33

IT SEEMED AS THOUGH just when you least wanted them, the Eighth House were always there. They were striding down the whitewashed corridor outside Dulcinea’s room as the rest of the group made their way back to her, making the whitewash look off-colour and dirty with the spotlessness of their robes. Gideon nearly drew her sword; but they had come in need, rather than in warfare.

“The Third House have defiled a body,” said Silas Octakiseron, by way of hello. “The servants are all destroyed. Where’s the Second and the Seventh?”

Harrow said, “Dead. Incapacitated. So is Teacher.”

“That leaves us critically shorthanded,” said the Eighth House necromancer, who could not be accused of having the milk of human kindness running through his veins. He did not even have the thin and tasteless juice of feigned empathy. “Listen. The Third have opened up Lady Pent—”

Palamedes said, “Abigail?” and Harrow said, “Opened up?”

“Brother Asht saw the Third leave the morgue this morning, but we have not seen them since,” said Silas. “They are not in their quarters and the facility hatch is locked. We are compelled to join forces. Abigail Pent has been interfered with and opened up.”

“Please elaborate opened up, because my imagination is better than your description and I am not having a lot of fun here,” said Gideon.

The Eighth cavalier said heavily, “Come and see.”

It couldn’t have been an ambush. There was one House versus two. And for once, Silas Octakiseron seemed genuinely jumpy. Gideon hung back near Harrowhark as the grisly procession made its way down through the hallways again, to the atrium, working their way toward the dining hall and the makeshift morgue off the kitchen.

Harrow murmured beneath her breath, for Gideon’s ears only: “The Second dead and dying. Teacher dead, and the revenants with him—”

“Teacher turned against the Second. Why are you so sure that Teacher didn’t kill the others?”

“Because Teacher was afraid of Canaan House and the facility most of all,” said Harrow. “I need to go back and check, but I suspect he was incapable of going down that ladder at all. He was a construct himself. But what was Teacher the mould for? Griddle, at the first sign of trouble—”

“Run like hell,” said Gideon.

“I was going to say, Hit it with your sword,” said Harrow.

The morgue was dreary and chill and serene. The anxiety of the rest of Canaan House had not touched it. It was getting to be untenably full: the two teens were still safely away in their cold iron drawers, and Protesilaus was in situ, though he was a head without the body. As it would have been difficult to cram all of him in, this was maybe a blessing in disguise. Magnus was also laid out on his own slab, a little too tall for comfort: but his wife—

Abigail’s body had been left out, pulled fully away from its niche. She was still cold and ashen-faced and dead. Her shirt had been rolled up to her ribs. With no great elegance, a knife had been used to open up her abdomen on the right side of her body. There was a big bloodless hole there the size of a fist.

Their unseemly interest never quenched, both of the Sixth House immediately peered into the wound. Camilla flicked on her pocket torch. Harrow crowded in beside them while Gideon stayed to watch the Eighth. Silas looked as wan and uncomfortable as Abigail did; his cavalier was as impassive as ever, and he did not meet Gideon’s eye.

“The cut was made with Tern’s triple-knife,” said Palamedes. He had laid his hand over the wound. He eased his fingers into the hole without any hint of a wince, and he held them there for a second. “And removed the—no, the kidney’s still present. Cam, there was something here.”

“Magnifier?”

“Don’t need it. It was metal—Camilla, it was here for a while … the flesh had sealed over it. It would—fuck!”

The rest of the room jumped. But nothing had bitten Palamedes, except maybe internally: he was staring off into the middle distance, horrified. He looked as though he had just been given a piece of chocolate cake and found, after two bites, half a spider.

“My timing was wrong,” he said softly, to himself, and again more waspishly: “Nonagesimus. My timing was wrong.”

“Use your words, Sextus.”

“Why didn’t I investigate Abigail before—The Fifth went down into the facility—they must have completed a challenge. The night of the dinner. Pent was nobody’s fool. They were caught out on the top of the stairs coming back. Something was hidden inside her to avoid detection—God knows why she did it, or why anyone did it—three inches long, metal, shaft, teeth—”

“A key,” said Silas.

“But that’s insane,” said Gideon.

“Someone wanted to hide that key very badly—it may have been Lady Pent herself,” said Palamedes. Finally, he withdrew his hand from her insides, and crossed to wash it in the sink, which Gideon thought was the civilised thing to do. “Or it may have been the person who killed her. There is one room that someone has made every attempt to keep us from. Octakiseron, this wasn’t defilement for the sake of defilement, it was someone breaking open a lockbox.”

Silas said calmly, “Are those rooms worth carrying such a sin?”

Harrow stared at him.

“You took two keys off the Seventh House,” she demanded, “won one from a challenge, and never bothered to open their doors?”

“I won the first key to see what I was up against, and took possession of two more to preserve them from misuse,” said Silas. “I hate this House. I despise the reduction of a holy temple to a maze and a puzzle. I took the keys so that you wouldn’t have them. Nor the Sixth, nor the Third.”

Palamedes wiped his hands dry on a piece of towelling and pushed his glasses up his nose. They had fogged up from his breath, in that cold and quiet place.

“Master Octakiseron,” he said, “you are an intellectual cretin and a dog in a manger, but at least you’re consistent. I know which door this opens, as does the Ninth. And, we have to assume, so does the Third. I know where they’ll be, and I want to see what they’ve found—”

“Before it is too late,” said Harrow.

She went over to the racks of bodies, and she opened up one last slab that Gideon had forgotten about entirely. It was the sad pile of cremains and bone that they had found in the furnace. The biggest bits of the corpses were no bigger than a thumbnail. Surprising Gideon—yet again—it was Colum who moved opposite to Harrow, gesturing to the bones and the ashes almost impatiently.

“This one,” he said. “Half of it. It’s the Seventh cavalier.”

“I had assumed as much,” said Harrow. “There was no skull. The time of death only made sense if it was Protesilaus.”

“The other half is someone else,” said Silas.

“We can’t do anything for them yet,” said Palamedes. “The living have to take precedence here, if we want to keep living.”

As it turned out, he was wrong.