by Tamsyn Muir
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.”
16
GIDEON NAV HELD HER sword parallel to her body, the grease-black glass of her knuckle-knives close to her chest, and bit her tongue bloody. As most bitten tongues did, it hurt like an absolute bitch. Over the speakers, Harrow heaved. In front of her, still wet with the hot reek of powdered bone, the construct opened its mouth in a soundless shriek. They were back in Response, and they’d failed once already.
It wasn’t as though Harrow’s necromantic inability to chisel her skull open was from some reluctance of Gideon’s (which would have been completely fucking understandable); she was trying as hard as she could. She was sleepy from the food and she was sore from earlier that morning, and being sleepy and sore meant there was so much more for Harrowhark to wade through
. Gideon was forced to give her necromancer the first particle of credit in her life: Harrow did not yell at her. Harrow simply sank deeper and deeper into a morass of frustration and self-hatred, her fury at herself rising like bile.
The construct charged forward like a battering ram, and she leapt out the way and left half the skin of one knee on the ground for her pains. She still had a mouthful of blood as she began to holler, “Har—”
“Nearly,” crackled the speaker.
“—row, just let me take a whack at it—”
“Not yet. Nearly. The bitten tongue was good. Hold it off for a second, Nav! You could do this asleep!”
Not with a rapier. She might as well have chucked both knuckle and sword to the ground and started jogging for all the good her weapons were doing. Gideon wasn’t equipped for defence, and her head hurt. Her focus kept twitching in a migraine blur, dots and sparks coruscating in and out of her vision. A titanic blow from the construct bent her parry almost all the way back around to her head, and she moved with the blow rather than against as more of an afterthought.
“Three seconds. Two.” It almost sounded like begging.
Gideon was feeling more and more nauseous: there was an oily, warm feeling in the back of her throat and her tongue was running wet with spit. When she looked at the construct now it was through a hazy overlay, as though she were seeing double. There was a sharp pain between her eyes as it hauled back its centre of gravity, lurched—
“I can see it.”
Later on Gideon would think about how little triumph there was in Harrow’s voice: more awe. Her vision blurred, then spiked back abruptly into twenty-twenty colour. Everything was brighter and crisper and cleaner, the lights harder, the shadows colder. When she looked at the construct it smoked in the air like hot metal—pale, nearly transparent coronas wreathed its malformed body. They simmered in different colours, visible if you squinted this way or that, and in admiring them Gideon nearly got her leg broken.
“Nav,” hollered the speakers.
Gideon took a hard dive out of the way of a low stab, and then rolled away as the construct followed up by stomping hard where her foot had been. She hollered back: “Tell me what to do!”
“Hit these in order! Left lateral radius!”
Gideon focused on the nubbly, too-thick joint of the high left arm, and was surprised to find one of those mirage-like lights there: she sliced down and fell nearly off balance as her blade went through like a hot knife through fat. The long blade of the mutant arm clattered to the floor forlornly.
“Bottom-right tibia, lower quadrant, near the notch,” said Harrow. Now her triumph was barely held at bay. “Don’t make any other hits.”
Easier said than done. Gideon had to play grab-ass, snaking out of the construct’s remaining blades, before she disdained the rapier and slammed her booted foot down instead. It wasn’t hard: that part, just like the radius, was glowing like a flare. She got a square hit in and the construct’s leg shattered—it rocked to the side, trying to compensate, and the leg did not start regenerating.
The next was easy. Side of the mandible. The eighteenth rib. She peeled the construct apart, removing the unseen strut mechanisms that turned it from monster into pathetic, jaw-clattering fuckup, some kid’s first attempt at bone magic without ever having taken a look at an anatomy chart. When at last the Reverend Daughter said, “Sternum,” Gideon was already there—raising one gauntleted fist up where a slice of sternum glowed like a candleflame, and punching it into dust. The construct collapsed. Gideon felt dizzy for just a second, and then it left her. The whole world brightened and sharpened.
The only thing left of the monster was a big chunk of pelvis, atomizing slowly into sand. There was a pleasing overhead beep and the door to Response whooshed open—and remained open, letting through a Harrow so wet with sweat that her hood was stuck to her forehead. Gideon was distracted by the pelvis as the sand crumbled and parted to reveal a gleaming black box. Its lead-coloured screen ticked up—15 percent; 26 percent; 80 percent—until it swung open with a soft click to reveal nothing more interesting than—a key.
Harrow uttered a soft cry and swooped, but Gideon was quicker. She took it up and unsnapped the key ring she now kept down her shirt, and she looped it through one of the ornate clover-shaped holes on the handle. Two keys now dangled there in triumph: the upper hatch key, and their new prize. They both admired them for a long moment. The new key was chunky and solid, and dyed a deep, juicy scarlet.
Gideon found herself saying, “I saw—lights, when I was fighting it. Overlay. Bright spots, where you told me to hit, a glowing halo. Is that what you meant by thanergetic signature?”
