by Tamsyn Muir
“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.
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 s
cream,” 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?”