by Tamsyn Muir
“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 pin
ned 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 th
at 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.
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.”