She expected some dismissive You could not have comprehended the dark mysteries only my mascara’d eye doth espy, and was not prepared for Harrow’s open astonishment. Beneath the thick rivulets of blood and the smeared paint, she looked completely taken aback. “Do you mean,” her adept said slowly, “that there were things in the skeleton framework—mechanical lights, perhaps? Dyed segments?”
“No, they were just—googly areas of light. I couldn’t really see them properly,” she said. “I only saw them toward the end, when you were messing around.”
“That’s not possible.”
“I’m not lying.”
“No, I’m just saying—that shouldn’t have been possible,” Harrow said. Her dark brows were furrowed so deeply that they looked like they were on a collision course. “I thought I knew what the experiment was doing, but—well. I cannot assume.”
Gideon, tucking the keys safely back into her bandeau and, wincing at the chill, readied a flip comment; but as she looked up Harrowhark was looking at her, dead in the eye. Her chin was set. Harrow always looked so aggressively. Her face was moist from the effort and there were starbursts of broken red capillaries tucked into the white of each eye, but she turned those pitch-black irises right on her cavalier. The expression on her face was completely alien. Harrowhark Nonagesimus was looking at her with unalloyed admiration.
“But for the love of the Emperor, Griddle,” she said gruffly, “you are something else with that sword.”
The blood all drained away from Gideon’s cheeks for some reason. The world spun off its axis. Bright spots sparked in her vision. She found herself saying, intelligently, “Mmf.”
“I was in the privileged position of feeling you fight,” Harrow continued, fingers nervously flexing. “And it took me a while to work out what you were doing. Longer still to appreciate it. But I don’t think I’d ever really watched you, not in context … Well, all I can say is thank the Tomb that nobody knows you’re not really one of ours. If I didn’t know that, I’d be saying that you were Matthias Nonius come again or something equally saccharine.”
“Harrow,” said Gideon, finding her tongue, “don’t say these things to me. I still have a million reasons to be mad at you. It’s hard to do that and worry that you got brain injured.”
“I’m merely saying you’re an incredible swordswoman,” said the necromancer briskly. “You’re still a dreadful human being.”
“Okay, cool, thanks,” said Gideon. “Damage done though. What now?”
Harrowhark smiled. This smile was unusual too: it betokened conspiracy, which was normal, except that this one invited Gideon to be part of it. Her eyes glowed like coals with sheer collusion. Gideon didn’t know if she could handle all these new expressions on Harrow: she needed a lie down.
“We have a key, Griddle,” she said exultantly. “Now for the door.”
* * *
Gideon was thinking about nothing in particular when they left #1–2. TRANSFERENCE/WINNOWING. DATACENTER., except that she was happy; buzzed with adrenaline and anticipation. She’d eaten a good meal. She’d won the game. The world seemed less maliciously unfriendly. She and Harrow left in companionable silence, both swaggering a little, though newly conscious of the cold and the dark. They hurried along the corridors, Harrowhark leading, Gideon following half a
step behind.
There was nobody but them to trigger the motion sensors, and the lamps popped to life in rhythmic whumpk—whumpk—whumpk. They lit the way through the central room with the bronchial passages, and then down the short corridor to the access hatch ladder. At the beginning of that hall, Harrowhark stopped so abruptly that Gideon bumped into her in a flurry of robes and sword. She had gone absolutely still, and did not push back against her cavalier’s stumble.
For the first moment, following Harrow’s line of sight to the foot of the ladder, Gideon disbelieved her eyes. Her brain in an instant supplied all the information that her guts didn’t want to conceive, and then it was her, stuck, frozen, as Harrow sprinted to kneel alongside the tangle of wet laundry at the bottom of the ladder.
It wasn’t wet laundry. It was two people, so gruesomely entangled in each other’s broken limbs that they looked like they had died embracing. They hadn’t, of course: it was just the way their back-to-front limbs had arranged themselves in untidy death.
Hot bile rose in her mouth and made her tongue sticky. Her gaze drew away from the blood and exposed bone and fixed, inanely, on the empty wet scabbard by one busted wet hip: nearby was the sword, fallen point down in the flooring grille. The green lighting underfoot made its ivory steel glow a sickly lime. Gideon’s necromancer stonily flopped the top corpse to the side, exposing what remained of both faces, before rising to stand.
She’d known before Harrow had rolled him over that before them lay the sad, crumpled corpse of Magnus Quinn, jumbled up with the sad, crumpled corpse of Abigail Pent.
ACT THREE
17
IN THE EARLY MORNING, after hours and hours of trying, even Palamedes admitted defeat. He didn’t say so in as many words, but eventually his hand stilled on the fat marker pen that he had used to draw twenty different overlapping diagrams around the bodies of the Fifth, and he didn’t try to call them back anymore.
