She went down a short flight of cramped metal stairs. The house often seemed to split its level without letting her travel very far, but this was farther down and darker than any steps had taken her before. They led to a tiled vestibule where the lights fizzed disconsolately and refused to come on all the way; she pushed open two enormous, groaning doors, which led into an echoing chamber that made her nostrils flare. It smelled badly of chemicals, and most of the smell came from the huge, filthy, perfectly rectangular pit that dominated the centre of the room. The pit was lined with dull tile, and it gave the filthiest and oldest parts of the Ninth House a run for their money. There were metal ladders going down into the pit, but why would you though.
Gideon abandoned the pit and peered through a set of grubby glass double doors. From the other side of the room beyond, a hunched, cloaked figure peered back at her, and she reflexively went for her rapier: the hunched figure swiftly—identically—went for its own.
Good going, dickhead! thought Gideon, straightening up. It’s a mirror.
It was a mirror, an enormous one that covered the far wall. She pressed her face closer to the glass door. The room beyond had a flagstone floor, stones worn smooth from years and years of feet. There was a rusting basin and tap, where one love-abandoned towel had sat for God only knew how long, decayed to a waterfall of spiderous threads. Corroded swords were bolted to corroded panels on the wall. Through a window somewhere high up, the sunbeams poured down dust in golden torrents. Gideon would have dearly loved this training room in its prime, but she wouldn’t touch those rusted blades now if you paid her.
Going back to the vestibule with the spitting lights, she noticed another door, set close to the staircase. She hadn’t seen it before because a tapestry covered it almost entirely, but one of the corners had slipped and hinted at the frame beneath. She pushed the mouldering old tapestry aside to find a dark wooden door; she tried its handle, pulled it open, and stared. A long tiled corridor stared back, windowless, a succession of square lights in the ceiling whirring to life with a clunk … clunk … clunk … and tracing a path to an enormous door at the other end, totally out of place. Bracketed by heavy pillars, set with forbidding stone supports, the overall effect was not exactly welcoming. The door itself was a crossbar of black stone set in a bevelled frame of the same. A weird relief was carved above the lintel, set within a moulded panel. Gideon’s boots echoed down the shiny stone tiles as she came closer to see. The relief was five little circles joined with lines, in no pattern that Gideon recognised. Below this sat a solid stone beam with carved leaves swagged horizontally from one end to the other. At the apex of each swag was carved an animal’s skull with long horns, which curved inward into wicked points that almost met. Slim columns reached up to support this weird stone bunting, and wound around each column was something carved to seem writhing and alive—a fat, slithering thing, bulging and animal. Gideon reached out to touch the intricately carved marble and felt tiny overlapping scales, touched the seam where its ridged underbelly met its back. It was very cold.
There was no handle, no knocker, no knob: just a dark keyhole, for teeth that would have been as long as Gideon’s thumb. She peered through the keyhole and saw—jack shit. Suffice to say, all pushing, gripping, finger-inserting and pressing was in vain. It was locked as damn.
Curious, thought Gideon.
She went back to the claustrophobic little vestibule and, out of a complete sense of perversity, tacked the tapestry back up so that the door was totally covered. In the shadows, the effect was very good. Nobody’d be finding that one any time soon. It was a stupid, secretive Ninth thing to do, done out of habit, and Gideon hated how comforting it felt.
Voices were fading into the edge of her hearing from the top of the landing that led to the stairs. Another Ninth instinct had Gideon flatten herself back into the bottom of the stairwelclass="underline" done a million times before to avoid the Marshal of Drearburh, or Harrowhark, or one of the godawful great-aunts or members of the Locked Tomb cloister. Gideon had no idea whom she was avoiding, but she avoided them anyway because it was such an easy thing to do. A conversation, conducted in low, rich, peevish tones, drifted down.
“—mystical, oblique claptrap,” someone was saying, “and I have half a mind to write to your father and complain—”
“—what,” drawled another, “that the First House isn’t treating us fairly—”
“—a lateral puzzle isn’t a trial, and, now that I think about it, the idea that the old fogey doesn’t know a thing about it is beyond belief! Some geriatric playing mind games, or worse, and this is my theory, wanting to see who breaks—”
“Ever the conspiracy theorist,” said the second voice.
The first voice was aggrieved. “Why’re the shuttles gone? Why is this place such a tip? Why the secrecy? Why is the food so bad? QED, it’s a conspiracy.”
There was a thoughtful pause.
“I didn’t think the food was that bad,” said a third voice.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” continued the first voice. “It’s a cheap, Cohort-style enlisted man’s hazing. They’re waiting to see who’s stupid enough to take the bait. Who falls for it, you see. Well, I shan’t.”
“Unless,” said the second voice—which now that Gideon was hearing it, was very like the third voice in pitch and tone, differentiated only by affect—“the challenge is one of protococlass="underline" we have to provide a valid response to a necessarily vague question in order to authenticate ourselves. Making meaning from the meaningless. Et cetera.”
The first voice had taken on a tinge of whine when it said, “Oh, for God’s sake.”
Scuffle. Movement. The stairs echoed with footsteps: they were coming down.
“I do wonder where that funny old man hid the shuttles,” mused the third voice.
The second: “Dropped them off the side of the dock, I expect.”
“Don’t be mad,” said the first, “those things cost a fortune.”
At the bottom of the stairs, deep in the shadows, Gideon got her first good glimpse of the speakers. The strange twin-scions of the Third House were looking around, attended to by their sulky, slightly bouffant cavalier. Up close, Gideon was more impressed than ever. The golden Third twin was probably the best-looking person she’d ever seen in her life. She was tall and regal, with some radiant, butterfly quality—her shirt was haphazardly tucked into her trousers, which were haphazardly tucked into her boots, but she was all topaz and shine and lustre. Necromancers affected robes in the same way cavaliers affected swords, but she hadn’t tucked her arms into hers, and it was a gauzy, gold-shot, transparent thing floating out around her like wings. There were about five rings on each hand and her earrings would’ve put chandeliers to shame, but she had an air of wild and innocent overdecoration, of having put on the prettiest things in her jewellery box and then forgotten to take them off. Her buttery hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat, and she kept tangling a curl of it in one finger and artlessly letting it go.
The second twin was as though the first had been taken to pieces and put back together without any genius. She wore a robe of the same cloth and colour, but on her it was a beautiful shroud on a mummy. The cavalier had lots of hair, an aquiline face, and a self-satisfied little jacket.
“I think,” the bright twin was saying, “that it’s a hell of a lot better than sticking us in a room and playing who’s the best necromancer? Or worse—loading us up with old scrolls and having us translate rituals for hours and hours on end.”