Gideon the Ninth

Chapter 26

Side by side, the Fourth teens were laid to an uneasy sleep in the morgue, right next to the adults who had failed so terminally to look after them. Somebody had (how? It was a mystery) taken the cooling body from Gideon’s arms (who had plucked those spears from those terrible holes and carried Jeannemary back?) and a lot of people had spoken a lot of words to her, none of which had pierced her short-term memory. Teacher was there, in her mind’s eye, praying over the broken sieve of Isaac Tettares; and Harrowhark was in there somewhere too, and Palamedes, tweezering a big fragment of something out of the cooling corpse of Jeannemary the Fourth. These images were as jumbled-up and lacking in context as a dream.

She remembered one thing: Harrowhark saying you dullard—you imbecile—you fool, all the old contempt of the Ninth House nursery back and fresh as though she were there again. Harrow the architect, sweeping down the halls of Drearburh. Harrow the nemesis, flanked by Crux. It wasn’t clear what in particular Harrow was haranguing her for, but whatever the reason, she deserved it. Gideon had tuned out all the rest of the necromancer’s tirade, her head in her hands. And then Harrowhark had balled up her fists—breathed hard once through her nose—and gone away.

The only thing that had made sense was that she had ended up in the whitewashed room where they were keeping Dulcinea, sitting alone in an armchair, and there she had gritted tears out of her eyes for an hour. Someone had washed out all her cuts with reeking vermillion tarry stuff, and it smelled bad and hurt like hell whenever an errant drip of salt water touched the wounds. This made her feel sorry for herself, and feeling sorry for herself made her eyes even wetter.

Dulcinea Septimus was a good person to do this in front of. She did not say “You’ll be fine,” as Dulcinea lacked the lung capacity to spend on platitudes; she just sat propped up on about fifteen pillows and kept her thin hot hand on Gideon’s palm. She waited until Gideon had stopped her hard blinking, and then she said—

“There was nothing you could have done.”

“Bullshit there wasn’t anything I could have done,” said Gideon, “I’ve thought of everything I should’ve done. There’s about fifty things I could’ve done and didn’t.”

Dulcinea gave her a crooked smile. She looked terrible. It was a few hours before morning, and the early light was grey on her biscuit-coloured curls and blanched skin. The fine green veins at her throat and wrists seemed terribly prominent, like most of her epidermis had sloughed off already. When she breathed, it sounded like custard sloshing around an air conditioner. There was high colour in her cheeks, but it had the hectic brilliance of hot slag.

“Oh, could’ve … should’ve,” she said. “You can could have and should have yourself back into last week … back into the womb. I could have kept Pro by my side, or I should have gone with him. I can go back and make things happen perfectly if I just think about what I should have or could have done. But I didn’t … you didn’t … that’s the way it is.”

“I can’t bear it,” said Gideon honestly. “It’s just such crap.”

“Life is a tragedy,” said Dulcinea. “Left behind by those who pass away, not able to change anything at all. It’s the total lack of control … Once somebody dies, their spirit’s free forever, even if we snatch at it or try to stopper it or use the energy it creates. Oh, I know sometimes they come back … or we can call them, in the manner of the Fifth … but even that exception to the rule shows their mastery of us. They only come when we beg. Once someone dies, we can’t grasp at them anymore, thank God!—except for one person, and he’s very far from here, I think. Gideon, don’t be sorry for the dead. I think death must be an absolute triumph.”

Gideon could not get behind this. Jeannemary had died like a dog while Gideon napped, and Isaac had been made into a big teenage colander; she wanted to be sorry for them forever. But before she could say anything to this effect, a great cough that filled up about two and a half handkerchiefs tore at Dulcinea. The contents of these handkerchiefs made Gideon envy the dead, let alone Dulcinea.

“We’ll find your cav,” she said, trying to sound steady and failing so completely she set a record.

“I just want to know what happened,” said Dulcinea drearily. “That’s always the worst of it … not knowing what happened.”

Gideon didn’t know whether she could get behind this either. She would’ve been devoutly grateful to live not knowing exactly the things that had happened, in vivid red-and-purple wobbling intensity. Then again, her mind kept flaying itself over Magnus and Abigail, down there in the dark, alone—over the when, and the how; over whether Magnus had watched his wife be murdered like Jeannemary had watched Isaac. She thought: It is stupid for a cavalier to watch their necromancer die.

Gideon felt hot and empty and eager to fight. She said without real hope, “If you want your keys back from Silas Octakiseron, I’ll deck him for you.”

The coughing turned into a bubbling laugh. “Don’t,” said Dulcinea. “I gave them up freely, by my own will. What would I want with them now?”

Gideon asked baldly, “Why were you trying to do this whole thing in the first place?”

“Do you mean, even though I’m dying?” Dulcinea gave a friable smile, but one with a dimple in it. “That’s not a complete barrier. The Seventh House thinks my condition is an asset. They even wanted me to get married and keep the genes going—me! My genes couldn’t be worse—in case they produced poetry down the line.”

“I don’t understand.”

The woman in front of her shifted, raising her hand to brush a few fawn-coloured strands away from her forehead. She didn’t answer for a while. Then she said, “When you don’t have it too badly—when you can live to maybe fifty years—when your body’s dying from the inside out, when your blood cells are eating you alive the whole time … it makes for such a necromancer, Gideon the Ninth. A walking thanergy generator. If they could figure out some way to stop you when you’re mostly cancer and just a little bit woman, they would! But they can’t. They say my House loves beauty—they did and they do—and there’s a kind of beauty in dying beautifully … in wasting away … half-alive, half-dead, within the very queenhood of your power.”

The wind whistled, thin and lonely, against the window. Dulcinea struggled to raise herself up on her elbows before Gideon could stop her, and she demanded: “Do I look like I’m at the queenhood of my power?”

This would’ve made anyone sweat. “Uh—”

“If you lie I’ll mummify you.”

“You look like a bucket of ass.”

Dulcinea eased herself back down, giggling fretfully. “Gideon,” she said, “I told your necromancer I didn’t want to die. And it’s true … but I’ve been dying for what feels like ten thousand years. I more didn’t want to die alone. I didn’t want them to put me out of sight. It’s a horrible thing to fall out of sight … The Seventh would have sealed me in a beautiful tomb and not talked about me again. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. So I came here when the Emperor asked me … because I wanted to … even though I knew I came here to die.”

Gideon said, “But I don’t want you to die,” and realised a second afterward that she had said it aloud.

The first finger and thumb of the hand ringed around hers. The dark blue eyes were luminous—too luminous; their lustre was wet and hot and bright—and Gideon pressed those fingers between her hands, very carefully. It felt as though even a little bit of pressure would crush Dulcinea to dust between her palms, like the very oldest bones kept in the Ninth House oss. Her heart felt sore and tender; her brain felt sore and dry.

“I don’t plan on it, you know,” said Dulcinea, though her voice was thinning out now, like water poured into milk. She closed her eyes with a gravelly sigh. “I’ll probably live forever … worse luck. Whatever happened to one flesh, one end?”

“I’ve seen those words before,” said Gideon, thoughtless of where she had seen them. “What do they mean?”

The blue eyes cracked open.

“They’re not familiar?”

“Should they be?”

“Well,” said Dulcinea calmly, “you would have said them to your Reverend Daughter the day you pledged yourself in the service of her cavalier, and she would have said them to you—but you never did that, did you? You weren’t trained in the traditions of the House of the Locked Tomb, and you’re nothing like a Ninth House nun. And you fight like—I don’t know. I’m not even certain you were raised in the Ninth House.”

Gideon let her head rest against the bed frame momentarily. When she had thought about this moment, she had expected to feel panic. There was no more panic left in the box. She just felt tired.

“Rumbled,” she said. “I’m sick of pretending, so yeah. Right on nearly all those counts. You know I’m the fakest-ass cavalier who ever faked. The actual cav had chronic hyperthyroid and was a serial limpdick. I’ve been faking my way through his duties for less than two months. I’m a pretend cavalier. I could not be worse at it.”

The smile she got in return had no dimples. It was strangely tender—as Dulcinea was always strangely tender with her—as though they had always shared some delicious secret. “You’re wrong there,” she said. “If you want to know what I think … I think that you’re a cavalier worthy of a Lyctor. I want to see that, what you’d become. I wonder if the Reverend Daughter even knows what she has in you?”

They looked at each other, and Gideon knew that she was holding that chemical blue gaze too long. Dulcinea’s hand was hot on hers. Now the old panic of confession seemed to rise up—her adrenaline was getting a second wind from deep down in her gut—and in that convenient moment the door opened. Palamedes Sextus walked in with his big black bag of weird shit, adjusted his glasses, and stared two seconds too long at their hands’ proximity.

There was something dreadfully tactful and remote and un-Palamedes-y as he said, “I came to check in on the both of you. Bad time?”

“Only in that I am officially out,” said Gideon, snatching her hand away. Everyone was mad at her, which was great, albeit they could not possibly be as mad as she was. She stood and rolled her neck until all the joints popped and crackled anxiously, was relieved to find her rapier still on her hip, and squared up to Palamedes feeling—terrifically dusty and guilty. “I’m going back to my quarters. No, I’m fine, quit it. Thanks for the ointment, it smells bewitchingly like piss.”

“For God’s sake, Ninth,” said Palamedes impatiently, “sit back down. You need to rest.”

“Cast your mind back to previous rests I have enjoyed. Yeah, nah.”

“It’s not even ointment, it’s drawing salve. Be reminded that Cam pulled twenty bone splinters out of you and said there were still a dozen left—”

“Nonagesimus can get them out—or maybe not,” added Gideon, a bit wildly. “Might as well leave them in until I’m through getting people bumped off, am I right?”

“Ninth—”

She indulged herself in storming out past the Warden of the Sixth, and in careering down the hallway like a bomb. It was about the least dignified way to leave a perfectly normal conversation, but it was also really satisfying, and it got her out of there in record time. Gideon staggered down the hallway picking orange goo out of her fingernails, and it was in this scratchy frame of mind that she nearly knocked down Silas Octakiseron in his floaty, bactericidal Eighth House whites. Colum the Eighth flanked him automatically, looking more like jaundice than ever in the same colour.

“They are dead, then,” his uncle said, by way of hello.

The only thing that saved Gideon from howling like an animal was the relief that, finally, she would get the chance to shove one of Octakiseron’s feet so deep into his ass he’d be gargling with his calcaneus.

“They had names, you lily-livered, tooth-coloured asshole,” she said, “and if you want to make a thing about it, I warn you that I’m in the kind of mood that can only be alleviated by walloping you.”

Colum blinked. His necromancer did not.

“I had heard that you were speaking now,” he said. “It seems a pity. Save your gaucherie for someone else, Gideon Nav. I’ve no interest in the frightened rantings of a Ninth House thrall.”

“What did you call me?”

“Thrall,” said Silas. “Serf. Servant.”

“I don’t want a bunch of synonyms, you smarmy cloud-looking motherfucker,” said Gideon. “You said Gideon Nav.”

“Villein,” continued the necromancer of the house of the Eighth, warming to his thesaurus. Colum was staring at Gideon, almost cross-eyed with disbelief. “Foundling. I am not insulting you, I am naming you for what you are. The replacement for Ortus Nigenad, himself a poor representative of a foetid House of betrayers and mystics.”

Gideon’s brain skidded to a halt: it went back again to Drearburh, sitting with a fat lip and wicked friction burns on her wrists. The cries of the dwindling faithful. Green lights in the powdery dark. The greasy smell of incense. A woman weeping. Someone stealing her getaway shuttle, a million years ago. Two someones. One sad, one sadder, immigrants to the Ninth House themselves.

She still has family back on the Eighth …

“You’ve been listening to Sister Glaurica,” she said slowly.

“I talked to Glaurica on her return to the mother house,” said Silas. “And now I’d like to talk to you.”

“Me. The thrall. The servant. The other five words you said.”

“Yes,” said the boy, “because you grew up servant to a murderer, in a tribe of murderers. You are, more than anything, a victim of the Ninth House.”

That stopped the tiny bone in Gideon’s soul snapping; that stopped her from striding forward and balling both hands in the exquisite linen and chill mail of his robes—that and the fact that she hadn’t been straight-up shield-bashed yet by Colum the Eighth and wasn’t in a hurry to experience this exciting time. She stepped forward. Silas did not step away, but he turned his head a little from her, as though she were a bad breath. He had very brown eyes, startlingly framed by thick, whitish lashes.

“Don’t pretend like you know what happened to me there,” she said. “Glaurica never remembered I was alive, didn’t care about me when she remembered, and she wouldn’t have said anything to you on the subject. You don’t know anything about me and you don’t know anything about the House of the Ninth.”

“You are wrong on both points,” said Silas, to somewhere over her shoulder.

“Prove it.”

“You are invited to come and take tea with myself and Brother Asht.”

She scrubbed both her dirty fists into her eyes and narrowly avoided gumming one up with the terrible orangey salve, which was so noxious that it apparently caused splinters to leap from her body rather than hang around near it. Her corneas misted up momentarily with the smell. “Sorry, didn’t hear you right,” she said, “because I thought you said, ‘Come and take tea with myself and Brother Asht,’ the dumbest thing to say, ever.”

“You are invited to come and take tea with myself and Brother Asht,” Silas repeated, with the kind of hard patience that indicated a mantra going on inside his pallid head. “You will not bring the daughter of the Locked Tomb, but you’ll bring yourself, and you will be ready to listen. No price. No hidden motive. Just an invitation to become more than what you are now.”

“Which is—?”

Silas said, “The tool of your oppressors. The lock on your own collar.”

She couldn’t handle any more, having already lived a long night and suffered a number of emotional torments, among them supernatural murder and petty interpersonal drama. Gideon shrugged her cloak over her shoulders, thrust her free hand into a pocket, and stalked down the corridor away from any uncles and nephews.

The necromancer’s voice drifted down after her: “Will you come and listen to what I have to say? Be decisive.”

“Eat me, milk man,” said Gideon, and staggered around the corner.

She heard Colum’s “Means yes, probably,” but not the murmured reply.

From that time on, Gideon could not outfight the nightmares. She willed her subconscious to sink into a pattern of random eye movement that did not involve her waking up in a lather of cold sweat, but like so many things in her life now, it had lost fitness and apt response. She was dumb before the body of her failures, unmanned by the barrage of her brain. Gideon only had to close her eyes to see her own personal, randomly selected shitshow.

Magnus Quinn, still drinking his grassy morning tea, stabbed until his chest was steaming chunks of meat because she could not make her tongue yell Look behind you—

—a steaming cauldron filled with fragrant grain and the silent, foetal corpse of Abigail Pent, sinking beneath the surface before Gideon’s blistering fingers could dig her clear—

—Isaac Tettares gulping and swallowing from an upturned jug of acid that she was unable to wrench from his febrile, trembling hands—

—Jeannemary Chatur, whose dismembered arms and legs kept turning up while Gideon made a bed that got stickier and wetter and more jumbled with bits of Jeannemary as the covers were turned; and—

—the old dream of her mother. Alive now, overlapping with her life in a way she hadn’t in reality, shrieking Gideon—Gideon—Gideon! while, as Gideon watched, crones of the Ninth gently levered her skull from the rest of her head with a big crunchy crack.

And Harrow, telling her to wake up. That had only happened the once: the Ninth necromancer sitting in the dark, wrapped in a mouldering duvet like a cloak, her face very naked and blank and shorn of its monochrome skull mural. Gideon had fallen back into an uneasy sleep almost immediately. She could never decide if she had dreamed that into being—Harrowhark was not exploding, or having her intestines drip out of her ears like streamers, or sloughing off her skin right down to her subcutaneous fat—but she had been looking at Gideon with a coal-eyed expression of absolute pity. There had been something very weary and soft about the way that Harrow Nonagesimus had looked at her then, something that would have been understanding had it not been so tired and cynical.

“It’s just me,” she’d said impatiently. “Go back to sleep.”

All signs pointed toward hallucination.

At that, Gideon had to sleep, because the consequences of waking were too hideous. But from then on she slept wearing her rapier, her gauntlet on her chest like a heavy obsidian heart.

Chapter 27

“Let’s negotiate,” said Palamedes Sextus.

Harrow and Gideon sat in the Sixth House’s quarters, which was bizarre as hell as an experience. The Sixth had been housed in high, airy rooms tucked into the curve of the central tower. Their windows opened onto a sweeping view of the sea, or at least, they would’ve had the Sixth not covered them up with blackout curtains. The whole of the Sixth was huddled on the polar caps of a planet so close to Dominicus that exposure to the light side would melt the House clean away. The great libraries were set in a fat cake tin of a station, designed for the ongoing ordeal of not letting anything get too hot or too cold, which meant no windows at all whatsoever. Palamedes and Camilla had recreated that effect in here to the best of their ability, which meant a room with the airiness and lightness of a closet.

This was not helped by the fact that nearly every square inch was covered by flimsy: Palamedes’s scribbles were tacked up like wallpaper across every bare surface. They were taped to tables. They clustered over the mirror. Fat books lay in serried rows on the arms of every chair, stacked haphazardly, as though nobody ever sat down without bringing another one to bear. Gideon had peeked through the open door of the bedroom, into a dark nest where a huge whiteboard stared down at the ancient, wheezing four-poster bed, very neatly made. There was no question about whether or not Camilla inhabited the horrible cot attached to the end, cavalier-style. It sagged beneath assorted weapons and tins of metal polish.

“I’m not moving from my outline,” said Harrow. She and Palamedes sat on either side of a table swept hastily clear of books and notes: stray pens rolled across the surface at the least jolt. “I hold the keys. We enter together. You get an hour.”

“An hour’s not remotely sufficient—”

“You’re slow.”

“You’re paranoid.”

“I am—currently—alive,” said Harrowhark, and Gideon winced.

Palamedes had taken off his spectacles ten minutes into the argument, and he was now cleaning them on the front of his robe. This appeared to be more of an aggressive move than a defensive one: his eyes, free of glass plates, were arrestingly grey. It mainly only hurt Gideon, who was trying very badly to avoid his gaze. “So you are. The room in and of itself is of interest to me, and it ought to be of interest to you,” he said.

“You’re too forensic.”

“You lack scope. Give over, Nonagesimus. A key-for-key swap is the most logical and most elegant arrangement here. This refusal is just superstition and paranoia, cooked up with a side of—pure humbuggery.”

For a moment Gideon’s anger and remorse were overwhelmed by, Did you legit just say ‘pure humbuggery’?

The necromancers were now mirroring each other’s equally bowed postures: bony elbows on the table, hands clasped beneath their chins, staring at each other unblinking. Behind Palamedes’s chair, Camilla had the glazed expression of someone who had checked out ten minutes ago. Her arm was bandaged but not kept pinned up, and she appeared to have full range of movement with it. Gideon was lolling behind Harrow, picking at her fingernails and staring at the pieces of paper, which had handwriting that was more like cryptography. Her own necromancer settled back and said, sepulchral: “You are still convinced by your … megatheorem idea, then.”

“Yes. Aren’t you?”

“No. It’s sensational.”

“But not out of the question. Look. The tasks and challenges—the theories underpinning them—they’re really not that disparate. Neural amalgamation. Transferral of energy. As we saw in the entropy field challenge, continuous siphoning. The magical theory’s astonishing. Nobody has pushed necromantic power this far: it’s unsustainable. If the intent is to show off the sheer breadth of Lyctoral power—well, they did. I’ve seen the winnowing test, and if the self-replicating bone golem had been the only thing in it I would still be kept up at night. I don’t know how the hell they did it.”

“I do,” said Harrow, “and if my calculations are right I can replicate it. But all this is more than unsustainable, Sextus. The things they’ve shown us would be powerful—would bespeak impossible depth of necromantic ability—if they were replicable. These experiments all demand a continuous flow of thanergy. They’ve hidden that source somewhere in the facility, and that’s the true prize.”

“Ah. Your secret door theory. Very Ninth.”

She bristled. “It’s a simple understanding of area and space. Including the facility, we’ve got access to maybe thirty percent of this tower. That’s what’s called hard evidence, Warden. Your megatheorem is based on supposition and your so-called ‘instinct.’”

“Thanks! Anyway, I don’t like how many of these spells are about sheer control,” said Palamedes.

“Don’t be feeble. Necromancy is control.”

Palamedes slipped his spectacles back on. Phew. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know, some days. Look—Nonagesimus. These theorems are all teaching us something. I believe they’re parts of an overarching whole; like the whiteboard in the facility, remember? It is finished. You believe they’re giving us clues—prompts—toward some deeper occult understanding that’s hidden elsewhere, this power source idea. I see puzzle pieces; you see direction signs. Now, maybe you’re right and we’re meant to follow the crumbs to some master treasure. But if I’m right—if Lyctorhood is nothing more or less than the synthesis of eight individual theorems…”

Harrow did not speak. There was a long moment, and Gideon thought that Palamedes had lapsed into thought. But then he said crisply: “Then it’s wrong. There’s a flaw in the underlying logic. The whole thing is an ugly mistake.”

Now her necromancer said, “Leave the cryptic to the Ninth. What mistake, Sextus?”

“I’ll give you the relevant notes if you help me pick a lock,” said Palamedes.

This was enough to give her pause. “Give me your personal notes on all the theorems you’ve seen. What lock?”

“Throw in a copy of your map—”

“Do I have a map?” Harrowhark remarked, in general, to the air. “My goodness. That is, at the very best, a baseless assertion.”

“Not an idiot, Reverend Daughter. A Lyctoral lock—the one that matches the Sixth House key. The grey key. Which Silas Octakiseron currently holds. Hence: picking.”

“That’s impossible. How?”

“You can’t know until we do it. If it works, it gets you every single note on every theorem I’ve read, in return for yours, your cooperation, and the map. Are you in?”

There was a pregnant pause. As everyone had already known beforehand, Gideon’s necromancer was forced to admit that she was in. She rose to stand: the chair behind her teetered dangerously, and Gideon corrected it with her foot. “At least show me the door you told me about,” she commanded. “I despise this feeling that the Sixth House is taking my house for all it can get.”

“Most people would have looked upon this as a generous deal,” remarked Sextus, whose chair was being held back for him by the obliging Camilla, “but I did owe you one—for sticking by us when the Third House made its challenge. Not that we wouldn’t have won it—but we would have given more than I’m willing to give. So that’s the sticky sentiment part. Come with me for the cold hard facts.”

They all traipsed after him for the cold hard facts. When the Sixth House locked their front door, it was grimly amusing to see that as well as Palamedes’s wards they had hammered in five deadlocks, and reinforced the door so that it could not be taken off its hinges. Hearing Camilla shove all the bolts home was as good as an orchestra. The two necromancers drifted to the front—their long robes making them look like dreary grey birds—and Gideon and Camilla fell behind them, lingering beyond the mandated half step.

Camilla the Sixth’s shoulders were set. Her straight dark fringe fell out of the way as she half-turned her face to Gideon, briefly, expressionlessly, but that was all Gideon needed.

“Ask me how I am and I’ll scream,” she said.

“How are you,” said Camilla, who was a pill.

“I see you calling my bluff and I resent it,” said Gideon. “So, hey. What do you really use when you’re not pretending the rapier’s your main wield? Two short blades of equal length, or one blade and one baton?”

Her keen eyes narrowed into black-lined slits. “How did I mess up?” she asked, eventually.

“You drew your rapier and your dagger at the same time. And you’re ambidextrous. You keep cutting like both your blades are curved. Also, there’s six swords and a nightstick on your bed.”

“Should’ve tidied my mess,” admitted Camilla. “Two blades. Double-edged.”

“Why? I mean, that’s boss, but why?”

The other cavalier massaged her elbow gingerly, flexing her fingers as though to make sure there was no correlating pain. She seemed to be considering something, and then she came to an abrupt conclusion. “I applied to be the Warden’s cavalier primary when I was twelve,” she said. “Got accepted. We’d looked at the data on weapons, before. Decided that two short blades had—more general applications. I learnt the rapier,”—that was an understatement—“but I’ll be fighting with the blades, when the time comes to really fight.”

Before Gideon could get to grips with the disquieting implication this was not yet the time to really fight, Camilla got in an elbow jab: “Why are you acting like you and he are arguing?”

“Nooooo,” said Gideon brightly, followed up with a: “thaaaaanks.”

“Because you’re not arguing.” Beat. “You’d know if you were arguing.”

“Can you— I don’t know! Can you tell him that if he wants me to introduce him to Dulcinea, I can do it? Can you tell him I’m not trying to cramp his friggin’ style?”

“The last thing the Warden needs,” said Camilla, “is an introduction to Lady Septimus.”

“Then can you tell him to maybe stop acting like he read everyone’s feelings in a book ages ago? Because that would be completely sweet,” said Gideon.

Without another word, Camilla moved to bookend her adept as he paused before a large, gilt-framed picture: the gilt was mostly brown except where it had gone black, and the picture itself was so faded that it looked like a coffee stain. It was a curious image: a dusty expanse of rock, cracked into an enormous canyon running down the centre, a sepia river winding into flaked-off nothingness at the very bottom.

“I documented this one a long time back,” said Harrow.

“Let’s take another look.”

Palamedes and Camilla each shouldered one corner of the portrait, lifting it off some unseen tack. It seemed very light. The great Lyctoral door behind it—with its black pillars and its carved horned skulls, its graven images and grim stone—was not particularly well hidden. In all respects, it was a nearly exact match for the other Lyctoral door Gideon had seen. But Harrow sucked in her breath.

She went to the lock, and then Gideon saw why: it had been filled in with some hard, tarry grey stuff, like putty or cement. Someone had deliberately tampered with the keyhole. Part of the putty had been chipped away at the bottom, with great gouges taken out of it, but otherwise it seemed depressingly solid. There was no getting through that stuff without significant engineering work.

“Sixth,” said her necromancer, “it was not in this condition the first night we were in Canaan House.”

“I still can’t believe you documented every door in this place on the first night,” said Palamedes, with one of his slight dry smiles, “and that I didn’t. I couldn’t tell when the lock was first jammed. I thought I was losing my grip.”

Harrow was already easing her gloves off with her teeth, flexing her long nervous fingers like a surgeon. She drew the pad of her thumb over the stuff, furrowed her brow so deeply that it could have held a pencil, and swore under her breath. She tossed the gloves to Gideon—Gideon caught them neatly—and depressed the matter with her thumb and forefinger. “This,” she said calmly, “is regenerating ash.”

“Perpetual bone, which accounts for it being undateable—”

“Same stuff as the transferral construct.”

“In which case—”

“Whoever put this in place would need to have a comparable level of skill to whoever made the construct,” said Harrow. “Getting it out again would require more power than most bone specialists hold—in aggregate.”

“I didn’t bring you here to remove it,” Sextus said. “I just brought you here to confirm, which you’ve done nicely, thank you.”

“Excuse me. I never said I couldn’t remove it.”

One eyebrow went up above the thick spectacles. “You don’t think…?”

It was the Harrowhark of old who responded, the one who walked down dusty Ninth House halls as though crushing purple silk beneath her feet. “Sextus,” she said blandly, “I am embarrassed for you that you can’t.”

She clapped her hand over the gall of bone matter welted over the lock. Then she drew it back, and—with all the self-affinity of chewing gum or glue—it travelled back with her hand, a gummy web of about a finger’s length, the point of origin vibrating madly as a bead of sweat appeared at her temple. Palamedes Sextus sucked in a breath—and then the stuff snapped back, like flexible plastic, rubbering together sullenly in an immovable lump. Harrow tried again. Her fingers kept flexing in and out impotently, kneading, and she turned her head away and closed her eyes. She stretched the stuff away a whole hand’s length—and then it broke, re-formed, scattered back like a reverse explosion. She tried again. And again; and again after that.

The paint on Harrow’s forehead was shiny with blood sweat now. It bubbled up in greyish-pink rivulets. It shone around each nostril. Before she knew what she was doing, Gideon found that she had moved in to flank her: hiding what she was doing from Sextus’s impassive gaze, rolling up the long black sleeve of her Ninth cloak, mouth moving before her brain did. “Battery up,” she muttered.

It was the first thing Gideon had said to her since Harrow had stalked from the Sixth House quarters, taut with what had seemed to be the world’s most dismissive disappointment, a disdainful black crow of a girl. Her adept opened one baleful black eye.

“Pardon?”

“I said saddle up, sunshine. Come on. You know what to do.”

“I manifestly don’t, and never tell me to saddle up, sunshine ever again.”

“I’m saying to you: siphon me.”

“Nav—”

“Sixth are watching,” said Gideon, brutally.

