by Tamsyn Muir
The kick was Cam’s only mistake. The pain clearly set every neuron in Dyas’s body shrieking with adrenaline. Someone like Naberius would have been prone on the table from shock, probably bleating and shitting. But the Second kept her wits about her—she took the pain with a stagger, kept her footing and held her blade, and parried another sweeping blow from Camilla’s knife. She moved back for breathing space—Camilla harassing her with strike after strike to get back inside her guard—until she could move no more: she was, after all, fighting on a table. Camilla’s foot lashed out to her offhand, and the dagger clattered to the ground. The Second, with an honestly beautiful dodge and a perfect reaction, took her one opportunity and lunged.
Dyas was desperate, and Dyas was of the Second House. Cam fought like a grease fire, but she left herself too many openings. Dyas’s thrust would have pierced a lesser fighter right beneath the collarbone and run her through. It caught Camilla Hect low in the right forearm as she nearly dodged it—piercing the meat next to the ulna and making her snarl. She dropped her cobweb-light rapier, grabbed Marta’s wrist, and yanked. The arm dislocated with a bright pop.
Lieutenant Dyas didn’t quite scream, but she got most of the way there. She windmilled at the edge of the table. Still holding the wrist, Camilla stepped past her, kicked her legs out almost dismissively, and drove her down facefirst into the wooden boards with a crunch. This left Camilla standing over her opponent, one foot pressed into the back of her neck, the dislocated arm pinned up at an angle that looked seriously uncomfortable. Dyas made a strangled, agonised noise, and Judith Deuteros snapped: “Mercy!”
“Mercy called, match to the Sixth,” said Coronabeth, as though saying it faster would make it over sooner.
There was silence, except for Camilla’s ragged breathing and the lieutenant’s tiny, half-amazed gasps. Then Jeannemary said, “Hot dog.”
Both cavaliers were oozing blood. It dripped from Camilla’s wound where the sword had stuck her, and it was soaking through Lieutenant Dyas’s shirt and dribbling from her nose, the exact same colour as her neckerchief. She had her eyes screwed up tightly. Palamedes was already standing beside the table, and with another excruciating noise he set Marta’s arm back inside its joint. This time she really did scream. Captain Deuteros watched, face absolutely blank.
“Your keys,” he said.
“I don’t have—”
“Then your facility key. Hand it over.”
“You have its exact copy.”
Palamedes rounded on her with a sudden fury that made everyone jump, even Gideon. “Then maybe I’ll throw it out the fucking window,” he snarled. “Two good cavs hurt, yours and mine, all because the Second tried to beat up the weak kid first.” He jabbed a finger at Judith’s immaculate waistcoat with intent to impale; she didn’t flinch. “You have no idea how many keys we’re holding! You have no idea how many keys anybody’s holding, because you haven’t paid any damn attention since the shuttles landed! You picked on us because the Sixth aren’t fighters. You could have fought Gideon the Ninth, or Colum the Eighth. You fought Camilla because you wanted a quick win, and you didn’t even watch her first, you just assumed you could take her. And I can’t stand people who assume.”
“I had cause,” said the Second, doggedly.
“I don’t care,” said Palamedes. “Isn’t it funny how it took the Second, of all houses, to blow this whole thing open? You’ve stuck a target on the back of everyone toting a key. It’s a free-for-all now, and it’s your fault, and you’ll pay for it.”
“For God’s sake, Warden, you misunderstand my intention—”
“Give me your key, Captain!” roared the scion of the Sixth. “Or is the Second faithless, as well as dense?”
“Here,” said Lieutenant Dyas. She had mopped most of the blood away from her mouth and nose, although her once-white shirt was drenched with scarlet. She fumbled in her jacket pocket with her unhurt arm and held out a key ring, adorned with a single key. Palamedes gave her a curt nod, plucked it from her fingers, and turned his back on them both. Camilla was sitting on the edge of the table, her hand clapped over her wound, blood seeping freely from between her fingers.
“Missed the bone,” she said.
“Remember that you’re using a rapier, please.”
