Her teacher made a noise in her throat somewhere between disgust and desolation. “What are you doing with your other hand?” Gideon compensated. “No! Oh, Lord. Put that down until I formally show you how.”
“The sword and the powder,” said Harrowhark eagerly.
“The sword and the knuckle, my lady,” said Aiglamene. “I’m dropping my expectations substantially.”
Gideon said, “I still have absolutely not agreed to any of this.”
The Reverend Daughter picked her way toward her over discarded swords, and stopped once she was level with the pillar that Gideon had reflexively flattened her back against. They regarded each other for long moments until the absolute chill of the monument made Gideon’s teeth involuntarily chatter, and then Harrow’s mouth twisted, fleetingly, indulgently. “I would have thought you would be happy that I needed you,” she admitted. “That I showed you my girlish and vulnerable heart.”
“Your heart is a party for five thousand nails,” said Gideon.
“That’s not a ‘no.’ Help Aiglamene find you a sword, Griddle. I’ll leave the door unlocked.” With that languid and imperious command, she left, leaving Gideon lolling her head back against the frigid stone of the pillar and chewing the inside of her cheek.
It was almost worse getting left alone with the sword-master. An awkward, chilly silence spread between them as the old woman grumpily picked through the pile, holding each rapier up to the light, pulling rancid strips of leather away from the grip.
“It’s a bad idea, but it’s a chance, you know,” said Aiglamene abruptly. “Take it or leave it.”
“I thought you said it was the best idea we have.”
“It is—for Lady Harrowhark. You’re the best swordsman that the Ninth House has produced—maybe ever. Can’t say. I never saw Nonius fight.”
“Yeah, you would have only been what, just born,” said Gideon, whose heart was hurting keenly.
“Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you.”
Swords rattled into a leather case as Aiglamene selected a couple at hand, shaking a few of the knuckle-knives in to boot. The case creaked and she creaked as she had to tip herself forward, painful with dignity, getting on her one half-good knee in order to pull herself up to stand. Gideon moved forward automatically, but one look from the woman’s working eye was enough to make her pretend she’d just been getting back into her robes. Aiglamene hauled the case over her shoulder, kicking unwanted swords back into a niche, yanking the useless sword from Gideon’s nerveless hand.
She paused as her fingers closed over the hilt, her haggard face caught up in her consideration, a titanic battle apparently going on somewhere deep inside her head. One side gained the upper hand, and she said gruffly: “Nav. A word of warning.”
“What?”
There was something urgent in her voice: something worried, something new.
“Things are changing. I used to think we were waiting for something … and now I think we’re just waiting to die.”
Gideon’s heart sagged.
“You really want me to say yes.”
“Go on and say no,” said her captain. “It’s your choice … If she doesn’t take you, I’ll go with her and gladly. But she knows … and I know … and I think you damn well know … that if you don’t get out now, you won’t even get out in a box.”
“So what happens if I agree?”
Breaking the spell, Aiglamene roughly shouldered the leather case into Gideon’s arms, slapping it there before stalking back the way that Harrow had left them. “Then you hurry up. If I’m to turn you into the Ninth’s cavalier, I needed to start six years ago.”
Chapter 5
The second letter that they received care of the Resurrecting King, the gentle Emperor, was somewhat less prolix than the first.
They were lurking in the personal Nonagesimus library, a stone-arched room packed tight with shelves of the musty and neglected books Harrowhark didn’t study and the musty, less neglected books that she did. Gideon sat at a broad, sagging desk piled high with pages covered in necromantic marginalia, most of them in Harrow’s cramped, impatient writing. She held the letter before her with one hand; with the other, she wearily painted her face with a piece of fibre wadding and a pot of alabaster paint, feeling absurdly young. The paint smelled acid and cold, and working the damn stuff into the creases next to her nose meant sucking globs of paint up her nostrils all day. Harrow was sprawled on a sofa spread with tattered brocade, robes abandoned, scrawny black-clad legs crossed at the ankles. In Gideon’s mind she looked like an evil stick.
Gideon reread the letter, then again, twice, before checking her face in a little cracked mirror. Gorgeous. Hot. “I know you said ‘First House’ like three times,” she said, “but I thought you were being metaphorical.”
“I thought it would fill you with a sense of adventure.”
“It damn well doesn’t,” said Gideon, rewetting the wadding, “you’re taking me to the planet where nobody lives. I thought we’d end up on the Third or the Fifth, or a sweet space station, or something. Not just another cave filled with old religious nut jobs.”
“Why would there be a necromantic gathering on a space station?”
This was a good point. If there was one thing Gideon knew about necromancers, it was that they needed power. Thanergy—death juice—was abundant wherever things had died or were dying. Deep space was a necro’s nightmare, because nothing had ever been alive out there, so there were no big puddles of death lying around for Harrow and her ilk to suck up with a straw. The brave men and women of the Cohort looked on this limitation with compassionate amusement: never send an adept to do a soldier’s job.
“Behold the last paragraph,” Harrow said from the sofa, “turning your benighted eyes to lines five and six.” Unwillingly, Gideon turned her benighted eyes to lines five and six. “Tell me the implications.”
Gideon stopped painting and leant back in her chair before thinking better of it, easing it back down to the chill tiles of the floor. There was something a little soggy about one of the legs. “‘No retainers. No attendants, no domestics.’ Well, you’d be shitted all to hell otherwise, you’d have to bring along Crux. Look—are you really saying that nobody’s going to be there but us and some crumbly old hierophants?”
“That,” said the Reverend Daughter, “is the implication.”
“For crying out loud! Then let me dress how I want and give me back my longsword.”
“Ten thousand years of tradition, Griddle.”
“I don’t have ten thousand years of tradition, bitch,” said Gideon, “I have ten years of two-hander training and a minor allergy to face paint. I’m worth so much less to you with pizza face and a toothpick.”
The Reverend Daughter’s fingers locked together, thumbs rotating in languid circles. She did not disagree. “Ten thousand years of tradition,” she said slowly, “dictates that the Ninth House should have been at its leisure to produce, at the very least, a cavalier with the correct sword, the correct training, and the correct attitude. Any implication that the Ninth House did not have the leisure to meet even that expectation is as good as giving up. I’d be better off by myself than taking you qua you. But I know how to fake this; I can provide the sword. I can provide a smattering of training. I cannot even slightly provide your attitude. Two out of three is still not three. The con depends on your shut mouth and your adoption of the minimal requirements, Griddle.”