At the last remark—which was a sledgehammer of a statement, not a stiletto—Harrowhark fell silent. Her expression was resentful in a way that her cavalier could not understand, except to parse it as grim hatefulness that—once again—the only path open to her was that of using her cavalier, a girl who had screwed up so badly as to provide the universe at large with a new understanding of screwup. All she said was, “You don’t have to roll up your sleeve, you nincompoop,” and then the leaching, squirming feeling of siphoning began.

It was just as bad as the first time, but unquestionably shorter than Harrow’s long and awful walk from one side of the avulsion room to the other; and now Gideon knew what to expect. The pain was a familiar brand of terrible. She did not cry out, though that probably would have been more dignified: instead she toned it down to a series of wheezes and grunts as her necromancer took something from her that sandpapered her soul. Her blood boiled in her veins, then froze abruptly and grazed her innards with each pump of her heart.

Harrowhark curved her fingers, and she pulled. At the end of a very long moment she held an inert sphere of compressed ash and bone, grey and pockmarked, tamed to submission. The lock was as clear and as clean as though the obstruction had never existed. The pair from the Sixth stared at them. Eventually, Palamedes leaned down to squint through the newly cleared keyhole.

“Don’t get used to using her that way, Nonagesimus,” he said, and disapproval had crept into his voice. “It’s not good theory and it’s not good morals.”

It was Gideon who said, “You’re sounding more and more like Silas Octakiseron.”

“Ouch,” said Palamedes, sincerely. Then he straightened up. “Well. It’s off, for good or for ill. Maybe we should’ve left it on, but I want to make it—them—whatever—nervous. Even a supernatural force is vulnerable.” He let his finger rest on the lock. “Did you hide the last key too?” he asked it quietly. “Or are we racing you to it? Well, move faster, dickhead.”

Camilla cleared her throat, maybe because her necromancer was talking to a door. He dropped his hand. “Owe you another one, Ninth,” he said to her skull-faced necromancer. “You get a free question.”

“It’s unattractive to set yourself up as the repository of all knowledge, Sextus.”

“‘Set up’ nothing.”

“How many keys are in play now?”

Palamedes suddenly grinned. It was a curious act of alchemy that turned his raw-boned, plain face into something magnetic: very nearly good looking, instead of being the act of three jawbones meeting a chin. “We’ve got three,” he said. “You’ve got two—or, you did, until you gave one to Lady Septimus, as per the agreement she’d offered me first. You should have haggled for more, by the way—she offered me a look at the keys she already had. But I suspect you didn’t need her to sweeten the deal.” Harrow didn’t react, though Gideon bet she was swearing up a storm in some vile crypt of her brain. “The Eighth had one, and now they’ve got two more through trickery—Dulcinea’s. But that still leaves one spare.”

“The Third?” suggested Harrow.

“Nope. Cam heard them talking this morning, they’ve got nothing. And it’s not the Second unless they lied to me after the duel, which, you know, Second. So watch your back. The Second are still looking for a way to shut the whole thing down, the Third don’t like coming last, and the Eighth will take anything and justify the cost.” He frowned. “It’s the Third I’m least certain of. I don’t know which twin to watch out for.”

“The big one,” said Harrow, without hesitation. Gideon was pretty sure both twins were the same size, and was surprised to discover that even the anatomist’s gaze of Harrowhark Nonagesimus was not immune to the radiance coming off Princess Corona. “They’re both only middling necromancers, but the big one is the dominant. She says I; the sister says we.”

“Honestly a good point. Still not sure. Meet me tomorrow night and we’ll start the theorem exchange, Ninth. I’ve got to think.”

“The missing key,” said Harrow.

“The missing key.”

After the brief goodbyes, both of the Sixth House turned away in their drab greys—until, much to Gideon’s acute dislike, Palamedes spun around. He had not met her eye the whole time, maybe out of service to the fact that she was avoiding his, but now he looked her dead in the face. She swallowed down the urge to say: I’m sorry, I don’t hate you, I just kind of hate me right now. Instead, she coolly looked away, which was the opposite of an apology.

“Keep an eye on her, Nav,” said Palamedes quickly. And then he turned to catch up with Camilla.

“He’s getting presumptuous,” said the Reverend Daughter, watching their retreating backs.

“I think he wasn’t—talking about you.”

They kept a long and drawn-out silence, as unwillingly stretchy as the ashes and bone shards that had been clumped over the keyhole. “Good point,” said Harrow. “That reminds me! I now officially ban you from seeing Lady Septimus.”

“Are we having this conversation? Are we really having this conversation?”

Harrow’s face was pinched into an expression of deliberate patience. “Nav,” she said. “Take it from me. Dulcinea Septimus is dangerous.”

“You’re nuts. Dulcinea Septimus can’t even blow her nose. I’m sick of how weird you’re getting over this.”

“And yet you’ve never thought about how she still managed to get a key—how am I being weird?”

“I don’t know,” said Gideon, heartily fed up with the whole thing. “I don’t know! Maybe it’s because whenever she’s mentioned, you effortlessly tick both boxes for jealous and creep?”

“If you looked in a dictionary you’d find it’s envious, and I’m hardly envious of—”

“No, it’s one hundred percent jealous,” said Gideon recklessly, “on account of how you’re always doing this when it looks like she’s taking up my time.”

There was a horrible pause.

“I have been lax,” said her necromancer, steadily ignoring this last statement like it was a dump Gideon had taken in the hallway. She took her gloves from Gideon’s awkward hands and slipped them back over her fingers. “I have indulged myself in apathy while you attached yourself to every weirdo in Canaan House.” (“You cannot possibly call anyone a weirdo,” said Gideon.) “No more. We now have less to hide, but more to lose.”

“She’s got nobody if that thing comes after her. It’s a death sentence.”

“Yes. She has no cavalier now,” said Harrow. “It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when. Let the dead reclaim the dead. You won’t take my word when I’ve proven my judgement before? Fine. You’re still barred from her sickroom.”

“No,” said Gideon. “Nah. Nope. Denied. That’s not me.”

“You’re not her bodyguard.”

“I never pledged to be yours either,” said Gideon. “Not really.”

“Yes, you did,” snapped Harrowhark. “You agreed to act as my cavalier primary. You agreed to devote yourself to the duties of a cavalier. Your misunderstanding of what that entailed does not make you any less beholden to what your duty actually is—”

“I promised to fight for you. You promised me my freedom. There’s a hell of a good chance that I’m not going to get it, and I know it. We’re all dying here! Something’s after us! The only thing I can do is try to keep as many of us as I can alive for as long as I can, and hope that we work something out! You’re the ignorant sack of eyeballs who doesn’t understand what a cavalier is, Harrow, you just take whatever I give you—”

“Melodrama, Griddle, never became you,” said her adept flatly. “You’ve never complained about any of our previous transactions.”

“My ass, transactions. What happened to ‘I cannot afford to not have you trust me, now I’m going to make awkward eye contact and act like you broke my nose just because you hugged me once’?”

An indrawn breath. “Don’t mock my—”

“Mock you? I should kick your ass for you!”

“I’m making a reasonable request,” said Harrowhark, who had taken her gloves off and on again three times and was now examining her fingernails as though bored. The only reason Gideon had not already tried to deck her was that her eyelashes were trembling in rage, and also because she’d never hit Harrow before and was tremendously afraid that once she started she wouldn’t stop. “I ask you to draw back and reprioritise the Ninth in what—as you’ve said—is a dangerous time.”

“I’ve got my priorities straight.”

“Nothing you have done in the past two days suggests that.”

Gideon went cold. “Fuck you. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I didn’t mean to let Jeannemary die.”

“For God’s sake, I didn’t mean—”

“Fuck you,” Gideon added again, for emphasis. She found herself laughing in that awful, high way that was totally devoid of humour. “Fuck. We don’t deserve to still be around—have you realised that yet? Have you realised that this whole thing has been about the union of necromancer and cavalier from start to finish? We should be toast. If they’re measuring this on the strength of that—we’re the walking dead. Magnus the Fifth was a better cavalier than I am. Jeannemary the Fourth was ten times the cavalier I am. They should be alive and we should be bacteria food. Two big bags of algor mortis. We’re alive through dumb luck and Jeannemary isn’t and you’re acting like me letting Dulcinea die is all that’s standing between you and Lyctorhood—”

“Stop worshipping the sound of your own voice, Nav, and listen to me—”

“Harrow, I hate you,” said Gideon. “I never stopped hating you. I will always hate you, and you will always hate me. Don’t forget that. It’s not like I ever can.”

Harrow’s mouth twisted so much that it should have been a reef knot. Her eyes closed briefly, and she sheathed her hands inside her gloves. The tension should have deflated then, but it didn’t: like a pricked boil, it got full and shiny and hot. Gideon found she had swallowed six times in ten seconds and that the inside of her chest felt dry and bright. Her necromancer said evenly: “Griddle, you’re incorrect.”

“How—”

“Nothing stands between myself and Lyctorhood,” said Harrowhark, “and you are not a part of the equation. Don’t get carried away by the Sixth’s ideas. The tests are not concerned with some frankly sickening rubric of sentiment and obedience; they’re testing me and me alone. By the end, neither I nor the Ninth will need you for this pantomime. You may hate me all you wish; I still don’t even remember about you half the time.”

She turned away from Gideon. She did not walk away, but stood there for a moment in the simple arrogance of showing the other girl her back—of giving Gideon, with a sword in her scabbard, unfettered access to the back of her rib cage. Harrow said, “You’re banned from seeing Septimus. The quicker she shuffles off, the better. If I were in her position … I would have already thrown myself out the window.”

“Stand in front of a window now and I’ll do the hard part,” said Gideon.

“Oh, take a nap,” snapped Harrowhark.

Gideon very nearly did lay hands on her then, and probably should have.

“If you don’t need me, release me to the Seventh House,” she said, very slow and very calm, like she was reading at a service. “I’d rather serve—Dulcinea dying—than the living Reverend Daughter.”

Harrowhark turned to leave—airily, casually really, as though she and Gideon had finished a conversation about the weather. But then she inclined her head back to Gideon a little, and the fragment of her expression that Gideon saw was as wheezing and airless as a blow to the solar plexus.

“When I release you from my service, Nav,” her necromancer said, “you will know about it.” And she walked away.

Gideon decided, then and there, her betrayal.

Chapter 28

Half an hour later, Gideon Nav stood before the doors of the Eighth House quarters, in front of an extremely befuddled Colum the Eighth. In the misty red recesses of her mind this traitorous act was the correct thing to do, though she couldn’t yet quite decide why.

“Your uncle wanted me,” she said. “So. Here I am.”

The cavalier looked at her. She had obviously interrupted him in the middle of some domestic housekeeping, which would have been extremely funny at any other time. The flawless white leather and scale mail pauldrons were gone; he was in his white breeches and a slightly dingy undershirt and he was holding a very oily cloth. The shabbiness of the cloth and the undershirt looked even dingier against the scintillating Eighth whiteness of the trousers. She had never been alone with Colum the Eighth before. Outside his uncle’s shadow he was just as patchy and discoloured, as though he had a liver inflammation; he was still a leathery yellow-brown, and his hair was similar, which made him look the same all over. It was startling to realise that he was maybe a little younger than Magnus. He looked worn-out and secondhand.

“You came alone?” he said, in his perpetually scratchy voice.

“You’d know if my necromancer was here.”

“Yes,” said Colum. He looked as though he were on the verge of saying something, and then decided against it. Instead he said, “Sword and second, please.”

“What? I’m not disarming—”

“Look,” he said, “I’d be a fool not to make you. Bear with me.”

“That’s not part of the deal—”

“There’s nothing in here to hurt you,” said Colum. “I swear it by my honour. So—give over.”

There was nothing likeable about the wiry, rue-eyed man, but there was something sincere about him, and also he had maybe the worst job in the history of the world. Gideon did not trust him. But she handed over her rapier and she handed over her glove, and she trotted after him unwillingly.

The red fog was clearing a little, and now Gideon was regretting the rage that had taken her from Harrow to Teacher and from Teacher’s directions to the rooms that housed the Eighth House. They had been put in high-vaulted, squarish rooms with very high windows, airy and gracious; what furniture they had been given would remain a mystery, because they’d gotten rid of it all. The living space had been mopped until it hurt. It was baffling to see such cleanliness in Canaan House; someone had even given them a pot of furniture polish, and the wooden floorboards beneath Gideon’s feet smelled oiled and fresh. They had kept a writing desk and chair, and a table and two stools, and that was all. The table was covered with a white cloth. There was a book on the writing desk. The rest was prim and sparse.

The only splash of colour was an enormous portrait of the Emperor as Kindly Master, with an expression of beatific peace. It was placed directly opposite the table, so that anyone sitting there would have him as an unavoidable dinner guest. In one corner was a polished metal box with Colum’s targe sitting precariously on a nest of hand weights.

Her sword and glove were both placed carefully next to the door, which she appreciated. Colum disappeared into another room. He reappeared a few minutes later with Silas in tow, kitted out in his perpetual uniform of cornea-white silk and silver-white chain, and his long floating wings of a robe. Gideon must have caught him mid-ablutions, because his chalk-coloured hair was wet and tousled as though it had just been rubbed with a towel. It seemed frivolously long, and she realised she had never seen it except pinned back. He pulled over the chair from the writing desk and sat while his cavalier produced a comb from somewhere, sorting out the still-damp locks of thin white.

Silas looked as though he had not slept well lately. Shadows beneath the eyes made his sharp and relentless chin sharper and even more relentless.

“You must be aware that I would never suffer a shadow cultist in an Eighth sanctuary,” he said, “unless I thought it was of huge moral utility.”

“Thanks,” said Gideon. “Can I sit?”

“You may.”

“Give me a moment,” said Colum. “I’ll finish up, then make the tea.”

She squeaked a stool away from the table, wilfully working the back legs into the shining wood. The necromancer shut his eyes as though the sound hurt him. “I was never part of the Locked Tomb congregation,” she said, settling herself down. “If you had talked to Sister Glaurica, you would have known that.”

Having combed the hair to his satisfaction, Colum began separating sections at the back with the teeth of the comb. Silas ignored this treatment as though it happened so often it was not worth attention. Gideon once again thanked her lucky stars that she had not had a traditional cavalier’s training.

“A rock does not have to make a vow that it is a rock,” said Silas tiredly. “You are what you are. Take your hood off. Please.”

The please was second cousin to an afterthought. Gideon pulled back her hood a little unwillingly, letting it fall on her shoulders, with the now-strange feeling of a nude head. Silas’s eyes were not on her face, now fully exposed, but on her hair, which badly needed a trim.

“I wonder where you come from,” he remarked. “Your mother had the same hair phenotype. Unusual … perhaps she was Third.”

Gideon swallowed.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t make cryptic comments about my—my mother. You don’t know the first thing about her, or me, and it’s just going to piss me off. When I’m pissed off, I walk out. Are we clear?”

“As crystal,” said the necromancer of the Eighth. “But you misunderstand. This isn’t an interrogation. I was more interested in the story of your mother than I was in you, when we questioned Glaurica. You were an accidental inclusion. Glaurica confused the erroneous with the useful. But ghosts always do.”

“Ghosts?”

“Revenants, to be explicit,” said Silas. “Those rare and determined spirits who search out the living before they pass, unbidden, by clinging to scraps of their former lives. I was surprised that a woman like Glaurica made the transition. She did not last long.”

Her vertebrae did not turn to ice, but it would’ve been a lie to say they didn’t cool down considerably.

“Glaurica’s dead?”

Silas took an infuriatingly long drink of water. The pallid column of his throat moved. “They died on the way back to their home planet,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Their shuttle exploded. Curious, considering it was a perfectly good Cohort shuttle with an experienced pilot. This was the shuttle you had intended to commandeer, was it not?”

Ortus would never rhyme melancholy with my mortal folly again. Gideon did not confirm or deny. “I don’t know the full story,” admitted Silas. “I don’t need to. I am not here to read out all the secrets of your life and startle you into saying anything. I’m here to talk about the children. How many in your generation, Gideon the Ninth? Not infants. But your peers, your age group.”

Not infants. Maybe Glaurica had kept some secrets after all. Or—more like—her spirit chose to shriek back into existence solely to complain about the two things that had been of utmost importance to her: her sad dead sack of a son, and the sacred bones of her sad dead husband. Gideon held her tongue. Silas pressed, “Yourself? The Reverend Daughter?”

“What do you want, a census?”

“I want you to think about why you and Harrowhark Nonagesimus now represent an entire generation,” he said, and he leant forward onto his elbows. His eyes were very intense. His nephew was still braiding his hair, which only somewhat lessened the effect. “I want you to think about the deaths of two hundred children, when you and she alone lived.”

“Okay, look, this is wacky,” said Gideon. “You’ve picked on exactly the wrong thing to slam Harrow with. If you want to talk about how she’s a corrupt tyrant, I’m all ears. But I know about the flu. She wasn’t even born yet. I was, what, one year old, so I didn’t do it. There was vent bacteria in the creche and the schoolroom hall, and it took out all the kids and one of the teachers before they found out what it was.”

This had made perfect sense to her, always: not only were the children of the Ninth unusually sickly and decrepit anyway—the Ninth House only seemed to truck with the pallid, defective, and upset—but among so much malign decay nobody would have noticed a ventilation problem until it was far too late. She had always privately suspected that she had lived due to the other children avoiding her. The youngest had gone first, and the eldest who were caring for the youngest, and then everyone was gone from the age of nineteen down. A whole generation of holy orders. Harrow had been the only birth amidst a sea of tiny tombs.

“Vent bacteria does not kill immunoefficient teenagers,” said Silas.

“You’ve never seen a Ninth House teenager.”

“Vent bacteria,” said Silas again, “does not kill immunoefficient teenagers.”

It made no sense. He didn’t know that Harrow was the last baby born. The Ninth House had been jealous of its dwindling population for generations. Bumping off any child, let alone its youngest crop of nuns and cenobites, would be a horrifying waste of resources. The creche flu had been an extinction event. “I don’t get it,” Gideon said. “Are you trying to make out like the Reverend Father and Mother killed hundreds of their own kids?”

He did not answer her. He took another long draw of his water. Colum had finished the braid and pinned it back, perfecting the usual severe silhouette of the Master’s pale head, after which he measured tiny spoonfuls of black tea into a jug to steep cold. He then lowered himself down onto a stool a little way away from the table, close to the door and face to the window like a true paranoid. The cavalier took a pile of what looked to be darning and began to run a nervous white seam up a pair of white trousers. The Eighth House must all be martyrs to stains, she thought.

“The Ninth House is a House of broken promises,” said Silas. “The Eighth House remembers that they were not meant to live. They had one job—one rock to roll over one tomb; one act of guardianship, to live and die in a single blessedness—and they made a cult instead. A House of mystics who came to worship a terrible thing. The ruling Reverend Father and Mother are the bad seeds of a furtive crop. I do not know why the Emperor suffered that shadow of a House. That mockery of his name. A House that would keep lamps lit for a grave that was meant to pass into darkness is a House that would kill two hundred children. A House that would kill a woman and her son simply for attempting to leave is a House that would kill two hundred children.”

Gideon felt grimy and unsettled. “I need a better motivation than the fact that the Ninth House sucks,” she said. “Why? Why kill two hundred kids? More importantly, why two hundred kids and not me or Harrow?”

Silas looked at her over steepled fingers.

“You tell me, Gideon the Ninth,” he said. “You are the one who tried to leave in a shuttle they planted a bomb in.”

Gideon was silent.

“I do not think any scion of the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father should become a Lyctor,” said Silas softly. “The open grave of the Ninth House should not produce its own revenant. In fact, I am unsure that any of us should become Lyctor. Since when was power goodness, or cleverness truth? I myself no longer wish to ascend, Gideon. I’ve told you what I know, and I assume you will understand when I say I must take your keys from you.”

Her spine jolted her upright in her chair. The dust-coloured fingers paused on their bleached seam.

“That’s what this is about,” said Gideon, almost disappointed.

“My conscience is clear. I ask for the good of all the Houses.”

“What if I say no?”

“Then I will challenge you for them.”

“My sword—”

“You may find the challenge hard without it,” said Silas Octakiseron, quiet and resigned in his triumph.

Gideon couldn’t help darting a glance at Colum, half-expecting to find his sword already in his hand and a grim smile on his face. But he was standing with his needlework tumbled to the floor, his face closed like a fist and his shoulders so set each tendon looked like it was flossing his clavicular joints. He was brown-eyed and baleful, but he was not looking at her.

“Master,” he said, and stopped. Then: “I told her there’d be no violence here.”

Silas’s eyes never left Gideon’s, so they did not see his cavalier’s face. “There’s no sin in that, Brother Asht.”

“I—”

“An oath to the Ninth is as medicine to sand,” the necromancer said. “It sinks from sight and yields no benefit. She knows this as well as any, and better than some. The Ninth heart is barren, and the Ninth heart is black.”

Gideon opened her mouth for a witty riposte—Well, fuck to you too!—but Colum got in first, to her infinite surprise. “I’m not worried about the Ninth’s heart, Uncle.”

“Brother Asht,” said Silas, quite gently, “your heart is true.”

“Every day we spend here I’m less sure about that,” said Colum.

“I share your feelings, but—”

“I said to her, ‘I swear on my honour.’”

“We will waste no truth on liars,” said Silas, his voice still colourless but harder now, like water to ice: reminding, not reassuring. “Nor pledges on the damned.”

“I said,” repeated Colum, slowly, “‘I swear on my honour.’ What does that mean to you?”

Gideon stayed very still, like a strung-up animal, but she let her eyes slide sideways to the door. Sudden movement might let her pick up her sword and get the hell out of there before this terrible uncle-nephew soap opera climaxed in beating her like a gong, but it might also remind them she existed and that they could have this heart-to-heart later. Silas had shifted restlessly in his seat, and he was saying: “I will not dissect words and meanings with you like a mountebank, Brother. Leave the semiotics to the Sixth. Their sophists love nothing more than proving up spelled differently is down. If a wasted oath pains you I will lead you in atonement later, but for now—”

“I am your cavalier,” said his cavalier. This shut Silas off midflow. “I’ve got my sword. I’ve got my honour. Everything else is yours.”

“Your sword is mine also,” said Silas. His hands were gripping the finials of his chair, but his voice was calm and even and actually sympathetic. “You need take no action. If your honour must remain unsullied, I may have your sword without asking for it.”

He raised his hand, and the white linen sleeve fell away from the pale chain cuff. Gideon remembered the blood-stuffy room where Abigail and Magnus lay, and she remembered all the colour pulled from the room like it was just so much fast fabric dye. She knew that this was a game over, and her eyes slid sideways from the door and onto Colum, who was—looking right at her.

Their stares met for a single hot second. This single second felt like so long and stretched a pause that her overwound nerves very nearly went ping like elastic and fired her clean across the room. Then Colum seemed to make a decision.

“Once upon a time you would’ve taken everything I said as gospel,” he said, in a very different voice. “I used to think that was worse than now … but I was wrong.”

The hand faltered. Silas snapped his head around to stare at the older man. It was the first time he’d looked anywhere but at Gideon since she entered the room. “I urge you to recall yourself,” he said shortly.

“I recall myself perfectly,” said Colum. “You don’t. You did, once. When you and I started this, when you weren’t even twelve. When you thought I knew everything.”

The fingers curled inward, just slightly, before straightening out again as though some inner resolve had stiffened. “This is not the time.”

Colum said: “I respected the child. At times I can’t stand the man, Si.”

Silas’s voice had sunk to a dead whisper: “You made an oath—”

“Oath? Ten years of training, before you were even born. Oath? Three brothers with different blood types, because we couldn’t tell what you’d be and which of us you’d need. Ten years of antigens, antibodies, and waiting—for you. I am the oath. I was engineered into a man who doesn’t—pick and choose his decencies!”

His voice had risen to fill the room. This left Silas Octakiseron perfectly white and still. Colum jerked his chin hard toward Gideon, and she noticed dimly that it was just another version of the elfin, fork-tine chin on Silas. He turned and strode toward the door. Gideon, completely out of her depth but sensing escape on some automatic rodent-brain level, started out of her chair and followed. Silas stayed where he was.

When Colum reached the sword, he picked it up, and Gideon had just a second to worry that he was now going to exploit some insane religious loophole and kill her with her own weapon. But this was beneath her. When Colum held her sword out to her, horizontally in one hand, it was as cavalier to cavalier. His expression was perfectly calm now, as though the anger had never even surfaced: maybe it hadn’t. And his eyes were the eyes of a man who had just tied his own noose.

She took her blade. She now owed him very badly, which sucked.

“The next time we meet,” he said beneath his breath, as monolithic and impassive as when she’d arrived, “I think it’s likely one of us will die.”

“Yeah,” Gideon said, “yeah,” instead of “I’m sorry.”

Colum picked up the knuckle-knife and handed that to her as well. “Get away from here,” he said, and it sounded more warning than command.

He moved away from her again. Gideon was sorely tempted to take him with her and away from Silas, sitting still and pale in his great white room, but she felt that probably that wasn’t going to happen. She also thought about skidding off a couple middle fingers to Silas around Colum’s shoulders, but concluded the moral high ground was sometimes worth holding on to. So she left.

As she walked away, she braced for a sudden burst of angry voices, yelling, recriminations, maybe even a cry of pain. But there was only silence.

Chapter 29

In a welter of stupefaction Gideon wandered the halls of Canaan House, unwilling to go home. She walked down the neglected halls and dimly realised she could no longer smell the mould, having smelled it for so long that it had become indistinguishable from the air around her. She stood in the cool shadows of putrefied doorways, trailing her fingers over the porous bumps and splinters of very old wood. Skeleton servitors rattled past her, holding baskets or ancient watering cans, and when she looked out through a filth-streaked window she saw a couple of them standing on the battlements, lit up by white sunshine, holding long poles over the side. Her brain registered this as making total sense. Their ancient finger bones gleamed on the reels, and as she watched one pulled a jerking, flapping fish to the apex of its extreme journey from ocean to phalange. The construct carefully put it in a bucket.

She passed the great atrium with the dry, dubious fountain, and she found Teacher there. He was sitting in front of the fountain, in a chair with a ruptured cushion, praying, or thinking, or both. His shining head was drooping, but he gave her a weary smile.

“How I hate the water,” he said, as though this conversation was one they’d had before and he was simply continuing it. “I’m not sorry that this has dried up. Ponds … rivers … waterfalls … I loathe them all. I wish they had not filled the pool downstairs. It’s a terrible portent, I said.”

“But you’re surrounded by sea,” said Gideon.

“Yes,” said Teacher unexpectedly, “it is a bit of a pisser.”

Gideon laughed—slightly hysterical—and he joined in, but his eyes filled with tears.

“Poor child,” he said, “we’re all sorry. We never intended this to happen, none of us. The poor child.”

Gideon might’ve been the child in question; she might’ve not. She strongly did not care either way. She soon found herself wandering through the little vestibule and past the gently lapping pool that Teacher hated: the low whitewashed ceiling, the softly gleaming tiles. Past the glass-fronted doors, which stood open, lay abandoned towels on the floor of the training room where the cavaliers practised their art, and what was unquestionably Naberius’s prissily pinned-up jacket. And inside the training room was Corona.

Her lovely golden hair was stuck up in sweaty tendrils atop her head, and she had stripped down to her camisole and her shorts, which Gideon was far too befuddled to appreciate but not too befuddled to overlook. Her long tawny limbs were leprous here and there with chalk dust, and she held a rapier and a knife. She was fixed in the classic training attitude, arm coming down in a slowly controlled arc through the movements of thrust—half step—knife thrust—retreat, and there was a deep red flush of exertion on her face. Her necromantic robe lay abandoned in a thin filmy heap at the side, and Gideon watched, fascinated, through the open door.

Coronabeth spun to face her. Her stance was good: her eyes were very beautiful, like amethysts.

“Have you ever seen a necromancer hold a sword before?” she asked gaily.

“No,” said Gideon, “I thought their arms would all flop around.”

The Third princess laughed. The flush on her cheeks was a little bit too hot and pink. “My sister’s do,” she said. “She can’t hold her arms up long enough to braid her hair. Do you know, Ninth, I’ve always wanted to challenge you?” This was said with a low, intense breathlessness, ruined by the addendum: “Babs said it was incredible.”

This was maybe the worst statement of a day so filled with terrible statements that they crowded one another, like spectators at a duel. Once Gideon would have loved to hear Corona talk to her with that low, breathy intensity, maybe saying “Your biceps … they’re eleven out of ten,” but right now she did not want anyone to talk to her at all.

“If I never fought Naberius again I’d be happy,” she said. “He’s a prick.”

Corona laughed in a hard, light trill. Then she said smilingly: “You might have to, eventually. But I don’t mean him.”

