in the old bed, arms and legs now flung wide, as if she had kicked off the blankets and sheets in a bad dream: this would have been fine, except for the huge shafts of bone spearing each shoulder to the mattress. Two more through the thighs. One straight through the very centre of her ribs. These spears of bone met Jeannemary’s body with haloes of red, splotching through her clothes, seeping into the bedspread.

“No,” said Gideon meditatively, “no, no, no, no, no.”

Jeannemary’s eyes were very slightly open. There was blood spattered in her curls, and there was blood spattered over the headboard. Gideon’s gaze followed the splatter upward. Written on the wall, in silky wet red, was: