“Teacher said that the facility was chocka with ghosts and you might die?”
“Correct.”
“Surprise, my tenebrous overlord!” said Gideon. “Ghosts and you might die is my middle name.”
Chapter 14
This lapse of Harrowhark’s did not make her one bit nicer to live with. Very early next morning, despite all logic and sense, she forced Gideon to put on the robe and paint on the paint like every morning since they’d arrived at Canaan House: she was impatient with what Gideon saw as the necessities of life, i.e., eating breakfast and stealing lunch. Gideon won the breakfast argument, but lost the right not to stare wretchedly at the mirror as she stippled black paint over her cheekbones.
At Harrow’s behest, the Ninth House moved through the silent grey corridors like spies. There were many times when the necromancer would stop in the shadow of a doorway and wait there for fully five minutes before she would allow them both to carry on, to creep noiselessly down the shabby staircases and down to the bowels of the First. They only met one person on the way: in the light before sunrise, Harrow and Gideon pressed themselves up into the shadow of an archway and watched a figure with a book clenched in one hand cross a dusty hall, silent and shadowed, littered with sagging chairs. Because she had spent her whole life in the darkest hole of the darkest planet in the darkest part of the system, Gideon could make out the etiolated profile of the repellent Third twin, Ianthe. She disappeared out of sight and Harrow remained, silently waiting, far longer than Gideon thought necessary before she gestured for them to move.
They made it to the dismal hole with the access hatch without incident, though it was dark enough there that Gideon had to pocket her glasses and Harrow had to tug down her veil. Harrow was breathing impatiently through her nose as Gideon slid the key into the lock, and flung herself down the hole as though being chased. They descended the long, frigid ladder, and Harrow brushed herself off at the bottom.
“Good,” was the first thing she said since they’d left the room. “I’m relatively sure we’re alone. Follow me.”
Dogging her adept’s rapid steps, rapier bumping against her hip, Gideon was interested to see that they did not traverse the mazelike corridors to Sanitiser. They instead passed down a long, broad hallway, buzzing quietly with the sound of electric light, until after a few corners they reached a door marked LABORATORY TWO. Harrow pushed this open.
The little foyer beyond was cupboard sized. There were hooks on the walls, and on one what Gideon took to be some ugly, partly dissolved tapestry, until she realised it was the remains of somebody’s abandoned coat. On the door ahead was a dilapidated folder behind a piece of plex, with a scribbled and pale title in a faded, haphazard hand: #1–2. TRANSFERENCE/WINNOWING. DATACENTER.
Above the sterile metal door was the more familiar sight of a mounted skull, probably once painted red but now tarry brown. It had lost its jaw at some point and seemed all front teeth. Harrow fussily crammed minuscule chips of phalange in and around the entryway. It was an unusual experience to be crossing, rather than barred from, a Nonagesimus bone ward, but Gideon didn’t get the time to enjoy it: Harrow pushed through the door and led Gideon through to another room.
This room—more spacious, more elongated—gave the distinct impression of having been ransacked. It was ringed with broad metal desks, and the walls were pockmarked with empty electrical sockets. There were shelves and shelves that must once have contained books and files and folders, but now only contained a lot of dust; there were discoloured places on the walls where things must have been tacked up and had since been taken down. It was a naked and empty room. One wall was windowed all along its length to let you see into the chamber ahead, and that wall had a door in it marked with two things: one, a sign on the front saying RESPONSE, and two, a little plaque on the top marked OCCUPIED. This had a bleary glow of a green light next to it, indicating that Response was probably not occupied. Looking through to Response—a bleak, featureless chamber, characterised only by a couple of vents on the far side of the square—the floor was an absolute shitshow of bits of broken bone.
The other wall—filled with brackets to prop up books that had long since been removed—had a door too, and this one was labelled: IMAGING. The Imaging door had the same plaque as Response, but with a little red light instead. Imaging also had a little plex window whose outside was smeared with old bloody handprints.
“Someone’s been having fun in here,” said Gideon.
Harrow shot her a look but did not enforce the vow of silence. “Yes,” she said. “Me.”
Her cavalier tried the door marked Response, but it wouldn’t move and there didn’t seem to be a conventional touchpad. Harrow said, “It won’t open like that, Nav. Come with me, and don’t touch anything.”
Gideon went with Harrow and did not touch anything. The autodoor to Imaging obligingly opened at their approach, revealing a dismal cupboard of a room with a huge array of old mechanical equipment, lightless and dead. A single ceiling panel fuzzed its way to life, white and pallid and not revealing much but more shadow. The long desk still had what she realised was a rusted old clipboard, to which a thin, nearly transparent piece of paper was attached. Gideon at last gave in to the urge to touch something, and the paper dissolved as though it were ash. It left a grey stain on her fingertips.
“Fucking yuck,” she said, wiping them on her front.
Harrow said curtly, “Have some care, you dolt, everything here is impossibly old.”
In the centre of the room was a tall metal pedestal. Atop the pedestal was a strange, flat panel of weirdly reflective glass—beautiful, with a dichromatic black fleck. The black-robed necromancer, painted brow furrowed with concentration, passed her hand over the top of the glass: it buzzed at her proximity, sending shivering green sparks jumping over the pedestal. Harrow peeled off her glove and placed one long-fingered hand directly on the glass. Two things happened: the glass folded over her hand like a cage, and the Imaging door shut with a heavy whunk. Gideon pressed into it, but it did not open again.
“What happens now?”
Harrow said, “Look through the window.”
Through the smeary little window Gideon could see that Response had opened up. Harrow continued, joylessly: “The door shuts in response to—as far as I can tell—weight and motion. I didn’t test precisely how much weight, but it’s around thirty moving kilograms. I have, at this point, sent around ninety kilos’ worth of bone matter into that room.”
The things Harrow could pull off with the tip of someone’s toe bone were astonishing. Three kilos of osseo for Harrow could have been anything. A thousand skeletons, crammed and interlocked within Response. Seas of spines. An edifice of cranium and coccyx. Gideon just said, “Why?”
Harrow said, stiffly: “Every single construct I’ve put into that room has been pulverised.”
“By what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “If I take my hand off the pedestal, the door unlocks and the room reverts. I can’t see it. I only hear it.”
At hear it the hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck rose, and she shook off her hood. Harrow jerked her wrist away from the pedestal and the glass neatly unfolded itself from her hand. The Imaging door opened with another automatic whunk, spilling light in from the anterior room.