She lunged. Gideon drew, because despite her brain’s long droning white noise her nervous system was still full of adrenaline. She slipped her hand into her gauntlet and was cautious when she met Corona’s shiny Third blade with her own—was surprised at the force behind the blow, at the manic energy in the other girl’s eyes. Gideon pushed down, forcing Corona’s blade aside—and Corona moved with her, sliding her blade down with the pressure, her footwork taking her into a beautiful disengage. She pressed, and it was only a hasty parry on Gideon’s part that kept the Princess at bay.

Corona was breathing hard. For a moment Gideon thought that this was the necromancer weakness coming to bear—the lungs already sagging under the strain—but she realised that Corona was excited, and also very nervous. It was like the queenly, confident Corona of old, masked over badly damaged stuffing. This lasted just a moment. She gave a sudden purple, furtive look over Gideon’s shoulder, stiffening and retreating backward, and there was an indrawn breath from the doorway.

“Drop it,” barked Naberius Tern.

Not fucking likely, thought Gideon—but he skirted far around her reach, lunging past her to curl a hand hard around Corona’s forearm. His eyes were bugged out with alarm. He was in his undershirt, with his collection of rangy and sinuous muscles all being brought to bear on his princess. She sagged mutinously, like a child caught fist-deep in the lollies jar, and he was putting his arm around her. “You can’t,” he was saying, and Gideon realised: he was also terrifically afraid. “You can’t.”

Corona made a giving-up sound of incoherent, fruitless rage, muffled by Naberius’s arm. It was, thankfully, not tears. She said something that Gideon missed, and Naberius said in reply: “I won’t tell her. You can’t do this, doll, not now.”

For the second time that day, Gideon drifted away from a scenario she was utterly shut out of, something she did not want to be privy to. The saline tickled her nose as she sheathed her rapier and backtracked away, before Naberius decided he might as well challenge for her keys while she was there, but as she darted a glance over her shoulder he had utterly discarded her presence: he had placed his arm like a crossbar over Corona’s collarbone, and she had bitten him, apparently to soothe her own obscure feelings.

Gideon wished for no more part in any of this. Gideon went home.

Her feet took her, heavy and unwilling, back to the bone-wreathed door of the Ninth quarters: her hands pushed open the door hard, recklessly. There was no sign of anyone within. The door to the main bedroom was closed, but Gideon pushed that open too, without even knocking.

There was nobody there. With the curtains drawn Harrow’s room was dark and still, the bed inhabiting the centre of the room like a big hulking shadow. The sheets were rumpled and unmade. She could see the foetal-curl dent on the mattress where Harrow slept. Pens spilled off the mildew-spotted dressing table, and books propped up other, usefuller books on the drawers. The whole room smelled like Harrow: old Locked Tomb veils and preserving salts, ink, the faint smell of her sweat. It skewed harder toward the preserving salts. Gideon stumbled around blindly, kicking the corner of the four-poster bed in the same way that Corona had sunk her teeth into her cavalier’s arm, stubbing her toe, not caring.

The wardrobe door was ajar. Gideon made a beeline toward it, pulling it open violently, though she had no heart to sew shut the cuffs on all of Harrowhark’s shirts as she once might have done. She half-expected bone wards to yank both her arms from their sockets, but there was nothing. There was no guard. There was nothing to have ever stopped her doing this. This drove her demented, for some reason. She slapped the rainbow of black clothes aside: neatly patched trousers, neatly pressed shirts, the formal vestments of the Reverend Daughter tied up inside a net bag and hung from a peg. If she looked at them too long she would feel tight-chested, so she very forcibly didn’t.

There was a box at the bottom of the cupboard—a cheap polymer box with dents in it, tucked beneath a pair of Harrowhark’s boots. She would not have noticed it except that there had been a cursory attempt to hide it with the aforementioned boots and a badly ripped cloak. It was about a forearm’s length on every side. A sudden exhaustion of everything Harrow had ever locked away drove her to mindlessly pull it out. She eased off the pockmarked top with her thumbs, expecting diaries, or prayer bones, or underwear, or lithographs of Harrow’s mother.

With numb fingers, Gideon removed the severed head of Protesilaus the Seventh.

Chapter 30

In the flimsy-papered living room of the Sixth quarters, Gideon sat staring into a steaming mug of tea. It was grey with the sheer amount of powdered milk stirred into it, and it was her third cup. She had been terribly afraid that they’d put medicines into it, or tranquillizers or something: when she wouldn’t drink, both necromancer and cavalier had taken sips to prove it was unadulterated, with expressions that plainly said idiot. Palamedes had been the one to wait patiently next to her while she had thrown up lavishly in the Sixth’s toilet.

Now she sat, haggard and empty, on a spongy mattress they had pulled out as a chair. Protesilaus’s head sat, dead-eyed, on the desk. It looked exactly as it had in life: as though, upon being separated from its trunk, it had entered into some perfect state of preservation to remain boring forever. It looked about as lively as it had when she’d met him. Palamedes was investigating the white gleam of the spinal column at the nape of the neck for maybe the millionth time.

Camilla had shoved a mug of hot tea into Gideon’s hands, strapped two swords to her back, and disappeared. This had all happened before Gideon could protest and now she was left alone with Palamedes, her discovery, and a cluster headache. Things were happening too much. She took a hot mouthful, swilled tea around her teeth, and swallowed mechanically. “She’s mine.”

“You’ve said that five times now.”

“I mean it. Whatever goes down—whatever happens—you have to let me do it. You have to.”

“Gideon—”

“What do I do,” she said, quite casually, “if she’s the murderer?”

His interest in the spinal column was not abating. Palamedes had slipped his glasses down his long craggy nose, and was holding the head upside down like he was emptying a piggy bank. He had even shone light into the nose and ears and horrible warp of the throat. “I don’t know,” he said. “What do you do?”

“What would you do if you discovered Camilla was a murderer?”

“Help her bury the body,” said Palamedes promptly.

“Sextus.”

“I mean it. If Camilla wants someone dead,” he said, “then far be it from me to stand in her way. All I can do at that point is watch the bloodshed and look for a mop. One flesh, one end, and all that.”

“Everyone wants to tell me about fleshes and ends today,” said Gideon unhappily.

“There’s a joke in there somewhere. You’re sure there was nothing else along with the head—bone matter, fingernails, cloth?”

“I checked. I’m not a total tool, Palamedes.”

“I trust Camilla. I trust that her reasons for ending someone’s life would be logical, moral, and probably to my benefit,” he said, sliding one fragile eyelid up an eyeball. “Your problem here is that you suspect that Harrow has killed people for much less.”

“She didn’t kill the Fourth or Fifth.”

“Conjecture, but we’ll leave it.”

“Okay, so,” said Gideon, putting her empty mug next to her mattress. “Um. You are now getting the impression that my relationship with her is more—fraught—than you might’ve guessed.” (“You shock me,” muttered Palamedes.) “But that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve known her as long as she’s lived. And I thought I knew how far she’d go, because I will tell you for free she has gone to some intensely shitty lengths, and I guess she’s gone to some shittier lengths than I thought concerning me, but that’s the thing—it’s me, Sextus. It’s always me. She nearly killed me half a dozen times growing up, but I always knew why.”

Palamedes took off his glasses. He finally stopped molesting the head, and he pushed himself up and away from the desk; he sat down heavily on the mattress next to Gideon, skinny knees tucked up into his chest. “Okay. Why?” he asked simply.

“Because I killed her parents,” said Gideon.

He did not say anything. He just waited, and in the space of that waiting, she talked. And she told him the beginning stuff—how she was born, how she grew up, and how she came to be the primary cavalier of the Ninth House—and she told him the secret she had kept for seven long and awful years.

Harrowhark had hated Gideon the moment she clapped eyes on her, but everyone did. The difference was that although most people ignored small Gideon Nav the way you would a turd that had sprouted legs, tiny Harrow had found her an object of tormentable fascination—prey, rival, and audience all wrapped up in one. And though Gideon hated the cloisterites, and hated the Locked Tomb, and hated the ghastly great-aunts, and hated Crux most of all, she was hungry for the Reverend Daughter’s preoccupation. They were the only two children in a House that was otherwise busy getting gangrene.

Everyone acted as though the Emperor had personally resurrected Harrowhark just to bring them joy: she had been born healthy and whole, a prodigious necromancer, a perfect penitent nunlet. She was already mounting the ambo and reading out prayers even as Gideon began desperately praying herself that she might one day go to be an enlisted soldier, which she had wanted ever since Aiglamene—the only person Gideon didn’t hate all the time—had told her she might be one. The captain had told her stories of the Cohort since Gideon was about three.

This was probably the best time of their relationship. Back then they clashed so consistently that they were with each other most of the time. They fought each other bloody, for which Harrow was not punished and Gideon was. They set elaborate traps, sieges, and assaults, and grew up in each other’s pockets, even if it was generally while trying to grievously injure the other one.

By the time Harrow was ten years old, she had glutted herself on secrets. She had grown bored of ancient tomes, bored of the bones she had been raising since before she’d finished growing her first set of teeth, and bored of making Gideon run gauntlets of skeletons. At last she set her gaze on the one thing truly forbidden to her: Harrow became obsessed with the Locked Door.

There was no key to the Locked Door. Maybe there had never been a key to the Locked Door. It simply didn’t open. What lay beyond would kill the trespasser before they’d cracked it wide enough to go through anyway, and what lay beyond that—long before ever getting to the tomb—would make them wish they were dead long before their final breath. The nuns dropped to their knees at the mere mention of what was through there. It was the brief delight of Gideon’s life that the unnecessarily beatified Harrowhark Nonagesimus chose to ditch her sainthood and unlock it, and that Gideon had been witness to that fact.

Out of everyone who found Gideon Nav repellent, Harrow’s parents had always found her particularly so. They were chilly, joyless Ninth House necromancers of the type that Silas Octakiseron seemed to think universally inhabited Drearburh: black in heart, power, and appearance. Once when she had touched a fold of Priamhark Noniusvianus’s vestments he had held her down with skeletal hands and whipped her till she howled. It was only out of the most desperate perversity that she ran straight to them to tell her tale: out of some baffling desire to show some evidence of House loyalty, to absolutely drop Harrow in the shit, to get the pat on the head she knew she’d earned for preserving the integrity and the fervid spirit of the House—precisely the qualities she was so ceaselessly accused of lacking. She felt no flicker of guilt or doubt. Just hours before, she’d wrestled Harrow down in the dirt, and Harrow had scratched until she’d had half of Gideon’s face beneath her fingernails.

So she told them. And they listened. They had not said a word, either in praise or in censure, but they had listened. They had called for Harrow. And they had made Gideon leave. She waited outside the great dark doors of their room for a very long time, because they hadn’t told her to go away, just go out of the room, and because she was a shitty trash child she wanted to relish the one chance she had of hearing Harrowhark raked over the coals. But she waited a whole hour and never heard a damn thing, let alone Harrow’s screams as she was confined to oss duty until she turned thirty.

And then Gideon couldn’t wait anymore. She pushed open the door and she walked in—and found Pelleamena and Priamhark hanging from the rafters, purple and dead. Mortus the Ninth, their huge and tragic cavalier, swung beside them from a rafter groaning with his bulk. And she walked in on Harrowhark, holding lengths of unused rope among the chairs her parents had kicked aside, with eyes like coals that had burnt away.

Harrow had beheld her. She had beheld Harrow. And nothing had ever gone right after that, never ever.

“I was eleven,” said Gideon. “And here I am, narking all over again.”

Palamedes did not say anything. He just sat there, listening as solemnly as if she had described some new type of novel necromantic theorem. Far from feeling cleansed by her impromptu confession, Gideon felt absolutely the opposite: dirty and muddy, terribly exposed, as though she had unbuttoned her chest and given him a good long look at what was inside her ribs. She was garbage from the neck to the navel. She was packed tight with a dry and dusty mould. She had been filled up with it since she was eleven, on the understanding that as long as she was attached to the House of the Ninth she could never make it go away.

Gideon took a long breath, then another.

“Harrow wants to become a Lyctor,” she said. “She would do anything to become a Lyctor. She’d easily have killed Dulcinea’s cavalier if she thought it would help her become a Lyctor. Nothing else matters to her. I know that now. In the last couple days, I sometimes thought—”

Gideon did not finish that sentence, which would have been “that she had stopped making it her top priority.”

Palamedes said very gently, “You really should not need me to tell you that an eleven-year-old isn’t responsible for the suicides of three grown adults.”

“Of course I’m responsible,” said Gideon disgustedly. “I made it happen.”

“Yes,” said Palamedes. “If you hadn’t told Harrow’s parents about the door, they would not have made the decision to end their lives. You inarguably caused it. But cause by itself is an empty concept. The choice to get up in the morning—the choice to have a hot breakfast or a cold one—the choice to do something thirty seconds faster, or thirty seconds slower—those choices cause all sorts of things to happen. That doesn’t make you responsible. Here’s a confession for you: I killed Magnus and Abigail.”

Gideon blinked at him.

“If, the second I stepped off my shuttle,” said the suddenly revealed double murderer blithely, “I had snatched Cam’s dagger and put it straight through Teacher’s throat, the Lyctoral trial could never have begun. There’d have been uproar. The Cohort would have arrived, I’d have been dragged away, and everyone else would have been sent safe back home. Because I didn’t kill Teacher, the trial began, and because the trial began, Magnus Quinn and Abigail Pent are dead. So: I did it. It’s my fault. All I ask is that you put some pen and flimsy in my cell so I can start on my memoirs.”

Gideon blinked a couple more times. “No, hold up. That’s stupid, they’re not the same.”

“I don’t see why not,” said the necromancer. “We both made decisions that led to bad things happening.”

She rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “Octakiseron said you guys loved to mess with what words mean.”

“The Eighth House thinks there’s right and there’s wrong,” said Palamedes wearily, “and by a series of happy coincidences they always end up being right. Look, Nav. You ratted out your childhood nemesis to get her in trouble. You didn’t kill her parents, and she shouldn’t hate you like you did, and you shouldn’t hate you like you did.”

He was peering at her through his spectacles. “Hey,” she objected lamely, “I never said I hated myself.”

“Evidence,” he said, “outweighs testimony.”

Awkwardly, and a bit brusquely, he took her hand. He squeezed it. They were both obviously embarrassed by this, but Gideon did not let go—not when she rummaged in the pocket of her robe with her other hand, and not when she passed over the scrumpled-up piece of flimsy that had bewildered her for so long.

He unscrumpled it, and read without reaction. She squeezed his hand like an oath, or a threat.

“This is from a Lyctor lab,” he said eventually. “Isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” she admitted. “Is it—I mean—is it real?”

He looked at her. “It’s nearly ten thousand years old, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, I’m not,” she said. “So … what the fuck, basically.”

“The ultimate question,” he agreed, returning his attention to the flimsy. “Can I borrow this? I’d like to look at it properly.”

“Do not show it to anyone else,” Gideon said, without really knowing why. Something about her name being on this ancient piece of garbage felt as dangerous as a live grenade. “I’m serious. It stays between us.”

“I swear on my cavalier,” he said.

“You can’t even show her—”

They were interrupted by six short knocks on the door, followed by six long. Both sprang up to pull apart the interlaced lattice of deadbolts. Camilla came through, and with her, upright and calm, was Harrow. For one wacky moment Gideon thought that she and Camilla had been holding hands and that today was one huge rash of interhousal hand fondling, but then she realised that their wrists were cuffed together. Camilla was nobody’s fool, though how she’d cuffed Harrow was going to be a tale of terror for another day.

Gideon did not look at her, and Harrow did not look at Gideon. Gideon very slowly put her hand on her sword, but for nothing. Harrow was looking at Palamedes.

She expected pretty much anything, but she didn’t expect him to say—

“Nonagesimus—why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t trust you,” she said simply. “My original theory was that you’d done it. Septimus wasn’t capable on her own, and it didn’t seem far-fetched that you were working in concert.”

“Will you believe me when I say we aren’t?”

“Yes,” she said, “because if you were that good you would have killed my cavalier already. I hadn’t even intended to hurt him, Sextus, the head fell off the moment I pushed.”

What?

“Then we go,” said Palamedes. “We get everyone. We talk to her. I won’t have any more conversations in the dark, or doubting of my intentions.”

Gideon said helplessly, “Someone enlighten me, I am just a poor cavalier,” but nobody paid her the slightest damn bit of attention even though she had her hand very forbiddingly on her sword. Harrow was ignoring her entirely in favour of Palamedes, and she was saying:

“I wasn’t sure you’d be willing to go that far, even for the truth.”

Palamedes looked at her with an expression as grey and airless as the ocean outside the window.

“Then you do not know me, Harrowhark.”

They all crowded into Dulcinea’s little hospital room: it was them and the priest with the salt-and-pepper braid, who scuttled out as though affrighted as they lined the room in stony array. The whole gang had arrived for party times. Palamedes had sent for all the survivors, though considering their current group-wide interest in killing one another the fact that they had bothered coming was nothing short of a miracle. The Second stood against the wall, their jackets less creased than their faces; Ianthe and Coronabeth sat fussily crowded up on each other’s knees, with their cavalier close behind. Silas stood inside the door, Colum stood just behind him, and if anyone had wanted to take them all out then and there it would have been as simple as shutting the door and letting them all asphyxiate on Naberius Tern’s pomade. It seemed so strange that this was now all of them.

The necromancer of the Seventh House was propped up on a bundle of fat cushions, looking calm and transparent. With every stridorous breath her shoulders shook, but her hair was perfectly brushed and her nightgown nightmarishly frilly. She had in her lap the box that contained Protesilaus’s head, and when she drew it gently out—wholly unspoiled as if he were still alive—there were several indrawn breaths. Hers was not among them.

“My poor boy,” she said, sincerely. “I’ll never be able to put him back together now. Who took him apart? He’s a wreck.”

Palamedes steepled his fingers and leaned forward, greyly intent.

“Lady Septimus, Duchess of Rhodes,” he said, very formally, “I put to you before everyone here—that this man was dead before you arrived, by shuttle, at the First House, and appeared alive only through deep flesh magic.”

There was an immediate hubbub, uncalmed by his impatient be quiet gestures and the shoving of his spectacles up his nose. Among the collective mutters, Ianthe Tridentarius’s acid drawl was loudest: “Well, this is the only interesting thing she’s ever done.”

Nearly as piercing was Captain Deuteros: “Impossible. He’s been with us for weeks.”

“It’s not impossible at all,” said Dulcinea herself. She had been gravely meeting Protesilaus’s murky stare, as though trying to find something out, and now she settled the head on her lap. “The Seventh House have been perfecting the way of the beguiling corpse for years and years and years. It’s just—not entirely allowed.”

“It is unholy,” said Silas, flatly.

“So is soul siphoning, my child,” she said, in tones of deliberately celestial sweetness. “And it’s not unholy—it’s entirely useful and blameless; just not when you do it like this, which is the very old way. The Seventh aren’t just soul-stoppers and mummifiers. Yes, Pro was dead before we even landed.”

Gideon said, just as flatly as Silas: “Why?”

Those enormous flower-blue eyes turned to Gideon as though she were the only person in the room. There was no laughter in them, or else Gideon might have started to yell. Suddenly, the dying necromancer seemed enormously old; not with wrinkles, but with the sheer dignity and quiet with which she sat there, totally serene.

“This competition caught out my House,” she said baldly. “Let me tell you the story. Dulcinea Septimus was never intended to be here, Gideon the Ninth … they would have preferred she be laid up at home and have another six months wrung out of her. It’s an old story of the House. But there wasn’t another necromantic heir. And there was a very good cavalier primary … so even if the necromantic heir was one bad cold away from full lung collapse … it was thought that he might even the odds. But then he had an accident.”

Dulcinea fretted the dull hair of the head with her fingertips, then smoothed it out as if it were a doll’s. “Hypothetically. If you were the Seventh House, and all your fortunes were now represented in two dead bodies, one breathing a little bit more than the other, wouldn’t you consider something far-fetched? Let’s say, by utilizing the way of the beguiling corpse, and hoping that nobody noticed that your House was DOA? I’m sorry for deceiving you, but I’m not sorry I came.”

“That doesn’t add up.”

Harrow was stiff as concrete. Her eyes were huge and dark, and though only Gideon could tell, very agitated. “The spell you’re talking about is not within the range of a normal necromancer, Septimus. Impossible for a necromancer in their prime, let alone a dying woman.”

“A dying woman is the perfect necromancer,” said Ianthe.

“I wish I could get rid of that idea. Maybe for the final ten minutes,” said Palamedes. “The technical fact that dying enhances your necromancy is vitiated considerably by the fact that you can’t make any use of it. You might have access to a very personal source of thanergy, but considering your organs are shutting down—”

“It’s not possible,” insisted Harrow, words hard and clipped in her mouth.

“You seem to know a lot about it. Well, I put it to you: Would it be possible for all the heads of the Seventh House,” said Dulcinea calmly, “adepts of the perfect death—a Seventh House mystic secret, one that’s been ours forever—working all in concert?”

“Perhaps initially, but—”

“King Undying,” said Silas, primly disgusted. “It was a conspiracy.”

“Oh, sit on it,” said Dulcinea. “I know all about you and your house, Master Silas Octakiseron … the Emperor himself never bothered to speak out against beguiling corpsehood, but he did say that siphoning was the most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up, and ought only to be done with the siphoner in cuffs.”

“That does not mitigate the penalty for performing a necromantic act of transgression—”

“I’ve no interest in meting out the justice of the tome,” said Captain Deuteros, gruffly. “I know that’s the Eighth House’s prerogative. But at the same time, Master Octakiseron, we cannot afford this right now.”

“A woman who would be party to this kind of magic,” said Silas, “might be party to anything.”

The woman who was party to that kind of magic and therefore maybe party to anything opened her mouth to speak, but instead had a coughing fit that seemed to start at her toes and go all the way up. Her spine arched; she bleated, and then began to moistly choke to death. Her face turned so grey that for a moment Gideon was convinced the Eighth House was doing something to her, but it was a block of phlegm rather than her soul being sucked out. Palamedes went for her, as did Camilla. He turned her over on her side, and she did something awful and complicated with her finger inside Dulcinea’s mouth. The head on her lap went rolling, and was caught only by the quick reflexes of Princess Ianthe, who cupped it between her hands like an exotic butterfly.

“What do you want, Octakiseron?” said the captain in the wake of this, stone-faced. “Room confinement? A death sentence? Both are uncharacteristically easy to fulfil in this instance.”

“I understand your point,” said Silas. “I do not agree with it. I will take my leave, madam. This is not interesting to me anymore.”

His exit was arrested by his cavalier, as brown and as careworn as ever, standing between him and the doorway. Colum did not really seem to notice his necromancer’s attempts to leave. “The furnace,” he said shortly. “If we’ve got his head, what’s in the furnace?”

Dulcinea, grey and squirming, managed: “What did you find in the fu—fur—fur—” before Palamedes slapped her on the back, at which point she coughed up what looked like a ball of bloody twigs. The Third turned their faces away.

Captain Deuteros did not: maybe she’d seen worse. She gestured to her lieutenant, who had removed the head none too gently from Ianthe’s fascinated gaze and was boxing it up as though it were an unwanted meal. The captain moved closer to Harrow and Gideon, and demanded: “Who found him?”

“I did,” said Harrow, casually failing to provide any details on how. “I took the head because I couldn’t readily transport the body. The body has since disappeared through unknown means, though I’ve got my suspicions. The skull’s mine by finder’s rights—”

“Ninth, the head is going in the morgue where it belongs,” said the captain. “You don’t have carrion rights over found murders, and today is not the day when I’ll countenance your House taking bones that don’t belong to it.”

“I agree with Judith,” said Corona. She had pushed her twin off her thigh, and was looking a bit green around her lovely gills. She also looked uncharacteristically tired and careworn, though she managed to pull this off with a certain pensive loveliness to the fine crinkles at her eyes and mouth. “Today isn’t the day when we start to use one another’s bodies. Or tomorrow, or ever. We’re not barbarians.”

“Sheer prevarication,” remarked her sister to nobody in particular. “Some people will do anything to get … a head.”

Everyone ignored her, even Gideon, who found herself trembling like a leaf. Harrowhark said merely, “The furnace bones are still mine to identify.”

“You can utilise the morgue all you like,” said the captain dismissively. “But the bodies aren’t your property, Reverend Daughter. That goes for the Warden, that goes for everybody. Do I make myself clear, or shall I repeat?”

“Understood,” said Palamedes.

“Understood,” said the Reverend Daughter, in the tones of someone who neither understood nor intended to.

Silas had not left.

“In that case,” he said, “I consider it my bounden duty to take watch over the morgue, in case the Ninth forgets what constitutes defilement of the bodies. I will take the remains. You may find me there.”

Captain Deuteros did not roll her eyes. She gestured to her lieutenant, who handed over the box: Silas took it and winced faintly, and then passed it to his nephew. Gruesome parcel secured, they finally turned and left. The Third were already starting to bitch—

“I always said he didn’t look right,” said the cavalier.

“You said no such thing,” said the first twin.

“At no point did you ever say that,” said the second twin.

“Excuse you, I did—”

Captain Deuteros cleared her throat over the fresh internecine squabbling. “Does anyone else want to take this opportunity to admit that they’re already dead, or a flesh construct, or other relevant object? Anyone?”

Palamedes had been wiping Dulcinea’s mouth very gently with a white cloth. He laid his hand at her neck. She was still. Her face was now the thin blue-white colour of Canaan House’s milk, and for a moment Gideon expected him to add her to the already dead list. She would decide to go out with an audience, with her hair done, and with her miserable secrets revealed. Now she knew that Dulcinea had always been alone, carrying on an even greater farce than Gideon’s, knowing the impossibility of the odds. But the dying necromancer sucked in a sudden, rattling, popped-balloon breath, her whole body surging in spasm. Gideon’s heart started up again. Before she could move, Palamedes was there, and with terrible tenderness—as though they were alone in the room and the world alike—he kissed the back of Dulcinea’s hand.

Gideon looked away, blushing with a shame she didn’t interrogate, and found Teacher in the doorway with his hands folded before his gaudy rainbow sash. Nobody had heard him enter.

“Maybe later, Lady Judith,” he said.

She said, “You’ll need to contact the Seventh House and have her sent back home. It’s morally and legally out of the question to leave her this way. Is that clear?”

“I cannot,” said Teacher. “There was only ever a single communications channel in Canaan House, my Lady … and I cannot call her House on it. I cannot call the Fifth, nor the Fourth, nor now the Seventh. That is part of the sacred silence we keep. There will be an end to all this, and there will be a reckoning … but Lady Septimus will stay with us until the last.”

The Second’s adept had stopped all of a sudden. For a moment Gideon thought she was going to lose her carefully buttoned rag. But she cocked her dark head and said, “Lieutenant?”

“Ready,” said Marta the Second, and they both marched out as though they were in parade formation. They did not give the rest of the room a backward glance.

Teacher looked at the tableau before him: the bed, the blood, the Third. Palamedes, still clutching Dulcinea’s fingers within his own, and Dulcinea out cold.

“How long does Lady Septimus have?” he asked. “I can no longer tell.”

“Days. Weeks, if we’re lucky,” said Palamedes bluntly. Dulcinea made a little hiccupping noise on the bed that sounded half like a giggle and half like a sigh. “That’s if we keep the windows open and her airways clear. Breathing recyc at Rhodes probably took ten years off her life. She’s been sitting on the brink without shifting one way or the other—the woman has the stamina of a steam engine—and all we can do is keep her comfortable and see if she doesn’t decide to pull through.”

Harrow said to him, slowly: “Undoing the cavalier’s bodywork should have killed her. It would have been an incredible shock to her system.”

“Spreading it between multiple casters may have diluted the feedback.”

“That is not remotely how it works,” said Ianthe.

“Oh, God, here comes the expert,” Naberius said.

“Babs,” said Ianthe’s sister hurriedly, “you’re getting hangry. Let’s go find some food.”

Gideon watched her necromancer’s gaze fix on Ianthe Tridentarius. Ianthe did not notice, or affected not to notice; her eyes were as pale and purple and calm as they ever were, but Harrowhark was quivering like a maggot next to a dead duck. As the Third traipsed out—as noisy as if they were leaving a play, not a sickroom—Harrow’s eyes went with them. Gideon said aloud, “Hey. Palamedes. Do you need someone to stay with her?”

“I will,” said Teacher, before Palamedes could respond. “I will move my bed here. I will not leave her alone again. Whenever I must leave my post one of the other priests will take my place. I can do that much, at least … I am not afraid, nor do I have better things to do with my time. Whereas—I am very much afraid—you do.”

