15

“I’D DO A HELL of a lot better with a longsword,” Gideon said.

A few hours after, Harrowhark had woken up from her floor nap and accompanied her cavalier back to their quarters. She’d been all for trying again then and there, but it took Gideon one look at her slightly crossing eyes and shaky hands to nix that plan. Now they were back in their main, dark-panelled room, the noonday light filtering through the blinds in hot slats of white, with Gideon galumphing down bread and Harrow picking at crusts. The necromancer had woken up just as sour as ever, which gave Gideon some hope that everything back there had been a passing fit of insanity.

“Insinuation denied,” said Harrowhark. “You don’t have one”—sweet, that meant Harrow hadn’t successfully been through all her stuff—“and more importantly, you should do without. I never liked that cursed thing anyway; I always felt like it was judging me. If you require a two-handed sword every time the chips are down you’re worth nothing as my cavalier.”

“I still don’t get how this whole test is meant to work.”

The Reverend Daughter gave this consideration, for once. “All right. Let me—hmm. You know that a bone construct is animated by a necromantic theorem.”

“No way! I assumed you just thought super hard about bones until they happened.”

Ignoring this, Harrow continued: “This particular construct is animated by multiple theorems, all—woven together, in a sense. That enables it to do things normal constructs can’t possibly.”

“Like regenerate.”

“Yes. The way to destroy it is to unpick that tapestry, Nav, to pull on each thread in turn—in order—until the web gives way. Which would take me ten seconds, if I only had it at arm’s length.”

“Huh,” said Gideon, unwillingly starting to get it. “So I unpick it for you.”

“Only with my assistance. You are not a necromancer. You cannot see thanergetic signatures. I have to find the weak points, but I have to do it through your eyes, which is made infinitely more difficult by you waving a sword around the whole time while your brain—yells at me.”

Gideon opened her mouth to say My brain is always yelling at you, but was interrupted by a sharp rap on the door. The necromancer froze as though she were under attack, but this knock was followed by guttural hysterics of the kind that Gideon had heard before. The sound drifted off down the corridor accompanied by the hurried footsteps of two semiterrified teenagers. Jeannemary and what’s-his-face had shoved something underneath the door, and left.

She went to see what it was. It was a plain, heavy envelope—real paper, creamy brown. “Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus,” she read out loud. “Gideon the Ninth. Fan mail.”

“Give it to me. It might be a trap.”

Gideon ignored this, as it was quite likely Harrow would toss the thing out the window rather than give it a chance. She also ignored Harrow’s lemon-pucker scowl as she withdrew a piece of flimsy—less impressive than the envelope, but who barring the Emperor would use real paper for a letter—and read aloud its contents.

LADY ABIGAIL PENT AND SIR MAGNUS QUINN

IN CELEBRATION OF THEIR ELEVENTH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY

PRESENT THEIR COMPLIMENTS TO THE HEIR AND CAVALIER PRIMARY OF THE NINTH HOUSE

AND REQUEST THE HONOUR OF THEIR COMPANY THIS EVENING.

DINNER TO BE SERVED AT SEVEN O’CLOCK.

Underneath in hasty but still beautifully-formed handwriting was another note:

Don’t be affrighted by the wording, Abigail can’t resist a formal invitation, at home am practically issued one for breakfast. Not at all a serious function & would be deeply pleased if you could both see fit to come. I will make dessert, can reassure you I cook better than I duel.—M.

Harrow said, “No.”

“I want to go,” said Gideon.

“This sounds impossibly vapid.”

“I want to eat a dessert.”

“It occurs to me,” said Harrow, drumming her fingers, “that during a single dinner the deaths of multiple House scions could be assured by one clever pair, a bottle of poison, and then—suddenly, the Fifth House’s primacy is assured. And all because you wanted a sweet.”

“This is a formal invitation to the Ninth House, not just you and me,” said Gideon, more cunningly, “and being dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists, shouldn’t we make a teeny weeny appearance? It’ll look rude if we don’t go. We can extrapolate heaps from whoever doesn’t come, and everyone will, to be polite. Politics. Diplomacy. I’ll eat yours if you don’t want it.”

The necromancer lapsed into brooding. “But this delays finishing the trial,” she complained finally, “and wastes an evening in which Sextus can get ahead of us at his leisure.”

“Bet you Palamedes will be there. We can do the trial afterward. And I’ll be so good. I’ll be silent and Ninth and melancholy. The sight will astound and stimulate you.”

“Nav, you are a hog.”

But that meant they were going to go. Gideon reflected on her unexpected victory as she stared in the mirror, idly counting the pimples cropping up as the result of repeated slathers of cult paint. The atmosphere was—relaxed, in this strange and waiting way, like the time she’d got a sedative and knew a nun was coming to whip out her tonsils. She and Nonagesimus were both waiting for the knife. She had never known Harrow to be so malleable, nor to go such a long time without raking her claws across Gideon’s internal tender spots. Maybe the Lyctor trials were having a mellowing effect on her.

No, that was too much to hope for. Harrowhark was pleased because everything was coming up Harrowhark—she was glutted on getting her own way, and the moment that glow wore off the knives would come out again. Gideon couldn’t trust Harrow. There was always some angle. There was always some shackle closing on you before you could even see it, and you’d only know when she turned the key. But then—

That evening, it was funny to see Harrow fuss. She put on her best and most senescent Ninth robes, and became a skinny black stick swallowed by night-coloured layers of Locked Tomb lace. She fiddled with long earrings of bone in front of the mirror and repainted her face twice. Gideon realised with no small amount of amusement and curiosity that Harrowhark was very frightened. She got more snappish as the evening wore on, and moved from languid postures of affected boredom with a book to a tense, rolled-up curl with hunched shoulders and knees. Harrow kept staring at the clock and wanted to go a full twenty minutes early. Gideon had just thrown on a clean robe and her tinted glasses, and noted that the necromancer was too tetchy even to veto those.

Why on earth was she scared? She had headed up function after dreary, overembroidered Ninth function, ornate in its rules and strict in its regulations, since she was a kid. Now she was all jitters. Maybe it was about being denied her dark necromantic needs down past the access hatch. In any case, both she and Harrowhark turned up, gorgeously gowned in their Locked Tomb vestments, painted like living skulls, looking like douchebags. Harrow clinked when she walked with the sheer multiplicity of bonely accoutrement.

“You came!” said Magnus Quinn when he saw them; he was too well bred to double-take at two horrible examples of Drearburh clergy on the loose. “I’m so pleased you’re wearing your, ah, glad rags; I was convinced I’d be the only one dressed up, and would have to sit resplendently among you all, feeling a bit of an idiot. Reverend Daughter,” he said, and he bowed very deeply to Harrow. “Thank you for coming.”

He himself was immensely trim in a pale brown, long-coated suit that had probably cost more than the Ninth House had in its coffers. The Ninth was high on ancient, shitty treasures but low on liquid assets. In a lower and chillier voice than Harrow usually ever affected, she said: “Blessings on the cavalier of the Fifth. Congratulations on the eleventh year of your espousal.”

Espousal. But Magnus said, “Indeed! Yes! Thank you! It was actually yesterday. By happy accident I remembered and Abigail forgot, so in her resulting angst she wanted to make me dinner. I suggested we all benefit. Come in, please—let me introduce you.”

The dining room off the atrium looked as it ever did, but with certain festive additions. The napkins had all been folded very carefully and some mildly yellowing tablecloth had come out of deep storage. There were correctly articulated place cards by each bright white plate. They were both led to the little kitchen and introduced to the slightly stressed Fifth necromancer whom Gideon had only ever seen in passing: she proved to have more or less the same easy, unaffected manner as Magnus, the type you only got when you came from a house like the Fifth. She looked Gideon very straight in the eye and shook her hand very firmly. Unlike Magnus, she also had the manner some necromancers and librarians developed when they had been working on dead spells for the last fifteen years and no longer worried too much about the living: her stare was far too intense. But she was wearing an apron and it was hard to feel intimidated by her. Her very correct pleasantries with a po-faced Harrow were interrupted with the appearance in the doorway of the wretched teens, who were wearing around a million earrings each. The Ninth moved back to the hall.

