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.”
Chapter 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!”