Gideon allowed herself a lingering look at Dulcinea, who made for a more beguiling corpse than her stolid dead cavalier ever did: lying on the bed looking nearly transparent with streaks of drying, bloodied mucus on her chin. She wanted to help, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Harrow moving out of the doorway and into the corridor—staring after the disappearing Third—and she steeled herself to say, “Then we’re out. Can you—let us know if anything changes?”

“Someone will come for you,” said Teacher gently.

“Cool. Palamedes—”

He met her eye. He had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them with one of his innumerable handkerchiefs.

“Ninth,” he said, “if she were capable of anything, in order to become a Lyctor—don’t you think she’d be one already? If she really wanted to watch the world burn—wouldn’t we all be alight?”

“Stop flattering her. But—thanks,” said Gideon, and she darted off into the corridor after Harrow.

Chapter 31

In the corridor, her necromancer was staring distantly down the passageway at the disappearing hems of the Third: her brow had furrowed a wrinkle into her paint. Gideon had intended to—she had intended to do a lot of things; but Harrow left her no opening for the actions she’d planned and offered none of the answers she’d wanted. She simply turned in a swish of black cloth and said, “Follow me.”

Gideon had prepared beforehand a fuck-you salvo so long and so loud that Harrow would have to be taken away to be killed; but then Harrow added, “Please.”

This please convinced Gideon to follow her in silence. She had more or less expected Harrow to lead with “What were you doing in my closet,” at which point Gideon might well have shaken her until the teeth in her head and the teeth in her pockets all rattled. Harrowhark swept down the stairs two at a time, the treads creaking in panic, as they went down the grand flight that led them to the atrium: from there, down one corridor, down another, one left, and then down the steps to the training rooms. Harrow ignored the tapestry that would have taken them to the hidden corridor and the ransacked Lyctor laboratory where Jeannemary had died, and instead pushed open the big dark doors to the pool.

Once there, she tossed down two grubby knuckles from her pockets. A substantial skeleton sprang from each, unfurling. They stood before the door, linked elbows, and held it shut. She scattered another handful of chips like pale grain; skeletons rose, forming and expanding the bone as though bubbling up from it. They made themselves a perimeter around the whole room, pressing the knobbles of their spines against the old ceramic tile and standing to attention. Shoulder to shoulder they stood, as though bodyguards, or hideous chaperones.

Harrow turned to face Gideon, and her eyes were as black and inexorable as a gravity collapse.

“The time has come—”

She took a deep breath; and then she undid the catches to her robes, and they fell away from her thin shoulders to puddle around her ankles on the floor.

“—to tell you everything,” she said.

“Oh, thank God for that,” said Gideon hysterically, profoundly embarrassed at how her heart rate had spiked.

“Shut up and get in the pool.”

This was so unanticipated that she didn’t bother to question, or to complain, or even to hesitate. Gideon unhooked her robe and hood and pulled off her shoes, unstrapped her rapier and the belt that held her gauntlet. Harrow seemed ready to enter the greenly lapping waves wearing her trousers and shirt, so Gideon figured Oh well, what the hell and made the plunge almost fully clothed. She jumped in recklessly: tidal waves exploded outward at her passing, peppering the stone sides of the pool with droplets, gushing and foaming. The seamy, distasteful feeling of water seeping through her underwear hit her all at once. Gideon spluttered, and ducked her head beneath, and spat out a mouthful of liquid that was warm as blood.

After a moment’s consideration, Harrow stepped in too—walking off the side carelessly, slipping beneath the water like a clean black knife. She disappeared beneath the surface, then emerged, gasping, spluttering in a way that ruined everything about the portentous entrance. She faced Gideon and trod water, flapping her arms a little before she managed to get her toes touching the bottom.

“Are we in here for a reason?”

Their voices echoed.

“The Ninth House has a secret, Nav,” said Harrow. She sounded calm and measured and frank in a way she’d never been before. “Only my family knows of it. And even we could never discuss it, unless—this was my mother’s rule—we were immersed in salt water. We kept a ceremonial pool for the purpose, hidden from the rest of the House. It was cold and deep and I hated every moment I was in it. But my mother is dead, and I find now that—if I really am to betray my family’s most sacred trust—I am obliged at the least to keep, intact, her rule.”

Gideon blinked.

“Oh shit,” she said. “You really meant it. This is it. This is go time.”

“This is go time,” agreed Harrowhark.

Gideon swept both of her hands through her hair, trickles going down the back of her neck and into her sodden collar. Eventually, all she said was, “Why?”

“The reasons are multitudinous,” said her necromancer. Her paint was wearing off in the water; she looked like a grey picture of a melting skeleton. “I had—intended to let you know some of it, before. An expurgated version. And then you looked in my closet … If I had told you my suspicions about Septimus’s meat-puppet on the first day, none of this would have happened.”

“The first day?”

“Griddle,” said Harrow, “I have not puppeted my own parents around for five years and learned nothing.”

Anger did seep into Gideon then, along with a couple more litres of salt water. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me when you killed him?”

“I didn’t kill him,” said Harrowhark sharply. “Someone else did—blade through the heart, from what I saw, though I only got a few minutes to look before I had to run. I only had to push the theorem the most basic bit before he came apart. I took the head and left when I thought I heard someone coming. This was the night after we completed the entropy field challenge.”

“No, you monster’s ass,” said Gideon coldly. “I mean, why didn’t you tell me you’d killed him before you sent Jeannemary Chatur and her necromancer down to the facility to look for the guy who was in a box in your closet? Why didn’t you take the moment to say, I don’t know, Let’s not send two children downstairs to get fucked up by a huge bone creature.”

Harrow exhaled.

“I panicked,” she said. “At the time I thought I was sending you down a blind tunnel, and that the real danger was Sextus and Septimus; that either one might ambush you, and that the sensible solution was to take them both on myself. My plan was to get you clear of a necromantic duel. At the time I even thought it elegant.”

“Nonagesimus, all you had to do was delay, tell me you were freaking out. All you had to do was say that Dulcinea’s cav was a mummy man—”

“I had reason to believe,” said Harrow, “that you would trust her more than you trusted me.”

This answer contorted Gideon’s face into her best are you fucking kidding me expression. Opposite, Harrow smoothed her forehead out with her thumbs, which took away another significant portion of skeleton.

“I thought you were compromised,” she continued waspishly. “I assumed you would assume that I dismantled the puppet as an act of bad faith and go straight to the Seventh. I wanted to do enough research to present you with a cut-and-dry case. I had no idea what it would mean for the Fourth House. The Ninth is deep in their blood debt and I am undone by the expense. I—I did not want to hurt you, Griddle! I didn’t want to disturb your—equilibrium.”

“Harrow,” said Gideon, “if my heart had a dick you would kick it.”

“I did not want to alienate you more than I already had. And then it seemed as though—we were on a more even footing,” said Harrow, who was stumbling in a way Gideon had never before witnessed. It looked as though she were ransacking drawers in her brain trying to find the right set of words to wear. “Our—we— It was too tenuous to risk. And then…”

Too tenuous to risk. “Harrow,” said Gideon again, more slowly, “if I hadn’t gone to Palamedes—and I nearly didn’t go to Palamedes—I would have waited for you in our rooms, with my sword drawn, and I would have gone for you. I was so convinced you were behind everything. That you’d killed Jeannemary and Isaac. Magnus and Abigail.”

“I didn’t—I don’t—I never have,” said Harrow, “and—I know.”

“You would have killed me.”

“Or vice versa.”

This surprised her into silence. The wavelets sploshed gently at the tiled edges of the pool. Gideon kicked off the bottom and fluttered her feet back and forth, bobbing, her shirt billowing out with water.

“Okay,” she said eventually. “Question time. Who did all the murders?”

“Nav.”

“I mean it. What’s happening? Is Canaan House haunted, or what? What—who—killed the Fourth and the Fifth?”

Her necromancer also pulled her feet up from the bottom and floated, momentarily, chin-deep in green salt water. Her eyes were narrowed in thought. “I can’t say,” she said. “Sorry. That’s not a fruitful line of inquiry. We are being pursued by revenants, or it’s all part of the challenge, or one, or more, of us is picking off the others. The murders of the Fifth and the Fourth may be connected, or not. The bone fragments found in everyone’s wounds don’t match, naturally—but I believe their very particle formation points to the same type of necromantic construction, no matter what Sextus says about topological resonance and skeletal archetype theory…”

“Harrow, don’t make me drown myself.”

“My conclusion: if the murders are linked and if some adept, rather than a revenant force or the facility itself, is behind the construct you saw—then it is one of us,” said Harrow. “We’re the only living beings in Canaan House. That means the suspect list is the Tridentarii; Sextus; Octakiseron; the Second; or myself. And I haven’t discounted Teacher and the priests. Septimus has something of an alibi—”

“Yes, being nearly dead,” said Gideon.

Harrowhark said, rather grudgingly: “I’ve downgraded her in some respects. Logically, judging by ability, and mind, and the facility to combine both in service to an end, it’s Palamedes Sextus and his cavalier.” She shook her head as Gideon opened her mouth to protest. “No, I realise neither has, as you might put it, a fucking motive. A logical conclusion is worth very little if I don’t have all the facts. Then there’s Teacher—and the Lyctor laboratories—and the rules. Why those theorems? What powers them? Why was the Fourth cavalier killed, but you left alive?”

These were all questions that Gideon had privately asked the dead of night many times since Jeannemary had died. She let her shoulders slide back into the water until it was cold up to the backs of her ears, staring at the single fluorescing bar that swung above the pool. Her body floated, weightless, in a puddle of yellow light. She could have asked Harrow anything: she could have asked about the bomb that had taken Ortus Nigenad’s life instead of hers, or she could have asked about her whole entire existence, why it had happened and for what reason. Instead, she found herself asking: “What do you know about the conditioner pathogen that bumped off all the kids—the one that happened when I was little, before you were born?”

The silence was terrible. It lasted for such a long time that she wondered if Harrow had slyly drowned herself in the interim, until—

“It didn’t happen before I was born,” said the other girl, sounding very unlike herself. “Or at least, that’s not precise enough. It happened before I was even conceived.”

“That’s unwholesomely specific.”

“It’s important. My mother needed to carry a child to term, and that child needed to be a necromancer to fill the role of true heir to the Locked Tomb. But as necromancers themselves, they found the process doubly difficult. We hardly had access to the foetal care technology that the other Houses do. She had tried and failed already. She was getting old. She had one chance, and she couldn’t afford chance.”

Gideon said, “You can’t just control whether or not you’re carrying a necro.”

“Yes, you can,” said Harrow. “If you have the resources, and are willing to pay the price of using them.”

The hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck rose, wetly.

“Harrow,” she said slowly, “by resources, are you saying—”

“Two hundred children,” said Harrowhark tiredly. “From the ages of six weeks to eighteen years. They needed to all die more or less simultaneously, for it to work. My great-aunts measured out the organophosphates after weeks of mathematics. Our House pumped them through the cooling system.”

From somewhere beneath the pool, a filter made blurting sounds as it recycled the spilloff. Harrow said, “The infants alone generated enough thanergy to take out the entire planet. Babies always do—for some reason.”

Gideon couldn’t hear this. She held her knees to the chest and let herself go under, just for a moment. The water sluiced over her head and through her hair. Her ears roared, then popped. When she pushed above the surface again, the noise of her heartbeat thumping through her skull was like an explosion.

“Say something,” said Harrowhark.

“Gross,” said Gideon dully. “Ick. The worst. What can I say to that? What the fuck can I say to all that?”

“It let me be born,” said the necromancer. “And I was—me. And I have been aware, since I was very young, about how I was created. I am exactly two hundred sons and daughters of my House, Griddle—I am the whole generation of the Ninth. I came into this world a necromancer at the expense of Drearburh’s future—because there is no future without me.”

Gideon’s stomach churned, but her brain was more urgent than her nausea.

“Why leave me, though?” she demanded. “They murdered the rest of the House, but they left me off the list?”

There was a pause.

“We didn’t,” said Harrow.

“What?”

“You were meant to die, Griddle, along with all the others. You inhaled nerve gas for ten full minutes. My great-aunts went blind just from releasing it and you weren’t affected, even though you were just two cots away from the vent. You just didn’t die. My parents were terrified of you for the rest of their lives.”

The Reverend Father and Mother hadn’t found her unnatural because of how she’d been born: they’d found her unnatural because of how she hadn’t died. And all the nuns and all the priests and all the anchorites of the cloister had taken the cue from them, not knowing that it was because Gideon was just some smothered and unfortunate animal who had still been alive the next day.

The world revolved as Harrow floated closer. Memory took Pelleamena’s steady gaze, and refocused the way it slid through and over Gideon from contempt to dread. It took the stentorious, short-changed breath when Priamhark saw her and breathed it again in horror, not in repugnance. One small kid who, to two adults, was a walking reminder of the day they had chosen to mortgage the future of their House. No wonder she had hated the huge dark doors of Drearburh: beyond that portal lurked the used-up, emptied-out shades of a bunch of kids whose main sin in life was that they’d be good batteries. “And do you think you’re worth it?” she asked bluntly.

Next to her, Harrow didn’t flinch. “If I became a Lyctor,” she said meditatively, “and renewed my House—and made it great again, and greater than it ever was, and justified its existence in the eyes of God the Emperor—if I made my whole life a monument to those who died to ensure that I would live and live powerfully…”

Gideon waited.

“Of course I wouldn’t be worth it,” Harrow said scornfully. “I’m an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground. My parents committed a necromantic sin that we ought to have been torpedoed into the centre of Dominicus for. If any of the other Houses knew of what we’d done they would destroy us from orbit without a second’s thought. I am a war crime.”

She stood up. Gideon watched as sheets of seawater slicked down her shoulders, her hair a wet black cap on her skull, her skin sheening grey and green from the waves. All the paint had rubbed off, and Harrowhark looked thin and haggard and no older than Jeannemary Chatur.

“But I’d do it again,” said the war crime. “I’d do it again, if I had to. My parents did it because there was no other way, and they didn’t even know. I had to be a necromancer of their bloodline, Nav … because only a necromancer can open the Locked Tomb. Only a powerful necromancer can roll away the stone … I found that only the perfect necromancer can pass through those wards and live, and approach the sarcophagus.”

Gideon’s toes found purchase and she stood, chest deep in water, goose-bumped all over from the cold. “What happened to praying that the tomb be shut forever and the rock never be rolled away?”

“My parents didn’t understand either, and that’s why they died,” said Harrowhark. “That’s why, when they knew I’d done it—that I’d rolled away the stone and that I’d gone through the monument and that I had seen the place where the body was buried—they thought I’d betrayed God. The Locked Tomb’s meant to house the one true enemy of the King Undying, Nav, something older than time, the cost of the Resurrection; the beast that he defeated once but can’t defeat twice. The abyss of the First. The death of the Lord. He left the grave with us for our safekeeping, and he trusted the ones who built the tomb a myriad ago to wall themselves up with the corpse and die there. But we didn’t. And that’s how the Ninth House was made.”

Gideon remembered Silas Octakiseron: The Eighth never forgot that the Ninth was never meant to be.

“Are you telling me that when you were ten years old—ten years old—you busted the lock on the tomb, broke into an ancient grave, and made your way past hideous old magic to look at a dead thing even though your parents told you it’d start the apocalypse?”

“Yes,” said Harrowhark.

“Why?”

There was another pause, and Harrow looked down into the water. Limned by electric light, her pupils and her irises appeared the same colour.

“I was tired of being two hundred corpses,” she said simply. “I was old enough to know how monstrous I was. I had decided to go and look at the tomb—and if I didn’t think it was worth it—to go up the stairs … all the flights of the Ninth House … open up an air lock, and walk … and walk.”

She lifted her gaze. She held Gideon’s.

“But you came back instead,” said Gideon. “I’d told the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father what I’d seen you do. I killed your parents.”

“What? My parents killed my parents. I should know.”

“But I told them—”

“My parents killed themselves because they were frightened and ashamed,” said Harrow tightly. “They thought it was the only honourable thing to do.”

“I think your parents must’ve been frightened and ashamed for a hell of a long time.”

“I’m not saying I didn’t blame you. I did … it was much easier. I pretended for a long time that I could have saved them by talking to them. Them and Mortus the Ninth. When you walked in, when you saw what you saw … when you saw what I had failed to do. I hated you because you saw what I didn’t do. My mother and father weren’t angry, Nav. They were very kind to me. They tied their own nooses, and then they helped me tie mine. I watched them help Mortus onto the chair. Mortus didn’t even question it, he never did …

“But I couldn’t do it. After all I’d convinced myself I was ready to do. I made myself watch, when my parents—I could not do the slightest thing my House expected of me. Not even then. You’re not the only one who couldn’t die.”

The waves lapped, tiny and quiet, around their clothes and their skins.

“Harrow,” said Gideon, and her voice caught. “Harrow, I’m so bloody sorry.”

Harrow’s eyes snapped wide open. The whites blazed like plasma. The black rings were blacker than the bottom of Drearburh. She waded through the water, snatched Gideon’s wet shirt in her fists, and shook her with more violence than Gideon had ever thought her muscularly capable of. Her face was livid in its hate: her loathing was a mortar, it was combustion.

“You apologise to me?” she bellowed. “You apologise to me now? You say that you’re sorry when I have spent my life destroying you? You are my whipping girl! I hurt you because it was a relief! I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery, and they would have killed you too and not given it a second’s goddamned thought! I have spent your life trying to make you regret that you weren’t dead, all because—I regretted I wasn’t! I ate you alive, and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re sorry?”

There were flecks of spittle on Harrowhark’s lips. She was retching for air.

“I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfoot—I took you to this killing field as my slave—you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.”

Gideon braced her shoulders against the weight of what she was about to do. She shed eighteen years of living in the dark with a bunch of bad nuns. In the end her job was surprisingly easy: she wrapped her arms around Harrow Nonagesimus and held her long and hard, like a scream. They both went into the water, and the world went dark and salty. The Reverend Daughter fell calm and limp, as was natural for one being ritually drowned, but when she realised that she was being hugged she thrashed as though her fingernails were being ripped from their beds. Gideon did not let go. After more than one mouthful of saline, they ended up huddled together in one corner of the shadowy pool, tangled up in each other’s wet shirtsleeves. Gideon peeled Harrow’s head off her shoulder by the hair and beheld it, taking her inventory: her point-boned, hateful little face, her woeful black brows, the bloodless bow of her lips. She examined the disdainful set of the jaw, the panic in the starless eyes. She pressed her mouth to the place where Harrow’s nose met the bone of her frontal sinus, and the sound that Harrow made embarrassed them both.

“Too many words,” said Gideon confidentially. “How about these: One flesh, one end, bitch.”

The Ninth House necromancer flushed nearly black. Gideon tilted her head up and caught her gaze: “Say it, loser.”

“One flesh—one end,” Harrow repeated fumblingly, and then could say no more.

After what seemed like a very, very long time, her adept said:

“Gideon, you need to promise me something.”

Gideon wiped a thumb over her temple, tidied away a stringy lock of shadow-coloured hair; Harrow shuddered. “I thought that this was all about me getting a bunch of concessions and you grovelling, but you called me Gideon, so shoot.”

Harrow said, “In the event of my death—Gideon, if something ever does get the better of me—I need you to outlast me. I need you to go back to the Ninth House and protect the Locked Tomb. If I die, I need your duty not to die with me.”

“That is such a dick move,” said Gideon reproachfully.

“I know,” said Harrow. “I know.”

“Harrow, what the hell is in there, that you’d ask that of me?”

Her adept closed heavy-lidded eyes.

“Beyond the doors there’s just the rock,” she said. “The rock and the tomb surrounded by water. I won’t bore you with the magic or the locks, or the wards or the barriers: just know that it took me a year to walk six steps inside, and that it nearly killed me then. There’s a blood ward bypass on the doors which will only respond for the Necromancer Divine, but I knew there had to be an exploit, a way through for the true and devout tomb-keeper. I knew in the end it had to open for me. The water’s salt, and it’s deep, and it moves with a tide that shouldn’t exist. The sepulchre itself is small, and the tomb…”

Her eyes opened. A small, astonished smile creased her mouth. The smile transformed her face into an affliction of beauty that Gideon had heretofore managed to ignore.

“The tomb is stone and ice, Nav, ice that never melts and stone that’s even colder, and inside, in the dark, there’s a girl.”

“A what?”

“A girl, you yellow-eyed moron,” said Harrowhark. Her voice dropped to a whisper, and her head was dead weight in Gideon’s hands. “Inside the Locked Tomb is the corpse of a girl.

“They packed her in ice—she’s frozen solid—and they laid a sword on her breast. Her hands are wrapped around the blade. There are chains around her wrists, coming out of her grave, and they go down into holes by each side of the tomb, and there are chains on her ankles that do the same, and there are chains around her throat …

“Nav, when I saw her face I decided I wanted to live. I decided to live forever just in case she ever woke up.”

Her voice had the quality of someone in a long dream. She stared through Gideon without looking at her, and Gideon gently took her hands away from Harrow’s jaw. Instead she sat back in the water, buoyed by the salt, her eyes starting to sting from it. They both floated there for a long time in amicable silence, until they pulled themselves up and sat, dripping, on the side of the pool. The salt was crusting up their hair. Gideon reached over to take Harrow’s hand.

They sat there, wet through and uncomfortable, fingers curled into each other’s in the half-light, the pool interminably lapping at the cool tiles that surrounded it. The skeletons stood in perfect, silent ranks, not betraying themselves with even a creak of bone against bone. Gideon’s brain moved and broke against itself like the tiny wavelets they had left, the water lurching restlessly from side to side, until it came to a final conclusion.

She closed the gap between them a little, until she could see tiny droplets run down the column of Harrow’s neck and slide beneath her sodden collar. She smelled like ash, even smothered under litres and litres of saline. As she approached Harrow grew very still, and her throat worked, and her eyes opened black and wide: she looked at Gideon without breathing in, her mouth frozen, her hands unmoving, a perfect bone carving of a person.

“One last question for you, Reverend Daughter,” said Gideon.

Harrow said, a little unsteadily: “Nav?”

Gideon leaned in.

“Do you really have the hots for some chilly weirdo in a coffin?”

One of the skeletons punted her back into the water.

For all the rest of that evening they were furtive and unwilling to let the other one out of their sight for more than a minute, as though distance would compromise everything all over again—talking to each other as though they’d never had the opportunity to talk, but talking about bullshit, about nothing at all, just hearing the rise and fall of the other one’s voice. That night, Gideon took all her blankets back to the unedifying cavalier bed at the foot of Harrow’s.

When they were both lying in bed in the big warm dark, Harrow’s body perpendicular to Gideon’s body, Gideon said: “Did you try to kill me, back on the Ninth?”

Harrow was obviously startled into silence. Gideon pressed: “The shuttle. The one Glaurica stole.”

“What? No,” said Harrow. “If you’d gotten on that shuttle, you’d have made it safe to Trentham. I swear by the Tomb.”

“But—Ortus—Sister Glaurica—”

There was a pause. Her necromancer said, “Were meant to be brought back after twenty-four hours, in disgrace, with Ortus declared unfit to hold his post, relegated to the meanest cloister of the House. Not that Ortus would have minded. We had paid off the pilot.”

“Then—”

“Crux claimed,” said Harrow slowly, “that the shuttle had a fault, and blew up en route.”

“And you believed him?”

Another pause. Harrow said, “No.” And then: “Above all else, Nav … he couldn’t bear what he saw as disloyalty.”

So it was Crux’s mean, blackened revenge on his own House—his own zealous desire to burn it clear of any hint of insurrection—that had forced Glaurica’s ghost back to her home planet. She did not say this. Silas Octakiseron knew more than he should, but if Harrow discovered that now, she’d be off down the corridor in her nightdress with a sack of emergency bones and a very focused expression. “What a dope,” she said instead. “I was never loyal a day in my life and I still saw you in the raw.”

“Go to sleep, Gideon.”

She fell asleep, and for once didn’t dream of anything at all.

Chapter 32

“This is cheating,” said Harrowhark forbiddingly.

“We’re just being resourceful,” said Palamedes.

They were standing outside a laboratory door that Gideon had never seen. This one had not been hidden, just very inconveniently placed, at the topmost accessible point of the tower: it took more stairs than Gideon’s knees had ever wanted, and was situated plainly at the end of a terrace corridor where the sun slanted in through broken windows. The terrace in question looked so frankly about to disintegrate that Gideon tried to stay close to the corridor’s inside wall, in case most of the floor suddenly decided to fall off the side of Canaan House.

This Lyctoral door was the same as the others had been—gaping obsidian eye sockets in carved obsidian temporal bones: black pillars and no handle, and a fretwork symbol to differentiate it from the other two doors Gideon had seen. This one looked like three rings, joined on a line.

“We have no key,” Harrow was saying. “This is not entering a locked door with permission.”

Palamedes waved a hand. “I completed this challenge. We have the right to the key. That’s basically the same thing.”

“That is absolutely not the same thing.”

“Look. If we’re keeping track, which I am, the key for this room currently belongs to Silas Octakiseron. Lady Septimus had it, and he took it off her. That means the only way either of us ever gets inside is by defeating Colum the Eighth in a fair duel—”

“I can take Colum,” said Camilla.

“Pretty sure I can also take Colum,” added Gideon.

“—and then relying on Octakiseron to hand it over. Which he won’t,” concluded Palamedes triumphantly. “Reverend Daughter, you know as well as I do that the Eighth House wouldn’t let a little thing like fair play get in the way of its sacred duty to do whatever it wants.”

Harrow looked conflicted. “This is no ordinary lock. We’re not just going to—pick it with a bit of bone, Sextus.”

“No, of course not. I told you. Lady Septimus let me hold the key. I’m an adept of the Sixth. She might as well have let me make a silicone mould of the damn thing. I can picture every detail of that key right down to the microscopic level. But what am I going to do by myself, carve a new one out of wood?”

Harrow sighed. Then she rummaged in her pocket and took out a little nodule of bone, which she placed in the palm of her right hand. “All right,” she said. “Describe it for me.”

Palamedes stared at her.

“Hurry up,” she prompted. “I’m not waiting for the Second to find us.”

“It—I mean, it looked like a key,” he said. “It had a long shaft and some teeth. I don’t—I can’t just describe a molecular structure like it’s someone’s outfit.”

“Then how exactly am I meant to replicate it?” demanded Harrow. “I can’t—oh. No.”

“You did Imaging and Response, right? You must have, you got the key for it. Same deal. I’m going to think about the key, and you’re going to see it through my eyes.”

“Sextus,” said Harrow darkly.

“Wait, wait,” put in Gideon, intrigued. “You’re going to read his mind?”

“No,” said both necromancers immediately. Then Palamedes said, “Well, technically, sort of.”

“No,” said Harrow. “You remember the construct challenge, Nav. I couldn’t read your mind then. It’s more like borrowing perceptions.” She turned back to Palamedes. “Sextus, this was bad enough when I did it to my own cavalier. You’re going to have to focus on that key incredibly hard. If you get distracted—”

“He doesn’t get distracted,” said Camilla, as if this had caused difficulties in the past.

Palamedes closed his eyes. Harrow gnawed on her lip furiously, then closed hers too.

Nothing happened for a good thirty seconds. Gideon was dying to make a joke, just to get a reaction, when the tiny lump of matter in Harrow’s palm twitched. It flexed and began to stretch, forming a long, thin, cylindrical rod. Another few seconds passed, and a spine of bone extruded slowly from near one end. Then another.

Gideon was honestly impressed. In all the time Harrow had tormented her back on Drearburh, she had only ever used bones as seeds and starters—stitching them together into trip wires, grasping arms, kicking legs, biting skulls. This was something new. She was using bone like clay—a medium she could shape not just into one of a bunch of predetermined forms, but into something that had never existed before. It looked like it was giving her trouble too: her brow was furrowed, and the first faint traces of blood sweat gleamed on her slim throat.

“Focus, Sextus,” her necromancer gritted out. The object on her palm was now clearly a key: Gideon could see three individual teeth, twisting and flexing as Harrow filled in the fine detail. The whole length of the key quivered, and looked for a moment as though it would jump off her hand and fall to the floor, but then it abruptly lay still. Harrow opened her eyes, blinked, and peered at it suspiciously.

“This won’t work,” she said. “I’ve never had to work with something so small before.”

“That’s what she said,” murmured Gideon, sotto voce.

Palamedes opened his eyes too, and breathed a long sigh of what sounded like relief.

“It’ll be fine,” he said unconvincingly. “Come on. Let’s try it out.”