It was a strange evening. Harrow nearly vibrated with tension. Teacher, perennially pleased to see them for no reason Gideon ever knew, cornered them immediately. He and the other priests were there already and each had a birthday expression of glee: for his part, Teacher was twinkling with a magnitude usually reserved for dying stars.

“What do you think of Lady Abigail?” he said. “They do say she’s an extraordinarily clever necromancer—not so much in your line, Reverend Daughter, but a gifted summoner and spirit-talker. I have fielded many questions from her about Canaan House. I hope she and Magnus the Fifth are good cooks! We First have all hyped the occasion, I’m afraid, but priests who live plainly must get excited over food. Of course, the sombre Ninth must be similar.”

The sombre Ninth, in the form of its adept, said: “We prefer to live simply.”

“Of course, of course,” said Teacher, whose attention had already wandered to trashy gossip. His bright blue eyes had searched the room for other objects of interest, and finding them, leaned in confidingly. “Yes, and there’s young Jeannemary the Fourth and Isaac Tettares. Looking very pretty, the both of them. Isaac looks as though he has been studying too much.” (Isaac, the necromancer teen with brushed-up hair bleached orange, looked more like he was suffering an abundance of pituitary gland.) “Naturally he is Pent’s protégé. I hear the Fifth takes special pains with the Fourth … hegemonic pains, some may say. It must be difficult when they are both so young. But they all seem to get on well…”

“How do you know?”

“Reverend Daughter,” the priest said, smiling, “you miss out on important things spending all your time so usefully down in the dark. Now, Gideon the Ninth—she could tell you a great deal if she were not bound to her admirable vow of silence. Your penitence shames me.”

At this, Teacher gave Gideon a roguish wink, which was also the worst.

Movement in the doorway. The Third and Sixth Houses had arrived all at once, the drab moth of Palamedes making the golden butterfly of Coronabeth Tridentarius all the more aureate and fair. They were sizing each other up like prize fighters. Teacher said, “Now, the main event!”

It turned out that the Fifth’s idea of a rollicking good time was a seating arrangement. This realisation caused Harrow’s carefully controlled mask to take on a distinct veer to the tragic. They were separated, and Gideon found herself elbow to elbow between Palamedes and the dreadful teen cavalier of the Fourth, who looked as though she regretted everything that had ever led up to this moment. Dulcinea, opposite, kissed her hand to Gideon twice before Gideon had even sat down.

At least Harrow wasn’t faring any better. She had been placed at the other end of the table diagonal to the mayonnaise uncle, who looked even more appalled than Jeannemary the Fourth. Opposite was Ianthe and to the other diagonal was Protesilaus, completing one of the worst tableaus in history; Naberius Tern was to Harrow’s left and was carrying on some long communication with Ianthe conducted entirely in arch eyebrow quirks. As Harrow smouldered with hatred, Gideon began to enjoy herself.

Magnus clinked his spoon against his water glass. The conversation, which was terminal to start with, convulsed to a halt.

“Before we begin,” he said, “a short speech.”

The three priests looked as though they had never wanted anything so much in their lives as a short speech. One of the teens, slumped out of Magnus’s sight, mimed putting their neck in a noose.

“I thought I’d, er,” he began, “say a few words to bring us all together. This must be the first time in—a very long time that the Houses have been together like this. We were reborn together but remain so remote. So I thought I’d point out our similarities, rather than our differences.

“What do Marta the Second, Naberius the Third, Jeannemary the Fourth, Magnus the Fifth, Camilla the Sixth, Protesilaus the Seventh, Colum the Eighth, and Gideon the Ninth all have in common?”

You could have heard a hair flutter to the floor. Everyone stared, poker-faced, in the thick ensuing silence.

Magnus looked pleased with himself.

“The same middle name,” he said.

Coronabeth laughed so hard that she had to honk her beautiful nose into a napkin. Someone was explaining the joke to the salt-and-pepper priest, who, when they got it, said “Oh, ‘the’!” which started Corona off again. The Second, entombed in dress uniforms so starched you could fold them like paper, wore the tiny smiles of two people who’d had to put up with Cohort formal dinners before.

The appearance of two skeletons bearing an enormous tureen of food broke the last tension. Under Abigail’s direction, they filled everyone’s bowl with good-smelling grain, white and fluffy, boiled in onion broth. Little drifts of chopped nuts or tiny tart red fruits were scattered throughout, and it was hot and spicy and good, which had completed Gideon’s requirements for a meal at hot. She put her head down and ate, insensible, until one of the white-robed skeletons stepped forward to give her seconds.

At that point she could tune in to the conversations around her, which had survived their first faltering encounters with the enemy and were now in full swing:

“—the juicy part is the sarcotesta. Good, aren’t they? There’s a red seed apple growing in the greenhouse. Have you seen the greenhouses?—”

“—in keeping with Ottavian custom for a necromancer’s fast until evening, which includes—”

“—which failed to fix the drive, which failed to get her back to the system in time, which meant I spent the first nine months wrapped in house dirt—”

“—interesting question,” Palamedes was saying at Gideon’s right. “You might say that Scholar recognises the specialist, and Warden recognises the duty, which is why Master Warden is the higher rank. Taken in the sense of the supervisor and, if you think about it another way, the sense of the prison. D’you know what we call the internal jaws of a lock?—”

Opposite, Dulcinea murmured to Abigail: “I think that is a perfect shame.”

“Thank you. We’re over it; it simply wasn’t in our cards,” the necromancer said, a bit bracingly. “My younger brother’s the next in line. He’ll do well. It gives me more time to collate the manuscript, which I’ve been married to longer than I have to Magnus.”

“So keep in mind I’m the kind of pity case you bring out at parties to make other people feel better about themselves,” the other woman said smilingly, ignoring the Fifth’s polite protests to the contrary, “but I would love you to explain your work, just so long as you pretend I am five and go from there.”

“If I can’t explain this clearly, then the fault is mine, not yours. It’s not so complex. We have so little that survived from the period post-Resurrection, pre-sovereignty and pre-Cohort, except in secondhand records. We have transcripts of those from the Sixth, though they’re keeping the originals.”

“They’re kept in a box full of helium so they’ll outlast the heat death of Dominicus, Lady Pent,” said Palamedes.

“Your Masters won’t even let me look at them through the glass.”

“Light is the paper-killer,” he said. “Sorry. It’s nothing against you. It’s not in our particular interest to hoard Lyctoral records.”

“They’re good copies, at least—and I spend my time studying those. Writing commentary, naturally. But being here meant almost more to me than the idea of serving the Emperor. Canaan House is a holy grail! What we know about the Lyctors is tremendously antiseptic. I’ve actually found what I think are unencrypted communiqués between—”

Even with Dulcinea Septimus making the intense eyelash bat of What you are doing and saying is so fascinating to me, Dulcinea Septimus, Gideon knew a boring conversation when she heard one. She took cautious sips of the purple, slightly chewy wine and was trying not to cough as she swung her attention over to her own shadowy marchioness of bones: Harrow was picking at the food, sandwiched between the stony cavaliers of the Seventh and Second. Every so often she would say something terse to Protesilaus, who would take sixty seconds to think about it before making replies so uninflected and curt that they made Harrow sparkle by comparison.

The mayonnaise uncle was talking to the anaemic twin, his probable future bride. “I was removed by … surgical means,” Ianthe was saying calmly, her long fingers toying with the stem of her glass. “My sister is a few minutes older.”

The white-kirtled young uncle was not eating. He had taken a few priggish sips of wine, but spent most of his time with his hands folded quietly over each other and staring. He had the posture of a metre ruler. “Your parents,” he said, in his unexpectedly deep and sonorous voice, “risked intervention?”

“Yes. Corona, you see, had removed my source of oxygen.”

“A wasted opportunity, I’d think.”

“I don’t live alternate histories. Corona’s birth put my survivability somewhere around definite nil.”

