12

“EXCELLENT TO HAVE YOU with us,” said Teacher one morning, “excellent to see the Ninth fitting in so well! How beautiful to have all the Houses commingled!”

Teacher was a fucking comedian. He often sat with Gideon if he caught her at table for later meals—he never showed up to breakfast; she suspected he had his much earlier than anyone else at Canaan House—with the jovial, I find vows of silence very restful! Constant questions were still being asked of Teacher and the Canaan House priests, some coaxing, some curt, all in varying stages of desperation. He was implacably ignorant.

“I do enjoy all this bustle,” Teacher said. (Only he and Gideon were in the room.)

By the end of that week, Gideon had met nearly all of the adepts and their cavaliers. This did not break down barriers and form new friendships. They nearly all gave her wide berths in the dim Canaan House corridors—only Coronabeth would greet her breezily according to Coronabeth’s whims, which were capricious, and Magnus was always good for a cordial Good morning! Er, excellent weather! Or Good evening! Weather still excellent! He tried pathetically hard. But most of them still looked at her as though she were something that could only be killed with a stake through the heart at midnight, a half-tame monster on a dubious leash. Naberius Tern often sneered at her so hard that he was due a lip injury.

But you got a lot of information by being silent and watching. The Second House acted like soldiers on unwilling leave. The Third revolved around Corona like two chunks of ice about a golden star. The Fourth clustered by the Fifth’s skirts like ducklings—the Fifth necromancer turned out to be a fresh-faced woman in her mid-thirties with thick glasses and a mild smile, who looked about as much the part as a farmer’s wife. The Sixth and Seventh were perennially absent, ghosts. The Eighth’s creepy uncle–creepy nephew duo she saw seldom, but even seldom was more than enough: the Eighth necromancer prayed intensely and fervidly before each meal, and if they passed in the corridor both flattened themselves to the furthest wall as though she were contagious.

Small wonder. The way to the Ninth’s living quarters—the corridor that led to their front door, and all about their front door, like ghoulish wreaths—was now draped in bones. Spinal cords bracketed the door frame; finger bones hung down attached to thin, nearly-invisible wires, and they clinked together cheerlessly in the wind when you passed. She had left Harrowhark a note on her vastly underused pillow—

WHATS WITH THE SKULLS?

and received only a terse—

Ambiance.

Well, ambiance meant that even Magnus the Fifth hesitated before saying Good morning, so fuck ambiance in the ear.

As far as Gideon could tell, Dulcinea Septimus spent 100 percent of the time on the terraces, reading romance novels, being perfectly happy. If she was trying to psych out the competition, she was doing so with flair. It was also very difficult to avoid her. The Ninth’s cavalier elect would walk past an open doorway, and a light voice would call out Gideon—Gideon! And then she would go, and no mention of her sword would be made: just a pillow to be moved, or the plot of a romance novel to be related, or—once—a woman seemingly lighter than a rapier to be picked up and very carefully transferred to another seat, out of the sun. Gideon did not resent this. She had the sinking feeling that Dulcinea was doing her a favour. Lady Septimus was, delicately, showing she did not care that Gideon was Gideon the Ninth, a paint-faced shadow cultist, a Locked Tomb nun apparent: or at least, if she cared, she viewed it as the delight of her days.

“Do you ever think it’s funny, you being here with me?” she asked once, when Gideon sat, black-hooded, holding a ball of wool for Dulcinea’s crocheting. When Gideon shook her head, she said: “No … and I like it. I send Protesilaus away a good deal. I give him things to do: that’s what suits him best. But I like to see you and make you pick up my blankets and be my scullion. I think I’m the only person in eternity to make a Ninth House cavalier slave away for me … who’s not their adept. And I’d like to hear your voice again … one day.”

Fat chance. The one half-glimpsed vision of Harrow Nonagesimus was all that Gideon had seen, after that first spar. She didn’t appear again, in the training room or at the Ninth quarters. Her pillow was rumpled in a different way each morning, and black clothes heaped themselves untidily in the laundry basket that the skeletons took away at intervals, but she did not darken Gideon’s door.

Gideon went back to the training room regularly—and so did the cavaliers of Fourth and Fifth, and Second and Third—but the Sixth and Seventh cavaliers avoided it, even now that it was laminated to a high shine and smelled of seed oils. The skeletons had moved their efforts to cleaning the floors now. The burly Eighth cavalier had come in once when she was there, but on seeing Gideon, bowed politely and left posthaste.

Gideon still preferred to train by herself. It was her habit of long years to wake and wedge her feet under some piece of furniture, and do sit-ups until she had counted them out in their hundreds, and then press-ups: a hundred normal, a hundred clapping. Standing upside down, on her arms with her feet in the air. Sitting on the heels of her hands with her legs extended, testing to what degree she could stretch her toes. You didn’t need half of what she’d done to gain medical entry to the Cohort, but she had fed her entire life into the meat grinder of hope that, one day, she’d blitz through Trentham and get sent to the front attached to a necromancer’s legion. Not for Gideon a security detail on one of the holding planets, either on a lonely outpost on an empty world or in some foreign city babysitting some Third governor. Gideon wanted a drop ship—first on the ground—a fat shiny medal saying INVASION FORCE ON WHATEVER, securing the initial bloom of thanergy without which the finest necromancer of the Nine Houses could not fight worth a damn. The front line of the Cohort facilitated glory. In her comic books, necromancers kissed the gloved palms of their front-liner comrades in blessed thanks for all that they did. In the comic books none of these adepts had heart disease, and a lot of them had necromantically uncharacteristic cleavage.

This had all played out in Gideon’s imagination on many solitary nights, and often she had indulged in a wilder flight of fancy where Harrowhark would open an envelope galaxies and galaxies away, and read the news that Gideon Nav had won a bunch of medals and a huge percentage of prize money for her role in the initial strike, a battle in which she was both outstanding and very hot. Harrow’s lip would curl, and she would drawl something like, Turns out Griddle could swing a sword after all. This fantasy often got her through a hundred reps.

Back in the Ninth she would have ended the day with a jog around the planting fields, as the photochemical lamps dimmed for the end of their cycle, running through the fine moisture mist spritzed out at even times to wet the soil. The mist was recyc water and smelled ureal. It was a before-bedtime smell to her. Now the scent was old wood, and the sulfide reek of the sea, and water on stone.

But not even Gideon could train all the time. She amused herself by exploring the huge, sinuous complex of Canaan House, often getting profoundly lost. That you could only explore so far was her first discovery. There must have been floors beneath floors all the way down, many hundreds of feet of building, but as you descended the prevalence of *** CAUTION *** printed on yellow plastic tape and crosses spray-painted onto big iron blast doors only grew. You could only get about fifty metres below the dock layer before all ways were closed. You could only go up so far too, about an equivalent hundred metres up: there was a broken lift you could walk into, and there was a staircase up the tower that branched off in two directions. To the left was where Teacher and the other two priests of Canaan House slept, in a whitewashed network of corridors where potted succulent plants grew lasciviously in long tendrils. She had not yet tried the right.

After two silent, ironed-out days of exploring and squats, Gideon did not exactly get bored. It took a hell of a lot more to bore a denizen of the House of the Ninth. It was a lack of change at the microscopic level that made her suspicious: one morning she realised that the rumples on Harrow’s bed and the top layer of black clothes in the laundry hamper had not changed for over twenty-four hours. Two nights had passed without Harrow sleeping in the Ninth quarters, or changing out of dirty clothes, or refreshing her paint. Gideon cogitated:

1. Harrow had been prevented from coming home for reasons, e.g., that

   (i) She was dead;

  (ii) She was too impaired;

 (iii) She was busy.

2. Harrow had chosen to live elsewhere, leaving Gideon free to put her shoes on Harrow’s bed and indiscriminately rifle through all her things.

3. Harrow had run away.

#3 could be discounted. If Harrow were the type, Gideon’s childhood would have been a hell of a lot smoother. #2 was an exciting prospect in that Gideon longed to put her shoes on Harrow’s bed and to indiscriminately rifle through all Harrow’s things, but given that those things were still there, this seemed unlikely. Given twenty-four hours to break a bone ward, Gideon would have immediately made plans to get into Harrow’s wardrobe and do up all the buttons on her shirts, making sure that each button went into the hole above the one it was meant to go into. It was an inevitability that the Reverend Daughter never would have allowed for.

This left #1. (iii) relied on Harrow being so busy doing whatever she was doing that she’d forgotten to come back, though given previous reasoning and the sheer availability of buttons to be tampered with this was a nonstarter. (i) was contingent on either the world’s happiest accident or murder, and if it was murder, what if the murderer was, like, weird, which would make their subsequent marriage to Gideon pretty awkward? Maybe they could just swap friendship bracelets.