He headed for the black stone door, followed by Harrow, both cavaliers, and the five skeletons that Harrow had refused point-blank not to conjure on their way up here. He took the newly formed bone key, examined it, fitted it in the lock, and then turned it decisively to the left.

The mechanism went click.

“Oh, my God,” said Harrow.

Sextus ran a hand convulsively through his hair. “All right,” he said. “No, I did not actually think that was going to happen. Masterful work, Reverend Daughter—” and he gave her a little mock-bow.

“Yes,” said Harrow. “Congratulations to you also, Warden.”

He pushed the door open onto total blackness. Harrow stepped closer to Gideon and muttered, “If anything moves—”

“Yaaas, I know. Let it head for Camilla.”

Gideon did not know how to handle this new, overprotective Harrowhark, this girl with the hunted expression. She kept looking at Gideon with the screwed-up eyes of someone who had been handed an egg for safekeeping and was surrounded by egg-hunting snakes. But now she stepped forward grandly, spread her palms wide in the necromantic gesture as threatening as a cavalier unsheathing a sword, and strode into the dark. Palamedes went after her, groped around on the wall for a few moments, and then hit the light switch.

Gideon stood in the laboratory and stared as Camilla carefully closed the door behind them. This Lyctoral lab was an open-plan bomb wreck. There were three long lab tables covered in old, disused tools, splotches of what looked to be russet fungus, abandoned beakers, and used-up pens. The floor underfoot was hairy carpet, and in one corner there was a hideous, slithery tangle of what Gideon realised must be sleeping bags. In another corner, an ancient chin-up bar sagged in the middle alongside a strip of towel left to hang for a myriad. Everywhere there were bits of paper or shaken-out clothes, as though somebody had left the place in a hurry or had simply been an unbelievable slob. Spotlights shone down hot on the ruined jumble.

“Hm,” said Camilla neutrally, and Gideon knew immediately that she organised Palamedes’s and her socks by colour and genre.

Harrowhark and Palamedes picked their way through the mess to the tables. Palamedes was saying in his explanation voice: “It’s not as though I didn’t complete this challenge by lunchtime, though I had a distinct advantage. It was a psychometrical challenge. The main difficulty was working out what the challenge wanted in the first place: it was set up by someone with an obscure sense of humour. It was just a room with a table, a locked box, and a single molar.”

“Reconstruction?”

“Not all of us can respring a body by dint of a molar, Reverend Daughter. Anyway, I must have examined that tooth for two hours. I know every single thing there is to know about that tooth. Mandibular second, deciduous eruption, vitamin deficiency, male, died in his sixties, flossed obediently, never left the planet. Died in this selfsame tower.”

Both of them were riffling through the papers left on the desk: Palamedes left them in forensically exact piles divided by where they had been found. He adjusted his glasses and said, “Then Camilla took over because I wasn’t bloody thinking.”

Camilla grunted. She had meandered over to look at the rust-pitted crossbars of the chin-up, and Gideon had repaired to the worm mound of sleeping bags to kick them unhelpfully. Harrow said impatiently, “Get to the denouement, Sextus.”

“I had tracked the tooth. It told me nothing—no spiritual links to any part of the building. It was a black hole. It was as though the body it came from had never been alive. No ghost remnants, nothing—this is impossible, you understand, it meant the spirit had somehow been removed entirely. So I did some old-fashioned detective work.”

He peered under an abandoned clearfile. “I looked upstairs for the skeleton with the missing upper molar. He wouldn’t come down with me, but he did let me make a plaster impression of his clavicle. The clavicle! Someone was having a joke. Anyway, you can imagine my reaction when I unlocked the box with it and found it empty.”

Gideon looked up from a pasteboard box she had found: it was full of the ring tabs you got on pressurised drink cans, and jingled unmusically when she shook it. “The constructs? Like, the bone servants?”

“Second’s right, first isn’t,” said Camilla laconically.

“They’re the opposite of what Lady Septimus calls the beguiling corpse,” said Palamedes. “They seem to have most of their faculties intact. Mine was very nice, though he’s forgotten how to write. The skeletons aren’t reanimations, Ninth, they’re revenants: ghosts inhabiting a physical shell. They simply lack a true revenant’s ability to move itself along a thanergetic link. The beguiling corpse is a remnant of spirit attached to a perfect and incorruptible body—that’s the idea, anyway—where what I’ll term the hideous corpse is a fully intact spirit attached permanently to a rotting body. Not that someone hasn’t preserved those bones beautifully.”

Harrowhark slammed a ring-binder down on the bench.

“I’m a fool,” she said bitterly. “I knew they moved too well to be constructs—no matter how I tried to mimic how they’d been done. I just could have sworn—but that’s impossible. They’d need someone to control them.”

“They do—themselves,” said Palamedes. “They are autonomously powering themselves. It debunks every piece of thanergy theory I ever learned. The old fogeys back home would peel their feet for half an hour alone with one. It still doesn’t explain why there’s no energy signature on the bones, though. Anyway, this is the laboratory of the Lyctor who created them—and here’s their theory.”

Much like the one back in the other laboratory, the theorem was carved into a big stone slab pinned down in a dusty back corner and covered up with loose-leaf flimsy. Both cavaliers drifted over, and they all together stared at the carved diagrams. The laboratory was very quiet and the spotlights haloed streams of dust so thick you could lick them.

Resting on the edge of the stone set into the table, there was a tooth. Palamedes picked it up. It was a premolar, with long and horrible roots: it was brown with age. He handed it to Harrow, who gently unfolded it in the way that only a bone magician could and in the way that always made Gideon’s jaw hurt. She turned it into a long ribbon of enamel, an orange with the skin taken off and flattened, a three-dimensional object turned two-dimensional.

Written on the tooth in tiny, tiny letters was this:

Harrowhark took out her fat black journal and was scribbling down notes, but Palamedes had abruptly lost interest in the theory stone. He was looking at the walls instead, flipping open some of the ring-binders that she had discarded. He stopped in front of a faded pinboard, riddled thick with pins, all with bits of string attached. Gideon came to stand next to him.

“Look at this,” he said.

There were rainbow splotches of pins all over the board. There were tiny clusters, and Gideon noticed that at the centre of each cluster there was one white pin; the smallest and most numerous clusters had three pins fixed around one white pin. Some others had five or six. Then there were two other separate whorls of pins, each made up of dozens alone, and then one enormous pin-splotch: more than a hundred of them in a rainbow of colours, thickly clustered around one in white.

“The problem of necromancy,” said Palamedes, “is that the acts themselves, if understood, aren’t difficult to do. But maintaining anything … we’re glass cannons. Our military survives because we have hundreds of thousands of heavily armed men and women with big swords.”

“There’s always more thanergy to feed from, Sextus,” said Harrow distantly, flicking her eyes back and forth as she copied. “Give me a single death and I can go for ten minutes.”

“Yes, but that’s the problem, isn’t it; ten minutes, then you need more. Thanergy’s transient. A necromancer’s biggest threat is honestly themselves. My whole House for a reliable food source—”

“Warden,” said Camilla, quite suddenly.

She had opened up a ring-binder untidy with pages. Inside were an array of old flimsy lithographs, the black-and-white kind. On the very first page there was a faded note that had once been yellow, the letters still legible in a short, curt hand:

Camilla flipped through the binder. The pictures were hasty, low-quality snaps of men and women from the shoulders up, squinting at the camera, eyes half-shut as though they hated the light: most of them looked very serious and solemn, as though posing for a mugshot. Some of these men and women had been crossed out. Some had a few ticks against their picture. Camilla thumbed a page over, and they all paused.

The overexposure did not disguise a head-and-shoulders photo of the man they all called Teacher, bright blue eyes a desaturated sepia, still smiling from a lifetime away. He looked not a day older or younger. And his photograph had been ringed around in a black marker pen.

“Sextus,” Harrow began, ominously.

“I couldn’t tell,” said Palamedes. For his part, he sounded almost dazed. “Ninth, I absolutely could not tell. Another beguiling corpse?”

“Then who’s controlling him? There’s nobody here but us, Sextus.”

“I’d like to hope so. Could he be independent? But how—”

Palamedes’s eyes drifted back to the pinboard. He took his spectacles off and squinted his lambent grey eyes at it. He was counting under his breath. Gideon followed along with him gamely up into the hundreds until a dreadful noise startled them out of any mental arithmetic.

It was an electronic klaxon. From somewhere within the room—and without—it howled: BRRRRAAARRP … BRRRRARRRRP … BRRRRARRRRRP …

This was followed by, bafflingly, a woman’s voice, unreasonably calm. “This is a fire alarm. Please make your way to designated safe zones, led by your fire warden.” Then the klaxon again: BRRRARRRRP … BRRRRARRRRP … BRRRRARRRRRRRRP … and the exact same recorded inflexion: “This is a fire alarm. Please make your way…”

They looked at each other. Then all four of them sprinted for the door. Palamedes didn’t even stop to shut it behind them.

The Sixth and the Ninth Houses knew that a fire was absolutely no joke, and moved like people who had learned that a fire alarm could be the last thing any of them heard, the last thing their whole House heard. But this was curious. There was no smoke to smell, nor any latent heat: when they all got to the atrium, the only thing they saw amiss was that one of the skeletons had fallen over with an armful of towels, spread-eagle in the awful dried-up fountain.

Camilla looked around, narrowed her eyes, and headed toward the lunch room. Here there was an ongoing pssshhhtt sound that Gideon could not identify until they reached the kitchen—there was a bad smell, and white steam—and realised it was a water sprinkler, the really old kind. They all squashed themselves through the kitchen door and stood out of the reach of the spray.

All the skeletons were gone. In their places were untidy piles of bones and sashes. A pan of fish smoked on a lit stove: Gideon waded in, kicked aside a humerus, and fumbled with the knobs until the fire extinguished. There were piles of bones at the sink, a skull floating in a familiar pot of green soup: the tap had been left on, and the sink was close to overflowing. A pile of bones had mixed in among the potato peelings. Gideon ducked back out and away from the spray and stared. She was only vaguely aware of Harrowhark disdainfully mopping her wet head with a handkerchief.

The sprinklers stopped. Camilla knelt down and, amidst all the dripping and burbling, touched one of the phalanges that had fallen on the tiles. It dissolved into ash like a sigh.

Palamedes went and turned off the tap like someone in a dream. The bones in the sink gently bobbed against a saucepan. He and Harrow looked at each other and said—

“Shit.”

With only the faintest liquid whisper of metal on sheath, Camilla drew her swords. Gideon had never had the opportunity to study Camilla’s two short swords before: they were more like very long daggers, slightly curved at each end, wholly utilitarian. They glittered clean and hot beneath the soggy light of the kitchen; she marched back toward the door to the dining hall.

“Split up?” she said.

“Hell no,” said Gideon.

Harrow said, “Let’s not waste time. Get to Septimus,” and Gideon could have kissed her.

There seemed to be nobody else in the long, echoing halls of Canaan House, now longer and more echoey than ever. They passed another skeleton, arrested by an unseen force in the middle of carrying a basket. As it tumbled to the floor the weight of the basket had crushed its brittle pelvis to a powder. When they got to Dulcinea’s sickroom, Gideon had a sharp moment of not knowing what the hell to expect; but they found Dulcinea, struggling feebly to try to sit up, whey-faced and wide-eyed. Opposite her was the salt-and-pepper priest in the high-backed chair, looking as though they were peacefully asleep.

“It wasn’t me,” Dulcinea wheezed, in no small alarm.

Camilla ducked forward. The white-robed priest’s chin had slumped forward to their chest, and the braid was tucked beneath their chin. As Camilla pressed her hand to their neck, the priest lurched very gently sideways, limp and heavy, until the Sixth cavalier had to prop them up so that they wouldn’t slide off the chair entirely.

“Dead as space,” said Harrowhark, “though, accurately, that’s been true for a very, very long time.”

Palamedes turned to Dulcinea, who had given up thrashing her way to her elbows and was lying flat on the pillows, panting in exertion. He brushed her hair gently away from her forehead and said, “Where’s Teacher?”

“He left me maybe an hour ago,” said Dulcinea helplessly, eyes darting between him and the rest of them. “He said he wanted to lock a door. What’s going on? Why is the priest dead? Where did Teacher go?”

Palamedes patted her hand. “No idea. This is the interesting part.”

“Dulcinea,” said Gideon, “are you going to be okay by yourself?”

Dulcinea grinned. Her tongue was scarlet with blood. The veins in her eyelids were so dark and prominent that the blue of her eyes appeared a limpid, moonless purple.

“What can anyone do to me now?” she said simply.

They could not even warn her not to let anyone in: she seemed exhausted simply from the act of sitting up. They left her with only the dead priest for company and headed to a wing where Gideon had never gone: the hot, sultry corridor lined with fibrous green plants of all sorts, the wing where the priests and Teacher lived.

It was a pretty, whitewashed passageway, totally out of kilter with the rest of Canaan House. The light bounced off the walls from the clean, well-kept windows. There was no need to knock at the doors or yell to find the action; at the end of the corridor, there was an absolute pile-up of bones, sashes, and the laid-out body of the other wizened priest. He had collapsed flat on his face with his arms outstretched, as if he had tripped while running.

The bones were all piled up outside a closed door, as though they had been trying to get through it. Palamedes led the way, crunching through the wreckage. Gideon put her hand on the hilt of her sword, and Palamedes threw open the door.

Inside, Captain Deuteros looked up, somewhat wearily. She was sitting in a chair facing the door. Her left arm hung uselessly at her side, wizened and crumpled. Gideon did not want to look at it. It looked like it had been put in a bog for a thousand years and then stuck back on. Her right arm was tucked up against her stomach. There was an enormous crimson stain spreading out onto the perfect white of her jacket, and her right hand was clasped, as though ready to draw, around the enormous bone shard shoved deep in her gut.

Teacher lay unmoving by her side. There was a rapier buried in his chest, and a dagger through his neck. There was no blood around the blades, only great splashes of it at his sleeves and his girdle. Gideon looked around for the lieutenant, found her, and then looked away again. She didn’t need a very long look to tell that Dyas was dead. For one thing, her skeleton and her body had apparently tried to divorce.

“He wouldn’t listen to reason,” said Judith Deuteros, in measured tones. “He became aggressive when I attempted to restrain him. Binding spells proved—useless. Marta used disabling force. He was the one to escalate the situation—he blew out her eye, so I was compelled to respond … This didn’t—it didn’t have to happen.”

Two professional Cohort soldiers, one a necromancer, one a cavalier primary; all this mess for one unearthly old man. Palamedes dropped to his knees beside the captain, but she pushed him away, roughly, with the tip of her boot.

“Do something for her,” she said.

“Captain,” said Camilla, “Lieutenant Dyas is dead.”

“Then don’t touch me. We did what we came to do.”

Gideon’s eyes were drawn to a machine in the corner. She hadn’t noticed it because it seemed ridiculously normal, but it wasn’t normal at all, not for Canaan House. It was an electric transmitter box, with headphones and a mic. The antenna was set out the window, glowing faint and blue in the afternoon sunshine.

“Captain,” said Palamedes, “what did you come to do?”

The Second necromancer shifted, grunted in pain, closed her eyes. She sucked in a breath, and a bead of sweat travelled down her temple.

“Save our lives,” she said. “I sent an SOS. Backup’s coming, Warden … it’s just up to you to make sure nobody else dies … He said I’d betrayed the Emperor … said I’d put the Emperor at risk … I entered the Emperor’s service when I was six.”

Captain Deuteros’s chin was drooping. She lifted it back up with some effort. “He wasn’t human,” she said. “He wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. Marta put him down—Marta … Go tell them she avenged the Fifth and the Fourth.”

Palamedes had ignored the kick and moved in again. The Second laid one booted foot on his shoulder in warning. He said, “Captain, you are no use to anyone dead.”

“It is my privilege to no longer be of use,” said the captain. “We fixed the problem none of the rest of you could … did what we had to do … and paid for it, dearly.”

Harrow had gone to stand over the quiet, punctured corpse of Teacher. She dropped to his side like a long-tailed crow. All Gideon could do was press herself back up against the wall, smell the blood, and feel absurdly empty. Her necromancer said, “You fixed nothing.”

“Harrow,” Palamedes said warningly.

“This man was a shell filled with a hundred souls,” said Harrow. The captain’s eyes flicked open, and stayed open. “He was a thing of ridiculous power—but he was a prototype. I doubt he had killed anyone before today. I would be astonished if he had a hand in the deaths of the Fourth and Fifth Houses, as he was created for the sole purpose of safeguarding the place. There is something a great deal more dangerous than an old experiment loose in the First House, and he could have helped us find out what it is. But now you’re going to die too, and you’ll never know the whole story.”

The whites of Judith’s eyes were very white, her carefully merciless face suddenly a picture of hesitation. Her gaze moved, more remorselessly than Gideon’s ever could have, to her cavalier; then she returned it to them, half-furious, half-beseeching. Palamedes moved in.

“I can’t save you,” he said. “I can’t even make you comfortable. A team of trained medics could do both. How far away is the Second? How long do we have to wait for Cohort backup?”

“The Second’s not coming,” said Captain Deuteros.

She smiled, tight and bitter. “There’s no communication with the rest of the system,” she said, hoarsely now. “He didn’t lie. There was no way to reach the Houses … I got through to the Imperial flagship, Sixth. The Emperor is coming … the King Undying.”

Next to Harrow, Teacher gurgled.

“You draw him back—to the place—he must not return to,” said the dead man, with a thin and reedy whistle of a voice around the blade in his vocal cords. His whole body wriggled. His dead eyes no longer twinkled drunkenly, but his tongue slithered. His spine arched. “Oh, Lord—Lord—Lord, one of them has come back—”

His voice trailed off. His body collapsed to the floor. The silence in the wake of his settling was huge and loathsome.

Palamedes said, “Judith—”

“Give me her sword,” she said.

The rapier was too heavy for her to hold. Camilla laid it over the necromancer’s knees, and Judith’s fingers closed around it. The steel of the hilt was bright in her hand. She squeezed down until her knuckles were white.

“At least let us get you out of here,” said Gideon, who thought it was a shitty room to die in.

“No,” she said. “If he comes back to life again, I will be ready. And I won’t leave her now … nobody should ever have to watch their cavalier die.”

The last Gideon ever saw of Captain Judith Deuteros was her propped up on the armchair, sitting as straight as she could possibly manage, bleeding out through the terrible wound at her gut. They left her with her head held high, and her face had no expression at all.

Chapter 33

It seemed as though just when you least wanted them, the Eighth House were always there. They were striding down the whitewashed corridor outside Dulcinea’s room as the rest of the group made their way back to her, making the whitewash look off-colour and dirty with the spotlessness of their robes. Gideon nearly drew her sword; but they had come in need, rather than in warfare.

“The Third House have defiled a body,” said Silas Octakiseron, by way of hello. “The servants are all destroyed. Where’s the Second and the Seventh?”

Harrow said, “Dead. Incapacitated. So is Teacher.”

“That leaves us critically shorthanded,” said the Eighth House necromancer, who could not be accused of having the milk of human kindness running through his veins. He did not even have the thin and tasteless juice of feigned empathy. “Listen. The Third have opened up Lady Pent—”

Palamedes said, “Abigail?” and Harrow said, “Opened up?”

“Brother Asht saw the Third leave the morgue this morning, but we have not seen them since,” said Silas. “They are not in their quarters and the facility hatch is locked. We are compelled to join forces. Abigail Pent has been interfered with and opened up.”

“Please elaborate opened up, because my imagination is better than your description and I am not having a lot of fun here,” said Gideon.

The Eighth cavalier said heavily, “Come and see.”

It couldn’t have been an ambush. There was one House versus two. And for once, Silas Octakiseron seemed genuinely jumpy. Gideon hung back near Harrowhark as the grisly procession made its way down through the hallways again, to the atrium, working their way toward the dining hall and the makeshift morgue off the kitchen.

Harrow murmured beneath her breath, for Gideon’s ears only: “The Second dead and dying. Teacher dead, and the revenants with him—”

“Teacher turned against the Second. Why are you so sure that Teacher didn’t kill the others?”

“Because Teacher was afraid of Canaan House and the facility most of all,” said Harrow. “I need to go back and check, but I suspect he was incapable of going down that ladder at all. He was a construct himself. But what was Teacher the mould for? Griddle, at the first sign of trouble—”

“Run like hell,” said Gideon.

“I was going to say, Hit it with your sword,” said Harrow.

The morgue was dreary and chill and serene. The anxiety of the rest of Canaan House had not touched it. It was getting to be untenably full: the two teens were still safely away in their cold iron drawers, and Protesilaus was in situ, though he was a head without the body. As it would have been difficult to cram all of him in, this was maybe a blessing in disguise. Magnus was also laid out on his own slab, a little too tall for comfort: but his wife—

Abigail’s body had been left out, pulled fully away from its niche. She was still cold and ashen-faced and dead. Her shirt had been rolled up to her ribs. With no great elegance, a knife had been used to open up her abdomen on the right side of her body. There was a big bloodless hole there the size of a fist.

Their unseemly interest never quenched, both of the Sixth House immediately peered into the wound. Camilla flicked on her pocket torch. Harrow crowded in beside them while Gideon stayed to watch the Eighth. Silas looked as wan and uncomfortable as Abigail did; his cavalier was as impassive as ever, and he did not meet Gideon’s eye.

“The cut was made with Tern’s triple-knife,” said Palamedes. He had laid his hand over the wound. He eased his fingers into the hole without any hint of a wince, and he held them there for a second. “And removed the—no, the kidney’s still present. Cam, there was something here.”

“Magnifier?”

“Don’t need it. It was metal—Camilla, it was here for a while … the flesh had sealed over it. It would—fuck!”

The rest of the room jumped. But nothing had bitten Palamedes, except maybe internally: he was staring off into the middle distance, horrified. He looked as though he had just been given a piece of chocolate cake and found, after two bites, half a spider.

“My timing was wrong,” he said softly, to himself, and again more waspishly: “Nonagesimus. My timing was wrong.”

“Use your words, Sextus.”

“Why didn’t I investigate Abigail before—The Fifth went down into the facility—they must have completed a challenge. The night of the dinner. Pent was nobody’s fool. They were caught out on the top of the stairs coming back. Something was hidden inside her to avoid detection—God knows why she did it, or why anyone did it—three inches long, metal, shaft, teeth—”

“A key,” said Silas.

“But that’s insane,” said Gideon.

“Someone wanted to hide that key very badly—it may have been Lady Pent herself,” said Palamedes. Finally, he withdrew his hand from her insides, and crossed to wash it in the sink, which Gideon thought was the civilised thing to do. “Or it may have been the person who killed her. There is one room that someone has made every attempt to keep us from. Octakiseron, this wasn’t defilement for the sake of defilement, it was someone breaking open a lockbox.”

Silas said calmly, “Are those rooms worth carrying such a sin?”

Harrow stared at him.

“You took two keys off the Seventh House,” she demanded, “won one from a challenge, and never bothered to open their doors?”

“I won the first key to see what I was up against, and took possession of two more to preserve them from misuse,” said Silas. “I hate this House. I despise the reduction of a holy temple to a maze and a puzzle. I took the keys so that you wouldn’t have them. Nor the Sixth, nor the Third.”

Palamedes wiped his hands dry on a piece of towelling and pushed his glasses up his nose. They had fogged up from his breath, in that cold and quiet place.

“Master Octakiseron,” he said, “you are an intellectual cretin and a dog in a manger, but at least you’re consistent. I know which door this opens, as does the Ninth. And, we have to assume, so does the Third. I know where they’ll be, and I want to see what they’ve found—”

“Before it is too late,” said Harrow.

She went over to the racks of bodies, and she opened up one last slab that Gideon had forgotten about entirely. It was the sad pile of cremains and bone that they had found in the furnace. The biggest bits of the corpses were no bigger than a thumbnail. Surprising Gideon—yet again—it was Colum who moved opposite to Harrow, gesturing to the bones and the ashes almost impatiently.

“This one,” he said. “Half of it. It’s the Seventh cavalier.”

“I had assumed as much,” said Harrow. “There was no skull. The time of death only made sense if it was Protesilaus.”

“The other half is someone else,” said Silas.

“We can’t do anything for them yet,” said Palamedes. “The living have to take precedence here, if we want to keep living.”

As it turned out, he was wrong.

Chapter 34

Six of them walked the dim hallways of Canaan House: three necromancers, three cavaliers. Every so often they would come across the fallen-down body of a skeletal servant, still and grinning emptily up at the ceiling, the chains that had bound them to this tower finally broken. Gideon found the sight of the little heaps and piles weirdly distressing. They had been walking around for ten thousand years, probably, and after two moments of panic and tragedy it was all over. The priests of the First House were gone. Maybe it was relief, or maybe it was sacrilege.

Gideon wondered what her state of mind would be after a whole myriad: bored as hell, probably. Desperate to do anything or be anyone else. She would have done everything there was to do, and if she hadn’t seen it, she could probably imagine what it looked like.

They followed Harrow’s map to the hallway of the stopped-up Lyctor door. The lock still carried the mark of the regenerating bone that had been such a bastard to remove. The stark painting of the waterless canyon had been taken away, and now all three necromancers stood silently before the great black pillars and bizarre carvings above. Silas said, “I feel no wards here.”

Harrow said, “It’s a lure.”

“Or carelessness,” said Palamedes.

“Or they just didn’t give a shit, guys,” said Gideon, “given that the key is still inside the lock.”

It was the third door that day they had opened with absolutely no knowledge of what would lie within. The yellow light flooded out into the corridor, and inside—

The other two laboratories Gideon had seen were caves. They were practical places to work and sleep and train and eat, homely at best, cheerless at worst, laboratories in the real sense of the word. This room was something else. It had been light and airy, once. The floors were made of varnished wood, and the walls were great whitewashed panels. The panels had been painted lovingly, a long time ago, with a sprawling expanse of fanciful things: white-skinned trees with pale purple blossoms trailing into orange pools, golden clouds thick with flying birds. The room was sparsely furnished—a few broad desks with pots of neatly arranged pencils and books; a polished marble slab with a tidy array of knives and pairs of scissors; what looked to be an ancient chest freezer; some rolled-up mattresses and embroidered quilts, decaying in an open locker at one end.

This was all immaterial. Three things caught Gideon’s attention immediately:

On one of the sweetly painted frescoes, fresh paint marred the blossom-decked trees. Over them, on the wall, black words a foot high proclaimed:

Someone was crying in the slow, dull way of a person who had been crying for hours already and didn’t know how to stop.

And Ianthe sat in the centre of the room, waiting. She had taken up position on an ancient and sagging cushion, reclining on it like a queen. Joining a growing trend, her pale golden robes were spattered with blood, and her pallid yellow hair was spattered with more. She was trembling so hard that she was vibrating, and her pupils were so dilated you could have flown a shuttle through them.

“Hello, friends,” she said.

The source of the crying became apparent a little way into the room. Next to the marble slab, Coronabeth was huddled, her arms wrapped around her knees as she rocked backward and forward. Next to her on the ground—

“Yes,” said Ianthe. “My cavalier is dead, and I killed him. Please don’t misunderstand, this isn’t a confession.”

Naberius Tern lay awkwardly sprawled on the ground. His expression was that of a man who had suffered the surprise of his life. There was something too white about his eyeballs, but otherwise he looked perfectly real, perfectly alive, perfectly coiffed. His lips were still a little parted, as if he were going to crossly demand an explanation any minute now.

They were stock-still. Only Palamedes had the presence of mind to move: he bypassed Ianthe entirely and crossed to where the cavalier lay, stretched out and stiffening. There were blood spatters down his front, a great tear ripped in his shirt. The blade had come through his back. Palamedes reached down, grimaced at something, and shut the man’s staring eyes.

“She’s right. He’s gone,” he said.

At this, Silas and Colum came to themselves. Colum drew. But Ianthe gave a sudden shrill trill of a laugh—a laugh with too many edges.

“Eighth! Sword away,” she said. “Oh, Eighth. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Ianthe suddenly tucked her knees into her chest and moaned: it was the low, querulous moan of someone with a stomach pain, almost comical.

“This is not how I had envisioned this,” she said afterward, teeth chattering. “I am merely telling you. I won.”

Gideon said, slowly: “Princess. None of us here speaks crazy lady.”

“A very hurtful name,” said Ianthe, and yawned. Her teeth started chattering again halfway through, and she bit her tongue, yowled, and spat on the floor. A thin wisp of smoke arose from the mingled spit and blood. They all stared at it.

“I admit it, this smarts,” she said, broodingly. “I had my speech all planned out—I was going to brag somewhat, you understand. Because I didn’t need any of your keys, and I didn’t need any of your secrets. I was always better than all of you—and none of you noticed—nobody ever notices, which is both my virtue and my downfall. How I hate being so good at my job … You noticed, didn’t you, you horrible little Ninth goblin? Just a bit?”

