by Tamsyn Muir
Gideon blinked a couple more times. “No, hold up. That’s stupid, they’re not the same.”
“I don’t see why not,” said the necromancer. “We both made decisions that led to bad things happening.”
She rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “Octakiseron said you guys loved to mess with what words mean.”
“The Eighth House thinks there’s right and there’s wrong,” said Palamedes wearily, “and by a series of happy coincidences they always end up being right. Look, Nav. You ratted out your childhood nemesis to get her in trouble. You didn’t kill her parents, and she shouldn’t hate you like you did, and you shouldn’t hate you like you did.”
He was peering at her through his spectacles. “Hey,” she objected lamely, “I never said I hated myself.”
“Evidence,” he said, “outweighs testimony.”
Awkwardly, and a bit brusquely, he took her hand. He squeezed it. They were both obviously embarrassed by this, but Gideon did not let go—not when she rummaged in the pocket of her robe with her other hand, and not when she passed over the scrumpled-up piece of flimsy that had bewildered her for so long.
He unscrumpled it, and read without reaction. She squeezed his hand like an oath, or a threat.
“This is from a Lyctor lab,” he said eventually. “Isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she admitted. “Is it—I mean—is it real?”
He looked at her. “It’s nearly ten thousand years old, if that’s what you mean.”
“Well, I’m not,” she said. “So … what the fuck, basically.”
“The ultimate question,” he agreed, returning his attention to the flimsy. “Can I borrow this? I’d like to look at it properly.”
“Do not show it to anyone else,” Gideon said, without really knowing why. Something about her name being on this ancient piece of garbage felt as dangerous as a live grenade. “I’m serious. It stays between us.”
“I swear on my cavalier,” he said.
“You can’t even show her—”
They were interrupted by six short knocks on the door, followed by six long. Both sprang up to pull apart the interlaced lattice of deadbolts. Camilla came through, and with her, upright and calm, was Harrow. For one wacky moment Gideon thought that she and Camilla had been holding hands and that today was one huge rash of interhousal hand fondling, but then she realised that their wrists were cuffed together. Camilla was nobody’s fool, though how she’d cuffed Harrow was going to be a tale of terror for another day.
Gideon did not look at her, and Harrow did not look at Gideon. Gideon very slowly put her hand on her sword, but for nothing. Harrow was looking at Palamedes.
She expected pretty much anything, but she didn’t expect him to say—
“Nonagesimus—why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t trust you,” she said simply. “My original theory was that you’d done it. Septimus wasn’t capable on her own, and it didn’t seem far-fetched that you were working in concert.”
“Will you believe me when I say we aren’t?”
“Yes,” she said, “because if you were that good you would have killed my cavalier already. I hadn’t even intended to hurt him, Sextus, the head fell off the moment I pushed.”
What?
“Then we go,” said Palamedes. “We get everyone. We talk to her. I won’t have any more conversations in the dark, or doubting of my intentions.”
Gideon said helplessly, “Someone enlighten me, I am just a poor cavalier,” but nobody paid her the slightest damn bit of attention even though she had her hand very forbiddingly on her sword. Harrow was ignoring her entirely in favour of Palamedes, and she was saying:
“I wasn’t sure you’d be willing to go that far, even for the truth.”
Palamedes looked at her with an expression as grey and airless as the ocean outside the window.
“Then you do not know me, Harrowhark.”
* * *
They all crowded into Dulcinea’s little hospital room: it was them and the priest with the salt-and-pepper braid, who scuttled out as though affrighted as they lined the room in stony array. The whole gang had arrived for party times. Palamedes had sent for all the survivors, though considering their current group-wide interest in killing one another the fact that they had bothered coming was nothing short of a miracle. The Second stood against the wall, their jackets less creased than their faces; Ianthe and Coronabeth sat fussily crowded up on each other’s knees, with their cavalier close behind. Silas stood inside the door, Colum stood just behind him, and if anyone had wanted to take them all out then and there it would have been as simple as shutting the door and letting them all asphyxiate on Naberius Tern’s pomade. It seemed so strange that this was now all of them.