In the end, (ii) had the most traction. The paint supplies were all here. She had never seen Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s naked face. With a deep resentment of heart and weariness of soul, Gideon threw on her robe and embarked upon a long, disconsolate day of searching.

Harrow was not in the central atrium, or in the dining room, or in the increasingly clean pit full of industriously scrubbing skeletons. Magnus the Fifth was standing watch over them with a furrowed expression of good-natured bewilderment, right next to his trig and glossy-haired adept, and he managed an “Er—Ninth! Hope you’re enjoying the … room!” before she bolted out of it.

Harrow was not on the long and sun-swept docking bay, its concrete an eye-sizzling white in the sweltering light of morning. Gideon tracked all across it—standing next to the weathered magnetic locks, listening to the churning water far below where the shuttles rested somewhere. Harrow was not on the terrace where Dulcinea Septimus often read, and neither was Dulcinea Septimus, though a few novels sat abandoned beneath a chair. It was lunchtime by the time she had walked the whole eastern wing leading up from a glorious, rotten old staircase to the left of the atrium, terminating in a door with a freshly chiselled plaque marked EIGHTH HOUSE that she backed away from in record time. Gideon went back to the dining hall and brooded over her cheese and bread and decided to give up.

Leave Harrow to her two broken legs and shattered pelvis. Finding her was an impossibly futile task, in an impossibly large and complex area where you could search all day every day for weeks and not exhaust the floor. It was stupid and it made her feel stupid. And it was Nonagesimus’s own fault for being controlling and secretive about every aspect of her whole ghastly little life. She would not thank Gideon even if she had sat her flat ass in a puddle of molten lava, especially not as Gideon would religiously mark each anniversary of the day Harrow destroyed her butt with magma. She washed her hands of the entire scenario.

After she had choked down food and drunk half a jug of water in quick succession, Gideon gave up and resumed the search. She decided on a whim to go bang on the doors of the lift that didn’t work, and then found that the neighbouring water-swollen door could be opened if you applied force. This revealed a cramped staircase, which she followed down until she burst out into a corridor she’d only once explored. It was a broad, low-ceilinged shaft with *** CAUTION *** tape hollering from every door and surface, but there was one door at the end where people had obviously passed: the tape had snapped and fell in limp ribbons to both sides. The door led to another corridor that was cut off midway by a huge old tarpaulin, which someone had tacked to the rafters to serve as a half-hearted barrier. Gideon ducked under the tarpaulin, turned right, and opened a narrow iron door out to a terrace.

She’d been here once before. Fully half of this terrace had crumbled off into the sea. The first time Gideon had seen it, the whole looked so precarious she had consequently gone down with a fit of acrophobia and beat hasty retreat to somewhere less insane. The sky had seemed too wide; the horizon too open; the terrace too much like a total death trap. The landing dock loomed overhead, and so did the opaque, sweeping windows where the Ninth was housed. Looking up was fine. Looking down, still hundreds and hundreds of metres above the sea, made her want to lose her lunch.

Fuelled by the reminder that the only difference between the drillshaft of Drearburh and the broken terrace was that one was fenced and one wasn’t, she ventured up there again. The wind screamed her into the side of the tower. It was crumbled only at the far end, and the part closest to the trunk of Canaan House seemed intact. Stone windbreakers and dry-soiled, extinct gardens trailed off as far as the eye could see around to the other side, rugged with long stretches of empty planter bed and trellis. Gideon took this path. It was not at all clear—some of the big boxy stone structures had collapsed and the rubble never cleared, and there was really not enough structure still left to distract the eye from the bitten-off terrace that had fallen away to its death—but if you travelled around enough, there was a spiralling staircase of wrought iron and brick clasped to the tower’s bosom.

This was also a bitch to travel up, as the more you climbed, the more of the dead terrace you saw—the sea creaked below, changeful in its colour, a deep grey-blue today and whitecapped with wind—but Gideon readjusted her sunglasses, took a deep breath through her nose, and climbed. The first autodoor she saw, she took, and had to hammer five full times before it silently slid open and gave her entry. Gideon ducked in and pressed against the wall as it slid reproachfully shut, and had to take a minute to collect herself.

It was dark here. She found herself in a long hall that terminated in a left-hand corner. It was very quiet, and very cool. The floor was of pale, cream-and-black tile, set in a starry pattern that repeated itself all the way down the corridor; the paler tiles seemed to float, luminous, as the darker melted into the shadows. Great panes of smoked glass had been set into the walls, lit by dark yellow lamps: sconces held dribbles of mummified candle. It was a wide, shady space, and had something of the inner sanctum of Drearburh about it, just with fewer bones. In fact, there was almost no decoration here. The hall seemed strangely closed in, smaller than the space ought to have been, shrugging inward. The floor was beautiful, and so were the doors—they were wood-inlaid with tiny squares of smoked glass, set smoothly in metal frames. There was a single statue at the end of the corridor where it turned left. It must have once been a person, but the head and arms had been lopped off, leaving only a torso with beseeching stumps. It took her a while to realise that she was in a lobby, and that the doors were elevator lifts: each had a dead screen overhead that must have once shown the floor number.

Gideon folded her sunglasses into a pocket of her robe. Quiet echoes caromed off the walls, up and down, then clarified. Voices floating upward. The stairs at the corner of the hallway led down two short flights, the landing visible below, and Gideon crept down them with careful and noiseless steps.

The indeterminate murmurs thinned into sound—

“—s impossible, Warden.”

“Nonsense.”

“Improbable, Warden.”

“Granted. But still—relative to what, exactly?”

There was some shuffling. Two voices: the first probably female, the second probably male. Gideon risked another step down.

“Six readings,” the second voice continued. “Oldest is nine thou. Youngest is, well, fiftyish. Emphasis ish. But the old stuff here is really very old.”

“The upper bound for scrying is ten thousand, Warden.” Yes, it was a woman’s voice, and not one Gideon had heard: low and calm, stating the obvious.

“The point is here, and you are far over there. Nine thousand. Fiftyish. Building.”

“Ah.”

“Fiat lux! If you want to talk improbable, let’s talk about this”—a scrape of stone on stone—“being three thousand and some years older than this.” A heavy clunk.

“Inexplicable, Warden.”

“Certainly not. Like everything else in this ridiculous conglomeration of cooling gas, it’s perfectly explicable, I just need to explic-it.”

“Indubitable, Warden.”

“Stop that. I need you listening, not racking your brain for rare negatives. Either this entire building was scavenged from a garbage hopper, or I am being systematically lied to on a molecular level.”

“Maybe the building’s shy.”

“That is just tough shit for the building. No; there’s a wrong thing here. There’s a trick. Remember my fourth circle exams?”

“When the Masters shut down the entire core?”

“No, that was third circle. Fourth circle they seeded the core with a couple of thousand fake records. Beautiful stuff, exquisite, even the timestamps, and all of it obviously wrong. Drivel. No one could have believed a word of it. So why bother?”

“I recall you said they were ‘being a pack of assholes.’”

“W—yes. Well, in substance, yes. They were teaching us a particularly annoying lesson, which is that you cannot rely on anything, because anything can lie to you.”

“Swords,” said the woman with a trace of satisfaction, “don’t lie.”

The necromancer—because Gideon had never been so sure in her life that she was listening to a damn necromancer—snorted. “No. But they don’t tell the truth either.”

By now she was almost at the foot of the stairs, and she could see into the room below. The only light came from its centre; the walls were splashed with long shadows, but seemed to be generic concrete, split in places by peeling lines of caution tape. In the centre, lit by a flashlight, was an enormous shut-up metal hatch, the kind Gideon associated with hazard shafts and accident shelters.

Crouching in front of the hatch was a rangy, underfed young man: he was wrapped in a grey cloak and the light glinted on the spectacles slipping down his nose. Standing next to him holding a big wedge of broken sculpture and the flashlight was a tall, equally grey-wrapped figure with a scabbard outlined at her hip. She had hair of an indeterminate darkness, cut blunt at her chin. She was restless as a bird, stepping from one foot to the other, quirking her elbows, rocking from the balls of her feet to the heel. The boy had one hand pressed to the heavy corner of the hatch, brooding over it like a seer with a piece of ritual intestine, lineated weirdly by the half-light. He was using his own tiny pocket torch to investigate the place where the seam of the floor met the metal of the hatch frame.

Both were filthy. Dust caked their hems. There were odd, still-wet smears on their clothes and hands. It looked as though they’d both been wrestling in some long-forgotten Ninth catacomb.

Gideon had moved too close: even in the darkness, hooded and cloaked, they were both nervy. The young man in glasses jerked up his chin, staring blindly back to the stairwell: at his sudden switch in focus, the young woman with the sword whirled around and saw Gideon on the stairs.

It was probably not a comforting sight to see a penitent of the Locked Tomb in the half dark, swathed in black, skull-painted. The cavalier narrowed her hooded eyes, fidgets gone and absolutely still; then she exploded into action. She dropped the wedge of sculpture with a clonk, drew her sword from its shabby scabbard before the wedge had bounced once, and advanced. Gideon, neurons blaring, drew her own. She slid her hand into her ebon gauntlet—the grey-cloaked girl let the flashlight fall, drew a knife with a liquid whisper from a holder across one shoulder—and their blades met high above their heads as the cavalier leapt, metal on metal ringing all around the chamber.

Holy shit. Here was a warrior, not just a cavalier. Gideon was suddenly fighting for her life and exhilarated by it. Blow after lightning blow rattled her defences, each one coming down like an industrial crush press, the short offhand knife targeting the guard of Gideon’s blade. Even with the advantage of higher ground she was forced to mount the steps backward. They were fighting in close, cramped quarters, and Gideon was getting pinned. She smashed the other girl’s offhand out of the way and into the wall, scattering loose glass tiles in its wake as it fell: her opponent dropped as though shot, crouched, kicked her dagger up into her hand, and did a handspring backward down the stairs. Gideon descended like an avenging necrosaint as she rose—slicing down in a winging cut that would have destroyed the blade given a longsword and the right footing, just for the pleasure of seeing her partner duck, huff between her teeth with exertion. Her sword met the other cavalier’s dagger and she pressed, both leaning hard into the blow. The cav in grey’s eyes were only mildly surprised.

“Camilla!” She only distantly registered the call. Gideon was stronger; the girl’s arm was buckling—she brought up her rapier to harass Gideon’s blocking arm, stabbing at the ebon cuff of the knuckle-knife, the tiny torch spotlight wavering drunkenly from face to face, turning their pupils into big black wells—“Camilla the Sixth, disengage!”

“Camilla” brought her elbow forward, sliding her sword down Gideon’s, jabbing it away with the hilt. Momentarily discombobulated, Gideon backed into the stairs and reset her stance; by then the cavalier in grey was already backing off, sword held high, offhand held low. The necromancer in matching grey was standing; the darkness in the small room was banded with hot shimmers, as though with heat. She thrust her arm forward—

—and stumbled back. Her heart was panicking in her chest, seized as though in the midst of a cardiac arrest, and her hand seemed to wither around the hilt of her sword—the flesh melting before her eyes, the fingernails going black and curling close to the skin as though burnt. She snatched her fist back and found that, clutched close, it was whole and unaffected again, but she did not press onward. She wasn’t a total goon. She backed away from the necromantic seal and sheathed her sword instead, hands held out in the universal ceasefire! gesture. The necromancer in grey, torch hand outstretched, exhaled: he wiped faintly pinkish sweat from his face.

“It’s the other one,” he said tersely, not sounding at all as though he’d just raised a massive thanergetic barrier and broken out in minor blood sweat. She was amazed it was only minor: the whole space before her shimmered like the oily surface of a bubble, fully three bodies high and three wide. “We don’t want an interhouse incident—not that it wouldn’t give our policy wonks back on the Sixth something to think about. You too”—this was to Gideon, a little more formally—“I offer apology that my cavalier engaged you in an unscheduled bout, Niner, but I don’t apologise for her drawing on someone sneaking around dressed all in black. Be reasonable.”

Gideon peeled the knuckle-knife off her hand and latched it back to her belt, and she surveyed the scene before her. Both cavalier and necromancer stood before the black hulk of the trapdoor, robes charcoal in the dimness, both of their eyes and hair mellowed to no colour in the thin light from the hallway. The little torch was quickly flicked off, plunging the whole into further gloom. She yearned to talk, beginning with: How did you do a little flip like that? but the necro brought her up short with:

“You’re here about Nonagesimus, aren’t you?”

The stupefied blankness on Gideon’s face must have been mistaken for something else. Face paint was good for masking. The necromancer scrubbed his hands together in sudden, fretful activity, wringing his fingers together hard. “Assumed she’d just—well. Have you seen her since the night before last?”

Gideon shook her head so emphatically no that she was surprised her hood didn’t fall off. The cavalier’s face was turned toward him, expressionless, waiting. The young man strummed his fingers together before coming to some unknown decision.