The horrible little Ninth goblin stared at her with tight-pressed lips. She had inched away from Gideon toward the theorem plate, and with no sense of shame began to look it over.

“You knew about the beguiling corpse,” Harrow said. “You knew how impossible it was.”

“Yee-ee-s. I knew the energy transferral didn’t add up. None of the thanergy signatures in this building added up … until I realised what we were all being led to. What the Lyctors of old were trying to tell us. You see, my field has always been energy transferral … large-scale energy transferral. Resurrection theory. I studied what happened when the Lord our Kindly God took our dead and dying Houses and brought them back to life, all those years ago … what price he would have had to pay. What displacement, the soul of a planet? What happens when a planet dies?”

“You’re an occultist,” said Palamedes. “You’re a liminal magician. I thought you were an animaphiliac.”

“That’s just for show,” said Ianthe. “I’m interested in the place between death and life … the place between release and disappearance. The place over the river. The displacement … where the soul goes when we knock it about … where the things are that eat us.”

Harrow said, “You make it sound a lot more interesting than it really is.”

“Stop being such a bone adept,” said Ianthe. She coughed and laughed again, fretfully. She closed her eyes and let her head loll suddenly downward. When she opened them again the pupil and the iris were gone, leaving the terrible white of the eyeball. They all flinched as Ianthe cried aloud. She closed her eyes tight and shook her head like a rattle, and when she opened them back up, she was panting with exertion, as though she’d just run a race. Gideon remained in a state of flinch.

Neither of her eyes were their original colour. Both the pupil and the iris were intermingled shades of brown, purple, and blue. Ianthe closed her eyes a third time, and when the pale lashes opened, both had returned to insipid amethyst.

Palamedes had moved to the wall behind Ianthe, flanking her. She did not even bother to turn or notice. She just curled in on herself. Behind Sextus, YOU LIED TO US stretched out in vast array.

“Step one,” she said, singsong, “preserve the soul, with intellect and memory intact. Step two, analyse it—understand its structure, its shape. Step three, remove and absorb it: take it into yourself without consuming it in the process.”

“Oh, fuck,” said Harrow, very quietly. She had moved back to Gideon’s side now, slipping her journal back into her pocket. “The megatheorem.”

“Step four, fix it in place so it can’t deteriorate. That’s the part I wasn’t sure of, but I found the method here, in this very room. Step five, incorporate it: find a way to make the soul part of yourself without being overwhelmed. Step six: consume the flesh. Not the whole thing, a drop of blood will do to ground you. Step seven is reconstruction—making spirit and flesh work together the way they used to, in the new body. And then for the last step you hook up the cables and get the power flowing. You’ll find that one a walk in the park, Eighth, I suspect it was your House’s contribution.”

Palamedes said: “Princess. You never had any keys. You never saw any of these rooms, except this one.”

“Like I said,” said Ianthe, “I am very, very good, and moreover I’ve got common sense. If you face the challenge rooms, you don’t need the study notes—not if you’re the best necromancer the Third House ever produced. Aren’t I, Corona? Baby, stop crying, you’re going to get such a headache.”

“I came to the same conclusion you did,” said Palamedes, but his voice was cold and inflexible. “I discarded it as ghastly. Ghastly, and obvious.”

“Ghastly and obvious are my middle names,” said the pale twin. “Sextus, you sweet Sixth prude. Use that big, muscular brain of yours. I’m not talking about the deep calculus. Ten thousand years ago there were sixteen acolytes of the King Undying, and then there were eight. Who were the cavaliers to the Lyctor faithful? Where did they go?”

Palamedes opened his mouth as though to answer this question; but he had bumped against something on the back wall, and had gone still. Gideon had never known him to be still. He was a creature of sudden movement and twitchy fingers. Camilla was watching him with obvious suspicion; one of his thumbs was tracing the edge of a black-painted letter, but the rest of his body was rigid. He looked as though someone had turned his power switch off.

But Silas was saying—

“None of this explains why you have killed Naberius Tern.”

Ianthe cocked her head to one side, drunkenly, to take him in. The violet of her eyes was dried-up flowers; her mouth was the colour and softness of rocks.

“Then you weren’t listening. I haven’t killed Naberius Tern. I ate Naberius Tern,” she said, indifferently. “I put a sword through his heart to pin his soul in place. Then I took it into my body. I’ve robbed Death itself … I have drunk up the substance of his immortal soul. And now I will burn him and burn him and burn him, and he will never really die. I have absorbed Naberius Tern … I am more than the sum of his half, and mine.”

Her head hung close to her chest again. She gave a hiccup that sounded a little bit like a sob, and a little bit like a laugh. As she did she appeared blurry and indistinct before them—rocking out of her edges, somehow, unreal. Gideon’s skin had already been crawling, but now it was trying to sprint.

Palamedes said, though he sounded as though he were ten thousand years away, “Princess, whatever you think you’ve done, you haven’t done it.”

“Oh, haven’t I?” said Ianthe.

She rose to stand, but Gideon did not see her move. Ianthe came back to solidity all at once, more real now than anything around her. The room faded into insignificance. She glowed from the inside out, like she had eaten a fistful of lightbulbs. “Do you really deny it, even now?” she said. “God, it makes so much sense. Even the rapiers—light swords, light enough to be held by an amateur … a necromancer. Each challenge—fusing, controlling, binding, utilising—utilising whom? Did you notice that none of those challenges could be completed by yourself? No, you didn’t, and yet that was the biggest red flag. I had to reverse-engineer the whole thing, just from looking at it … all alone.”

Silas sounded quite normal now when he turned and addressed the monotonously crying girl by the slab: “Princess Coronabeth. Is she speaking the truth? And did you, at any point, attempt to stop her, or know as a necromancer what act she was committing?”

“Poor Corona!” said Ianthe. “Don’t get on her case, you little white excuse for a human being. What could she have done? Don’t you know my sister has a bad, sad secret? Everyone looks at her and sees what they want to see … beauty and power. Incredible hair. The perfect child of an indomitable House.”

The Crown Princess of Ida was not acknowledging the fact that anyone was speaking to her. Her sister continued: “Everyone’s blind. Corona? A born necromancer? She was as necromantic as Babs. But Dad wanted a matched set. And we didn’t want anything to separate us—so we started the lie. I’ve had to be two necromancers since I was six. It sharpens your focus, I tell you what. No … Corona couldn’t’ve stopped me becoming a Lyctor.”

Palamedes said, vaguely, “This can’t be right.”

“Of course it’s right, goosey, the Emperor himself helped come up with it.”

“So that is Lyctorhood,” said Silas. He sounded quiet, almost fretful, lost in thought. Gideon thought—just for a moment—that she could see Colum Asht’s throat working, that his pupils had dilated just a very, very little. “To walk with the dead forever … enormous power, recycled within you, from the ultimate sacrifice … to make yourself a tomb.”

“You understand, don’t you?” said Ianthe.

“Yes,” said Silas.

Colum closed his eyes and was still.

“Yes,” repeated Silas. “I understand fallibility … and fallibility is a terrible thing to understand. I understand that if the Emperor and King Undying came to me now and asked me why I was not a Lyctor, I would fall on my knees and beg his forgiveness, that any of us had ever failed this test. May I be burnt one atom at a time in the most silent hole in the most lightless part of space, Lord—Kindly Prince—should I ever contemplate betraying the compact you appointed between him, and you, and me.”

Colum opened his eyes again.

“Silas—” he began.

“I will forgive you eventually, Colum,” said his purse-mouthed uncle, “for assuming I would have been prey to this temptation. Do you believe me?”

“I want to,” said his nephew fervently, with a thousand-yard stare and his missing finger twitching around his shield. “God help me, I want to.”

Ianthe said, contemptuously: “Come off it, you’d drain him dry if you thought it would keep your virtue intact. This is the same thing, just more humane.”

“Do not speak to me anymore,” said Silas. “I brand you heretic, Ianthe Tridentarius. I sentence you to death. As your cavalier is no more, you must stand in for him: make your peace with your House and your Emperor, because I swear to the King Undying you will find no more peace in this life, anywhere, in any world you care to travel to. Brother Asht—”

Harrow said, “Octakiseron, stop it. This is not the time.”

“I will cleanse everything here, Ninth, to stop the Houses from finding out how we have debased ourselves,” said Silas. His cavalier drew his great sword and slipped his calloused, stumped-up fingers into his targe: he had stepped before them all with an expression of something that was too deep into relief for Gideon to really translate it. His adept said: “Colum the Eighth. Show no mercy.”

“Somebody stop him,” said Ianthe. “Sixth. Ninth. I don’t intend for anyone’s blood to be spilled. Well, you know, any more.”

Harrow said, “Octakiseron, you fool, can’t you see—” and Camilla was saying “Everyone back off—”

But Colum Asht did not back off. He came down on Ianthe like a wolf on the fold. He was terrifically fast for such a big, ragged-looking man, and he hit her with such kinetic force that she should have been flung back to splatter on the wall like a discarded sandwich. His arm was true and steady; there was no hesitation in his hand or in his blade.

Neither was there any hesitation in Ianthe’s. Gideon had seen the exquisite sword of the Third House lying in a smear of blood next to the body of its cavalier: now it was suddenly in the hand of its necromantic princess. She met his blade with a flat parry—it knocked away that titanic blow as though Ianthe were not a head shorter and a third of his weight—and she eased back into perfect, surefooted precision.

It was Naberius Tern’s movement that tucked Ianthe’s arm behind her back, and Naberius Tern’s perfect, precise footwork. It was profoundly weird to see Naberius Tern’s moves restrung in Ianthe Tridentarius’s body—but there they were, recreated right down to the way she held her head. Colum moved in for advantage, a high vertical cut to her naked collarbones. She avoided his move with boyish contempt and countered. Colum had to scramble to meet her.

It was only then that it hit home to Gideon what Ianthe had done. The bizarre sight of a necromancer holding a sword—a ghost fighting inside the meat suit of his adept—made it real that Naberius was dead, but that he was dead inside Ianthe. It was not that he had taught her how to fight: it was him fighting. There was Naberius’s instant counterstrike; there was Naberius’s gorgeous deflection, the tiny movement knocking Colum’s shield away. Normally Gideon would have been fascinated to watch the cavalier of the Eighth at work—he was as light on his feet as a feather, and yet his blows were all heavy as lead—but her gaze was locked on Ianthe, only Ianthe, who was moving more Naberius than Naberius ever could, whose body was agile and lithe and as suprahuman as a wisp.

But there was one catch. The sword of the Third House must have weighed at least a kilogram, and Naberius’s muscle memory could not quite account for Ianthe’s arms. Some power must have been compensating for her body—her elbow should have been locking like a door—but whatever she was doing to wield that thing, it was just a fraction not good enough. She was sweating. There was a pucker in the middle of that preternaturally calm forehead, a wince in the eyes, the slight drunken lolling of the head that she had suffered from before. As she faded, Colum took the advantage. She shook herself, and he raised his foot and kicked her sword out of her hand. It spun over to the wall where Palamedes had been, and clattered there miserably, far out of reach. Colum raised his sword.

The Princess of the Third House raised her hand to her mouth, gored a chunk of flesh from the heel of her palm, and spat it at him like a missile. Ianthe disappeared beneath a greasy, billowing tent—cellular, fleshy, coated all over with neon-yellow bubbles and thin pink film. Colum bounced off this thing as though he had hit a brick wall. He went ass-over-teakettle and rolled over and over, only at the last skidding back up to stand, locking himself into position, panting. Where there had been a necromancer, there was instead a semitransparent dome of skin and subcutaneous fat, baffling to the eye. Nothing loath, Colum charged again, smashing his shield down on it with a bad wet noise like squirk. It was rubbery: it bounced back against him. He gave a mighty slash downward with his sword: the flesh-bubble tore and bled, but did not give.

Gideon put her hand on her sword to draw it, and slipped her fingers into her gauntlet. Thin fingers wrapped around her wrist. When she looked around, Harrow was tight-lipped.

“Don’t go near them,” she said. “Don’t touch her. Don’t think about touching her.”

Gideon looked around wildly for the Sixth House: she found only Camilla, swords sheathed, face impassive. Those watching were doing so in near-embarrassed, breathless silence as Colum circled the horrible skin shield, testing it with slashes, shoving his blade home hard and grunting when the flesh did not give. Then Silas closed his eyes and said quietly, “The necromancer must fight the necromancer.”

Colum raised his arm for a beautiful downward cross-slice, then jerked back as though he had been stung. He retreated, sword and small shield at the ready, and gritted his teeth. Gideon now knew what leeching felt like, and swore to God she could see the haze in the air and feel the chilly suction as his necromancer began to siphon.

“Stop fighting me,” said Silas, without opening his eyes.

Colum said gruffly: “Don’t do it. Don’t put me under. Not this time.”

“Brother Asht,” said his necromancer, “if you cannot believe, then for God’s sake obey.”

Colum made a sound in the back of his throat. Ianthe was visible as a blurred shape behind the yellow-streaked flesh wall. Silas walked forward on light feet—crackles of electricity arcing over his skin, his hands—and laid his palms on the shield.

The skin puddled around his fingers, and for a moment Gideon thought it was working. Then the wall sucked his hands inward, ripping and bristling with canine teeth. The shield bit down savagely, and there was blood at Silas’s wrists. He cried out, and then closed his eyes, the heat pouring off him in waves; Colum went greyer and greyer, and stiller and stiller, and Silas squeezed his hands into fists.

The shield went pop, like a pimple or an eyeball, and fell to the floor in ragged strips and jiggling globs. Silas looked almost surprised to see Ianthe, who was gripping her head in tight-knuckled hands. When Ianthe looked up, her eyes were wild and white again, and she screamed in a voice that required many more vocal cords than she possessed.

Silas approached her with hands like hot white murder. Ianthe ducked past him and flung herself down onto one of the still-bubbling sheets that had made up her shield. She sunk down into the skin with a splash, peppering the wooden floor with hot yellow fat. The skin blistered and crinkled up on itself like it had been burnt, and then it deliquesced into a viscous puddle, leaving no trace of Ianthe.

Silas knelt by the puddle, and—silver chain starting to warp and buckle on his perfect white tunic—thrust his hand into it. Colum made a noise as though he had been punched in the gut. A bloodied hand emerged from the puddle, seized Silas by the shoulder, and jerked him in.

The ceiling broke apart like a thundercloud, and a torrent of bloody, fatty rain sluiced down on them all. Gideon and Harrow gagged and pulled their hoods down over their heads. Two figures tumbled from above, filthy with blood and lymph. Ianthe landed on her feet, and delicately shivered off the fetid red soup, more or less unblemished, while Silas fell heavily to earth. There was a faint red mark like a slap on Ianthe’s face; she touched her cheek, and it paled into nothing.

Silas clambered to his knees, clasped his fingers together, and the feeling of suction popped the pressure in both of Gideon’s ears. She saw his power warping around Ianthe now, and she gave a disbelieving laugh. She was breathing hard, almost hyperventilating.

“Octakiseron,” Ianthe said, “you can’t take it faster than I can make it.”

“He’s trying to drain her,” muttered Harrow, spellbound. “But he’s splitting his focus—he needs to bring Colum back, or—”

Colum—ashen as his name, drunk in movement, numb—had lifted his sword, and was moving inexorably toward Ianthe. He backhanded her full across the face with his shield, as though to test her. Ianthe’s head snapped back, but she looked more dazed and surprised than hurt or injured. Her breath was coming in stutters. She righted herself like nothing had happened, and the cavalier thrust forward with his blade. She raised her hand and wrapped it around the shining edge like it was nothing. Her hand was bloody, but the blood itself pushed back gracefully, quietly repelling the blade like it was all just so many more fingers.

Silas clasped his hands together, and the pressure nearly made Gideon hurl. Colum shook his sword—the blood broke off like shards of glass—and Ianthe staggered, though nobody had touched her. As she lurched away from Colum the blood on the floor and the walls and the ceiling was drying up, burning into itself as though it had never been. Her eyes were that awful, blank white, and she was holding her head and shaking it as though to reposition her brain.

“Stop doing this to me!” she was hissing. “Stop it!”

Colum turned and with a liquid, exquisite movement, sliced down across her back. It was a shallow cut. Ianthe did not even seem to notice. The blood bubbled over her pretty yellow robe and the new gash revealed the wound sucking in on itself and zipping together. “Listen,” she was saying, “Babs, listen.”

Silas slammed his fists on the ground. The air was choked from Ianthe’s lungs. Her mouth and skin puckered and withered: she stopped, awkward, stiff, eyes bulging in surprise. The remnants of blood rose from the floor as pale smoke, trailing heavenward all around them. For a moment everything was blanched clean and luminously white. In the middle of all this stood Ianthe, unnaturally still and bent. Blood dripped calmly out of Silas’s nose and ears in the blood sweat.

Gideon felt Harrow flinch—

Ianthe’s pallid purple irises had returned, and so had the pupils, though perhaps all a little paler than before. She was ageing before their eyes. Her skin sloughed off in papery threads. But she was not staring at Silas, who held her as firmly as though he had her clasped in his hands. She was staring, disbelieving, at Colum the Eighth.

“Well, now you’re fucked,” she announced.

Colum the Eighth’s eyes were as liquid black as, before, Ianthe’s had been liquid white. He had stopped moving as a human being did. The warrior’s economy of movement; the long and lovely lines of someone who had trained with the sword his whole life; the swift-footedness was gone. He now moved like there were six people inside him, and none of those six people had ever been inside a human being before. He sniffed. He craned his head around—and kept craning. With an awful crack, his head turned one hundred and eighty degrees to look impassively at the room behind him.

One of the lightbulbs screamed, exploded, died in a shower of sparks. The air was very cold. Gideon’s breath came as frosty white frills in the sudden darkness, and the remaining lights struggled to pierce the gloom. Colum licked his lips with a grey tongue.

Particles of bone bounced along the floor. Harrowhark had thrown them in a long, overhand arc, and they fell true at Colum’s feet. Spikes erupted from the ground, crowding Colum between them, locking him in tight. Colum raised his white-booted foot indifferently, and kicked through them. They exploded into dusty, tooth-coloured clouds of calcium.

Silas looked up, nearly foetal, from the floor. He still glowed like a pearl in a sunbeam, but he’d lost his focus. Ianthe stepped out of his spell disdainfully, flesh plumping, colour coming back to her face, and she itched herself. There were lights beneath Colum the Eighth’s skin: things pushed and slithered along his muscles as he walked, heavy-footed, rocking from side to side.

Silas wiped the blood away from his nose and mouth and said calmly: “Brother Asht, listen to the words of the head of your House.”

Colum advanced.

“Come back,” said Silas, unruffled. “I bid you return. I bid you return. Colum—I bid you return. I bid you return. I bid you return. I bid. I bid, I bid, I bid— Colum—”

The thing that lived in Colum raised Colum’s sword, and drove the point through Silas Octakiseron’s throat.

Gideon moved. She heard Harrow shout a warning, but she couldn’t help it. She drew her rapier from its scabbard, and she threw herself at the grey thing wearing a person skin. It was not a cavalier: it did not meet the arc of her sword with a parry. It just clouted her with Colum’s shield with a strength no human being ever had. Gideon staggered, very nearly fell, ducked out of the way of a sword gracelessly slammed downward. She took advantage of his movement, got up close, pinned his arm between her body and her sword and shattered his wrist with a meaty crack. The thing opened its mouth and opened its eyes, right up in her face. Its eyeballs were gone—Colum’s eyeballs were gone—and now the sockets were mouths ringed with teeth, with little tongues slithering out of them. The tongue in his original mouth extended out, down, wrapping itself around her neck—

“Enough,” said Ianthe.

She appeared behind the grey-thing-that-had-been-Colum. She took its twisted neck in her hands as calmly and easily as though it were an animal, and she tilted it. The neck snapped. Her fingertips dipped inside the skin; the eye-mouths shrilled, and the tongue around Gideon’s neck flopped away, and both those mouths dissolved into brackish fluid. The body dropped to the floor—

—and it was Colum again, face disfigured, neck on the wrong way, sprawled over the pierced shell of his young dead uncle. There was no solace in that big, beat-up body, clutched around his necromancer’s in morbid imitation of the whole of their lives. Neither of them wore white anymore: they were stained all the way through, yellow, red, pink.

The lights buzzed again dismally. The air cleared. Ianthe was left among the gore looking like a moth, fairylike. She picked up the hem of her skirts delicately and shook them. The blood and muck came off like it was powder.

The Princess of Ida beheld the mess around her: then she slapped herself very lightly, like you would to wake someone up.

“Get it together,” she told herself. “You nearly lost that.”

She turned to Gideon, Camilla, and Harrow, and she said—

“There are worse things than myself in this building. Have that one for free.”

Then she stepped backward, into the puddled spray of Silas’s blood, and disappeared. They were left alone in the room, with the quiet, stretched-out corpses of Silas Octakiseron, Colum Asht, and Naberius Tern; and the low, dreary breathing of Coronabeth Tridentarius, looking like chopped-up jewellery.

Gideon lurched toward her, out of desperation to move—to move away from the middle and what was in it, to move toward the abandoned Third twin. Corona looked up at her with tears on her beautiful lashes and eyes swollen from crying. She threw herself into Gideon’s arms, and she sobbed, silently now, utterly destroyed. Gideon was soothed by the fact that someone in this madhouse was still human enough to cry.

“Are you okay—I mean, are you all right,” said Gideon.

Corona recoiled from Gideon and looked up at her, her golden hair smeared to her forehead with sweat and tears. “She took Babs,” she said, which seemed fair enough.

But then Corona started crying again, big tears leaking out of her eyes, her voice thick with misery and self-pity. “And who even cares about Babs? Babs! She could have taken me.”

Chapter 35

They left the lonely twin to her bitter, alien grief. Camilla and Harrow and Gideon stood together out in the hallway, reeling. Gideon was rotating her shoulder in its socket to make sure nothing had graunched out of place, and Harrowhark was flicking gobs of something unspeakable off her sleeves, when Camilla said: “The Warden. Where’s the Warden?”

“I lost track of him during the fight,” said Gideon. “I thought he was behind you.”

Harrow said, “He was—and I was by the door. I saw him only a few minutes ago.”

“I lost sight of him,” Camilla said. “I never lose sight of him.”

“Slow your roll,” said Gideon, with far more assurance than she actually felt. “He’s a big boy. He’s probably gone to make sure Dulcinea’s okay. Harrow says I’m a weenie over Dulcinea—” (“You are,” said Harrow, “a weenie over Dulcinea,”) “—but he’s six hundred per cent weenier than I am, which I still don’t get.”

Camilla looked at her and brushed her dark, slanted fringe out of her eyes. There was something in her gaze starker than impatience.

“The Warden,” she said, “has been exchanging letters with Dulcinea Septimus for twelve years. He’s been—a weenie—over her. One of the reasons he became the heir of the House was to meet her on even footing. His pursuit of medical science was entirely for her benefit.”

This turned all the fluids in Gideon’s body to ice-cold piss.

“She—she never mentioned him at all,” she said, stupidly.

“No,” said Camilla.

“But she—I mean, I was spending so much time with her—”

“Yes,” said Camilla.

“Oh, God,” said Gideon. “And he was so nice about it. Oh my God. Why the fuck did he not say anything? I didn’t—I mean, I never really—I mean, she and I weren’t—”

“He asked her to marry him a year ago,” said Camilla ruthlessly, some floodgate down now, “so that she could spend the rest of her time with someone who cared about her comfort. She refused, but not on the grounds that she didn’t like him. And they weren’t going to relax Imperial rules about necromancers marrying out of House. The letters grew sparser after that. And when he arrived here—she’d moved on. He told me he was glad that she was spending time with someone who made her laugh.”

Five people had died that day; it was weird how the small things ballooned out in importance, comparatively. The tragedy saturated the stiffening bones and static hearts lying in state at Canaan House, but there was also deep tragedy in the flawed beams holding up their lives. An eight-year-old writing love letters to a terminally ill teenager. A girl falling in love with the beautiful stiff she’d been conceived solely to look after. A foundling chasing the approval of a House disappointed with her immunity to foundling-killing gas.

Gideon lay on the floor, facedown, and became hysterical.

Her necromancer was saying, “None of this makes any sense.”

“Nope,” said Camilla heavily, “but it never has the whole time I’ve known them both.”

“No,” said Harrow. “I mean that Dulcinea Septimus twice spoke of Palamedes Sextus to me as a stranger. She told me that she didn’t know him well at all, after he had turned down her offer for the siphoning challenge.”

Gideon, facedown on the dusty ground, moaned: “I want to die.”

She was nudged with a foot, not unkindly. “Get up, Griddle.”

“Why was I born so attractive?”

“Because everyone would have throttled you within the first five minutes otherwise,” said her necromancer. Her attention was on Camilla: “Yet why her about-face, if it’s all how you say it was? I still don’t understand.”

“If I did,” said the Sixth cavalier restlessly, “my quality of life, my sleep, and my sense of well-being would improve. Ninth, get up. He doesn’t hate you. You didn’t ruin anything. He and she were always more complicated than that. He never even met her in person until he came here.”

Gideon emerged from her prone position and sprang to her feet. Her heart was a dry cinder, but it still seemed ridiculously important that Palamedes Sextus be okay with her: that at the end of this whole world, right before their divine intervention, all the little muddles of their personal lives be sorted out.

“I’ve got to catch up with him,” she said, “please give me a couple minutes alone. Harrow, go get my two-hander, it’s in the false bottom of my trunk.” (“Your what?” said Harrow, affrighted.) “Cam, please, do me a massive solid here and keep an eye on her. I’m sorry I’m a homewrecker.”

Gideon turned and sprinted away. She heard Harrow yell, “Nav!” but paid her no attention. Her rapier swung awkwardly into her hip, and her arm twinged in its socket, and her neck still felt weird, but all she could do was run as hard and as fast as she could to the place where she knew she’d find her last two living allies: the sickroom where Dulcinea Septimus lay dying.

She found the Warden standing at the midpoint along the long corridor, staring at the shut door to her room. The hem of his grey robe whispered on the ground, and he seemed lost in thought. Gideon took a breath, which alerted him to her presence. He took off his glasses, wiped the lens with his sleeve, and looked back at her as he perched them back on his long nose.

It seemed as though they looked at each other for such a long time. She took a step forward, and opened her mouth to say, Sextus, I’m sorry—

He folded his fingers together as you would a piece of paper. Her body stopped where it stood, as though steel needles had pierced her hands and her legs. Gideon felt cold all over. She tried to speak, but her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth and she tasted blood. She struggled—an insect pinned to its backing—and he looked at her, cold and dispassionate, unlike himself.

Palamedes surveyed his work, and he saw that it was good. Then he opened Dulcinea’s door. Gideon tried to flail against her invisible bonds, but her bones felt rigid in her body, like she was just the meat sock around them. Her heart struggled against her inflexible rib cage, her terror rising in her mouth. He smiled, and with that strange alchemy he was made lovely, his grey eyes bright and clear. Palamedes entered the sickroom.

He did not shut the door. There were soft noises within. Then she heard his voice, distinctly:

“I wish I had talked to you right at the start.”

Dulcinea’s voice was quiet but audible—

“Why didn’t you?”

“I was afraid,” he said frankly. “I was stupid. My heart was broken, you see. So it was easier to believe—that things had simply changed between us. That Dulcinea Septimus had been trying to spare my feelings—coddling an ignorant child who had tried to save her from something she understood far better than I ever could. I cared about her, and Camilla cared about us. I thought Dulcinea was saving us both the heartache of watching her fail, and die, during our task.”

There was silence in the room. He added, “When this started I was eight and you—you, Dulcinea—were fifteen. My feelings were intense, but for God’s sake, of course I understood. I was an infant. And yet I was shown endless tact and sympathy. My feelings were always taken as deadly serious, and I was treated as someone who knew what he was talking about. Does that run in the Seventh House?”

Gideon could hear the faint smile in Dulcinea’s voice. “I suppose it does. They have been letting young necromancers die for a very, very long time. When you grow up awfully ill, you’re used to everyone making those decisions for you … and hating it … so you do tend to want to take everyone’s feelings as seriously as yours aren’t.”

Palamedes said, “There are two things I want to know.”

“You can have more than two, if you want. I’ve got all day.”

“I don’t need more than two,” he said calmly. “The first is: Why the Fifth?”

There was a puzzled pause. “The Fifth?”

