Act Three
Chapter 17
In the early morning, after hours and hours of trying, even Palamedes admitted defeat. He didn’t say so in as many words, but eventually his hand stilled on the fat marker pen that he had used to draw twenty different overlapping diagrams around the bodies of the Fifth, and he didn’t try to call them back anymore.
Six necromancers had tried to raise them, singly or in concert, simultaneously or sequentially. Gideon had squatted in a corner and watched the parade. In the beginning a group of them had opened their own veins in a bid to tempt the early hunger of the ghosts. That period ended only when the teens, mad with rage at the inadequacy of only Isaac’s blood, both started stabbing at Jeannemary’s arm. They stood screaming at each other wordlessly, corseting belts above each other’s elbows to make the veins stand out, until Camilla took the knives from their hands and began dispensing rubber bandages. Then they held each other, knelt, and wept.
Harrow did not open herself up. She walked the perimeter like a wraith, measuring her steps for Palamedes to draw by, swaying minutely with what Gideon knew was exhaustion. Nor did Coronabeth spill her blood: she only drew close to the work to pull Ianthe’s hair away from her face, or to take a tiny knife from the twins’ bags to replace the one her sister was using. They had both come from their beds without bothering to dress, and hence were wearing astonishingly flimsy nightgowns, the only solace of the night. The air was full of chalk and ink and blood and strong light from the electric torches that the Sixth had rigged up.
The Sixth had been painfully useful. Palamedes, wearing a scruffy bedrobe, had put up lights and marked the ladder with bits of tape at obscure places. He had stained the fluff on his dowdy old slippers pink as he walked quietly among the bodies, saying excuse me once when he stepped too close to Abigail’s arm. He held the light up for Camilla as she sketched the whole unlovely scene on a big sheet of white flimsy, from the side, from the top, from their feet. He shed his scruffy bedrobe to reveal button-up pyjamas when Dulcinea drifted in wearing only a short shirt and trousers too big for her, and wrapped the robe around her shoulders without prompting. Then he went back to work.
A tableau of magicians and their guardians revolved around the corpses. Books were hauled out of pockets or the insides of coats, read, abandoned. People would go in, work, leave, be replaced, return, stay, leave as more of the inhabitants of Canaan House arrived. Harrowhark worked for nearly two hours before fainting abruptly into a puddle of congealing blood, at which point Gideon had removed her from the scene: upon waking she shadowed the Sixth instead, much to the ill-concealed annoyance of Camilla, who seemed to regard all incursions on Palamedes’s personal space as probable assassination attempts. For his part, Palamedes talked quietly and briskly to Harrow as though to a colleague he had known all his life.
The Third princesses worked like musicians who couldn’t help but return for the encore: a spell, retirement, another, another. They knelt side by side, holding hands, and for all that Ianthe had made fun of her sister’s intellect Corona never broke a sweat. It was Ianthe who ran wet with blood and perspiration. At one point she beckoned Naberius forward and, in a feat that nearly brought up Gideon’s dinner (again), ate him: she bit off a hunk of his hair, she chewed off a nail, she brought her incisors down on the heel of his hand. He submitted to all this without noise. Then she lowered her head and got back to work, sparks skittering off her hands like fire off a newly beaten sword, every so often spitting out a stray hair. Gideon had to stare pretty hard at skimpy nighties to get over that one.
The horrid Isaac worked, but Gideon didn’t like to look at him. He was sobbing with his entire sad teen face, mouth, eyes, nose. Dulcinea reached out as though to join the fray until Protesilaus drew her back with a hand as inexorable as it was meaty. The revolving parade of necromancer after necromancer went on, until just Palamedes was left; then he slumped as though his strings had been cut, blindly reaching for the bottle of water Camilla held out, pulling long gasps of liquid.
“Coming down,” said a voice from the top of the ladder.
Down the ladder came the jaundiced, faded cavalier of the Eighth House, dressed in his leathers with his sword at his hip; he helped his uncle, who was white and silver and alight with distaste, to the bottom. The Eighth adept primly rolled up his alabaster sleeves and skirted the corpses, considering, licking two fingers as though to turn a page.
“I will try to find them,” he said, in his strangely deep and sorrowful voice.
Harrow said, “Don’t waste your time, Octakiseron. They’re gone.”
The Eighth necromancer inclined his head. The hair that fell over his shoulders was the funny, ashy white you got when a fire burned away; a headband kept it scraped back and away from his sharp and spiritual face.
“You will pardon me,” he said, “if I do not take advice on spirits from a bone magician.”
Harrow’s face slammed shut. “I pardon you,” she said.
“Good. Now we need not speak again,” said the Eighth necromancer. “Brother Colum.”
“Ready, Brother Silas,” said the scarred nephew immediately, and stepped in closer to the younger man, so that they were near enough to touch.
For a moment Gideon thought they were going to pray in front of the corpses. Or they might share an emotional moment. They were close enough to hug it out. But they did neither: the necromancer laid his hand on one of Colum’s brawny shoulders, having to stretch up somewhat, and closed his eyes.
For a moment nothing seemed to happen. Then Gideon saw the colour begin draining from Colum the Eighth as though he were covered with cheap dye: leaching as shadow leached hue in the nighttime, more horrible and more obvious in the unforgiving light of the electric torches and underfloor lamps. As he faded, the pale Silas incandesced. He glowed with an irradiated shimmer, iridescent white, and the air began to taste of lightning.
Someone close by said softly, “So it’s real,” just as someone else said, “What is he doing?”
It was Harrow who said, without rancour but also without joy: “Silas Octakiseron is a soul siphoner.”
By this point Colum the Eighth looked greyscale. He was still standing, but he was breathing more shallowly. By contrast the adept of the Eighth was putting on a light show, but not much else happened. The furrow deepened in the ghostly boy’s brow; he wrung his hands together, and his lips soundlessly began to move.
Gideon felt an internal tug, like a blanket being pulled off in the cold. It was a little bit like the sensation back in Response (which was, what, a thousand years ago?)—something deep inside her being prodded in its tender spot. But it also wasn’t, because it hurt like hell. It was like having a headache inside her teeth. The torchlights gave an asthmatic gurk and dimmed as though their batteries were being sucked dry, and when Gideon looked at her hands through bleary eyes they were deepening grey.
There was something pale blue sparking within the corpse of Abigail Pent, and suddenly and horribly the body shuddered. The world grew heavy and black around the edges, and Gideon felt cold all the way to her marrow. Someone screamed, and she recognised the voice as Dulcinea’s.