“Well, you’re cutting it fine,” he said abruptly. He pulled his thick, nerdy spectacles off his long nose and shook them as though wicking them free of something. “She was down there last night too and, if I’m correct, never surfaced. Her blood’s on the floor down there.” Because necromancers lived bad lives, he added: “To clarify. Her intravenous blood. Her intravenous blood.”

At this clarification, a very strange thing happened to Gideon Nav. She had already exhausted neurons, cortisol, and adrenaline, and now her body started moving before her head or her heart did; she strode past the boy and yanked so hard on the top of the hatch that it damn near broke her wrists. It was shut tighter than Crux’s ass. At this embarrassing heaving, the boy sighed explosively and threw his zipped-up bag to Camilla, who caught it out of midair.

“Cavaliers,” he said.

Camilla said, “I wouldn’t have left you alone for twenty-seven hours.”

“Of course not. I’d be dead. Look, you simpleton, it’s not going to open,” he told Gideon, swinging his sights on her like a man levelling a blade. “She’s got your key.”

Up close, he was gaunt and ordinary looking, except for the eyes. His spectacles were set with lenses of spaceflight-grade thickness, and through these his eyes were a perfectly lambent grey: unflecked, unmurked, even and clear. He had the eyes of a very beautiful person, trapped in resting bitch face.

Gideon hauled again at the hatch, as though offering up the universe’s most useless act might endear her to the physics of a locked door. His sigh grew sadder and more explosive as he watched her. “You’re winners, you and Nonagesimus both. Hang on—Cam, do a perimeter, please—Ninth, listen. It’s well above freezing down there. That means blood stays wet for an hour, let’s say an hour and a half. Hers hadn’t skeletonised altogether. You with me? She might have spilt it deliberately—although, she’s an osseo, she’s not going to do blood ritual on herself—right, you’re not even pretending to pay attention.”

Gideon had stopped paying attention somewhere around wet and was now bracing both feet to pull: she was pressing down the frame with a foot, distantly taking in every fifth word. Blood. Skeletonised. Osseo. The necro called out, “Camilla, any sign she left while—”

Camilla was on the stairs.

“No, Warden.”

He said to Gideon, gruffly: “Odds are she’s still down there.”

“Then get off your ass and help me,” said Gideon Nav.

This did not surprise or alarm him. In fact, his tightly-wound shoulders relaxed a fraction from black-hole stress fracture to pressure at the bottom of the ocean. He sounded almost relieved when he said, “Sure.”

A jangling object sailed through the air, visible more as sound and movement than as thing. The necromancer failed to catch it: it banged him hard on his long, scrabbling hands. Gideon recognised it as the iron loop that she had been given on the very first day in Canaan House. As he squatted beside her, smelling like dust and mould, she could see that a long key had been put through the loop and was clanking there untidily. There was another, smaller key dangling off to one side, gleaming golden, with an elaborately carved shank and deep pockmarks instead of cuts in the shaft. A key ring? They’d all been given key rings?

Inserted into the keyhole, the first key opened the trap door with a low, hard snap, and together the boy and Gideon threw it open. It revealed a ladder of metal staples down a long, unbelievably dark hole: light shaded in at the bottom, throwing into relief the fact that one slip meant a broken neck along with your broken ass-bones.

A pointing finger appeared in front of her like a spear tip: Camilla’s. The Sixth cavalier had reclaimed the flashlight, and by its glow she could see that Camilla’s eyes were much darker than her necromancer’s: his were like clear stone or water, and hers were the unreflective, fathomless colour of overturned Ninth House sod, neither grey nor brown. “You go first, Ninth,” she said. “Palamedes follows. I bring up the rear.”

It took a full minute to descend that long, claustrophobic tube, staring at the rungs of the ladder with her robes tucked between her knees, sword clanking on metal all the way down—and at the bottom, Gideon was utterly nonplussed.

What lay beneath the trapdoor was a retro installation. A six-sided tunnel lined with dusty, perforated panels stretched out before them. The ceiling was merely a grille that air coolers pumped through and the floor a grille with visible pressure pumps beneath, and the lights were electric bulbs beneath luminous white plastic. There were exposed pipes. The supporting archways contained bulky, square autodoor sidings. This rhapsody of greys and sterile blacks was interrupted over the nearest arch, where, twisting in the dry breeze of the climate cooler, hung a bundle of old bones. Ancient prayer wrappers were ringed around it, and it was the only human, normal touch.