“The Ninth and Eighth houses posed the most clear and present danger,” he said. “The Ninth due to Harrow’s sheer ability, the Eighth due to how easily they could have outed you—any slip would have shown an Eighth necromancer that you weren’t what you claimed. He would only have had to siphon you to know. I even wonder why I’m still walking around, if you don’t find that arrogant. But it was the Fifth House that scared you.”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t lie to me, please.”

Dulcinea said, “I have never lied to any of you.”

“Then—why?”

A tiny, fluttering sigh, like a butterfly coming to rest. Gideon heard her say: “Well, think about it. Abigail Pent was a mature speaker to the dead. That’s no good. It’s not insurmountable—but it’s a problem. But while that was a factor, it wasn’t the reason … that was her hobby.”

“Hobby?”

“I didn’t think anybody would care about the distant past … but Pent had an unwholesome interest in history. She was interested in all the old things she was finding in the library, in the rooms. Letters, notes … pictures … the archaeology of a human life.”

“Abigail Pent may have been a necromancer, but she was also a historian—a famous one, I might add. You didn’t do your research.”

“Oh, I’ve been kicking myself, believe me. I should have gone and swept the whole place first thing. But—I was nostalgic.”

“I see.”

“Gosh, I’m glad you didn’t. I didn’t comprehend your mastery of the ghost-within-the-thing. Sixth psychometry.” There was a sudden, tinkling laugh. “I think you ought to be really glad I didn’t comprehend that. Pent by herself gave me such a fright.”

“And you put the key inside her—why?”

“Time,” said Dulcinea. “I couldn’t afford anybody catching me with it. Hiding it in her flesh obscured its traces. I thought you’d find it earlier, honestly … but it gave me time to gum up the lock. Who got rid of that? I’d thought I’d made it absolutely unusable.”

“That was the Ninth.”

“That’s more than impressive,” she said. “The Emperor would love to get hold of her … thank goodness he never will. Well, that’s another blow to my ego. If I’d thought the lock could have been broken and the key found, I would have cleaned out the place, I wouldn’t have left it to be found … but that’s why we’re having this conversation now, aren’t we? You used your psychometric tricks on the message. If you hadn’t gone in there, you never would have known that I’d been in there too. Am I right?”

“Maybe,” said Palamedes. “Maybe.”

“What’s your second question?”

Gideon struggled again, but she was caught as fast as if the very air around her were glue. Her eyes were streaming from her total inability to blink. She could breathe, and she could listen, and that was it. Her brain was full of sweet fuck-all.

Palamedes said, very quietly: “Where is she?”

There was no answer.

He said, “I repeat. Where is she?”

“I thought she and I had come to an understanding,” Dulcinea admitted easily. “If she had only told me about you … I could have taken some additional precautions.”

“Tell me what you have done,” said Palamedes, “with Dulcinea Septimus.”

“Oh, she’s still here,” said the person who wasn’t Dulcinea Septimus, dismissively. “She came at the Emperor’s call, cavalier in tow. What happened to him was an accident—when I boarded her ship he refused to hear a word of reason, and I had to kill him. Which didn’t have to happen … not like that, anyway. Then she and I talked … We are very much alike. I don’t mean just in appearance, though that was the case, except in the eyes, as the Seventh House is awfully predictable for looks—but our illness … she was very ill, as ill as I was, when I first came here. She might have lived out the first few weeks she was here, Sextus, or she mightn’t have.”

He said, “Then that story about Protesilaus and the Seventh House was a lie.”

“You’re not listening. I never lied,” said the voice. “I said that it was a hypothetical, and you all agreed.”

“Semantics.”

“You should have listened more closely. But I never ever lied. I am from the Seventh House … and it was an accident. Anyway, she and I talked. She was a sweet little thing. I really had wanted to do something for her—and afterward, I kept her for the longest time … until someone took out my cavalier. Then I had to get rid of her, quickly … the furnace was the only option. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not a monster. Septimus was dead before the shuttle landed at Canaan … she hardly suffered.”

There was a very long pause. Palamedes’s voice betrayed nothing when he said: “Well, that’s something, at least. I suppose we’re all to follow now?”

“Yes, but this wasn’t really about any of you,” said the woman in the room with him. “Not personally. I knew that if I ruined his Lyctor plans—killed the heirs and cavaliers to all the other eight Houses—I’d draw him back to the system, but I had to do it in a subtle enough way that he wouldn’t bring the remaining Hands with him. If I had arrived in full force, he’d have turned up on a war footing, and sent the Lyctors to do all the dirty work like always. This way he’s lulled into a false sense of … semisecurity, I suppose. And he won’t even bother coming within Dominicus’s demesne. He’ll sit out there beyond the system—trying to find out what’s happening—right where I need him to be. I’ll give the King Undying, the Necrolord Prime, the Resurrector, my lord and master front-row seats as I shatter his Houses, one by one, and find out how many of them it takes before he breaks and crosses over, before he sees what will come when I call … and then I won’t have to do anything. It will be too late.”

A pause.

“Why would one of the Emperor’s Lyctors hate him?”

“Hate him?” The voice of the girl whom Gideon had known as Dulcinea rose, high and intent. “Hate him? I have loved that man for ten thousand years. We all loved him, every one of us. We worshipped him like a king. Like a god! Like a brother.”

Her voice dropped, and she sounded very normal and very old: “I don’t know why I’m telling you this … you who have been alive for less than a heartbeat, when I have lived past the time when life loses meaning. Thank your lucky stars that none of you became Lyctor, Palamedes Sextus. It is neither life nor death—it’s something in between, and nobody should ever ask you to embrace it. Not even him. Especially not him.”

“I wouldn’t have done that to Camilla.”

“So you know how it happens. Clever boy! I knew you’d all work it out … eventually. I didn’t want to do it either … I didn’t want to do it at all … but I was dying. Loveday—she was my cavalier—she and I thought it could make me live. Instead I’ve just kept dying, all this time. No, you wouldn’t have done it, and you’re smart not to. You can’t do that to somebody’s soul. Teacher was nearly demented. Did you know what we did to him? I say we, but he wasn’t my project … he was a holy terror. Blame your own House for that! I can’t be grateful enough to those Second ninnies for killing him and calling for help. He was the only one here who scared me. He couldn’t have stopped me, but he might have made things stupid.”

“Why did Teacher not recognise you?”

“Perhaps he did,” said the woman. It sounded like she was smiling. “Who knows what that soul melange was ever thinking?”

There was another pause. She said, “You’ve taken this much more sensibly than I thought you would. When you’re young, you do everything the moment you think about it. For example, I’ve been thinking about doing this for the last three hundred years … but I assumed you would try something silly when you realized she was dead.”

“I wouldn’t ever try to do something silly,” Palamedes said lightly. “I made the decision to kill you the moment I knew there was no more chance to save her. That’s all.”

She laughed, as clear and as bright as ice. It was arrested midway through by a cough—a deep, sick-sounding cough—but she laughed through it anyway, as though she didn’t care.

“Oh, don’t … don’t.”

“I just had to buy enough time,” he said, “to do it slowly enough that you wouldn’t notice—to keep you talking.”

There was another laugh, but this one was punctuated by a big wet cough too. No laughter followed. She said, “Young Warden of the Sixth House, what have you done?”

“Tied the noose,” said Palamedes Sextus. “You gave me the rope. You have severe blood cancer … just as Dulcinea did. Advanced, as hers was when she died. Static, because the Lyctor process begins radical cell renewal at the point of absorption. All this time we’ve been talking, I’ve been taking stock of everything that’s wrong with you—your bacterial lung infection, the neoplasms in your skeletal structure—and I’ve pushed them along. You’ve been in a terrific amount of pain for the last myriad. I hope that pain is nothing to what your own body’s about to do to you, Lyctor. You’re going to die spewing your own lungs out of your nostrils, having failed at the finish line because you couldn’t help but prattle about why you killed innocent people, as though your reasons were interesting … This is for the Fifth and the Fourth—for everyone who’s died, directly or indirectly, due to you—and most personally, this is for Dulcinea Septimus.”

The coughing didn’t stop. Not-Dulcinea sounded impressed, but not particularly worried. “Oh, it’s going to take a great deal more than that. You know what I am … and you know what I can do.”

“Yes,” said Palamedes. “I also know you must have studied radical thanergetic fission, so you know what happens when a necromancer disperses their entire reserve of thanergy very, very quickly.”

“What?” said the woman.

He raised his voice:

“Gideon!” he called out. “Tell Camilla—”

He stopped.

“Oh, never mind. She knows what to do.”

The sickroom exploded into white fire, and the bonds pinning Gideon snapped. She fell hard against the wall and spun, drunkenly, lurching back down the corridor as Palamedes Sextus made everything burn. There was no heat, but Gideon sprinted away from that cold white death without bothering to spare a glance behind as though flames were licking at her heels. There was another enormous CRRR-RRR-RRRACK and a boom. The ceiling shook wide showers of plaster dust down on her head as she threw herself bodily through a doorway. She ran for her life down the long corridors, past ancient portraits and crumbling statues, the grave goods of the tomb of Canaan House, the mechanisms of this feeble shitty machine crumbling as Palamedes Sextus became a god-killing star.

Gideon fell to her knees in the atrium, before the dried-up fountain with its dried-up skeleton and his soggy towels. She put her forehead to the lip of the fountain’s marble and pressed a dent into herself, still listening to the muffled sounds of destruction behind her. She pressed as though sheer surface contact alone would allow her to get off the ride. How long she did that for—how hard she pressed, and how long she huddled—she did not know. Her mouth was tight with wanting to cry, but her eyes were dry as salt.

Years later—lifetimes later—there was movement at the entrance of the atrium she had flung herself through. Gideon turned her head.

White steam poured from the hole. Within the steam stood a woman: her fawn-coloured curls sadly sizzled to nothing, her deep blue eyes like electromagnetic radiation. Huge wounds exposed her bones and the bright pink meat inside her arms and her neck and her legs, and those wounds were sewing themselves up even as Gideon watched. She had wrapped herself in the bloodied white sheet that had covered her sickbed, and she was standing upright as though it was the easiest thing in the world. Her face was old—lineless and old, older than the rot of the whole of Canaan.

The woman Gideon had kind of had the hots for held a gleaming rapier. She was barefoot. She leaned in the smoking doorway and turned away, and she began to cough: she spasmed, retched, clung to the frame for support. With a great asphyxiating bellow, she vomited what looked like most of a lung—studded all over with malformed bronchi, with wobbling purple barbs and whole fingernails—onto the ground in front of them. It went splat.

She groaned, closed those terrible blue eyes and pushed herself to stand. Blood dripped down her chin. She opened her eyes again.

“My name is Cytherea the First,” she said. “Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, the seventh saint to serve the King Undying. I am a necromancer and I am a cavalier. I am the vengeance of the ten billion. I have come back home to kill the Emperor and burn his Houses. And Gideon the Ninth…”

She walked toward Gideon, and she raised her sword. She smiled.

“This begins with you.”

Chapter 36

Camilla hit the advancing Lyctor like the wrath of the Emperor.

She crashed into her from the side, her two knives flashing like signal lamps in the sunlit hall. Dulcinea—Cytherea—staggered, flung up a parry, gave ground. She needed distance to bring her rapier to bear, but Camilla denied it to her; every step she fell back, the cavalier pushed forward, attacking so fast and with such ferocity Gideon could hardly see the individual strikes. For a second or two she thought Cytherea was meeting the blows with a bare hand, until she saw that a shank of bone had sprouted from the backs of her knuckles.

Camilla Hect off the leash was like light moving across water. She punched her knives into the Lyctor’s guard over and over and over. Cytherea met them ably, but such was Camilla’s speed and perfect hate that she could only hope to block the thunderstorm of blows; she could not even begin to push back against them.

This gave Gideon time to stand, to ready her sword and slide her gauntlet home, biting the straps tight with her teeth. It was a relief to know she would never have to tell Camilla that her necromancer had died. She was already fighting as though her heart had exploded.

“Stop it,” said Cytherea. Camilla did not hear her. She drove past the Lyctor’s guard and found her blade trapped in a thicket of spines that had evolved from the offhand spur of bone. The spines, flexing like snakes, began to curl over the guard, past her hand, onto her wrist.

Scarcely missing a beat, she stepped in and headbutted Cytherea in the face. The Lyctor’s head snapped back, but no blood showed. She laughed, thickly, hoarse. Camilla’s body jerked, still pinned by the tangle of bones around her hand. Her other knife fell from slack fingers to clatter on the floor. Her skin seemed to ripple and take on a greyish tinge. She began to wither.

As Gideon sized up the best angle to join the fray, a bleached, skeletal hand emerged from behind Cytherea and grabbed her face. Another hand gripped her sword-arm at the wrist. Over Gideon’s shoulder, the skeleton in the fountain began to stir. Harrowhark stood at the top of the stairs, hands full of white particles, her skull-painted face as hard and merciless as morning: she flung them out before her like she was sowing a field. From each grain of bone a perfectly formed skeleton arose, a huge angular mass jostling and crowding on the stairs, and they poured out in single formation to rush the Lyctor one by one. She went under in a sea of bone.

Camilla hauled herself away from the rushing, grinding ocean of Harrow’s mindless dead, clutching her knives more firmly in her recovering hands—the muscles in her arms were visibly springing back into shape. Gideon advanced, heart in her throat, moving to take Camilla’s place.

“Leave it!” barked her necromancer. “Nav! Here!”

Six more skeletons sprang to her call. They were unstrapping something from Harrow’s back—it was Gideon’s longsword, shining and heavy and sharp. She unbuckled her scabbard and let the black rapier fall—shook her gauntlet off next to it, and gave them both a private prayer of thanksgiving for services rendered—and she caught her sword by the hilt as it fell toward her. She wrapped her hands around its grip and hefted its old familiar weight.

The squirming pile of skeletons exploded outward, and so did the floor. Bricks and tiles and splinters of wood scythed across the atrium like shrapnel. Gideon threw herself behind the fountain, Camilla dived behind an old sofa and Harrow wrapped herself in a hard white cocoon. Skeletons tumbled through the air like morbid rag dolls, bone shrapnel pinging off every surface. Cytherea the First emerged from the clusterfuck, coughing into the back of her hand, looking rumpled but entirely whole.

From the hole emerged one long, overjointed leg, then another. And another. A fretwork of bones, a net, a lace of them—long stingers of teeth, a nesting body, a construct so big that it turned one’s bowels into an icebox. The hulking construct that had killed Isaac Tettares filled the room behind its mistress, stretching itself out and expanding, pulverising a wall and a staircase as it emerged. Its great bone head lolled and loomed above them, masklike, with its hideous moulded lips and squinted-shut eyes.

But now this benighted vision stood before its natural predator, the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House. As yet more skeletons jerked and clambered upward from their fallen comrades, Gideon got up, dusted herself off, and found Harrow standing in a pool of osseous dust and facing the construct with a hot-eyed, half-delighted anticipation. Without even thinking about it, her body moved to take her rightful place: in front of her necromancer, sword held ready.

“This is the thing that killed Isaac,” said Gideon urgently. The enormous construct was still trying to wriggle one leg free from the floor, which would have been funny if it hadn’t been so terrible.

“Sextus—?”

“Dead.”

Harrow’s mouth briefly ruckled. “A necromancer alone can’t bring that down, Griddle. That’s regenerating bone.”

“I’m not running, Harrow!”

“Of course we’re not running,” said Harrowhark disdainfully. “I said a necromancer alone. I have you. We bring hell.”

“Harrow—Harrow, Dulcinea’s a Lyctor, a real one—”

“Then we’re all dead, Nav, but let’s bring hell first,” said Harrow. Gideon looked over her shoulder at her, and caught the Reverend Daughter’s smile. There was blood sweat coming out of her left ear, but her smile was long and sweet and beautiful. Gideon found herself smiling back so hard her mouth hurt.

Her adept said: “I’ll keep it off you. Nav, show them what the Ninth House does.”

Gideon lifted her sword. The construct worked itself free of its last confines of masonry and rotten wood and heaved before them, flexing itself like a butterfly.

“We do bones, motherfucker,” she said.

Her arms were whole again. Her most beloved and true companion—her plain two-hander, unadorned and perfect—smashed through tendrils and teeth like a jackhammer drill. Stinging flails of bone met her blade and exploded into grey foam as she stood her ground and pummelled them with great, swinging arcs of good cold Ninth House steel.

With Harrow there, suddenly it was easy, and her horror of the monster turned to the ferocious joy of vengeance. Long years of warfare meant that they each knew exactly where the other would stand—every arc of a sword, every jostling scapula. No hole in the other’s defences went unshielded. They had never fought together before, but they had always fought, and they could work in and around each other without a second’s thought.

Gideon pushed for space. She forced a path, step by careful step, toward the centre of the construct. A tentacle lashed out at her leg; she sliced it open on the downswing and danced away from a stiff whip of molars aimed straight at her heart. Behind her, Harrow took it: it trembled into its component parts, then became a dust of teeth, which settled into a glue that stuck wobbling tendrils together so they broke themselves into pieces trying to smash away. What Harrow did not take, Gideon struck down. She struck at spines with the mad fury and sudden belief that if she just hit and hit and hit—accurately enough and hard enough and well enough—she could rewrite time and save Isaac and Jeannemary; save Abigail, save Magnus.

But the size of the thing defied thought, and every strike created shrapnel. Harrow was doing something, shielding her somehow; the air was a hail of sharp particles that ought to have shredded her skin, and yet none of them seemed to reach her. Even so, the white-out of pinging, ricocheting chips made it hard to see her target. From the corner of her eye, she saw Camilla running through a blizzard of teeth and spines and swinging bone lappets with both knives crossed in front of her chest—then she was gone, lost to view.

Gideon ploughed through a veil of flimsy bone shafts. They were under the bulk of the construct now. Six more skeletons sprang to life and formed a perimeter—these were pillars without legs, thrust through the floor, with the big plated arms and bone-wadded shoulders of the construct in the Response room. They grappled great breadths of the construct’s tendrils to themselves, and in the clearing between their backs Harrow flexed her fingers together. She shook finger bones out of her sleeves and slapped the trembling phalanges between her hands like clay. Gideon was busy shearing off questing tentacles that snaked past the skeleton guard and went for her necromancer, catching only a confused glimpse of the slim rosary of knuckles that Harrow was looping around her arm. Then Harrow flung it upward like a whip, and it punched straight through the monster’s midsection, burying itself somewhere deep.

She barked at Gideon, “Get clear!”

Two of the skeleton-pillars, still hugging tangled bunches of bone, bowed apart to make a path. Gideon pulled her hood down over the exposed skin of her face as she squeezed through the gap and staggered clear, away from the nightmare of splintering fibulae and tibiae. But before she could find her footing, Cytherea the First leapt from her place of ambush.

She was utterly beautiful and entirely terrible: whole, unhurt, untouched by anything that had happened to her. The wounds from Palamedes’s last spell seemed to have vanished as if they’d never been made. It was like she wasn’t even made of flesh. A memory flashed up through the haze of adrenaline: Do I look like I’m in the queendom of my power?

The Lyctor’s rapier thrust whipped out like a fang, like a ribbon. Gideon knocked the stupid fucking thing aside with her two-hander, and turned the momentum into an overhead strike. Cytherea raised her free hand, grabbed the heavy blade, and held it still. A thin trickle of scarlet ran from the base of her thumb down the inside of her skinny wrist. Behind them the construct shook and swayed and thrashed with whatever the hell Harrow was doing to it, and Cytherea’s eyes locked on Gideon’s.

“I meant it,” she said earnestly. “You were wonderful. You would have made that little nun such a cavalier—I almost wish you’d been mine.”

“You couldn’t fucking afford me,” said Gideon.

She stepped away and wrenched her sword upward—pulling Cytherea’s arm up with it—closed the gap in a hurry, and kicked the Lyctor’s legs out beneath her. Cytherea lost her grip and collapsed into the bone-litter strewn across the atrium floor. She coughed and winked at Gideon, and the scattered bones rose up and closed around her like waves, hiding her from sight.

From above came a terrible muffled bellow—a lowing forced through pursed lips. The construct was howling. It tried to surge forward, but the movement kept getting arrested in midjerk, as though pinned to the floor. Its tendrils slapped and drove against the ground, tilling up billowing clouds of wood pulp and carpet fragments. The thing gave a frustrated final push and overbalanced, then came down hard on the floor right where her necromancer had been. There was an agonizing crash as the fountain shattered under its weight. Gideon’s heart was in her throat: but there was the dusty black figure emerging from the wreckage, ropes of teeth wrapped around her wrists where she had jerked the thing to ground, a vanguard of skeletons swatting tendrils away from her.

Gideon fought her way toward her blindly, clipping off strands and trailing chains of bone as she waded her way to Harrowhark. The construct still pursued her, its legs scrabbling to find purchase as the floor buckled and quaked beneath it, sharpened beaks of bone bearing down on her adept. Harrow was forced to split her focus between fending them off and keeping her hands on the reins holding the construct to earth, blood shining on her forehead with the strain. Gideon arrived just in time to plant herself in front of her necromancer and smash a drilling lappet to shards.

“I need to be inside you,” Harrow bellowed over the din.

“Okay, you’re not even trying,” said Gideon.

Her necromancer said: “It’s all I can do to pin it in place, so you need to finish it for me. Breach the legs—I will show you exactly where—and then I can keep it quiet for a while.”

“Seriously? How?”

“You’ll see,” said Harrow grimly. “I apologise, Nav. Get ready to move.”

The construct crooned in its chains. The central rod that Harrow had somehow awled through its trunk was bowing dangerously. Gideon dove back into the affray of joint and gristle with her sword scything before her and, just as in the Response room, felt another presence slide into her mind like a knife into a pool of water. Her vision blurred out and something said in the back of her mind:

On your right. Eye level.

It wasn’t a voice, precisely, but it was Harrowhark. Gideon pivoted right, longsword held high. The first leg of the construct loomed before her, a weighty breadth of impenetrable bone, but the back of her mind told her: Wrong. Inch higher. Pierce.

Gideon rehefted the weight of her sword in her hands, steadied the pommel with the butt of one palm, and thrust it home. The bone was thinner here. Across her softened sight a light fizzed in and out of vision, the exact same corona of light that had happened a thousand years ago—a hundred thousand, a myriad of myriads—inside the first trial chamber. She pulled her sword free and the leg buckled.

Half a dozen tendrils came after her. They would have given her an interesting array of new airholes for speed, but a skeleton staggered out of the darkness and took most of the blows, jawbone crushed into powder as a tendril lashed open its skull. Another skeleton lurched in where its comrade had died—but this one dashed past Gideon, over to the glimmering wound she had carved into the leg, and it thrust its arm into the gash.

Then it melted. Gideon had a few seconds to watch as it sludged into shining silvery-white bone matter. With a little sizzle of evil-smelling steam, it shrouded the wound and the bottom of the leg in a lahar of hot bone gunge.

She tore her gaze away to skid beneath the heaving torso of the beast, narrowly dodging another few desperate tendrils, cutting her way through a damp nest of them as they unfurled and regrew themselves like the coils of a razor-sharp plant. The leg closest to her had found purchase on the floor with its dainty, sharp-capped foot, so much like the leg of an arachnid, and seemed to be in the process of levering the whole thing upright.

The back of her head said: It’s above you. Gideon slipped her grip down the handle of her sword, her forearm alarmed with the effort, tip wavering as the leg shifted and hesitated above her. The back of her head said: Now.

This one was harder. She didn’t have as much purchase. Gideon rammed her sword upward, getting a grip on the pommel and shoving into the limb again, as plates of bone splintered overhead and dried flakes of marrow spun down like confetti. The leg tumbled down like a cut tendon.

Yet another skeleton appeared next to her and, as she withdrew the sword, plunged into the shining gap. It too dissolved into the hot, foul muck that slid inside the construct’s body and enrobed the rest of the leg, dripping down into the floor, cooling rapidly. The hard shine of it and the suppressed agony of triumph in the back of Gideon’s head made her eyes water, and she was filled with a weird pride that was all her own. Holy shit. Perpetual bone. Harrow had actually cracked it.

She was too busy admiring her necromancer to catch the thick rope of vertebrae that looped around her waist and cinched tight.

The connection in her mind stuttered and disappeared, then her vision sharpened, rendering everything happening to her in bloody clarity. Before Gideon could say OH MY FUCKING WORD she was plucked off her feet, hoisted upward, and flung bodily into the air.

For one vertigo-inducing moment she was above the battlefield. She sailed past the huge, masklike face of the bone construct, a thick coating of regenerating bone seeping down its legs in rivulets—free-falling, with an aerial view as Camilla danced through the chaos toward the calm and fragile figure of Cytherea the First, who stood watching her approach. Gideon tried to twist in the air—if she could just contrive to hit a window, rather than the wall—

She was caught with a force that jangled her teeth in her mouth. A spindly pillar of skeletal arms had risen up from the maelstrom to stop her in midcareer, a hundred bone fingers scoring bloody ribbons over her back; but she was not splattered against the wall, which was the main thing.

The pillar of arms was destroyed by a long, sweeping blow from one of the construct’s innumerable bone whips, and she fell to earth again, gravity arrested by the hands helpfully piling themselves up to reduce her fall to terrible from obituary. She landed in a pile next to her necromancer, and her knee went crunch.

“I have bested my father,” said Harrow to nobody, staring upward at nothing, alight with fierce and untrammelled triumph. They were both lying supine on a pile of what felt like feet. “I have bested my father and my grandmother—every single necromancer ever taught by my House—every necromancer who has ever touched a skeleton. Did you see me? Did you behold me, Griddle?”

This was all said somewhat thickly, through pink and bloodied teeth, before Harrow smugly passed out.

The dust was clearing. The construct could not move. It was making low, plaintive grunts as it thrashed in its half coffin of regenerating ash: with its tentacles, it picked and smashed at the bone cocoons on its back legs, but as soon as it broke some off the stuff simply crumbled back into being. Now that it was concentrating so completely on itself, Gideon could find the cavalier of the Sixth.

Camilla, as she’d seen from above, had caught up with Cytherea the First. She had one hand in the Lyctor’s singed curls, dragging her head back. The other hand pressed a knife against the smaller woman’s throat. This would have been a commanding position, except that the knife blade was quivering in place. Its edge creased the pale skin, but it hadn’t drawn blood, even though Camilla seemed to be leaning on it as hard as she could. Whatever terrible force was holding the knife at bay was also slowly peeling the skin from the cavalier of the Sixth’s hand.

“You’re a nice girl,” the Lyctor said. “I had a nice girl as a cavalier too … once. She died for me. What can you do?”

Camilla said nothing. Her face was slick with sweat and blood. Her crop of dark, blunt-cut hair was powdered grey with bone. Cytherea looked faintly amused by the blade that was a finger’s breadth away from being buried in her jugular. She drawled, “Is this meant to kill me?”

“Give me time,” said Camilla, through gritted teeth.

Cytherea gave this due consideration. “I’d rather not,” she said.

Gideon saw, as Camilla could not, the tentacle of bone that wound silently upward from the mess behind the cavalier, tipped with a vicious point the length of a duellist’s dagger. Even if she’d had a pristine knee and no necro to haul, Gideon was too far away to save her. The barb drew back, like a poised stinger, and Gideon yelled, “Cam!”

Perhaps it was the yell; perhaps it was Camilla’s extraordinary instincts. The Sixth cav twisted sideways, and the hook that should have punched through her spine drove into the meat of her shoulder instead. Her eyes went wide with shock, and the knife fell from her half-flayed hand. Cytherea took the opportunity to shove her contemptuously in the chest, and Camilla toppled backward onto the ground, the sharpened bone still buried in her flesh.

Cytherea took up her rapier. In a panic, Gideon began trying to kick her futile way through a jungle of yellow bone, but putting her weight on her bad leg made her stagger and almost drop. Camilla was struggling herself free of the bone skewer, but another tendril had snaked up across her thighs, trapping her against the floor. The Lyctor stood above her with her green sword gleaming in the light.

“You can’t hurt me,” said Cytherea, almost despairingly. “Nothing can hurt me anymore, cavalier.”

The sword glittered. Gideon thrashed through a mesh of bones that her adept could have parted mid-yawn. As the Lyctor drew back her arm for a clean thrust into Camilla’s heart, four inches of bloodied steel emerged from her belly.

Camilla stared up at her as though trying to work out why everything hadn’t gone black. A red stain was spreading across the thin bedsheet. The Lyctor’s face didn’t change, but she turned her head slightly. A pale head was now nearly pillowed on her shoulder, peeking over, as though to make sure the sword had hit home. Colourless fair hair spilled over Cytherea’s collarbone like a waterfall: the figure behind her smiled.

“Spoke too soon, old news,” said Ianthe.