“I’m not making excuses, but she was quick as hell—”
A voice interrupted: “I challenge the Sixth for their keys. I name the time, and the time is now.”
24
EVERYONE’S HEADS FOLLOWED THE SOUND—except for Ianthe Tridentarius, who was lounging in her chair with one eyebrow raised, and Naberius Tern, who had issued the challenge. He vaulted to the table in one lustrous movement, swinging himself up to stand on it, even as Judith Deuteros very carefully eased her cavalier down into an empty seat. He looked down at them all with a hard sneer and the one stupid curl that he always managed to get right in the middle of his forehead.
“No, you don’t,” said Coronabeth faintly.
“Yes, he does,” said Ianthe, rising to stand. “You need a facility key, don’t you? Here’s our chance. I suspect we won’t be given a better.”
There was an expression of grim alarm rising on Judith Deuteros’s face. She had both hands across the oozing slit on her cavalier’s chest, and she had paused in her work out of sheer annoyance.
“You have no cause,” she said.
“Neither did you, if we’re all being honest with ourselves. Sextus was perfectly right.”
“If you want to cast me as the villain, do it,” said the captain. “I’m trying to save our lives. You’re giving in to chaos. There are rules, Third.”
“On the contrary,” Ianthe said, “you’ve amply demonstrated that there are no rules whatsoever. There’s only the challenge … and how it’s answered.”
When she looked at her sister’s stricken face—Corona was somewhere beyond fury and shame now, and had lost every atom of her poise—she only said, quite softly: “This is for you, dear, don’t be picky. This may be the only chance we have. Don’t feel bad, sweetheart—what can you do?”
Corona’s face changed—the struggle gave way to exhaustion, but at the same time there was a weird relief in her. Her teeth were gritted, but one of her hands tangled in her sister’s long, thin, ivory-blond locks and she drew their heads close. “I can do nothing,” she said, and Gideon realised they’d just lost her, somehow.
“Then let’s do this together. I need you.”
“I need you,” echoed her twin, rather piteously.
Camilla hauled herself up to stand. She had taken Palamedes’s handkerchief and bound her arm, but the blood was already showing through and she held it in a funny way. Palamedes looked close to vibrating out of his skin from fear or anger. “Right,” she said laconically, “second round.”
But Gideon was experiencing one powerful emotion: being sick of everyone’s shit. She unsheathed her sword. She slid her gauntlet over her hand, and tightened the wrist straps with her teeth. And she looked over her shoulder at Harrowhark, who was apparently breaking out of a blue funk to experience her own dominant emotion of oh, not again. Gideon silently willed her necromancer to put her knucklebones where her mouth was and, for the first time in her life—for the first real time—do what Gideon needed her to do.
And Harrowhark rose to the occasion like an evening star.
“The Ninth House will represent the Sixth House,” she said, sounding cold and bored, as though this had been her plan all along. Gideon wanted to sing. Gideon wanted to dance her up and down the corridor. She broke out in a broad, unnervingly un-Ninth smile, and Naberius Tern—who had gone from greasy villainy to aggrieved caution—was having to force his smirk.
Ianthe just looked a little amused. “The plot congeals. Since when has the Ninth been bosom with the Sixth?”
“We’re not.”
“Then—”
Harrowhark said, in the exact sepulchral tones of Marshal Crux: “Death first to vultures and scavengers.
”
Unable to bear it any longer, Jeannemary hopped up on the table too: she held her shining Fourth House rapier before her, the beautiful navy-and-silver fretwork of her dagger gripped in an altogether professional way at her hip. Although her puffy eyes and corrugated, unbrushed hair proved that she had not slept more than a few hours in the last few days, she looked intimidatingly ready. Gideon was coming to the conclusion that despite an overworked pituitary gland, there was really something in the Chatur name after all.
“Once you face her, you face the Fourth House,” she said ringingly. “Fidelity, and the Emperor!”
Naberius Tern sheathed his sword and his neat, gleaming knife, rolling his eyes so hard that they ought to have fallen backward into his sinuses. He sighed explosively and swung himself down from the table, wiping that stupid curl off his forehead with an airy head toss.