“Follow me,” said the young man called Palamedes.

He strode forward, filthy hem whispering on the dusty-ass tiles. This place ate sound. There were no echoes: they were squashed and absorbed into the panelling. The three of them clanked unmusically down the tunnel until it opened into a big nonagonal room, with passageways radiating out like bronchiae. Letters of brushed steel were set beside each passage:

LABORATORY ONE–THREE

LABORATORY FOUR–SIX

LABORATORY SEVEN–TEN

PRESSURE ROOM

PRESERVATION

MORTUARY

WORK ROOMS

SANITISER

Light wells above made the panelling white; lights from below—little blinking lights attached to huge machines that went down metres beneath the grille, a huge deep way beneath their feet—made the floors softly green. The walls were unadorned, except for an enormous old whiteboard rimmed in metal, printed with lines for a timetable that had not been used in a very, very, very long time. The lines had blurred; the board was stained. Here and there meaningless bits of letters survived: the loop of what might be O or C; the arch of an M; a line-suffixed curve that could be G or Q. But in one bottom corner lingered the ghost of a message, drawn thickly in black ink once, now faded but still quite clear:

It is finished!

The atmosphere down here was oppressive. The air was so dry it made her eyes and mouth prickle. Camilla had one hand on her sword, and Palamedes kept wringing his together, rocking from foot to foot as he moved in a long, slow, 360-degree sweep of the room. At some stimulus, or lack of stimulus, he took a sharp turn toward Sanitiser. Gideon followed.

The short hallway to Sanitiser was floored with panels rather than grille, covered in a powdery build-up like salt, scuffed underfoot and heaped in little drifts. These dunes dissolved like an exhaled breath if kicked.

Quite abruptly there was blood. Palamedes thumbed his tiny flashlight out of his pocket and the liquid gleamed redly beneath the beam. Blood had been spilt, in some quantity, and then smeared heavily away down the hall, leaving a long dark scrape of drying gore. Smaller splatters had dried on the surrounding walls.

The door at the end of the hallway—a huge blast door, metal, with a glass panel set in its centre that was so grimy you could no longer see through it—opened with a touchpad that was also smudged with curls of dried blood. Dried, and drying. Gideon pressed it so hard that the doors twanged open like they were startled.

The first room of Sanitiser stretched before them as a huge, low-ceilinged, white-panelled maze of cubicles: long steel tables beneath the upside-down metal mushrooms of spray heads, and narrow boxes a human could stand upright in. It was fully as big as the grand, destroyed hall of Canaan House. The lights whirred overhead. A panel on the wall blinked furiously as some mechanism in it tried to wake up—it looked like a screen—but eventually it decided better, went blank, and the room was resubmerged in shadow. Gideon was hunting with a dog’s mindless, preternatural panic for a scent, trying to find—

Spatters of blood led her to a big ridged lump in one of the cubicles. This cocoon-looking thing was about the size of a person, if that person wasn’t particularly tall. Before Palamedes and Camilla could stop her, Gideon strode up to it and gave it an enormous kick. Osseous matter showered one side of the cubicle, tinkling away as the spell broke into the oily grey ash of cremains. Curled up inside—hands bloodied, paint smeared, the skin beneath it the same oily grey as the cremains—was Harrowhark Nonagesimus.

Gideon, who had spent the morning planning the wild, abandoned dance of joy with which she would greet Harrow’s dead body, turned back to Camilla and Palamedes.

“I can take it from here,” she said.

Ignoring her, Palamedes pushed past to the broken-bone chrysalis and fished around in its awful contents. He pulled a bit of Harrow’s black robe aside, then the collar of her shirt, past three necklaces of bone chips strung on thread, revealing a startling patch of bare skin—yikes—and pressed two fingers to her neck; he held a hand over her mouth; he said sharply, “Cam,” and she dropped to her knees beside him. She pulled a wallet from somewhere inside her shirt and removed, of all things, a wire. The outer insulation had been stripped from each end, revealing sharp metal tips, and one of these he jabbed into the fleshy part between his thumb and forefinger. It drew blood. The other end he pressed to Harrow’s neck where his fingers had been.

There followed a rapid conversation, high-speed, totally obtuse:

“High dilation rate. Blood loss not from outside injury. Hypovolemia. Breathing’s okay. Honestly—dehydration more than anything.”

