by Tamsyn Muir
“What did the priest specify was the only rule, the first day we were here?”
“You’re not very good at I’m Asking the Questions Now, Bitch, are you,” said Gideon.
“This is going somewhere. Answer me.”
Gideon resented the answer me, but she begrudgingly cast her mind back through a montage of rotting furniture, assholes, and astringent tea. “Teacher?” she said. “Uh—the door thing. We weren’t to go through any locked door.”
“More specifically, we weren’t to go through a locked door without permission. The old man’s a pain in the neck, but he was giving us a clue—take a look at this.”
Harrow appeared to be thawing to her subject. She thrashed feebly trying to sit up, but before this could soften Gideon’s concrete heart she got cross and snapped two bone chips out of her sleeve. Harrow pressed them against the dank arm of the four-poster bed, and out sprung bony arms that hauled her up into a sitting position. They dragged her flush with the headboard, and a shower of dust trickled down from the enormous cloth drapes. Harrow sneezed fretfully, half of it blood.
She searched about in her robes and came up with a thick little book bound in cracked, blackened stuff, with the awful orange tone of tanned human leather. The book was a thousand pages thick, maybe a million. “Light,” she demanded, and Gideon nudged the lamp forward. “Good. Look here.”
Harrow flicked through pages with scabby fingers until she had opened the squat book midway, showing three sets of angular diagrams. They appeared to be numerous overlapping squares, with lines coming out at odd angles and a scrawl of notes or numbers bumping up against the lines. The writing was minute and spidery: the squares mazelike and innumerable. Gideon realised after a moment that she was looking at an architectural drawing, and that it was an architectural drawing of Canaan House. It was scribbled thickly with cross marks.
“I’ve divided Canaan House into its three most significant levels, but that’s not quite accurate. The central floor is more of a mezzanine providing access to the top and bottom floors. The terraces are sections in and of themselves, but they’re not important for what I’m identifying here. Each X denotes a door. Current count is seven hundred and seventy-five, and Griddle—only six are locked. The first two hundred doors I identified—”
“You spent this whole time counting doors?”
“This calls for rigor, Nav.”
“Maybe rigor … mortis,” said Gideon, who assumed that puns were funny automatically.
“The first two hundred doors I identified,” Harrow repeated, through gritted teeth, “included the access hatch to the lower area of Canaan House. My method was to start at the bottom and go up as far as I could from a static starting point. There are two lock-points here, at X-22 and X-155. X-155 is the hatch, X-22 is another door. I went to Teacher and asked permission to enter both. He agreed to let me through the hatch if I could provide a safe place for the key, but said that X-22 didn’t belong to him and that he couldn’t in good conscience give permission. All the while he was winking at me so hard that I thought he had suffered a stroke.”
Despite everything, Gideon was starting to get interested. “Okay. Then what?”
“Then in the morning I retrieved the key ring,” said Harrow.
“Hold up, hold up. My key ring, more correctly, but let’s be clear here, you’d counted two hundred doors before the first morning?”
“A head start,” said her necromancer, “is the only advantage one can claim by choice. My other advantage is in workforce. In this case I’m fairly sure that Sextus started a mere two hours after me, and that Eighth House zealot not long after.”
All of this said a lot about the psyche of Harrowhark Nonagesimus, something about Palamedes Sextus, and a little about the mayonnaise uncle, but Gideon was given no time to interrupt. Harrow was continuing, “And I’m not at all sure about the Third. Never mind. Anyway, I’ve spent the majority of my time down the access hatch in the facility. Here.”
Another dry, crackly page was turned. This one was stained with unmentionable fluids and brown patches, which could have been tea and could have been blood. The diagram was much less detailed than the three for the upper levels. In a fat-leaded pencil Harrow had drawn a network of question marks, and some of the rooms were vague sketches rather than the perfectly ruled mazes of the first maps.