“I should’ve stayed home and gotten married,” he said resentfully.
“As though anyone was even offering,” snapped Ianthe.
“If you have all finished,” said Silas Octakiseron with his deep, tyrannically servile politeness, “Brother Asht and I are going to go and look for Protesilaus the Seventh. He is, after all, still missing.”
“Which will somehow involve trying those keys you’ve taken in doors you’ve never been able to open,” said Palamedes. “What a coincidence.”
“I have no interest in talking to you anymore,” said Silas. “The Warden of the Sixth House is an unfinished inbred who passed an examination. Your companion is a mad dog, and I doubt her legal claim to the title of cavalier primary. I would not even bother to thrash her. Enjoy the patronage of the shadow cult, while it lasts; I am sorry that it came to this. Brother Asht, we leave.”
When they dispersed, it was with the manner of people reluctantly turning their backs on their enemies. The Eighth Master swept out with his cavalier like a legion retreating from a battlefield. The Second—the unsteady cavalier supported by the captain’s arm—looked even more so, with something of the tattered refugee thrown in. The three Houses that were left looked at one another.
Palamedes rounded on Harrowhark, his hands bloody and his shining eyes a little wild. He had torn off his spectacles, and there were greasy red thumbprints over the lenses.
“There’s only one more key,” he said.
Harrow frowned. “One more to claim?”
“No, they’ve all been claimed. I’ve been through every challenge except the one I won’t play ball with.”
Harrow’s frown deepened fractionally, but Gideon was putting the pieces together. So too, apparently, was the necromantic teen Isaac. “If there’s only one of each key,” he said slowly, “what happens when you do a challenge someone else already completed?”
Palamedes shrugged. “Nothing. I mean, you can do the challenge, but you get nothing at the end of it.”
Jeannemary said, “So it’s just a huge waste of time,” and Gideon could not imagine how she’d have felt after the avulsion room if the plinth at the other end had been empty.
“Sort of. The challenge itself is still—instructional. It makes you think about things in a new way. Right, Nonagesimus?”
“The challenges so far,” said Harrow carefully, “have encouraged me to consider some … striking possibilities.”
“Right. But it’s like—imagine if someone showed you a new sword move, or whatever, but then you never actually got to sit down and read up on how it worked. It might give you ideas, but you wouldn’t really learn it. D’you follow?”
Jeannemary, Gideon, and Camilla all stared at him.
“What?” he said.
“The Sixth learns sword-fighting out of a book?” said Jeannemary, horrified.
“No,” put in Camilla, “the Warden just hasn’t been to Swordsman’s Spire since he was five and got lost—”
“Okay, okay!” Palamedes put his hands out. He was still holding the bloodstained spectacles. “That was clearly an inapposite comparison, but—”
“A challenge taken purely as a necromantic exercise,” said Harrow calmly, “suggests many things, but reveals none. Only the underlying theorem can lay bare the mystery.”
“And the theorems are behind the locked doors,” Isaac said meditatively, “aren’t they? You need the keys for the doors, or you’re screwed.”
Everyone’s attention was on the two shitty teens. They both looked back, with no small scorn, all grief, uncombed hair, and stud earrings. “We know about the doors,” said Jeannemary. “We’ve seen the doors … and people go through the doors … Well, what else could we do?” she added, somewhat defensively. “If we hadn’t been trailing everybody it would have been that creep Ianthe Tridentarius. And she’s stalking everyone. Believe me.”
(“And trailing differs from stalking how?”
“Because the Fourth doesn’t stalk?”)
“Nothing was preventing you from getting your facility key,” said Palamedes.
Isaac said emptily, “Abigail said—to wait for her.”
Gideon did not know how much the Sixth knew about the keys they’d amassed so far, or what they’d learned of the labs and the studies, how much they knew of the theorems. Palamedes was nodding, thoughtful. “Well, you’ve come to the right conclusion. Behind the doors there are studies, and all eight—there’s eight, obviously, one per House—contain notes on the relevant theorem. All eight theorems presumably add up to some kind of, ah…”
“Megatheorem,” supplied Isaac, who, after all, was like thirteen.