“It wasn’t on purpose, mark you,” drawled her cavalier from across the table. His hair was so perfect that Gideon kept staring at it, mesmerised, hoping some specific bit of the ceiling would break down and squash it flat.

Ianthe affected shock. “Why, Babs, are you part of this conversation?”

“I’m just saying, Princess, you don’t have to be so down on her like that—”

“You don’t have to contradict me in public, and yet—and yet.”

Naberius flicked his eyes very obviously over to the other end of the table, but Coronabeth was busy with Magnus: probably swapping new jokes, Gideon thought. He said, “Stop being a pill.”

“I repeat, Babs, are you part of this conversation?”

“Thank God, no,” said the hapless Babs sourly, and turned back to his previous conversation partner: the thickset nephew cavalier, stolidly refilling his bowl. He did not look thrilled to repossess the Third’s undivided attention. Next to the spruce Naberius Tern, he looked shabbier and more worn-out than ever. “Now, look, Eighth, here’s why you’re wrong about the buckler…”

Gideon would have liked to know what was wrong about the buckler; but as she reached over for her glass again, she felt a tug on her sleeve. It was the disagreeable teen who was sitting on her other side, looking at her with a particularly fierce expression, emphasised with near-Ninth quantities of black eye makeup. Jeannemary the Fourth screwed up her mouth as though expecting an injection, all the little corners of her face more angular in ferociousness, her jillion earrings jingling.

“This is going to be a weird question,” said Jeannemary.

Gideon dropped her arm and tilted her head quizzically. A little bit of blood drained from the teen’s face, and Gideon almost felt sorry for her: hood and paint and robes on the priesthood around her had put her off dinners at the same age. But the teen stuck her awful courage to its sticking place, breathed out hard through her teeth, and blurted very quietly:

“Ninth … how big are your biceps?”

It seemed to be long after Gideon was forced to supinate and flex at the whim of a teenage girl that their bowls were replaced with new ones, these filled with confections of cream and fruit, and mostly sugar; the Fifth had obviously been busy. Gideon ate three helpings and Magnus, not bothering to hide his amusement, pushed a fourth her way. Magnus was inarguably a much better cook than a duellist. Before she had come to Canaan House, Gideon had considered getting full a grim process of gruel and spoon and mouth that had to be done in order to maximise chances of not having her ass later kicked by Aiglamene in some dim room. It was one of the first times that she had felt full and fat and honestly happy about it.

Afterward there was a tray of the hot, grassy tea to clear the mouth, and the various Houses stood around with warm cups in their hands to watch the skeletons clear up.

Gideon looked around for Harrow. Her necromancer was ensconced in a corner with, of all people, Teacher: she was talking to him in low tones as he alternately nodded or shook his head, looking more thoughtful than giddy for once, his thumbs stuck in his gorgeous rainbow sash.

Someone touched Gideon’s hand, very lightly, as though afraid of startling her. It was Dulcinea, who had taken refuge in a chair; she was shifting her hips a little awkwardly in the hard wooden seat with the tiny, restless motions Gideon suspected she made when she was sore. She looked tired, and older than usual; but her pink mouth was still very pink, and her eyes alight with illicit amusement.

“Are your biceps huge,” she said, “or are they just enormous? Ninth, please tick the correct box.”

Gideon made sure her necromancer couldn’t see her, and then made a rude gesture. Dulcinea laughed her silvery laugh, but it was sleepy somehow, quiet. She pointed serenely to a spot next to her seat and Gideon obligingly squatted there on her haunches. Dulcinea was breathing a little harder. She was wearing a filmy, foam-coloured dress and Gideon could see her ribs expand beneath it, like a shocked animal’s. Her silky, chestnut-coloured ringlets, painstakingly curled, spread out over her shoulders.

“I liked that dinner,” said Lady Septimus, with deep satisfaction. “It was useful. Look at the children.”

Gideon looked. Isaac and Jeannemary were standing close to the table, Jeannemary’s sleeves pulled down to reveal her biceps. They were the muscles of an athletic and determined fourteen-year-old, which was to say, unripped but full of potential; her floppy-haired teen-in-crime was wearily measuring them with his hands as they carried on a conversation in whispers—

(“I told you so.”