“Saline?”

“Nah. She can refill herself when she’s awake.”

Gideon couldn’t help herself. She could understand finding Harrow with her legs on backward and an exploded skull, but she was only following about half of this. “What are you talking about?” she demanded.

Palamedes rocked back on his haunches. He was pinching the edge of the bone cocoon, testing it, flexing it this way and that. “She hasn’t eaten or taken water for a while,” he said. “That’s all. She would have pushed too hard and experienced a rapid drop in blood pressure and heart rate. Likely fainted, woke up, made this—this is incredible, I can’t even … then she fell asleep. It’s all one piece, no wonder she’s out. Is this normal for her?”

“You can tell all that with Sixth necromancy?”

Shockingly, both he and Camilla laughed. They had gruff, barking little laughs, and Camilla took this opportunity to roll the wire back up into its wallet, pinching Harrow’s blood off one end. “Medical necromancy,” said her adept drily, “there’s an oxymoron for you. No. Being a necromancer helps, but no. It’s curative science. Don’t you have that on the Ninth? Don’t answer, I was joking. You can move her now.”

The Reverend Daughter was very light as Gideon folded her (both Palamedes and Camilla winced) into an over-shoulder lift. Air wheezed out of Harrow’s lungs, and the bone cocoon dissolved into a shower of chips and pebbles pattering onto the floor like hail. This seemed to be the one thing to really unnerve the Sixth House necromancer. He swore under his breath and then actually whipped a ruler out of his pocket, measuring one of the chips on the floor.

Gideon shifted, so that the weight and heft of Harrow was more evenly distributed. Her brain had not come back online enough to register that weight, or to save it for later detail in her fantasies where she dropped the Ninth House scion off the side of the docking bay. Her necromancer smelled like sweat and blood and old, burnt bone; her corselet of ribs poked painfully into Gideon’s shoulders. Ascending a staple-wall ladder with a body in tow was a hell of a lot more difficult than descending without one. Palamedes ascended first, then she did, each rung a fight with her awkward load; Camilla followed, and by the time they got to the top Gideon’s jaw hurt from clenching.

The cavalier of the Sixth took Harrow’s shoulders when she reached the top so that Gideon could get out, which was decent of her. Maybe it was just so they could hurry up and close the huge metal trapdoor, turning the key in the lock with a satisfying click. She sat down next to the unconscious figure and rolled one shoulder in its socket, then the other.

Palamedes was shouldering the zip-up bag and saying, “Give her water and food when she wakes up. She’ll take care of the rest. Probably. She needs eight hours of sleep—in a bed, not a library. When she asks how I knew she was in the library, tell her Cam says she clinks when she walks.”

Gideon reached down to take her burden up again, slinging Harrow’s limp and speechless body to occupy her other shoulder. She paused at the foot of the stairs, measuring in her mind’s eye the distance back down the corridor, to the terrace, down the zigzag flights of steps and back through to the Ninth House quarters. Plenty of corners to concuss Harrow with, on the way.

“I owe you one,” she said.

It was Camilla who said, in her quiet, curiously deep voice, “He did it for free.” It was the first time she had looked at Gideon without the flat, stony aggression of a retaining wall, which was nice.

Palamedes said, “What Cam said. Just—look, take a word of advice, here.”

As she waited, he pressed the pads of his fingertips together. His cavalier was looking at him dead on, tense, waiting. In the end, he said: “It’s unbelievably dangerous down there, Ninth. Stop splitting your forces.”

“Dangerous how?”

“If I knew,” said Palamedes, “it’d be a hell of a lot less dangerous.”

Gideon was impatient with vagaries. She wasn’t in Drearburh now. “How do you figure?”

The Sixth House necromancer walked forward and paused before her in the stairwell. He was washed in dilute light from above and behind Gideon, and it showed that he really was thin—the kind of thin made thinner by his grey, shapeless robe, the thinness of trousers cinched too tight to hips. Camilla hovered a perfect half step behind—the half step Aiglamene had trepanned into Gideon—as though suspicious even of the steps.

He said coolly: “Because I’m the greatest necromancer of my generation.”

The unconscious figure sacked across Gideon’s shoulder muttered, “Like hell you are.”

“Thought that would wake her up,” said Palamedes, with no small amount of satisfaction. “Well—I’m off. Like I said, liquids and rest. Good luck.”