Here there were familiar labels: LABORATORY ONE through to LABORATORY TEN. PRESSURE ROOM. PRESERVATION. MORT. WORK ROOM ONE through to WORK ROOM FIVE. And SANITISER, though also: CONTROL ROOM?, CONSOLE? and DUMP ROOM?. It was set out neatly, with corridors all the same width and doors in expected places. It reminded Gideon of some of the oldest parts of the Ninth House, the bits secluded deep below the more modern twisty little hallways and crooked walls with squints.
“It’s very old,” Harrow said, quietly, more to herself than to Gideon. “Considerably older than the rest of Canaan House. It’s pre-Resurrection—or made to look pre-Resurrection, which is just as curious. I know Sextus is obsessed with dating the structure, but as usual, he’s getting caught up in the details. What’s important is the function.”
“So what was it for?”
Harrow said, “If I knew that, I’d be a Lyctor already.”
“Do you know who used it?”
“That’s a much better question, Nav.”
“And why,” said Gideon, “were you down there with your ass kicked to hell, hiding in a bone?”
The Reverend Daughter sighed heavily, then had a fit of coughing, which served her right. “Whoever left the facility also left the majority of their work behind and intact. No theorems or tomes, unless they’ve been removed—and I doubt Teacher removed them—but, as I’ve discovered, it’s possible to trigger … tests. Theorem models that they would have used. Most of the chambers down there were used to prepare for something, and they were left in a state where anyone who comes across it can re-enact the setup. Someone left—challenges—down there for any necromancer talented enough to understand what they were doing.”
“Stop being opaque, Nonagesimus. What do you mean by challenges?”
“I mean,” said Harrowhark, “that I have lost one hundred and sixty-three skeletons to a single laboratory construct.”
“What.”
“I’m prevented from seeing whatever destroys the skeletons I raise,” came the terse answer. “I haven’t worked out how to properly outfit them yet. If the priests have managed to engineer a scaffolded skeleton of the type they use as servants—my God, Nav, have you seen the bonework on them?—then I surely can, but I haven’t worked out how to disassemble one of the First House corpus yet and I can’t do enough just by looking. Don’t get me wrong; I will. I get closer every day. You found me when I’d exhausted myself, that’s all.”
“But what the hell’s it all for?”
“As I have repeated to excess, Griddle, I’m still working on the theory. Nonetheless—look back at the maps.”
The necromancer fell to brooding, staring through swollen eyelids down at the journal. Somewhat astonished still, Gideon leaned over and, ignoring her adept’s dumb mystic despond, flipped the pages back to the three-level plan for Canaan House. A few of the X-marked doors were circled with scratchy black ink and marked with crabbed symbols that she did not recognise. These seemed to be distantly distributed throughout the First House building, tucked away or secreted.
Gideon flipped another page. There was a pencil sketch of an animal’s skull with long horns. The horns curved inward into points that almost touched but not quite, and the sockets were deep holes of black pencil lead. An electric thrill of recognition ran through her.
“I’ve seen this before,” she said.
Harrow bestirred herself. Her eyes narrowed. “Where?”
“Hang on. Let me look at the map again.” Gideon flipped back and found the atrium; she traced with her finger the twisty route from there to the corridor and stairs that led to the cavalier’s dais. She found the staircase, and
jabbed with her thumbnail: “You haven’t got it—way ahead of you, Nonagesimus. There’s a hidden hallway here, with a locked door.”
“Are you certain?” Now Harrow was well and truly awake. At the answering nod she rummaged in her robes for a long iron needle and jabbed it inside her mouth—Gideon winced—before the bones at the bedhead unceremoniously shoved her up to a ninety-degree angle, weapon held ready, end shining with red blood. She said, “Show me, Nav.”
Thoroughly satisfied with herself, Gideon placed her finger next to the enormous door of black stone she’d hidden behind the tapestry. Harrow marked the place with a bloody red cross and blew on the ink: it skeletonised immediately into a tarry, dry brown. X-203. The necromancer could not hide a triumphant smile. It stretched her mouth and made her split lips bleed. The sight was incomparably creepy. “If you’re correct,” she said, “and if I’m correct—well.”
Exhausted by all the effort, Harrow closed the journal and tucked it back inside her robe. She sank back down into the dusty embrace of the bones, wrist joints clacking as they lowered her onto the dark slippery material of the duvet. She groped blindly for the water and spilled half of the remnants down her front as she took gulping, greedy sips. She dropped the empty glass onto the bed next to her, and then she closed her eyes. Gideon found herself gripping the slender rapier at her hip and feeling the heft of its basket hilt.
“You could’ve died today,” she said conversationally.
For a long time the girl on the bed was supine and silent. Her chest rose and fell slightly, evenly, as though in sleep. Then Harrow said without opening her eyes, “You could attempt to finish me right now, if you liked. You might even win.”
“Shut up,” said Gideon, flat and grim. “I mean that you’re making me look like a disloyal buffoon. I mean it’s your fault that I can’t take being your bodyguard seriously. I mean that all this sacred duty do exactly as I say blah blah blah shit does not matter in the least if you die of dehydration in a bone.”
“I wasn’t about to—”
“Baseline standard of a cavalier,” said Gideon, “is you not dying in a bone.”
“There was no—”
“No. It’s Gideon Nav Talking Time. I want to get out of here and you want to be a Lyctor,” she said. “We need to get in formation if that’s going to happen. If you don’t want me to ditch the paint, this sword, and the cover story, you’re taking me down there with you.”
“Griddle—”
“Gideon Nav Talking Time. The Sixth must think we’re absolutely full of horseshit. I’m going down there with you because I am sick of doing nothing. If I have to wander around faking a vow of silence and scowling for one more day I will just open all my veins on top of Teacher. Don’t go down there solo. Don’t die in a bone. I am your creature, gloom mistress. I serve you with fidelity as big as a mountain, penumbral lady.”
Harrow’s eyes flickered open. “Stop.”
“I am your sworn sword, night boss.”
“Fine,” said Harrow heavily.
Gideon’s mouth was about to round out the words “bone empress” before she realised what had been said. The expression on the other girl’s face was now all resignation: resignation and exhaustion and also something else, but mostly resignation. “I acknowledge your argument,” she said. “I disagree with it, but I see the margin of error. Fine.”
It would have been pushing her luck to point out that there was no real way Harrowhark could have denied her; she had the key, the upper hand, and significantly more blood. So all she said was, “Okay. Great. Fine.”
“And you had better stop it with all this twilit princess garbage,” said Harrow, “because I may start to enjoy it. Helping me will be achingly dull, Nav. I need patience. I need obedience. I need to know that you are going to act as though giving me devotion is your new favourite pastime, even though it galls us both senseless.”
Gideon, dizzy with success, crossed one leg around the other and leant back on the dresser in a posture of triumph. “Come on. How bad could it be?”
Harrow’s lips curled. They showed her teeth, stained slightly pink with blood. She smiled again—slower than before, just as terrible, just as strange.
“Down there resides the sum of all necromantic transgression,” she said, in the singsong way of a child repeating a poem. “The unperceivable howl of ten thousand million unfed ghosts who will hear each echoed footstep as defilement. They would not even be satisfied if they tore you apart. The space beyond that door is profoundly haunted in ways I cannot say, and by means you won’t understand; and you may die by violence, or you may simply lose your soul.”
Gideon rolled her eyes so hard that she felt in danger of twisting the optic nerve.
“Knock it off. We’re not in chapel now.”
But Harrow said: “It’s not one of mine, Griddle. I’m repeating exactly—to the word—what Teacher said to me.”
“Teacher said that the facility was chocka with ghosts and you might die?”
“Correct.”
“Surprise, my tenebrous overlord!” said Gideon. “Ghosts and you might die is my middle name.”
14
THIS LAPSE OF HARROWHARK’S did not make her one bit nicer to live with. Very early next morning, despite all logic and sense, she forced Gideon to put on the robe and paint on the paint like every morning since they’d arrived at Canaan House: she was impatient with what Gideon saw as the necessities of life, i.e., eating breakfast and stealing lunch. Gideon won the breakfast argument, but lost the right not to stare wretchedly at the mirror as she stippled black paint over her cheekbones.
