This was also a bitch to travel up, as the more you climbed, the more of the dead terrace you saw—the sea creaked below, changeful in its colour, a deep grey-blue today and whitecapped with wind—but Gideon readjusted her sunglasses, took a deep breath through her nose, and climbed. The first autodoor she saw, she took, and had to hammer five full times before it silently slid open and gave her entry. Gideon ducked in and pressed against the wall as it slid reproachfully shut, and had to take a minute to collect herself.
It was dark here. She found herself in a long hall that terminated in a left-hand corner. It was very quiet, and very cool. The floor was of pale, cream-and-black tile, set in a starry pattern that repeated itself all the way down the corridor; the paler tiles seemed to float, luminous, as the darker melted into the shadows. Great panes of smoked glass had been set into the walls, lit by dark yellow lamps: sconces held dribbles of mummified candle. It was a wide, shady space, and had something of the inner sanctum of Drearburh about it, just with fewer bones. In fact, there was almost no decoration here. The hall seemed strangely closed in, smaller than the space ought to have been, shrugging inward. The floor was beautiful, and so were the doors—they were wood-inlaid with tiny squares of smoked glass, set smoothly in metal frames. There was a single statue at the end of the corridor where it turned left. It must have once been a person, but the head and arms had been lopped off, leaving only a torso with beseeching stumps. It took her a while to realise that she was in a lobby, and that the doors were elevator lifts: each had a dead screen overhead that must have once shown the floor number.
Gideon folded her sunglasses into a pocket of her robe. Quiet echoes caromed off the walls, up and down, then clarified. Voices floating upward. The stairs at the corner of the hallway led down two short flights, the landing visible below, and Gideon crept down them with careful and noiseless steps.
The indeterminate murmurs thinned into sound—
“—s impossible, Warden.”
“Nonsense.”
“Improbable, Warden.”
“Granted. But still—relative to what, exactly?”
There was some shuffling. Two voices: the first probably female, the second probably male. Gideon risked another step down.
“Six readings,” the second voice continued. “Oldest is nine thou. Youngest is, well, fiftyish. Emphasis ish. But the old stuff here is really very old.”
“The upper bound for scrying is ten thousand, Warden.” Yes, it was a woman’s voice, and not one Gideon had heard: low and calm, stating the obvious.
“The point is here, and you are far over there. Nine thousand. Fiftyish. Building.”
“Ah.”
“Fiat lux! If you want to talk improbable, let’s talk about this”—a scrape of stone on stone—“being three thousand and some years older than this.” A heavy clunk.
“Inexplicable, Warden.”
“Certainly not. Like everything else in this ridiculous conglomeration of cooling gas, it’s perfectly explicable, I just need to explic-it.”
“Indubitable, Warden.”
“Stop that. I need you listening, not racking your brain for rare negatives. Either this entire building was scavenged from a garbage hopper, or I am being systematically lied to on a molecular level.”
“Maybe the building’s shy.”
“That is just tough shit for the building. No; there’s a wrong thing here. There’s a trick. Remember my fourth circle exams?”
“When the Masters shut down the entire core?”
“No, that was third circle. Fourth circle they seeded the core with a couple of thousand fake records. Beautiful stuff, exquisite, even the timestamps, and all of it obviously wrong. Drivel. No one could have believed a word of it. So why bother?”
“I recall you said they were ‘being a pack of assholes.’”
“W—yes. Well, in substance, yes. They were teaching us a particularly annoying lesson, which is that you cannot rely on anything, because anything can lie to you.”
“Swords,” said the woman with a trace of satisfaction, “don’t lie.”
The necromancer—because Gideon had never been so sure in her life that she was listening to a damn necromancer—snorted. “No. But they don’t tell the truth either.”
By now she was almost at the foot of the stairs, and she could see into the room below. The only light came from its centre; the walls were splashed with long shadows, but seemed to be generic concrete, split in places by peeling lines of caution tape. In the centre, lit by a flashlight, was an enormous shut-up metal hatch, the kind Gideon associated with hazard shafts and accident shelters.
Crouching in front of the hatch was a rangy, underfed young man: he was wrapped in a grey cloak and the light glinted on the spectacles slipping down his nose. Standing next to him holding a big wedge of broken sculpture and the flashlight was a tall, equally grey-wrapped figure with a scabbard outlined at her hip. She had hair of an indeterminate darkness, cut blunt at her chin. She was restless as a bird, stepping from one foot to the other, quirking her elbows, rocking from the balls of her feet to the heel. The boy had one hand pressed to the heavy corner of the hatch, brooding over it like a seer with a piece of ritual intestine, lineated weirdly by the half-light. He was using his own tiny pocket torch to investigate the place where the seam of the floor met the metal of the hatch frame.
Both were filthy. Dust caked their hems. There were odd, still-wet smears on their clothes and hands. It looked as though they’d both been wrestling in some long-forgotten Ninth catacomb.
Gideon had moved too close: even in the darkness, hooded and cloaked, they were both nervy. The young man in glasses jerked up his chin, staring blindly back to the stairwelclass="underline" at his sudden switch in focus, the young woman with the sword whirled around and saw Gideon on the stairs.
It was probably not a comforting sight to see a penitent of the Locked Tomb in the half dark, swathed in black, skull-painted. The cavalier narrowed her hooded eyes, fidgets gone and absolutely still; then she exploded into action. She dropped the wedge of sculpture with a clonk, drew her sword from its shabby scabbard before the wedge had bounced once, and advanced. Gideon, neurons blaring, drew her own. She slid her hand into her ebon gauntlet—the grey-cloaked girl let the flashlight fall, drew a knife with a liquid whisper from a holder across one shoulder—and their blades met high above their heads as the cavalier leapt, metal on metal ringing all around the chamber.
Holy shit. Here was a warrior, not just a cavalier. Gideon was suddenly fighting for her life and exhilarated by it. Blow after lightning blow rattled her defences, each one coming down like an industrial crush press, the short offhand knife targeting the guard of Gideon’s blade. Even with the advantage of higher ground she was forced to mount the steps backward. They were fighting in close, cramped quarters, and Gideon was getting pinned. She smashed the other girl’s offhand out of the way and into the wall, scattering loose glass tiles in its wake as it felclass="underline" her opponent dropped as though shot, crouched, kicked her dagger up into her hand, and did a handspring backward down the stairs. Gideon descended like an avenging necrosaint as she rose—slicing down in a winging cut that would have destroyed the blade given a longsword and the right footing, just for the pleasure of seeing her partner duck, huff between her teeth with exertion. Her sword met the other cavalier’s dagger and she pressed, both leaning hard into the blow. The cav in grey’s eyes were only mildly surprised.