“That’s what she said,” said Gideon, and she took the ring from Harrow’s gloved fingers. She did not put her own hood up, but she slipped her glasses back on to her nose: now that she’d adjusted she really only needed them for the midday light, but they’d become something of a comfort. She drummed her fingers on the bevelled frame of lightless stone, and then she slid the red Response key into the lock.
It fit. The lock clicked open as easily as if it had been kept oiled for the last ten thousand years. Without the slightest creak or groan of hinge, the door swung inward at a push. Gideon slipped her rapier from her belt and her knuckle-knives onto her left hand, and she walked into the darkness.
It was dark. She did not dare go farther into the quiet and shadowy stillness, thrown into deeper quiet by her necromancer slipping in behind and pushing the massive door shut. They stood in the room and smelled the age of it: the dust, the chemicals hanging in the air. You could almost smell the darkness.
Harrow’s voice, almost a whisper: “A light, Nav.”
“What?”
“You did bring a torch.”
“This is a service I was unaware I was meant to provide,” said Gideon.
There followed soft cursing. She felt Harrow turn back toward the door, measure its width with her hands, grope blindly along the doorframe in order to find a lantern: she found something, and from the wall there came a loud click. Electric lights blared to life overhead, throwing the dark and lonely room into knife-sharp relief.
Gideon didn’t know what she’d expected. She stood, rooted to the ground, and so did Harrow; and for long moments they just got their fill of looking.
It was a study, left crystallised by someone who had one day stood up and never come back to the place where they must have worked for years. It was a long, square, spacious apartment, windowless, but beautifully lit. A long rail of electric lamps threw spotlights on important points in the room’s geography. One end of the room was occupied by a laboratory: stained, scoured-laminate benches, and shelves and shelves of notes in leather-bound books or ring binders. The big metal sink and the scrubbing-up brush looked strange against the walls, which were inlaid with bones. A pot was still full of fat chalk sticks to draw diagrams, and the flasks of preserved blood were still full and very red. Tacked up over one bench were thick sheaves of flimsy, dark with graphs and models: one of the flimsies was a rough drawing of a familiar chimera, many armed, armour ribbed, squat skulled. There were jewelled tools. There were epoxy spatulas that had been melted in some experiment. There was a blown-up picture on the wall—a lithograph, or a polymer photograph—of a group of people clustered around a table. Their faces had all been scribbled out with a thick black marker pen.
Harrowhark had already drifted to the laboratory. She hadn’t drawn breath yet. She was going to have to, Gideon thought distantly, or she’d be out on the floor. The room had been split into three main parts—there was the laboratory, and then a broad space where the furniture had been moved out of the way for an empty stone floor. The wall had a sword rack, and the sword rack still held two lonely rapiers, gleaming as though they’d been filed and whetted an hour before. A training floor. Leant up against the wall was a hideous collection of oblong metal shapes and stocks. It took Gideon a long time to realise that she was looking at something goddamn ancient: it was a blowback carbine gun. She’d only ever seen pictures.
The third part of the room was a raised platform with polished wooden stairs. The wood here was not so degraded as in the rest of Canaan House—this lightless, shut-off room must have preserved it, or otherwise somehow been stopped in time. The hairs on the back of Gideon’s neck had risen when the lights came on, and they hadn’t gone back down, as if her intrusion might well tempt time back to claim its grave goods. She found herself climbing the stairs and staring at a sweetly banal and domestic sight: a bookcase, a low table, a squashy armchair, and two beds. On the table was a teapot and two cups that lay abandoned forever.
The two beds were close to each other—if you lay in one, you could stretch out and touch whoever was sleeping in the other, provided you had a long arm—separated only by a nightstand. Much like the grotesque cradle tacked to the end of the enormous four-poster back in Harrow’s bedroom, the two people here would have been in proximity to wake if the other one sneezed. On the nightstand was another lamp, and debris that people had never cleared up. A very old watch. An empty glass. A filament-fine silver bracelet with no clasp. A shallow, greasy glass dish full of grey stuff like ashes. Gideon could tell they weren’t cremains, and when she touched them a strong scent clung to her fingers. The pillows had been smoothed out on the carved wooden cots, and the beds had been made. Someone had left a pair of extremely worn slippers beneath one, a crumpled piece of flimsy next to the nightstand. Gideon picked up the latter.
Harrow let out a cry of triumph. Gideon turned away from the beds and put the flimsy in her pocket, then stretched over the stair railing to see what her necromancer was delighted about. She was by the workbench staring at two great stone tablets that had been fused to the stone, shot through with pale green filaments glowing beneath Harrow’s touch. The writing was small and cramped and the diagrams totally impenetrable in their obtuseness. Harrow was already pulling out her journal.
“It’s the theorem from the trial room,” she called out. “It’s the completed methodology for transference—for the utilisation of a living soul. It’s the whole experiment.”
“Is this an exciting necromancer thing?”
“Yes, Nav, it is an exciting necromancer thing. I need to copy this down, I can’t lift the stone. Whoever did this was a genius—”
Gideon let Harrow have at it, and opened the first drawer of the nightstand. Sitting there, offensively ordinary, were three pencils, a finger bone, a coarse sharpening stone—bones and whetstones were beginning to feed her growing suspicion about who’d lived there—and an old, worn-down seal. She stared at the seal awhile: it was the crimson-and-white emblem of the Second House.
She sat down carefully on one of the beds, and the sprung mattress squeaked. She took the piece of crumpled-up flimsy out of her pocket and began trying to uncrumple it. It was part of a note that had—at some long-ago point—been ripped up, and this was just one scrunched corner.
“I’m done,” said Harrow, from below. “Tell me anything of import.”
Gideon stuffed the piece of flimsy back into her pocket and had a quick scan through the other drawers. A lost sock. A scalpel. Oilcloth. A tin with nothing in it but the vague waft of peppermints. This was all the stuff you’d find in anyone’s bedside drawers—though then again, not quite anyone’s; a particular pair of people. She descended the stairs and tipped her dark glasses high on her head. “A cav and their necro lived here,” she said.
“I drew the same conclusion,” said Harrowhark, shuffling her papers. She put one of her diagrams close to the one inscribed on the stone tablet to compare them for accuracy. “Here. Come and take a look at this.”
Harrow’s cramped handwriting was just as bad as the etching on the tablet. At the very end of a long list of exquisitely boring notes was a line on its own: