13

EITHER HARROWHARK FELL BACK unconscious, having used her last remaining energy to spite Palamedes, or she was just already such a dick she could spite him in her sleep. Or maybe she was playing dead. Gideon didn’t care. Her necromancer remained heavy and unmoving all the way back to their rooms. Nobody saw them on the way, for which she was grateful, and she was heartily glad by the end of it to dump her prone and black-wrapped burden on the bed.

Nonagesimus had looked like crap in the darkness of the weird facility. In the comfortable gloom of their quarters she looked worse. Unwrapping her hood and veil revealed torn lips and cracked face paint, flaking off in big brown-glazed smears at one temple. The veil had slipped down with the trip up the ladder. Gideon could see that her nostrils were ringed with a thick black rime of blood, and her hairline was also smeared with thin, crusty traces of it. There were no other signs of blood on the rest of her clothes or her robes, just sweat patches. Gideon had checked for injuries and been traumatised by the experience.

She went to the bathroom and filled up a glass of water from the tap, and she left it next to Harrow, then hesitated hard. How to rehydrate? Was she meant to—wash her mouth, or something? Did she need to clean off the tusks of dried blood at each nostril? Gideon popped each shoulder twice in indecision, grabbed the water glass, and reached toward Harrow.

“Touch me again and I’ll kill you,” said Harrow, scratch-throated, without opening her eyes. “I really will.”

Gideon pulled her fingers back as though from a flame, and exhaled.

“Good luck with that, bucko,” she said. “You look all mummification and no meat.”

Harrow did not move. There was a bruise peeking out behind her ear, already deep purple. “I’m not saying it wouldn’t hurt me, Griddle,” she murmured. “I am just saying you’d be dead.”

Gideon leant back heavily against the bedside table and took a long, malicious pull from Harrow’s glass of water. She felt tight and jangly, and the sweat had cooled to both an itch and a shiver inside her robes. She threw back the hood and shrugged herself out of the robe, feeling like a sleep-deprived child. “‘Thanks, Gideon,’” she said aloud. “‘I was in a pickle and you saved me, which I had no reasonable expectation of, since I’m an asshole who got stuck in a bone in a basement.’ Is that what you’ve been doing without me, all this time? Dicking around in a basement?”

The adept’s lips curled back, showing little slashes of swollen pink through the grey. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I was dicking around in the basement. You didn’t need to get involved. You did just what I was afraid you would do, which was to remove me from a situation that I didn’t need to be removed from.”

“Didn’t need—? What, you were having a nap of your own free will?”

“I was recuperating—”

“Balls you were.”

Harrow opened her eyes. Her voice rose, cracking with tension: “The Sixth House, Griddle! Do you know how difficult it is to stay ahead of Palamedes Sextus? Didn’t I tell you to keep your pneumatic mouth shut? I would have been fine; I’d fainted; I was resting.”

“And how I’m meant to know that,” said Gideon heavily, “I’ve got no idea. I want answers, and I want them yesterday.”

The whites around Harrow’s eyes were pink and inflamed, probably from too little rest and too much fainting. She closed them again and her head came down, heavy, back to the bed. Her dead black hair fell in lank and tangled hanks on the pillow. She looked flat and tired.

“I’m not having this conversation with you,” she said finally.

“Yeah, you are,” said Gideon. “I took my key ring back, so if you ever want to dick around in that basement again you’ll have a hell of a time getting back in there.”

The necromancer’s lips pursed in a sour, thin line that was obviously meant to show iron resolve but simply showed a bunch of mouth scabs. “That’s easily contrived. You can’t stay awake forever.”

“Quit bluffing, Nonagesimus! Quit acting like I was the one who messed up here! You haven’t spoken more than twenty words to me since we arrived, you’ve kept me totally in the dark, and yet I’ve done every single thing you ever goddamned asked of me no matter what it was—okay, I did come to find you, nearly every single thing—but I kept my head down and I didn’t start shit. So if you could see your way to being even ten percent less salty with me, that’d be just terrific.”

Silence spread between them. The iron resolve on that scabrous mouth seemed to waver, just a little bit. Gideon added, “And don’t push me. The places where I can and would stick this thing for safekeeping would astonish you.”

“Puke,” murmured Harrow. And: “Give me the water, Griddle.”

She could barely drink it. She lifted her head for a few spluttering sips, then lay back down, eyelashes brushing eyelids again. For a couple of moments Gideon thought she had gone back to sleep: but then Harrow stirred and said colourlessly: “I’d hardly call sucker-punching the Third cavalier keeping your head down.”

“You disapprove?”

“What? Hardly,” said Harrow, unexpectedly. “You should have finished the job. On the other hand, dallying with the Seventh House is the act of the naif or the fool, or both. What part of Don’t talk to anybody did you not register—”

“Dulcinea Septimus is dying,” said Gideon. “Give me a break.”

Harrow said, “She picked an interesting place to die.”

“What are you doing, where are you doing it, why are you doing it? Start talking, Reverend Daughter.”

They stared each other down, both similarly mulish. Harrow had taken another swig of water and was slowly swilling it around in her cheeks, apparently thinking hard. Gideon dropped back to sit on the gently sagging dresser, and she waited. Her necromancer’s mouth was still puckered up with a sourness that would’ve impressed a lemon, but she asked abruptly:

“What did the priest specify was the only rule, the first day we were here?”

“You’re not very good at I’m Asking the Questions Now, Bitch, are you,” said Gideon.

“This is going somewhere. Answer me.”

Gideon resented the answer me, but she begrudgingly cast her mind back through a montage of rotting furniture, assholes, and astringent tea. “Teacher?” she said. “Uh—the door thing. We weren’t to go through any locked door.”

“More specifically, we weren’t to go through a locked door without permission. The old man’s a pain in the neck, but he was giving us a clue—take a look at this.”

Harrow appeared to be thawing to her subject. She thrashed feebly trying to sit up, but before this could soften Gideon’s concrete heart she got cross and snapped two bone chips out of her sleeve. Harrow pressed them against the dank arm of the four-poster bed, and out sprung bony arms that hauled her up into a sitting position. They dragged her flush with the headboard, and a shower of dust trickled down from the enormous cloth drapes. Harrow sneezed fretfully, half of it blood.

She searched about in her robes and came up with a thick little book bound in cracked, blackened stuff, with the awful orange tone of tanned human leather. The book was a thousand pages thick, maybe a million. “Light,” she demanded, and Gideon nudged the lamp forward. “Good. Look here.”

Harrow flicked through pages with scabby fingers until she had opened the squat book midway, showing three sets of angular diagrams. They appeared to be numerous overlapping squares, with lines coming out at odd angles and a scrawl of notes or numbers bumping up against the lines. The writing was minute and spidery: the squares mazelike and innumerable. Gideon realised after a moment that she was looking at an architectural drawing, and that it was an architectural drawing of Canaan House. It was scribbled thickly with cross marks.

“I’ve divided Canaan House into its three most significant levels, but that’s not quite accurate. The central floor is more of a mezzanine providing access to the top and bottom floors. The terraces are sections in and of themselves, but they’re not important for what I’m identifying here. Each X denotes a door. Current count is seven hundred and seventy-five, and Griddle—only six are locked. The first two hundred doors I identified—”

“You spent this whole time counting doors?”

“This calls for rigor, Nav.”

“Maybe rigor … mortis,” said Gideon, who assumed that puns were funny automatically.

“The first two hundred doors I identified,” Harrow repeated, through gritted teeth, “included the access hatch to the lower area of Canaan House. My method was to start at the bottom and go up as far as I could from a static starting point. There are two lock-points here, at X-22 and X-155. X-155 is the hatch, X-22 is another door. I went to Teacher and asked permission to enter both. He agreed to let me through the hatch if I could provide a safe place for the key, but said that X-22 didn’t belong to him and that he couldn’t in good conscience give permission. All the while he was winking at me so hard that I thought he had suffered a stroke.”

Despite everything, Gideon was starting to get interested. “Okay. Then what?”

“Then in the morning I retrieved the key ring,” said Harrow.

“Hold up, hold up. My key ring, more correctly, but let’s be clear here, you’d counted two hundred doors before the first morning?”

“A head start,” said her necromancer, “is the only advantage one can claim by choice. My other advantage is in workforce. In this case I’m fairly sure that Sextus started a mere two hours after me, and that Eighth House zealot not long after.”

All of this said a lot about the psyche of Harrowhark Nonagesimus, something about Palamedes Sextus, and a little about the mayonnaise uncle, but Gideon was given no time to interrupt. Harrow was continuing, “And I’m not at all sure about the Third. Never mind. Anyway, I’ve spent the majority of my time down the access hatch in the facility. Here.”

Another dry, crackly page was turned. This one was stained with unmentionable fluids and brown patches, which could have been tea and could have been blood. The diagram was much less detailed than the three for the upper levels. In a fat-leaded pencil Harrow had drawn a network of question marks, and some of the rooms were vague sketches rather than the perfectly ruled mazes of the first maps.

Here there were familiar labels: LABORATORY ONE through to LABORATORY TEN. PRESSURE ROOM. PRESERVATION. MORT. WORK ROOM ONE through to WORK ROOM FIVE. And SANITISER, though also: CONTROL ROOM?, CONSOLE? and DUMP ROOM?. It was set out neatly, with corridors all the same width and doors in expected places. It reminded Gideon of some of the oldest parts of the Ninth House, the bits secluded deep below the more modern twisty little hallways and crooked walls with squints.

“It’s very old,” Harrow said, quietly, more to herself than to Gideon. “Considerably older than the rest of Canaan House. It’s pre-Resurrection—or made to look pre-Resurrection, which is just as curious. I know Sextus is obsessed with dating the structure, but as usual, he’s getting caught up in the details. What’s important is the function.”

“So what was it for?”

Harrow said, “If I knew that, I’d be a Lyctor already.”

“Do you know who used it?”

“That’s a much better question, Nav.”

“And why,” said Gideon, “were you down there with your ass kicked to hell, hiding in a bone?”

The Reverend Daughter sighed heavily, then had a fit of coughing, which served her right. “Whoever left the facility also left the majority of their work behind and intact. No theorems or tomes, unless they’ve been removed—and I doubt Teacher removed them—but, as I’ve discovered, it’s possible to trigger … tests. Theorem models that they would have used. Most of the chambers down there were used to prepare for something, and they were left in a state where anyone who comes across it can re-enact the setup. Someone left—challenges—down there for any necromancer talented enough to understand what they were doing.”

“Stop being opaque, Nonagesimus. What do you mean by challenges?”

“I mean,” said Harrowhark, “that I have lost one hundred and sixty-three skeletons to a single laboratory construct.”

“What.”

“I’m prevented from seeing whatever destroys the skeletons I raise,” came the terse answer. “I haven’t worked out how to properly outfit them yet. If the priests have managed to engineer a scaffolded skeleton of the type they use as servants—my God, Nav, have you seen the bonework on them?—then I surely can, but I haven’t worked out how to disassemble one of the First House corpus yet and I can’t do enough just by looking. Don’t get me wrong; I will. I get closer every day. You found me when I’d exhausted myself, that’s all.”

“But what the hell’s it all for?”

“As I have repeated to excess, Griddle, I’m still working on the theory. Nonetheless—look back at the maps.”

The necromancer fell to brooding, staring through swollen eyelids down at the journal. Somewhat astonished still, Gideon leaned over and, ignoring her adept’s dumb mystic despond, flipped the pages back to the three-level plan for Canaan House. A few of the X-marked doors were circled with scratchy black ink and marked with crabbed symbols that she did not recognise. These seemed to be distantly distributed throughout the First House building, tucked away or secreted.

Gideon flipped another page. There was a pencil sketch of an animal’s skull with long horns. The horns curved inward into points that almost touched but not quite, and the sockets were deep holes of black pencil lead. An electric thrill of recognition ran through her.

“I’ve seen this before,” she said.

Harrow bestirred herself. Her eyes narrowed. “Where?”

“Hang on. Let me look at the map again.” Gideon flipped back and found the atrium; she traced with her finger the twisty route from there to the corridor and stairs that led to the cavalier’s dais. She found the staircase, and jabbed with her thumbnail: “You haven’t got it—way ahead of you, Nonagesimus. There’s a hidden hallway here, with a locked door.”

“Are you certain?” Now Harrow was well and truly awake. At the answering nod she rummaged in her robes for a long iron needle and jabbed it inside her mouth—Gideon winced—before the bones at the bedhead unceremoniously shoved her up to a ninety-degree angle, weapon held ready, end shining with red blood. She said, “Show me, Nav.”

Thoroughly satisfied with herself, Gideon placed her finger next to the enormous door of black stone she’d hidden behind the tapestry. Harrow marked the place with a bloody red cross and blew on the ink: it skeletonised immediately into a tarry, dry brown. X-203. The necromancer could not hide a triumphant smile. It stretched her mouth and made her split lips bleed. The sight was incomparably creepy. “If you’re correct,” she said, “and if I’m correct—well.”

Exhausted by all the effort, Harrow closed the journal and tucked it back inside her robe. She sank back down into the dusty embrace of the bones, wrist joints clacking as they lowered her onto the dark slippery material of the duvet. She groped blindly for the water and spilled half of the remnants down her front as she took gulping, greedy sips. She dropped the empty glass onto the bed next to her, and then she closed her eyes. Gideon found herself gripping the slender rapier at her hip and feeling the heft of its basket hilt.

“You could’ve died today,” she said conversationally.

For a long time the girl on the bed was supine and silent. Her chest rose and fell slightly, evenly, as though in sleep. Then Harrow said without opening her eyes, “You could attempt to finish me right now, if you liked. You might even win.”

“Shut up,” said Gideon, flat and grim. “I mean that you’re making me look like a disloyal buffoon. I mean it’s your fault that I can’t take being your bodyguard seriously. I mean that all this sacred duty do exactly as I say blah blah blah shit does not matter in the least if you die of dehydration in a bone.”

“I wasn’t about to—”

“Baseline standard of a cavalier,” said Gideon, “is you not dying in a bone.”

“There was no—”

“No. It’s Gideon Nav Talking Time. I want to get out of here and you want to be a Lyctor,” she said. “We need to get in formation if that’s going to happen. If you don’t want me to ditch the paint, this sword, and the cover story, you’re taking me down there with you.”

“Griddle—”

“Gideon Nav Talking Time. The Sixth must think we’re absolutely full of horseshit. I’m going down there with you because I am sick of doing nothing. If I have to wander around faking a vow of silence and scowling for one more day I will just open all my veins on top of Teacher. Don’t go down there solo. Don’t die in a bone. I am your creature, gloom mistress. I serve you with fidelity as big as a mountain, penumbral lady.”

Harrow’s eyes flickered open. “Stop.”

“I am your sworn sword, night boss.”

“Fine,” said Harrow heavily.

Gideon’s mouth was about to round out the words “bone empress” before she realised what had been said. The expression on the other girl’s face was now all resignation: resignation and exhaustion and also something else, but mostly resignation. “I acknowledge your argument,” she said. “I disagree with it, but I see the margin of error. Fine.”

It would have been pushing her luck to point out that there was no real way Harrowhark could have denied her; she had the key, the upper hand, and significantly more blood. So all she said was, “Okay. Great. Fine.”

“And you had better stop it with all this twilit princess garbage,” said Harrow, “because I may start to enjoy it. Helping me will be achingly dull, Nav. I need patience. I need obedience. I need to know that you are going to act as though giving me devotion is your new favourite pastime, even though it galls us both senseless.”

Gideon, dizzy with success, crossed one leg around the other and leant back on the dresser in a posture of triumph. “Come on. How bad could it be?”

Harrow’s lips curled. They showed her teeth, stained slightly pink with blood. She smiled again—slower than before, just as terrible, just as strange.

“Down there resides the sum of all necromantic transgression,” she said, in the singsong way of a child repeating a poem. “The unperceivable howl of ten thousand million unfed ghosts who will hear each echoed footstep as defilement. They would not even be satisfied if they tore you apart. The space beyond that door is profoundly haunted in ways I cannot say, and by means you won’t understand; and you may die by violence, or you may simply lose your soul.”

Gideon rolled her eyes so hard that she felt in danger of twisting the optic nerve.

“Knock it off. We’re not in chapel now.”

But Harrow said: “It’s not one of mine, Griddle. I’m repeating exactly—to the word—what Teacher said to me.”

“Teacher said that the facility was chocka with ghosts and you might die?”

“Correct.”

“Surprise, my tenebrous overlord!” said Gideon. “Ghosts and you might die is my middle name.”