At Harrow’s behest, the Ninth House moved through the silent grey corridors like spies. There were many times when the necromancer would stop in the shadow of a doorway and wait there for fully five minutes before she would allow them both to carry on, to creep noiselessly down the shabby staircases and down to the bowels of the First. They only met one person on the way: in the light before sunrise, Harrow and Gideon pressed themselves up into the shadow of an archway and watched a figure with a book clenched in one hand cross a dusty hall, silent and shadowed, littered with sagging chairs. Because she had spent her whole life in the darkest hole of the darkest planet in the darkest part of the system, Gideon could make out the etiolated profile of the repellent Third twin, Ianthe. She disappeared out of sight and Harrow remained, silently waiting, far longer than Gideon thought necessary before she gestured for them to move.
They made it to the dismal hole with the access hatch without incident, though it was dark enough there that Gideon had to pocket her glasses and Harrow had to tug down her veil. Harrow was breathing impatiently through her nose as Gideon slid the key into the lock, and flung herself down the hole as though being chased. They descended the long, frigid ladder, and Harrow brushed herself off at the bottom.
“Good,” was the first thing she said since they’d left the room. “I’m relatively sure we’re alone. Follow me.”
Dogging her adept’s rapid steps, rapier bumping against her hip, Gideon was interested to see that they did not traverse the mazelike corridors to Sanitiser. They instead passed down a long, broad hallway, buzzing quietly with the sound of electric light, until after a few corners they reached a door marked LABORATORY TWO. Harrow pushed this open.
The little foyer beyond was cupboard sized. There were hooks on the walls, and on one what Gideon took to be some ugly, partly dissolved tapestry, until she realised it was the remains of somebody’s abandoned coat. On the door ahead was a dilapidated folder behind a piece of plex, with a scribbled and pale title in a faded, haphazard hand: #1–2. TRANSFERENCE/WINNOWING. DATACENTER.
Above the sterile metal door was the more familiar sight of a mounted skull, probably once painted red but now tarry brown. It had lost its jaw at some point and seemed all front teeth. Harrow fussily crammed minuscule chips of phalange in and around the entryway. It was an unusual experience to be crossing, rather than barred from, a Nonagesimu
s bone ward, but Gideon didn’t get the time to enjoy it: Harrow pushed through the door and led Gideon through to another room.
This room—more spacious, more elongated—gave the distinct impression of having been ransacked. It was ringed with broad metal desks, and the walls were pockmarked with empty electrical sockets. There were shelves and shelves that must once have contained books and files and folders, but now only contained a lot of dust; there were discoloured places on the walls where things must have been tacked up and had since been taken down. It was a naked and empty room. One wall was windowed all along its length to let you see into the chamber ahead, and that wall had a door in it marked with two things: one, a sign on the front saying RESPONSE, and two, a little plaque on the top marked OCCUPIED. This had a bleary glow of a green light next to it, indicating that Response was probably not occupied. Looking through to Response—a bleak, featureless chamber, characterised only by a couple of vents on the far side of the square—the floor was an absolute shitshow of bits of broken bone.
The other wall—filled with brackets to prop up books that had long since been removed—had a door too, and this one was labelled: IMAGING. The Imaging door had the same plaque as Response, but with a little red light instead. Imaging also had a little plex window whose outside was smeared with old bloody handprints.
“Someone’s been having fun in here,” said Gideon.
Harrow shot her a look but did not enforce the vow of silence. “Yes,” she said. “Me.”
Her cavalier tried the door marked Response, but it wouldn’t move and there didn’t seem to be a conventional touchpad. Harrow said, “It won’t open like that, Nav. Come with me, and don’t touch anything.”
Gideon went with Harrow and did not touch anything. The autodoor to Imaging obligingly opened at their approach, revealing a dismal cupboard of a room with a huge array of old mechanical equipment, lightless and dead. A single ceiling panel fuzzed its way to life, white and pallid and not revealing much but more shadow. The long desk still had what she realised was a rusted old clipboard, to which a thin, nearly transparent piece of paper was attached. Gideon at last gave in to the urge to touch something, and the paper dissolved as though it were ash. It left a grey stain on her fingertips.