11

THOSE EARLY DAYS AT Canaan House spaced themselves out like beads on a prayer string, dilated. They consisted of big, empty hours, of eating meals in unoccupied rooms, of being alone amid very strange strangers. Gideon couldn’t even rely on the familiarity of the dead. The skeletons of the First were too good, too capable, too watchful—and Gideon didn’t feel truly at her ease anywhere except shut up in the dim rooms that the Ninth had been given, doing drills.

After nearly giving everything away she spent two days almost entirely cloistered, working with her rapier until the sweat had smeared her face paint to a leering, staved-in mask. She stacked a rusting stool on top of the sagging ebon dresser and did chin-ups into the iron wedge that ran across the rafters. She did press-ups in front of the windows until Dominicus limned her with bloody light, completing its sprint around the watery planet.

Both nights she went to bed sore and furious with loneliness. Crux always had said that she was at her most unbearable after confinement. She fell into a deep, black sleep and woke up only once, the second night, when—in the very early morning when the night outside seemed more like the lightless Ninth—Harrowhark Nonagesimus shut the door behind herself, very nearly silently. She kept her eyes mostly closed as the Reverend Daughter paused before the makeshift bed, and as she watched the robed black figure drifted over to the bedroom. Then there was no more noise; and Harrow was gone again, in the morning, when Gideon awoke. She didn’t even leave rude notes.

It was in this abandoned state that the cavalier of the Ninth House ate two breakfasts, starved of both protein and attention, dark glasses slipping on her nose as she drank another bowl of soup. She would have killed to see a couple of haggard nuns tottering around the place, and was therefore 100 percent vulnerable when she looked up to see a Third House twin stride into the room like a lion. It was the lovely one; she had the sleeves of her gauzy robe haphazardly rolled up to each golden shoulder and her hair tied back in a tawny cloud, and she looked at Gideon with an expression like an artillery shell midflight.

“The Ninth!” she said.

She sauntered over. Gideon had risen to stand, remembering the pale eyes of her pissed-off twin, but instead found a beringed hand proffered in her direction: “Lady Coronabeth Tridentarius,” she was told, “Princess of Ida, heir of the Third House.”

Gideon did not know what to do with the hand, which was offered to her fingers out, palm upward. She touched her fingers to it in the hope that she could grip it briefly and get out that way, but Coronabeth Tridentarius, Princess of Ida, took her hand and roguishly kissed the backs of Gideon’s knuckles. Her smile was sparklingly pleased with her own gall; her eyes were a deep, liquid violet, and she spoke with the casual effrontery of someone who expected her every command of jump! to be followed by a rave.

“I’ve organised sparring matches for the cavaliers of all the Houses,” she said. “It’s my hope that even the Ninth will accept my invitation. Will it?”

If Gideon had not been so lonely; if Gideon had not been so used to having a fighting partner, even one more used these days to battling rheumatism; if Coronabeth Tridentarius had not been so astonishingly hot. All these ifs she contemplated wearily, led by the Third House necromancer down the poky, confined little staircase immediately familiar to her as the one she’d explored before; down to the dark, tiled vestibule with the flickering lights, and through to the room with the foul-smelling chemical pit.

This room was now alive with activity. There were three skeletons down in the pit with hairy mops and buckets, cleaning the slime out of it; a fourth was wiping down the streaked glass double doors through to the mirror room beyond. The fug of rot was overlaid with the equally pervasive fug of surfactants and wood polish. Old age still had the place in a chokehold, but in the hot light of the early morning, two figures danced around each other on the outspread flagstone dais of the mirror room. The urgent metal scrape of sword on sword filled the space up to the rafters.

A skeleton in the corner wound a long pole into a network of cobwebs, displacing showers of dust; a couple of others sat about, watching the fight. The cavalier of the Third she recognised even without his smug little jacket, which he had hung over a peg as he struck a fatigued attitude to clean his sword. She could not mistake the cavalier of the Second in her intense Cohort officer whites, contrasted with a jacket of blazing red. She was watching the two in the centre: facing each other on the flagstones, swords and long knives throwing up bevelled yellow reflections on the walls, were Magnus and the abominable girl teen, stripped down to their shirtsleeves. Everyone looked up as the Princess of Ida glowed into sight, because you couldn’t do anything else.

“Sir Magnus, behold my coup!” she said, and she gestured to Gideon.

This did not produce a susurrus of respectful murmurs, as she had obviously hoped. The dress-uniform cavalier stood to attention, but her gaze was blank and cool. The Fourth girl dropped form and rocked backward on her heels, whistling noisily in fascinated horror. The cavalier of the Third raised his eyebrows and took on an expression of dismay, as though his necromancer had just presented them with a leper. Only Magnus gave her a genial, if slightly bewildered, smile.

“Princess Corona, trust you to nab Gideon the Ninth!” he said, and to his dreadful teen: “See, now you can have a duel with someone else, and not bore everyone by how soundly Jeannemary the Fourth can thrash me.”

(“Nooooo, Magnus, don’t mention me,” hissed that dreadful teen.)

“I’d be ashamed to admit to that,” said the Third cavalier significantly.

The unfortunate Jeannemary the Fourth was going red in the face. She drew herself up to say something obviously unwise, but her sparring partner clapped her on the back with an unsinkable smile.

“Ashamed, Prince Naberius? To lose to a Chatur?” he said heartily. “Goodness me, no. Cavalier family since the time of the Resurrection. Should feel ashamed if she lost to me. I’ve known her since she was a child—she knows I’m absolutely no good. You should have seen her when she was five—”

(“Magnus, do not talk about me being five.”)

“Now, let me tell you this story—”

(“Magnus, do not tell anyone this story.”)

“Challenged me to a duel during a reception, said I’d insulted her—think it was a matter of propping her up with cushions, and to be honest, she would’ve had me if she hadn’t been using a bread knife as her offhand—”

Disgusted beyond all tolerance, the much-tried Jeannemary let out a primal yell and escaped to the benches on the other side of the room, far away from them. Now that she wasn’t looking, Magnus gave Naberius a look of frank reproof. The Third’s cavalier coloured and looked away.

“I want to see a match,” said Princess Corona. “Come—Gideon the Ninth, right?—why don’t you try Sir Magnus instead? Don’t believe him when he says he’s rubbish. The Fifth House is meant to turn out very fine cavaliers.”

Magnus inclined his head.

“Of course I’m willing, and the princess is gracious,” he said, “but I didn’t get to be cavalier primary due to being the best with a rapier. I’m cavalier primary only because my adept is also my wife. I suppose you could say that I—ha, ha—cavalier primarried!”

From the other side of the room, Jeannemary let out a long noise like a death rattle. Princess Corona laughed outright; Magnus looked extremely pleased with himself. The faces of the other two were patiently blank. Gideon made a mental note to write down the joke so that she could use it herself later.

Corona inclined her bright head in toward Gideon. She smelled nice, like how Gideon imagined soap was meant to smell.

“Will the Ninth honour us?” she murmured prettily.

Stronger women than Gideon could not have said no to an up-close-and-personal Corona Tridentarius. She stepped up to the dais, her boots ringing out on the stone: the older man opposite’s eyes widened when he saw that she was not going to take off her robe, nor her hood, nor her glasses. The air in the room thrilled, all except for the dreary scrape, scrape, scrape of the skeleton removing cobwebs. Even Jeannemary sat up from her posture of premature death to watch. There was a low murmur of amazement from Corona when Gideon twitched open her robe to reveal the knuckles latched to her belt; they glittered blackly in the sunlight as she slipped them onto her hand.

“Knuckle-knives?” said the Third’s cavalier in outright disbelief. “The Ninth uses knuckle-knives?”

“Not traditionally.”

That was the cavalier in the Cohort uniform, who had a voice as crisp as her collar. Naberius said with forced languor: “I simply can’t remember ever thinking knuckle-knives were a viable option.”

“They’re tremendously nasty.” (Gideon admitted to herself that the way Corona said it was kind of hot.)

Naberius sniffed.

“They’re a brawler’s weapon.”

The Cohort cav said, “Well. We’ll see.”

That was the strange thing about keeping mute, thought Gideon. Everyone seemed to talk at you, rather than to you. Only her erstwhile sparring partner was looking her dead in the eye—as much as he could through dark glasses, anyway.

“Does the Ninth, er—” Magnus was gesturing in a rather general way to Gideon’s robes, her glasses, her hood, which she translated to Are you going to take those off? When she shook her head no he shrugged in wonder: “All right!” and added the slightly bewildering, “Well done.”

Corona said, “I’ll arbitrate,” and they moved into position. Once again Gideon was back down in the half-lit depths of Drearburh, in the cement-poured tomb of a soldier’s hall. Cavalier duels worked the same way Aiglamene had taught her they would, which was very much the same way they did back home, just with more folderol. You stood in front of each other and laid your offhand arm across your chest, showing which main-gauche weapon you intended to use: her knuckle-knives were laid, fat and black, against her collarbone. Magnus’s sword—a beautiful dagger of ivory-coloured steel, the handle a twist of creamy leather—touched his.

“To the first touch,” said their arbiter, badly hiding her rising excitement. “Clavicle to sacrum, arms exception. Call.”

First touch? In Drearburh it was to the floor, but there was no time to contemplate that one: Magnus was smiling at her with the boyish, teacherly enthusiasm of a man about to play a ball game with a younger sibling. But beneath that excellent mask there was a note of doubt about his eyes, a tugging of his mouth, and something in Gideon rose as well: he was a little afraid of her.

“Magnus the Fifth!” he said, and: “Er—go easy!”

Gideon looked over at Corona and shook her head. The necromancer-princess of Ida was too well bred to query and too quick to mistake, and simply said: “I call for Gideon the Ninth. Seven paces back—turn—begin…”

There were four pairs of hungry eyes watching that fight, but they all blurred into the background of a dream: the lines one’s brain filled in to abbreviate a place, a time, a memory. Gideon Nav knew in the first half second that Magnus was going to lose: after that she stopped thinking with her brain and started thinking with her arms, which were frankly where the best of her cerebral matter lay.

What happened next was like closing your eyes in a warm and stuffy room. The first feint from the Fifth House was the heavy drowsiness that filled the back of her head, all the way down to her toes; the second the weightless loll of the skull to the chest. Gideon tucked her offhand behind her back, said to herself: Stop blocking every blow! and did not even bother to parry. She pivoted away each syrup-slow thrust without meeting it, bent back from the follow-up with the dagger like they had agreed beforehand where it would fall: he pressed his quarter, trying to force her, and she very gently folded his sword to the side with hers, contraparried. The point of her black rapier flickered like paper touched with a flame and came to rest, a quarter-inch away from his heart, making him stutter to a halt. She bumped the tip of her sword into his chest, very gently.

It was over in three moves. A mental haptic jolt bunted Gideon awake, and there she was: rapier held still to Magnus’s chest; Magnus with the good-natured but poleaxed expression of a man caught mid–practical joke; four sets of staring, equally blank expressions. Their very good-looking arbiter’s mouth was even hanging very slightly open, lips parting over white teeth, gaping dumbly until she caught up—

“Match to the Ninth!”

“Goodness me,” said Magnus.

The room let out a collective breath. Jeannemary said: “Oh my days,” and the Cohort cav of the Second sat up at least two inches taller than before, thumb pressed furiously hard into the soft part under her chin in thought. Gideon was busy sheathing her sword a heartbeat after Magnus had sheathed his, jerky with lag time in returning his bow, turning away. Her sweat had turned to adrenaline; her adrenaline was singing through her as fine, hot fuel, but her brain and heart had not caught up with the result. The only emotion she was feeling was a slow-to-saturate relief. She had won. She had won even though moving in a robe and dark glasses was so stupid. Aiglamene’s honour could go another day intact, and Gideon’s ass could go spiritually unkicked.

Conversations were happening around her, not to her:

A bit plaintively: “I’m not quite that out of form, am I?—”

(“Magnus! Maaaaagnus. Three moves, Magnus.”)

“—Am I getting old? Should Abigail and I divorce?—”

“I didn’t even see her move.” Corona was breathing hard. “God, she’s fast.”

Because they were in closest proximity, her first gaze after the fight fell on the overgroomed cavalier of the Third, Naberius: his eyes were taut, and his smile was unnerved. His eyes were blue, but this close she could see that they were stained through in places with a light, insipid brown that made Gideon think of oily water.

“Next match to me,” said Naberius.

“Don’t be greedy,” said his princess, good-naturedly and a trifle distractedly. “The Ninth just fought. Why don’t you go toe-to-toe with Jeannemary?”

But it was clear that he did not want to go toe-to-toe with Jeannemary, and judging by the look on her face she was no keener on the idea. Naberius shrugged his shoulders back, rolling up the sleeves of his fine cotton shirt to each elbow. He did not drop his gaze from Gideon. “You didn’t even break a sweat, did you?” he said. “No, you’re ready to go again. Try me.”

“Oh, Babs.”

“Come on.” His voice was much softer, more coaxing and appealing, when he was speaking to Corona. “Let the Third show what it can do, my lady. I know you’d rather watch your own.” There was a peculiarly nasal lilt to his voice, a sort of posh elongated vowel that made it rathah. “Put me in. Dyas can get another look at me.” (Next to him, the Cohort cavalier who was obviously hight Dyas raised her eyebrows the exact one-eighth of an inch to indicate how much she wanted to get another look at him.)

“The Ninth?”

Gideon’s heart was still ricocheting around her chest. She raised her shoulders in an expression that the brethren of the Locked Tomb would have recognised immediately as the precursor of Gideon about to do something particularly daft, but Corona took it as acceptance, and said mock-indulgently to her cav: “Well, then, my dear, go off and make yourself happy.”

He beamed as though he had just been bought a new pair of shoes. Gideon thought: Shit.

The Cohort cavalier, Dyas, was saying: “Your Highness. The adept shouldn’t officiate for their cavalier.”

“Oh, pff! Surely just this once can’t harm, Lieutenant.”

“You can’t call yourself a disinterested arbitrator, Princess,” Magnus was saying.

“Nonsense: I’m harder on him than anyone else. To the touch; call!”

In a very short space of time she was standing face to face with another cavalier, and there was a juddering in her ears that she recognised as the beating of her own heart. The glass of her knuckle-knives felt black and cold and silky all the way through a layer of robe and her shirt, and her tongue felt thick in her mouth. She hadn’t been this overstimulated since that one time when training had consisted of Crux, a repeating crossbow, and two skeletons with machetes. The Third’s main-gauche dagger was as gorgeously wrought as his hair: chased silver and Imperial violet, the arms of the hilt curved and hugging inward in a way that tugged on her memory but did not grasp the right file. The blade was thin and bright and flared at the top. She was so busy looking at it that she barely heard Naberius say:

“Naberius the Third.”

And very, very quietly, just for her:

“Ninth cavs are necro suitcases. Who’re you?”

It was good that she had already practised how to be quiet, because the traditional Nav response would have been one of any number of pieces of crude backchat. She resented the contempt with which his mouth rounded over Ninth; she resented suitcases; she resented his hair. But Coronabeth was singing out, “I call for Gideon the Ninth!” and they were marking five paces—six—seven.

She had only a moment to size Naberius up. He was about an inch shorter than her, with a frame that had been whipped within an inch of its life into perfectly sculpted muscle. He was narrow shouldered with long, long arms, and she was beginning to believe that he was not simply a douchebag who used lip balm, but a douchebag who used lip balm and had a very long reach. He stood perfectly: more perfectly even than her teacher, who had partially fused her spine with standing to attention. His rapier was a froth of silver wire and tracery at the loop of the hilt, and the blade shone notchless, perfect as the line made from his shoulder to its tip: her answering stance felt slouchy and half-assed, and the black knuckle-knives brutish, unsurgical. The hard moue of his mouth told her that he was used to making people feel that way, but also that he definitely used lip balm. Her heart sped up: slowed: renewed, arrhythmic with anticipation.

“Begin!” called Corona.

In the first ten seconds, Gideon had known that the fight with the Fifth House was hers to lose. It took her twenty seconds to come to a very important discovery about the House of the Third: it valued cleanliness. Each twitch of the sword was a masterpiece of technique. He fought like clockwork: inevitable, bloodless, perfect, with absolute economy of movement. The first time the black sword of the Ninth flicked into action, the line of his rapier slicing hers to the side—a simple semicircle arc with the blade, bored, contemptuous, exact—would have brought an expert to tears. His advance and retreat were like lines from a manual, fed directly into his feet.

Stop blocking every blow, her brain told her. Her arm ignored her brain, and sparks glittered as Naberius’s sword clanked against the obsidian glass of her defending knuckle-knives; the force of the blow reverberated up Gideon’s arm and shuddered into her spine. Her sword sang forward in what she knew to be a perfect thrust, aimed true and hard at his side; she heard an oily shnk!, and then another blow quaked its way into her elbow and up to the base of her skull. The blade she had taken for a dagger had separated into three, trapping hers neatly: a trident knife, which was so hopelessly obvious that she probably had to offer to save time and kick her own ass for him. Naberius smiled at her, blandly.

It was the most irritating fight she’d ever had. He wasn’t as fast as she was, but he wasn’t wearing robes, and anyway he didn’t have to be as fast as she was. He just had to keep her at arm’s length, and he was a master at it. This to the touch nonsense was pissing her off. If she had been wielding her longsword she would have simply smashed through him like a brick through a windowpane. But she had a needle in one hand and a handful of black glass in the other, and had to skip and hop around like he was wielding poison; and he had been a cavalier probably since the day he was born. At some points he could stand there completely still, completely bored, his sword held in perfect form as though he were doing dressage. The light beat down on her robes and her head. She couldn’t believe she was being held at bay by someone who had eaten every cavalier manual and chewed dutifully twenty-five times.

Naberius toyed with her languidly—he had a trick where his sword licked out like a cat’s claw, immediate, before pulling back again with a measured half step—and he kept her at sword’s length, never letting her enter his space. He kept up his litany of parry; quick attack for space; pressure the sword with the offhand until she was sick to death of it.

Gideon ran her rapier down the length of his—lightless black on silver—with a shrill squeal, but he circled it deftly down and away. She thrust again, high, and found that the upper breadth of her blade was caught neatly within the fork of that goddamned trident knife: he used the leverage to push her down.… down … and she found that his rapier was sliding forward, over her arm, through the tuck of her elbow. Aiglamene had taught her to anticipate a death blow. She flinched to the side immediately, letting it press tight against her, swearing mentally all the way: in a real fight he’d be able to slice a hot ribbon over her chest and shoulder, but couldn’t kill her either way. And he couldn’t touch her with the point, just the edge. She was still in the duel.

But then he did something perfect. It was probably recorded in some shitty Seventh-style swordplay book as TWO CROWS DRINKING WATER or THE BOY STRANGLES THE GOOSE. He pivoted her sword downward with his three-bladed knife, jerked the wrist of his rapier-hand forward, and flicked the black blade of the Ninth from her grip. It clattered to the worn-out flagstones and was still. Jeannemary gulped off a yelp in the background. Her heart trickled like prayer beads sliding down a string.

Naberius stepped out of his lunge and smiled that irritating smile again.

“You cut too much,” he said.

He did not smile when Gideon unwound her sword-arm from his rapier in a swift wheel of movement, ducked forward, and punched him in the solar plexus. The breath wheezed from his lungs like he was an open airlock. Naberius crumpled backward, and she kicked her robes aside to touch one booted foot to the place beneath his knee: he staggered, spat, and fell. She dropped for her sword and backpedalled for space, as he thrashed like a fallen animal trying to rise. Gideon fell into stance, raised her sword, and let it come to rest at his collarbone.

“Match to the Third,” said Coronabeth, which startled her.

Her sword was shrugged away; Naberius, furious and wobbly, was finally up on both feet.

“Babs,” his princess said hurriedly, “are you all right?”

He was coughing throatily. His face was a dark, velvety red as he sheathed his sword and squeezed down on his knife, causing some mechanism to snockt the side blades back into place. When he bowed to her, it was amazingly scornful. Gideon slid her own sword back into her scabbard, somewhat discombobulated, and bowed in return; he tossed his head back haughtily and coughed again, which somewhat ruined the effect.

“She’s not some Nonius come-again, she’s just a brawler,” he said in throaty disgust. “Look, idiot, when I disarm you, match is over, you bow, all right? You don’t keep going.”

The sharply dressed Cohort cavalier said: “You let your guard down, Tern.”

“The match was over the moment I got her sword!”

“Yes,” she said, “technically.”

“Technically?” He was getting even redder-faced now. “Everything’s the technicals! And that’s Prince Tern to you, Lieutenant! What are you playing at, Dyas? I held her at bay the whole time, I won, and the cultist fouled the match. Admit it.”

“Yes,” said Dyas, who had relaxed into an arms-behind-the-back at ease position. It looked more at home in a military parade line-up than at an informal fitness match. She had a neat, mellifluous voice. “You won the bout. The Ninth is the less able duellist. I say she is the better fighter: she fought to win. But, Ninth,” she said, “he’s right. You cut too much.”

The cavalier from the Third looked like he was very close to violence: this, for some reason, had made his eyes bulge with sheer resentment. He looked as though he were about to unsheathe his sword and demand a rematch, and backed down only when one golden arm was slung about his shoulders and he was pulled into a half embrace from his necromancer. He submitted to a hair ruffle. Corona said, “The Third showed its stuff, Babs—that’s all I care about.”

“It was a convincing win.” He sounded like a huffy child.

“You were brilliant. I wish Ianthe had seen you.”

Jeannemary had risen to stand. She was a brown, bricklike young thing, Gideon had noticed, seemingly all corners: her eyes were alight, and her voice was piercing when she said:

“That’s how I want to fight. I don’t want to spend all my time in show bouts. I want to fight like a real cavalier, as though my life’s on the line.”

Naberius’s expression shuttered over again. His gaze met Gideon’s briefly, and it was somewhere beyond hostile: it was contempt for an animal that had crapped indelicately in the corner. But before any more could be said, Magnus coughed lightly into his hand.

“Perhaps,” he said, “we should fall to exercises, or paired work, or—something that will make me feel like I’m practising to be fighting fit. How about it? Sparring may be the meat of a fighter’s training, but you’ve got to have some—well—vegetables and potatoes?”

(“Magnus. Potatoes are a vegetable, Magnus.”)

Gideon stepped from the dais, unbuckling the knuckle-knives from her wrist, easing her fingers out of the grips. She wondered what Aiglamene would have thought of the fight; she almost wanted to see that disarm again. If Naberius hadn’t looked at her like she had personally taken a whiz on his nicest jacket, she would have asked him about it. It was sleight of hand rather than brute force, and she had to admit that she’d never even thought about a defence, which was stupid—

Some sixth sense made her look upward, beyond the skeleton still swabbing industriously at the glass door, out past the pit where centuries of old chemicals were being wiped away. In the aperture before the tiled room, a cloaked figure stood: skull-painted, a veil pushed down to the neck, a hood obscuring the face. Gideon stood in the centre of the training room, and for a second that emasculated minutes, she and Harrowhark looked at each other. Then the Reverend Daughter turned in a dramatic swish of black and disappeared into the flickering vestibule.