“Yours are fine?”

“Isaac.”

“It’s not like this is a bicep competition?”

“Dumbest thing you ever said?”)

Their hisses carried. Abigail, who was standing nearby deep in conversation with one of the Second, reached out a hand to touch Isaac lightly on the shoulder in reproof. She did not even turn around or break off talking. The Fourth adept winced: his cavalier had a hard, resentful, told-off expression on her face.

Dulcinea murmured, “Oh, Gideon the Ninth, the Houses are arranged so badly … full of suspicion after a whole myriad of peaceable years. What do they compete for? The Emperor’s favour? What does that look like? What can they want? It’s not as though they haven’t all gotten fat off our Cohort prizes … mostly. I have been thinking about all that, lately, and the only conclusion I can come to is…”

She trailed off. They were both silent in that pause’s pregnant wake, listening to the polite and impolite after-dinner chatter all around them, the clatter of skeletons with used-up knives and forks. Into that white noise came Palamedes, who was, weirdly enough, bearing a full teacup on a tray: he proffered it to the weary lady of the Seventh, who looked at him with frank interest.

“Thank you awfully, Master Warden,” she said.

If she had looked at him with interest, he looked at her with—well. He looked at her thin and filmy dress and her swell-jointed fingers, and at her curls and the crest of her jaw, until Gideon felt hell of embarrassed being anywhere near that expression. It was a very intense and focused curiosity—there wasn’t a hint of smoulder in it, not really, but it was a look that peeled skin and looked through flesh. His eyes were like lustrous grey stone; Gideon didn’t know if she could be as completely composed as Dulcinea under that same look.

Palamedes said lightly: “I’m ever at your service, Lady Septimus.”

Then he gave a small trim bow like a waiter, adjusted his spectacles, and abruptly turned tail. Well! thought Gideon, watching him slide back into the crowd. Hell! Then she remembered that the Sixth had a weirdo fascination with medical science and probably found chronic illness as appealing as a pair of tight shorts, and then she thought: Well, hell!

Dulcinea was placidly sipping her tea. Gideon stared at her, waiting for the conclusion that had never come. Eventually the Seventh tore her gaze away from the small crowd of House scions and their cavalier primaries, and she said: “My conclusion? It’s— Oh, there’s your necromancer!”

Harrow had broken off from Teacher and was homing in on Gideon like iron to a lodestone. She offered Dulcinea only the most cursory glance; Dulcinea herself was smiling with what she obviously thought was infinite sweetness and what Gideon knew to be an expression of animal cunning; for Gideon not even a word, but a thrust of the pointy chin upward. Gideon propelled herself to stand and tried to ignore the Seventh’s eyebrows waggling in their direction, which thankfully her necromancer didn’t notice. Harrowhark was too busy storming out of the room with her robe billowing out behind her in the way Gideon suspected she had secretly practised. She heard Magnus the Fifth call out a gentle, “I am glad you came, Ninth!” but Harrow took no time to say goodbye, which hurt her feelings a little because Magnus was nice.

“Slow down, numbnuts,” she hissed, when she thought they were out of earshot of anyone. “Where’s the fire?”

“Nowhere—yet.” Harrow sounded breathless.

“I’ve eaten my own body weight. Don’t make me hurl.”

“As mentioned before, you’re a hog. Hurry up. We don’t have much time.”

“What?” There was a moment’s respite as Harrow hauled open one of the little escape-route staircase doors. The sun had set and the generator lights glowed a sad and disheartened green: the skeletons, busy with dinner, had apparently not lit the candles. “What do you mean?”

“I mean we need to make up time.”

“Hey, repeatedly, on what grounds?”

Harrow propped open the door with a bony hand. The expression on her face was resolute. “Because Abigail Pent asked that faithless Eighth prig if he knew about access down to the lower floors,” she said, “and he said yes. Pent is not stupid, and that’s another confirmed competitor on our hands. For God’s sake hurry up, Griddle, I give us five hours before she’s in the chamber herself.”