The necromancer of the Seventh House was propped up on a bundle of fat cushions, looking calm and transparent. With every stridorous breath her shoulders shook, but her hair was perfectly brushed and her nightgown nightmarishly frilly. She had in her lap the box that contained Protesilaus’s head, and when she drew it gently out—wholly unspoiled as if he were still alive—there were several indrawn breaths. Hers was not among them.
“My poor boy,” she said, sincerely. “I’ll never be able to put him back together now. Who took him apart? He’s a wreck.”
Palamedes steepled his fingers and leaned forward, greyly intent.
“Lady Septimus, Duchess of Rhodes,” he said, very formally, “I put to you before everyone here—that this man was dead before you arrived, by shuttle, at the First House, and appeared alive only through deep flesh magic.”
There was an immediate hubbub, uncalmed by his impatient be quiet gestures and the shoving of his spectacles up his nose. Among the collective mutters, Ianthe Tridentarius’s acid drawl was loudest: “Well, this is the only interesting thing she’s ever done.”
Nearly as piercing was Captain Deuteros: “Impossible. He’s been with us for weeks.”
“It’s not impossible at all,” said Dulcinea herself. She had been gravely meeting Protesilaus’s murky stare, as though trying to find something out, and now she settled the head on her lap. “The Seventh House have been perfecting the way of the beguiling corpse for years and years and years. It’s just—not entirely allowed.”
“It is unholy,” said Silas, flatly.
“So is soul siphoning, my child,” she said, in tones of deliberately celestial sweetness. “And it’s not unholy—it’s entirely useful and blameless; just not when you do it like this, which is the very old way. The Seventh aren’t just soul-stoppers and mummifiers. Yes, Pro was dead before we even landed.”
Gideon said, just as flatly as Silas: “Why?”
Those enormous flower-blue eyes turned to Gideon as though she were the only person in the room. There was no laughter in them, or else Gideon might have started to yell. Suddenly, the dying necromancer seemed enormously old; not with wrinkles, but with the sheer dignity and quiet with which she sat there, totally serene.
“This competition caught out my House,” she said baldly. “Let me tell you the story. Dulcinea Septimus was never intended to be here, Gideon the Ninth … they would have preferred she be laid up at home and have another six months wrung out of her. It’s an old story of the House. But there wasn’t another necromantic heir. And there was a very good cavalier primary … so even if the necromantic heir was one bad cold away from full lung collapse … it was thought that he might even the odds. But then he had an accident.”
Dulcinea fretted the dull hair of the head with her fingertips, then smoothed it out as if it were a doll’s. “Hypothetically. If you were the Seventh House, and all your fortunes were now represented in two dead bodies, one breathing a little bit more than the other, wouldn’t you consider something far-fetched? Let’s say, by utilizing the way of the beguiling corpse, and hoping that nobody noticed that your House was DOA? I’m sorry for deceiving you, but I’m not sorry I came.”
“That doesn’t add up.”
Harr
ow was stiff as concrete. Her eyes were huge and dark, and though only Gideon could tell, very agitated. “The spell you’re talking about is not within the range of a normal necromancer, Septimus. Impossible for a necromancer in their prime, let alone a dying woman.”
“A dying woman is the perfect necromancer,” said Ianthe.
“I wish I could get rid of that idea. Maybe for the final ten minutes,” said Palamedes. “The technical fact that dying enhances your necromancy is vitiated considerably by the fact that you can’t make any use of it. You might have access to a very personal source of thanergy, but considering your organs are shutting down—”
“It’s not possible,” insisted Harrow, words hard and clipped in her mouth.
“You seem to know a lot about it. Well, I put it to you: Would it be possible for all the heads of the Seventh House,” said Dulcinea calmly, “adepts of the perfect death—a Seventh House mystic secret, one that’s been ours forever—working all in concert?”
“Perhaps initially, but—”
“King Undying,” said Silas, primly disgusted. “It was a conspiracy.”