“Megatheorem,” he agreed. “The key to the secrets of Lyctorhood.”
Jeannemary Chatur’s brain had obviously ground forward, struggling past confusion and puberty hormones to some slowly formed conclusion. “Wait. Go back, Sixth House,” she demanded. “What did you mean by one more key?”
Palamedes drummed his fingers on the table. “Well. Forgive me the explanation, Ninth, I know you’ve been keeping track of the keys—” (Ha! Ha! Ha! thought Gideon. She hadn’t.) “—but I couldn’t work out how many keys Lady Septimus had. I knew she had at least one, but when Octakiseron convinced her to hand them over”—he freighted convinced with such heavy scorn it ought to have fallen through the floor—“he accidentally showed us her card. She had two. That means there’s one left that I haven’t accounted for, and we’ve got to account for it.”
“We need to find the Seventh cav,” added Camilla.
He nodded. “Yes, and we also have to work out who the hell’s in the incinerator. Ianthe Tridentarius was right—a sentence I don’t like saying—in that there’s more than one person in there.”
Isaac said: “I have a duty to find out who killed Magnus and Abigail, first and foremost.”
“You’re right, Baron Tettares,” said Palamedes warmly, “but trust me, I think answering those three questions will help us quite considerably in solving that mystery. Ninth, Protesilaus was still down in the facility as of last night.”
Harrow looked at him blankly. “How do you know?”
“We saw him go in,” said the Fourth as one. And Isaac added: “After we eavesdropped on you and the Sixth.”
“Good for you. But it makes sense, too. Lady Septimus said He didn’t come back, and when we saw her key ring just now it only had challenge keys—no hatch key. She must have given that to him so he could access the facility by himself—although why, I still don’t know. I bet you the whole of my library’s physical sciences section that he’s still down there. It would be impossible for someone to bring him up without being seen.”
“Then we need to go down and look,” said Jeannemary, visibly impatient at the lack of action. “Let’s go!”
“Don’t be so Fourth,” said Palamedes. “We should split up. We’re fighting a battle on two fronts here. Frankly—I would not leave Lady Septimus unguarded, sans cavalier, with just the First House to guard her.”
Harrowhark said, “Her keys are gone. What’s the attraction now?”
Camilla said, “Vuln
erability.”
“Yes. It can’t just be a game of keys, Nonagesimus. Why did Magnus Quinn and Abigail Pent die, when they had nothing on them but a facility key and their own good selves? Why has Protesilaus gone missing, when the most he would have had was his facility key? Is he still down there? Who died before this challenge even began? And then there’s the issue of the other Houses. I do not know about you, Reverend Daughter, but until Cam’s healed up, I plan on wetting myself lavishly.”
Isaac gave a rather lame and high-pitched giggle. Camilla said gruffly: “Warden, it’s just my right hand—”
“Hark at her! Just your right hand. My right hand, more like. God, Cam, I’ve never been so scared in all my life.”
Harrowhark ignored this cavalier-necromancer banter and cleared her throat, pointedly. “Septimus wants guarding. Her cavalier should be found. What do you suggest?”
“The Fourth House stays with the Lady Dulcinea,” said Palamedes, slipping his glasses back over his long nose. “Gideon the Ninth stays with them as backup. You, I, and Camilla go down to the facility and see if we can locate Protesilaus.”
There was more than one bewildered stare aimed his way: his own cavalier looked at him as though he had taken leave of his senses, and Harrow yanked her hood off her head painfully as though to relieve her feelings. “Sextus,” she said, as though to a very stupid child, “your necromancer is wounded. I could kill the both of you and take your keys—or just take your keys, which would be worse. Why would you willingly put yourself in that position?”
“Because I am placing my trust in you,” said Palamedes. “Yes, even though you’re a black anchorite and loyal only to the numinous forces of the Locked Tomb. If you’d wanted my keys through chicanery you would have challenged me for them a long time ago. I don’t trust Silas Octakiseron, and I don’t trust Ianthe Tridentarius, but I trust the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus.”