“Oh,” said Cytherea, “oh, my! A baby Lyctor.”

The construct was stuck fast in the trap that Harrowhark had laid for it, and behind them Gideon could hear its central bulk straining to see what had pained its mistress, like a great skull swivelling in its web. It was held fast, but it still had range, and it lifted its spines to even the fight.

Ianthe ran her free hand over the blood trickling down Cytherea’s hip. She flicked hot drops over her shoulder, where they hung in the air, sizzling. They ran together like quicksilver—spread out, widened and flattened into a shimmering, transparent pink sheet. Ianthe narrowed her watercolour eyes and pointed her free hand upward. The sheet tightened, a wide, watery disc of blood, separating the two Lyctors from the construct.

A barbed bone stinger drove straight at Ianthe’s head, hit the shimmering disc, and dissolved. Gideon bodychecked her way clear, hauling herself to a corner of the room as far away from the construct as possible. She wasn’t thrilled about approaching the embracing Lyctors, but if she played her cards right, she could still get Harrowhark and Camilla out of here. Another stinger, then another, hurtled into the blood disc and evaporated. Despite herself, she turned to watch: the construct stiffened a dozen of its tendrils, two dozen, aiming them like javelins at Ianthe’s tiny form, and Gideon remembered Isaac Tettares, impaled on fifty spines at once.

As Gideon passed it, Ianthe’s blood pool spun even wider, an aegis, a shield. The construct struck from its stuck position, with its whole gathered array of swift spears, enough of them to reduce Ianthe to a double handful of chopped meat. Every single one went up in a cloud of bad-smelling steam.

The remaining stumps drew back in confusion. The construct swayed, and bones dropped free from its superstructure here and there, rattling down to join the general debris around its trapped legs. There was suddenly a lot more space; injured as well as pinned, the construct seemed to be drawing back on itself, pulling in its remaining limbs as if trying to keep them away from Ianthe.

Gideon snuck past the foot of the dais in time to see Cytherea smile. “I’ve always wanted a little sister,” she said.

She walked away from Ianthe’s sword with a bad, liquid sound. Camilla was still wriggling in place, trying to tug herself free of the spike in her shoulder, and Cytherea stepped on her, treading on her collarbone as thoughtlessly as on a ridge in the carpet. Once she was a couple of paces clear, she turned and fell into a beautiful fluid ready stance. She kept running her fingers over the blood at her abdomen, apparently amazed by her capacity to bleed. Gideon wished she was less interested and more dying, but you had to take victories where you could get them.

The other, much newer Lyctor raised Naberius’s sword, kicking bones away for footing.

“I’ve tried the sister thing already,” said Ianthe, circling around to one side, “and I wasn’t any good at it.”

“But I have so much to teach you,” said Cytherea.

They both charged. Once upon a time it would have been pretty cool to watch the perfect showman’s sword of the Third House compete against an ancient and undiluted warrior of the Seventh, but Gideon was crouching down next to Camilla and trying to gauge whether or not her own kneecap was trying to slide off somewhere weird. She had laid down the unconscious Harrowhark behind a pillar on a pile of the softest-looking bones, with her longsword for company, and was wishing fervently that her necromancer was awake. She grabbed Camilla’s shoulder in one hand and the slick bone spur in the other, said, “Sorry,” and pulled.

Camilla screamed. Gideon flung the bloodied spike away, got her arms under Camilla’s armpits, and pulled. Camilla bit her tongue so hard that blood squirted out her mouth, but Gideon heartlessly dragged her away from the ongoing brawl and into cover next to Harrowhark.

Gideon started to look her over to see if her intestines were fountaining out, or something, but Camilla grabbed her sleeve. Gideon looked down into her solemn, obstinate face, and Camilla said—

“He say anything?”

Gideon wavered. “He said to tell you he loved you,” she said.

“What? No, he didn’t.”

“Okay, no, sorry. He said—he said you knew what to do?”

“I do,” said Camilla with grim satisfaction, and laid herself back down among the bones.

Gideon looked back at the fight. It was not like watching Ianthe and Silas go at it. Ianthe had wiped the floor with Silas while simultaneously skirmishing with Naberius’s soul. A fight between two Lyctors was a swordfight on a scale beyond mortal. They moved almost faster than the eye could see, each clash of their swords sending great shockwaves of ash and smoke and aerosolized bone billowing outward.

The spacious atrium of Canaan House had been built to last, but not through this. The floor splintered and bowed dangerously wherever the construct had dragged itself—the tentacles dug through the floorboards, burrowed out again in showers of rotten timber and bone—and as Ianthe and Cytherea fought, parts of the room exploded at their passing, ancient beams and pillars giving up with screams of falling rock and wood. Brackish water from the fountain had spattered the floor and trickled into the cracks—

Cracks. Shit. The floor was cracking. Everything was cracking. Huge fissures separated Gideon from the doors. Ianthe—a lock of her colourless hair in her mouth, chewing furiously—raised her hand, and a gushing column of black arterial blood burst upward, lifting Cytherea twenty feet into the air and dropping her. She hit the ground awkwardly, and as she staggered to her feet again Ianthe stepped up, hand sparking and flickering with harsh white light, and hit her with a tremendous right hook.

The punch would have spun Marshal Crux’s scabrous, plate-clad bulk around three times like a top and left him on the floor seeing little skeletal birdies. It knocked Cytherea clean through the wall. The wall was already feeling pretty sorry for itself, and at this last insult it gave up entirely and collapsed, with a terrific rumble and crash of rock and brick and bursting glass slumping outward onto the garden terrace. Daylight flooded through, and the smell of hot concrete and wood mould filled the air. The potholed floor groaned as if threatening to follow suit. Camilla, who had guts of steel and the pain tolerance of a brick, wobbled to stand; Gideon wove her arm beneath Camilla’s sword arm before the Sixth cavalier could protest, retrieved the bird-bone bundle of her necromancer, and staggered outside as fast as this crippled procession could manage. There was simply nowhere else to go.

The salt wind from the sea blew hot and hard through holes in the glass that sheltered the expanse where mouldering plants continued to dry out on their great trellises. Insensitive to the situation, Dominicus shone down on them, cradled in the unreal cerulean of the First’s sky. Gideon laid Harrowhark down in the shadow of a broken-ass wall that seemed as though it wouldn’t crumple down and squash her yet. Camilla slumped next to her, swords crossed over her knees. At least this place had significantly fewer bones.

Ianthe strode down a low flight of stairs, sword in hand, hair rippling white-yellow in the breeze. Dead leaves and plant matter drifted down around her, disturbed by the crumbling wall. Cytherea was picking herself up off the flagstones where she’d been hurled, and as Ianthe lunged at her again it was obvious she was on the defensive. She was not as quick as Ianthe; she was not as reactive. She would still have speared Gideon through in the first ten seconds of a fair fight, but against another Lyctor, things seemed to be going wrong. Ianthe grew more vicious with each hit. As Cytherea’s blood flew into the air, she was freezing it in place, manipulating it, stitching long red lines through the space around and between them. Every time Cytherea got hurt—and she was getting hurt now, bleeding like a normal person, with none of her earlier invulnerability—the web of blood grew in size and complexity, until it looked like she was duelling in a cage of taut red string.

Nor was that the worst of it. As Gideon watched, somewhere between horror and fascination, the earlier wounds—the ones Palamedes had inflicted when he blew up the sickroom—began to reopen. Strips of skin along the Lyctor’s arms blackened and curled; a big, messy gouge split down her thigh, independent of Ianthe’s blade. Even the curly hair started to sizzle and crisp back up.

“What the hell?” objected Gideon, more to relieve her feelings than in hope of an answer.

“She hadn’t healed,” said Camilla weakly from beside her. Gideon glanced around; the other cav had dragged herself up into a sitting position against the wall and was watching the fight with grim, professional eyes. Of course, cavaliers from Houses with more than one living necromancer probably saw necromancers duel all the time. “She’d just skinned over the damage—a surface fix, hides the cracks. To really heal, she needs thalergy—life force—and she hasn’t got any to spare.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Gideon. “Sextus gave her turbo cancer.”

Camilla nodded with enormous personal satisfaction. “Well,” she said, “that’ll do it.”

Ianthe’s magic was as efficient and lean as Naberius’s swordsmanship—neat and contemptuous, clean and too perfect, not a beat missed or a second’s hesitation. Cytherea stumbled away from her onslaught, and Ianthe closed the trap. The cage of blood suddenly contracted, tightened, clinging to the older Lyctor like a net. Cytherea stood tangled in it, not even bothering to try to fight free, eyes closed to slits. Her hair was scorched almost down to stubble. She was struggling to breathe. Her shrapnel wounds were gaping red and fresh, and her knees were buckling. The smell of blood and leaves was overpowering.

Ianthe stood before her, panting now herself. She kept shaking her head as though to clear it—kept rubbing her temples fretfully—but she was gleaming and triumphant, sweating, smug. “Tired?” she said.

Cytherea opened her eyes and coughed. “Not particularly,” she said. “But you’re exhausted.”

The filmy red net dissolved to nothing. It didn’t even fall away from her; it seemed almost to be absorbed back through her skin. She straightened up, stepped forward, and grabbed Ianthe’s throat in one fine-boned, delicate hand. Ianthe’s eyes bulged, and her hands flew up to clutch at the other woman’s wrist.

“Just like a child … all your best moves first,” said Cytherea.

Ianthe squirmed. A thread of blood coiled in the air around her, uselessly, and then spattered to the ground. The ancient Lyctor said, “You aren’t completed, are you? I can feel him pushing … he’s not happy. Mine went willingly, and it hurt for centuries. If I’m old news … you’re fresh meat.”

She tightened her grip on Ianthe’s throat, and the dreadful, bone-deep suction of siphoning sent an icy ripple throughout the sheltered terrace. The trees and trellises shook. This was soul siphoning as Gideon had never felt it before. Colourless at the best of times, Ianthe was now as blank and tintless as a sheet. Her eyes rolled back and forth in her head, and then there was no eye to roll: she jerked and squealed, pupils gone, irises gone, as though Cytherea had somehow had the ability to suck them out of her skull.

“No,” cried Ianthe, “no, no, no—”

The great wound in Cytherea’s thigh was starting to weave itself back up: so too were the burn marks all over her arms and her neck. Her charred hair was growing back in—rippling out in pale brown waves from her skull—and she sighed with pleasure as she shook her head.

“Okay,” said Camilla in carefully neutral tones, “now she’s healing.”

The thigh wound closed up, leaving the skin smooth as alabaster. Cytherea dropped Ianthe dismissively to the ground in a crumpled-up heap.

“Now, little sister,” she told the grey-lipped Third princess, “don’t think this means I’m not impressed. You did become a Lyctor … and so you’ll get to live. For a while. But I don’t need your arms and your legs. So—”

She rested one delicate foot on Ianthe’s wrist, and Gideon rose to her feet. The sharp shank of bone extended from her knuckles, a long butcher’s blade with a wicked heft. Cytherea sliced down. Bright red blood sprayed in the sunshine as Ianthe’s right arm came off just above the elbow. Ianthe, too weak even to scream, made a keening sound.

By this point Gideon had already lurched forward two steps and regretted it. Her kneecap was absolutely not where it should have been. She tottered to the side, letting her sword drop one-handed, pressing her other over the knee and cursing the day she had been born with kneecaps. Cytherea was shifting to the other side, the other limb, judging the distance with her bloody spar—

“Duck,” called Camilla.

Camilla had somehow propped herself on the arm with the mangled shoulder wound, which was in no condition for propping. Her good arm was up behind her head, holding the blade of her knife. Gideon ducked. The knife whistled over the top of Gideon’s head in a flashing blur and buried itself in Cytherea’s upper back.

This time Cytherea screamed. She went stumbling away from Ianthe’s prone form, and Gideon saw what Camilla had been aiming at: a lump, a delicate swollen mass, right next to Cytherea’s shoulder blade. It bulged out only slightly, but once you saw it, it was impossible to unsee—especially with a long knife buried squarely in its centre. Cytherea fumbled one hand over her shoulder, bone appendage drifting into dust, groping for the knife. She found it—she pulled it out, drawing a spurt of appalling black-and-yellow liquid from the wound.

The Lyctor turned her head and coughed miserably into the crook of her elbow. Then she looked at the knife, wondering at it. She turned her head to look at Camilla and Harrow and Gideon. She sighed pensively and ran one hand through her curls again.

“Oh no,” she said, “heroics.”

She dropped the knife, fell gracefully to one knee beside Ianthe, and lifted a limp arm—the one that was still connected to her body—in a cruel mockery of hand holding. Gideon thought for a bad second she was going to pull the limb clean off, and wondered how far she could throw a longsword—except no, her longsword was never going to leave her hands again, thank you—but Cytherea was just siphoning. There was the deep-gut lurch as energy drained from the younger Lyctor to the older, knitting the gross knife wound back up again.

“An inadequate Lyctor,” said Cytherea, as though giving Gideon and Camilla a hot tip on stain removal, “still makes a perfect power source … an everlasting battery.”

She stood back up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Then she began walking toward Gideon: calm, almost insolent in her lack of aggression. This was somehow much scarier than if she’d stalked forward with a hateful glare and a rill of mad laughter.

Gideon planted herself before Camilla and the unconscious body of her adept and held her sword aloft. They were alone in a back area of the courtyard: a little area not yet buried in rubble or tilled up by the titanic fight between two immortal sorcerers. Dead trees bowed overhead. Gideon stood behind the iron fence that had once protected some herbaceous border, as though its bent, bowed spikes would be good for anything other than throwing herself down on as one last fuck-you salute.

Camilla was huddled in a corner, now standing upright—that was probably her own last fuck-you salute—but her wounded arm hung uselessly. She had lost a lot of blood. Her face was now pallid olive.

“Ninth,” said the Sixth impatiently. “Get out of here. Take your necromancer. Go.”

“Hell no,” said Gideon. “It’s time for round two.” She considered that. “Wait. Is this round three now? I keep losing count.”

Cytherea the First was brushing bloodstains off her makeshift dress, the blood leeching into her fingers as though it obeyed the merest touch of her fingertips. She vaulted daintily into their part of the courtyard and smiled Dulcinea’s smile at Gideon: dimpling, bright-eyed, as though they both knew something extra nice that nobody else did.

“There’s that two-hander,” she said admiringly.

“Want a closer look?” said Gideon.

The Lyctor arched her free hand languorously behind her back; she slid into position, weighting herself on her back foot, the sword in her hand luminous—tinted green like still water, or pearls. “You know you can’t do this, Gideon of the Ninth,” she said. “You’re very brave—a bit like another Gideon I used to know. But you’re prettier in the eyes.”

“I may be from the Ninth House,” said Gideon, “but if you say any more cryptic shit at me, you’re going to see how well you can regenerate when you’re in eighteen pieces.”

“Cry mercy,” said Cytherea. The dimple was still there. “Please. You don’t even know what you are to me … You’re not going to die here, Gideon. And if you ask me to let you live you might not have to die at all. I’ve spared you before.”

Something ignited deep in her rib cage.

“Jeannemary Chatur didn’t ask for mercy. Magnus didn’t ask for mercy. Or Isaac. Or Abigail. I bet you Palamedes never even considered asking for mercy.”

“Of course he didn’t,” said the Lyctor. “He was too busy detonating.”

Gideon the Ninth charged. Cytherea went straight for her heart, no foreplay, but this was a Gideon who had trained with a double-handed sword since before she could even hold the damn thing. This was a Gideon who had lived her entire life behind the hilt of a two-hander. No more playing around with dodging and ducking and moving away—it was her, her sword, and all of the power and strength and speed that Aiglamene had been able to realise in her.

She met Cytherea’s water-smooth thrust to her heart with an upward cut that flung the Lyctor’s rapier’s point skyward, and ought to have knocked it clean out of her hand. She stopped thinking about the pain in her knee and went back to being the Gideon Nav who never left Drearburh, who fought like it was her only ticket off-world. The Lyctor danced out and in again, close quarters, trying to slide her sword under and around Gideon’s own. Gideon knocked the thing to the ground, the rapier scraping the flagstones with an awful screech. Cytherea retreated, prettily, and Gideon smashed her guard and followed through with a huge, perfect overhand cut.

It ought to have cleaved the Lyctor open from the shoulder to the gut. She’d wanted it to. But the edge of her sword sank into Cytherea’s collarbone and bounced off, like she was trying to cut steel. There was the faintest pink mark on the skin—and then nothing. Her two-hander had failed. Something in Gideon rolled over and gave up.

Cytherea moved in for the kill, her sword flashing like a snake, like a whip, as Gideon moved half a second behind where she needed to be. She saved herself a skewered lung by clumsily blocking with the flat of her sword. The Lyctor’s unholy strength made the longsword shudder on impact, and Gideon’s forearms shuddered with it. Undeterred, Cytherea went for her numbed arm—sank the tip deep into the soft flesh above the bicep, met the bone, splintered something deep in there. Gideon gave ground, sword held in guard, clawing for distance now. The blade was drooping in her hands despite every iota of determination coursing through her body. She tried to conjure up some of the old, cruel caution with which Aiglamene had so often sent her to the mat—watched Cytherea closely, stepped away from a feint, saw an opening—turned herself to iron, and thrust forward, straight to her opponent’s heart.

Cytherea raised her free hand and caught the blade before it carved through her sternum. She had to step back with the force of the blow, but her frail, worn hand wrapped around the breadth of the blade and held it as easily as Naberius’s shitty trick trident knife had her rapier, all those years ago in the training room. Gideon shoved. Her feet slipped for purchase on the ground, her knee screaming. Her arm squirted blood with the effort. Cytherea sighed.

“Oh, you were gorgeous,” said the Lyctor, “a thing apart.”

She batted Gideon’s sword away with her hand. Then she advanced.

“Step off, bitch,” said Harrowhark Nonagesimus, behind her.

Cytherea turned to look. The black-robed, black-hooded figure had stumbled forward, step by staggering step, away from the shelter of the tower wall. She was bookended by skeletons—skeletons too huge to have ever lived inside the greasy meat sock of anyone real. Each was eight feet high with ulnar bones like tree trunks and wicked bone spikes spiralling over their arms.

“I wish the Ninth House would do something that was more interesting than skeletons,” said Cytherea pensively.

One of the monstrous constructs flung itself at Cytherea, like she was a bomb it was ending its life upon. The second came shambling after it. Cytherea contemptuously dashed away one skeleton’s enormous forearm spike—she shattered another with her rapier—and the spike, almost before it had finished crumbling, stretched and pushed itself back into shape. Harrow wasn’t stinting on the perpetual bone, and if she kept it up she was going to be a perpetual corpse.

Gideon rolled away, seized her sword, and crawled. Her pierced arm left a snail’s trail of slippery red behind her. It was only years of training under Aiglamene that gave her the guts to wobble herself upright before her adept, blind with blood, blade leant flat on her good shoulder. Two more dead giants were already knitting themselves together. Harrow couldn’t afford this, she thought dimly; Harrow couldn’t afford this at all.

“You’re learning fast!” said the Lyctor, and she sounded honestly delighted. “But I’m afraid you’ve got a long way to go.”

Cytherea crooked her fingers toward the massive hole torn in the side of the tower. There was a cry from within, followed by an awful cracking, tearing, breaking sound. When the horrible many-legged construct exploded through the hole, it was not as great nor as leggy as it had been before. It had torn itself free from Harrow’s shackles, and in doing so had left most of itself behind. It was a miserable shadow of its previous bulk. Compared to anything normal, though, it was still a horror of waving stumps and tendrils, all lengthening and thickening, regrowing themselves even as she watched. It had been stuck and now it was halved, but it could still regenerate. The huge expressionless face gleamed whitely in the afternoon light—now teetering on a trunk too small for its mask—and broken glass pattered down its sides like drops of water as it crawled out. It sat its broken body on the terrace like a ball of white roots, swaying on two legs, a bitten spider.

It wasn’t fair. Cytherea had been right all along: there was nothing they could do. Even half-destroyed, the bristling tentacles and lappets were raised a hundred strong in the air. It staggered and aimed itself in their direction, and there was nowhere to run, no dodging, no escape.

The Lyctor said: “None of you have learned how to die gracefully … I learned over ten thousand years ago.”

“I’m not done,” said Gideon’s half-dead necromancer.

Harrow closed her hands. The last thing Gideon saw was the debris of her perpetual servants rattling toward them, bouncing through the air and over the flagstones, hardening in a shell over her and Camilla and Harrow as all those tendrils struck them at once. The noise was deafening: WHAM—WHAM—WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM—until it became a single hammer, a metered pounding: WHAM … WHAM … WHAM …

The world vibrated around them. Everything was suddenly very dark. A wavering yellow light flicked on, and Gideon realised that against all odds Camilla had somehow retained her pocket torch.

They were closed in with the bowing iron trellises and the wilting, anciently dead bushes. The sky, the sea, and the rest of the garden were cut off behind a smooth curved shell of what seemed to be solid, uninterrupted bone, like the hemisphere of a propped-up skull. Harrow swayed upright in the gloom as the beast tried to crack them open like a nut and looked at Camilla and Gideon through a face that was mostly blood. Not even blood sweat: just blood. Beneath her skin blood vessels had detonated like mines. It was coming through her pores. She’d figured out how to make perpetual bone, half-destroyed a giant dead spider from hell, and now she’d raised a solid wall six inches thick and was holding it up with sheer nerve.

The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House smiled, tiny and triumphant. Then she keeled into Gideon’s arms.

Gideon stumbled, sick with terror, kneeling them both down to the ground as Harrow lay like a broken rag doll. She forgot her sword, forgot everything as she cradled her used-up adept. She forgot the wrecked ligaments in her sword arm, her messed-up knee, the cups of blood she’d lost, everything but that tiny, smouldering, victorious smile.

“Harrow, come on, I’m here,” she told her, howling to be heard above the thunder of the construct’s assault. “Siphon, damn it.”

“After what happened to the Eighth?” Harrow’s voice was surprisingly strong, considering she appeared to be all black robes and wounds. “Not ever again.”

“You can’t hold this shit forever, Harrow! You couldn’t hold this shit ten minutes ago!”

“I don’t have to hold it forever,” said the necromancer. She contemplatively spat out a clot of blood, rolled her tongue around inside her mouth. “Listen. Take the Sixth, get into a brace position, and I’ll break you through the wall. Bones float. It’s a long drop to the sea—”

“Nope—”

Harrow ignored her. “—but all you have to do is survive the fall. We know that the ships have been called. Get off the planet as soon as you can. I’ll distract her as long as possible: all you have to do is live.”

“Harrow,” said Gideon. “This plan is stupid, and you’re stupid. No.”

The Reverend Daughter reached up to take a fistful of Gideon’s shirt. Her eyes were dark and glassy through the pain and nausea; she smelled like sweat and fear and about nine tonnes of bone. She swabbed at her face again with her sleeve and said: “Griddle, you made me a promise. You agreed to go back to the Ninth. You agreed to do your duty by the Locked Tomb—”

“Don’t do this to me.”

“I owe you your life,” said Harrowhark, “I owe you everything.”

Harrow let go of her shirt and subsided to the floor. Her paint had all come off. She kept choking and sniffling on the thick rivulets of blood coming out her nose. Gideon tilted the wet, dark head so that her necromancer did not die untimely from drowning in her bloodied mucus, and tried desperately to think of a plan.

WHAM. One of the tentacles battered a crack in the shield: daylight streamed in from outside. Harrow looked even worse in the light. Camilla said steadily: “Let me out. I can provide the distraction.”

“Cram it already, Hect,” said Gideon, not looking away from her necromancer, who was painfully serene as even her eyebrows bled. “I’m not getting haunted by Palamedes Sextus’s crappy-ass revenant all telling me doctor facts for the rest of my life, just because I let you get disintegrated.”

“The other plan isn’t going to work,” said Camilla evenly. “If we could hold her off and wait on the shore, yes. But we can’t.”

Harrow sighed, stretched out on the floor.

“Then we hold her off as long as we can,” she said.

The crack knitted itself back together with painful, guttering slowness. Harrow snarled from the effort. They were plunged into darkness again, and the sounds from outside stopped, as though the construct was considering its next move.

Camilla closed her eyes and relaxed. Her long dark fringe fell over her face. It was that—Camilla in motion now Camilla at rest—that made the tiny voice inside Gideon’s head say, amazed: We really are going to die.

Gideon looked down at her necromancer. She had the heavy-lidded expression of someone who was concentrating in the knowledge that when they stopped concentrating, they would fall abruptly asleep. Harrow had gone unconscious once before: Gideon knew that the second time she let Harrow go under, there would probably not be any awakening. Harrow reached up—her hand was trembling—and tapped Gideon on the cheek.

“Nav,” she said, “have you really forgiven me?”

Confirmed. They were all going to eat it.

“Of course I have, you bozo.”

“I don’t deserve it.”

“Maybe not,” said Gideon, “but that doesn’t stop me forgiving you. Harrow—”

“Yes?”

“You know I don’t give a damn about the Locked Tomb, right? You know I only care about you,” she said in a brokenhearted rush. She didn’t know what she was trying to say, only that she had to say it now. With a bad, juddering noise, a tentacle had started to pound their splintering shelter again: WHAM. “I’m no good at this duty thing. I’m just me. I can’t do this without you. And I’m not your real cavalier primary, I never could’ve been.”

WHAM. WHAM. WHAM. The crack reopened at this punishment. The sunlight got in, and fragments of bone dissolved in a shower of grey matter. It held, but Gideon didn’t care. The construct wasn’t there: the shelter wasn’t there. Even Camilla, who had turned away to politely investigate something on the opposite wall, wasn’t there. It was just her and Harrow and Harrow’s bitter, high-boned, stupid little face.

Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound.

“Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House,” she said hoarsely, “you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.”

That was enough. Gideon the Ninth stood up so suddenly that she nearly bumped her head on the roof of the bone shield. Her arm complained loudly; she ignored it. She paced back and forth—Harrow watched her with only mild concern—studying the little space they were boxed into. The dead leaves. The cracked flagstones. Camilla—Camilla looked back at her, but she was already moving on. She couldn’t do this to Camilla. The powdery grey drifts of bone. The iron spikes of the railings.

“Yeah, fuck it,” she said. “I’m getting us out of here.”

“Griddle—”

Gideon limped over near the dusty flowerbeds. WHAM—WHAM—WHAM— She didn’t have much time, but she only had one shot anyway. She struggled out of her black robe and thought about taking off her shirt, in one mental blurt of panic, but decided she didn’t need to. She peeled her gloves off her wet red palms and rolled up her sleeves for no reason, except that it gave her something to do with her shaking hands. She made her voice as calm as possible: in a way, she was calm. She was the calmest she had ever been in her entire life. It was just her body that was frightened.

“Okay,” she said. “I understand now. I really, truly, absolutely understand.”

Harrowhark had leant back on her elbows and was watching her, black eyes lightless and soft. “Nav,” she said, the gentlest she had ever heard Harrow manage. “I can’t hold this for—much longer.”

WHAM—WHAM—WHAM!

“I don’t know how you’re holding it now,” said Gideon and she backed up, looked at what she was backing toward, looked back at her necromancer.

She sucked in a wobbly breath. Harrow was looking at her with a classic expression of faint Nonagesimus pity, as though Gideon had finally lost her intellectual faculties and might wet herself at any moment. Camilla watched her with an expression that showed nothing at all. Camilla the Sixth was no idiot.

She said, “Harrow, I can’t keep my promise, because the entire point of me is you. You get that, right? That’s what cavaliers sign up for. There is no me without you. One flesh, one end.”

A shade of exhausted suspicion flickered over her necromancer’s face. “Nav,” she said, “what are you doing?”

“The cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole entire life, believe me,” said Gideon. “You’ll know what to do, and if you don’t do it, what I’m about to do will be no use to anyone.”

Gideon turned and squinted, gauged the angle. She judged the distance. It would have been the worst thing in the world to look back, so she didn’t.

She mentally found herself all of a sudden in front of the doors of Drearburh—four years old again, and screaming—and all her fear and hate of them went away. Drearburh was empty. There was no Crux. There were no godawful great-aunts. There were no restless corpses, no strangers in coffins, no dead parents. Instead, she was Drearburh. She was Gideon Nav, and Nav was a Niner name. She took the whole putrid, quiet, filth-strewn madness of the place, and she opened her doors to it. Her hands were not shaking anymore.

WHAM—WHAM—WHAM. The structure bowed and creaked. Big chunks were falling away now, letting in wide splotches of sunlight. She felt movement behind her, but she was faster.

“For the Ninth!” said Gideon.

And she fell forward, right on the iron spikes.