“Oh, sit on it,” said Dulcinea. “I know all about you and your house, Master Silas Octakiseron … the Emperor himself never bothered to speak out against beguiling corpsehood, but he did say that siphoning was the most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up, and ought only to be done with the siphoner in cuffs.”
“That does not mitigate the penalty for performing a necromantic act of transgression—”
“I’ve no interest in meting out the justice of the tome,” said Captain Deuteros, gruffly. “I know that’s the Eighth House’s prerogative. But at the same time, Master Octakiseron, we cannot afford this right now.”
“A woman who would be party to this kind of magic,” said Silas, “might be party to anything.”
The woman who was party to that kind of magic and therefore maybe party to anything opened her mouth to speak, but instead had a coughing fit that seemed to start at her toes and go all the way up. Her spine arched; she bleated, and then began to moistly choke to death. Her face turned so grey that for a moment Gideon was convinced the Eighth House was doing something to her, but it was a block of phlegm rather than her soul being sucked out. Palamedes went for her, as did Camilla. He turned her over on her side, and she did something awful and complicated with her finger inside Dulcinea’s mouth. The head on her lap went rolling, and was caught only by the quick reflexes of Princess Ianthe, who cupped it between her hands like an exotic butterfly.
“What do you want, Octakiseron?” said the captain in the wake of this, stone-faced. “Room confinement? A death sentence? Both are uncharacteristically easy to fulfil in this instance.”
“I understand your point,” said Silas. “I do not agree with it. I will take my leave, madam. This is not interesting to me anymore.”
His exit was arrested by his cavalier, as brown and as careworn as ever, standing between him and the doorway. Colum did not really seem to notice his necromancer’s attempts to leave. “The furnace,” he said shortly. “If we’ve got his head, what’s in the furnace?”
Dulcinea, grey and squirming, managed: “What did you find in the fu—fur—fur—” before Palamedes slapped her on the back, at which point she coughed up what looked like a ball of bloody twigs. The Third turned their faces away.
Captain Deuteros did not: maybe she’d seen worse. She gestured to her lieutenant, who had removed the head none too gently from Ianthe’s fascinated gaze and was boxing it up as though it were an unwanted meal. The captain moved closer to Harrow and Gideon, and demanded: “Who found him?”
“I did,” said Harrow, casually failing to provide any details on how. “I took the head because I couldn’t readily transport the body. The body has since disappeared through unknown means, though I’ve got my suspicions. The skull’s mine by finder’s rights—”
“Ninth, the head is going in the morgue where it belongs,” said the captain. “You don’t have carrion rights over found murders, and today is not the day when I’ll countenance your House taking bones that don’t belong to it.”
“I agree with Judith,” said Corona. She had pushed her twin off her thigh, and was looking a bit green around her lovely gills. She also looked uncharacteristically tired and careworn, though she managed to pull this off with a certain pensive loveliness to the fine crinkles at her eyes and mouth. “Today isn’t the day when we start to use one another’s bodies. Or tomorrow, or ever. We’re not barbarians.”
“Sheer prevarication,” remarked her sister to nobody in particular. “Some people will do anything to get … a head.”
Everyone ignored her, even Gideon, who found herself trembling like a leaf. Harrowhark said merely, “The furnace bones are still mine to identify.”
“You can utilise the morgue all you like,” said the captain dismissively. “But the bodies aren’t your property, Reverend Daughter. That goes for the Warden, that goes for everybody. Do I make myself clear, or shall I repeat?”
“Understood,” said Palamedes.
“Understood,” said the Reverend Daughter, in the tones of someone who neither understood nor intended to.
Silas had not left.
“In that case,” he said, “I consider it my bounden duty to take watch over the morgue, in case the Ninth forgets what constitutes defilement of the bodies. I will take the remains. You may find me there.”
Captain Deuteros did not roll her eyes. She gestured to her lieutenant, who handed over the box: Silas took it and winced faintly, and then passed it to his nephew. Gruesome parcel secured, they finally turned and left. The Third were already starting to bitch—
“I always said he didn’t look right,” said the cavalier.
“You said no such thing,” said the first twin.
“At no point did you ever say that,” said the second twin.
