by Tamsyn Muir
“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, Seco
nd. 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 S
eventh 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.
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.”