“Excuse you, I did—”
Captain Deuteros cleared her throat over the fresh internecine squabbling. “Does anyone else want to take this opportunity to admit that they’re already dead, or a flesh construct, or other relevant object? Anyone?”
Palamedes had been wiping Dulcinea’s mouth very gently with a white cloth. He laid his hand at her neck. She was still. Her face was now the thin blue-white colour of Canaan House’s milk, and for a moment Gideon expected him to add her to the already dead list. She would decide to go out with an audience, with her hair done, and with her miserable secrets revealed. Now she knew that Dulcinea had always been alone, carrying on an even greater farce than Gideon’s, knowing the impossibility of the odds. But the dying necromancer sucked in a sudden, rattling, popped-balloon breath, her whole body surging in spasm. Gideon’s heart started up again. Before she could move, Palamedes was there, and with terrible tenderness—as though they were alone in the room and the world alike—he kissed the back of Dulcinea’s hand.
Gideon looked away, blushing with a shame she didn’t interrogate, and found Teacher in the doorway with his hands folded before his gaudy rainbow sash. Nobody had heard him enter.
“Maybe later, Lady Judith,” he said.
She said, “You’ll need to contact the Seventh House and have her sent back home. It’s morally and legally out of the question to leave her this way. Is that clear?”
“I cannot,” said Teacher. “There was only ever a single communications channel in Canaan House, my Lady … and I cannot call her House on it. I cannot call the Fifth, nor the Fourth, nor now the Seventh. That is part of the sacred silence we keep. There will be an end to all this, and there will be a reckoning … but Lady Septimus will stay with us until the last.”
The Second’s adept had stopped all of a sudden. For a moment Gideon thought she was going to lose her carefully buttoned rag. But she cocked her dark head and said, “Lieutenant?”
“Ready,” said Marta the Second, and they both marched out as though they were in parade formation. They did not give the rest of the room a backward glance.<
br />
Teacher looked at the tableau before him: the bed, the blood, the Third. Palamedes, still clutching Dulcinea’s fingers within his own, and Dulcinea out cold.
“How long does Lady Septimus have?” he asked. “I can no longer tell.”
“Days. Weeks, if we’re lucky,” said Palamedes bluntly. Dulcinea made a little hiccupping noise on the bed that sounded half like a giggle and half like a sigh. “That’s if we keep the windows open and her airways clear. Breathing recyc at Rhodes probably took ten years off her life. She’s been sitting on the brink without shifting one way or the other—the woman has the stamina of a steam engine—and all we can do is keep her comfortable and see if she doesn’t decide to pull through.”
Harrow said to him, slowly: “Undoing the cavalier’s bodywork should have killed her. It would have been an incredible shock to her system.”
“Spreading it between multiple casters may have diluted the feedback.”
“That is not remotely how it works,” said Ianthe.
“Oh, God, here comes the expert,” Naberius said.
“Babs,” said Ianthe’s sister hurriedly, “you’re getting hangry. Let’s go find some food.”
Gideon watched her necromancer’s gaze fix on Ianthe Tridentarius. Ianthe did not notice, or affected not to notice; her eyes were as pale and purple and calm as they ever were, but Harrowhark was quivering like a maggot next to a dead duck. As the Third traipsed out—as noisy as if they were leaving a play, not a sickroom—Harrow’s eyes went with them. Gideon said aloud, “Hey. Palamedes. Do you need someone to stay with her?”
“I will,” said Teacher, before Palamedes could respond. “I will move my bed here. I will not leave her alone again. Whenever I must leave my post one of the other priests will take my place. I can do that much, at least … I am not afraid, nor do I have better things to do with my time. Whereas—I am very much afraid—you do.”
Gideon allowed herself a lingering look at Dulcinea, who made for a more beguiling corpse than her stolid dead cavalier ever did: lying on the bed looking nearly transparent with streaks of drying, bloodied mucus on her chin. She wanted to help, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Harrow moving out of the doorway and into the corridor—staring after the disappearing Third—and she steeled herself to say, “Then we’re out. Can you—let us know if anything changes?”