“Hardly insurmountable,” said Harrow, having regained her composure.
“Very hopeful! What would you use?”
“A corporeal ward; skin-bound, tight focus.”
“Try it.”
Harrowhark flexed her fingers slowly. Gideon watched as she narrowed her eyes into obsidian slits, fringed thickly with blunt black lashes, and then extended her hand beyond the line again. There was a brief shower of blue sparks; Harrow snatched her hand back, amazed and furious. The fingers had withered into puckered twigs; her little nail had fallen off entirely. The edges of her sleeve had holed and frayed as though assaulted by moths. Gideon lunged out of a sheer desire to do something, but Harrow held her back with her healthy hand, staring fixedly at the hurt one as it slowly mended. Dulcinea watched with eager eyes: Protesilaus hulked next to the stairs.
Harrow shook a bracelet over her hurt hand, and bands of spongy osseous matter wrapped around her knuckles before forming thick plaques of bone. Gauntleted, she reached her hand out again—
“It won’t work,” said Dulcinea, dimpling.
—The gauntlet exploded into fragments of bone. Those that passed the yellow line fragmented further, and those bits degraded into dust and that into powder. The glove fell away in hunks, dwindling into fine sand before it even hit the ground, and Harrow yanked her hand back to stare at its sad puckered appearance a third time. She sat heavily on the stairs, and a bead of blood sweat trickled down one temple as, away from the barrier, her hand relaxed back into wholeness. Gideon longed to say: What the fuck?
“It’s two spells, overlaying each other,” said Dulcinea.
“You can’t have two spells with coterminous bounds. It’s impossible.”
“But true. They’re really coterminous—not just interwoven or spliced. It’s truly delicious work. The people who set it in place were geniuses.”
“Then one half is senescence—”
“And the other half is an entropy field,” said Dulcinea simply.
Gideon followed Harrow’s gaze over the long, dully gleaming field of corrugated metal, and the plinth shining at the end like a beacon. She saw Harrow suck in and bite the inside of one cheek, always a sign of furious thinking, flexing her fingers all the while as though still worried about their integrity. She took an old, ivory-coloured knuckle from her pocket, and she passed it to Gideon. “Throw,” she commanded.
Gideon obligingly threw. It was a good toss—the knuckle hit the field high and travelled for about half a metre before fragmenting into a rain of grey particles. Harrow’s gaze fixed on the crumbling shards: more tiny spikes and spurs of bone burst out of them and shrivelled, stillborn—another burst as Harrow curled her fist into a ball—then nothing. There was no more bone left.
Dulcinea breathed in admiration: “It’s awful quick.”
“Then,” said the adept of the House of the Ninth, “it is—and I don’t say this lightly—impossible. This is the most efficient death trap I’ve ever seen. The senescence decays anything before it can cross, and the entropy field—God knows how it’s holding—disperses any magical attempt to control the rate of decay. But why hasn’t the whole room collapsed? The walls should be so much dust.”
“The field and the flooring are a few micrometres apart—maybe the Ninth could make a very very weeny construct to go through that gap,” said the Seventh helpfully.
Harrow said, in bottom-of-the-ocean tones: “The Ninth House has not practised its art on—weeny—constructs.”
“Before you ask, it’s not a lateral puzzle either,” said Dulcinea. “You can’t go through the floor because it’s solid steel, and you can’t go through the ceiling because that’s also solid steel, and there’s no other access. And Palamedes Sextus estimated you could walk for probably three seconds before you died.”
Harrow got very focused very suddenly. “Sextus has seen this?”
“I asked him first,” said Dulcinea, “and when I told him the method, he said he’d never do it. I thought that was fascinating. I’d love to get to know him better.”
That got every particle of Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s attention. Dulcinea absently tossed her crutches to Protesilaus one by one, and he caught them out of the air as though he didn’t even have to think about it, which Gideon had to admit was cool. She sat down heavily on the stairs quite close to Harrow, and she said: “There is one way of doing it … and he wouldn’t. I’m sorry that I didn’t admit it … but you were my second choice. If black vestals won’t cross this line, I don’t think anyone will. And I can’t, because I physically can’t walk the whole way unassisted. If I faint or go funny halfway there it will mean my timely death.”
“And what is it,” said Harrow, in a voice that meant trouble, “that even Palamedes Sextus won’t do?”
“He won’t siphon,” said Dulcinea.
The shutters on Harrow’s face were pulled shut. “And nor will I,” she said.
“I don’t mean soul siphoning … not quite. When Master Octakiseron siphons his cavalier, he sends the soul elsewhere and then exploits the space it leaves behind. The power that rushes in to fill that space will keep refilling, for as long as either of them can survive. You wouldn’t have to send anyone anywhere. But the entropy field will drain your own reserves of thanergy as soon as you cross the line, so you need to draw on a power source on this side of the line, where the field can’t touch it. Do you understand?”
“Don’t patronize me, Lady Septimus. Of course I understand. Understanding a problem is nowhere near the same as implementing a solution. You should have asked Octakiseron and his human vein.”
“I probably would have,” said Dulcinea candidly, “if Pro hadn’t blacked his eye for him.”
“So technically,” said Harrow, acid as a battery, “we’re your third choice.”
“Well, Abigail Pent was a very talented spirit magician,” said Dulcinea, and relented when she saw Harrow’s expression. “I’m sorry! I’m teasing! No, I don’t think I would have asked the Eighth House, Reverend Daughter. There is something cold and white and inflexible about the Eighth. They could have done this with ease … maybe that’s why. And now Abigail Pent is dead. What am I to do? If you were to ask Sextus for me, do you think he’d do it? You seem to know him better than me.”
Harrow pushed herself up from the stairs. She had not seemed to notice that Dulcinea was leaning with her flowerlike face in her hands and drinking in her every movement, nor her expression of carefully studied innocence. Gideon was undergoing complicated feelings about not being the centre of the Seventh’s attention.
With a flourish of inky skirts, Harrowhark turned back to the stairs, staring through Dulcinea rather than at her. “Let’s say I agree with your theory,” she said. “To maintain enough thanergy for my wards inside the field, I’d need to fix a siphon point outside it. The most reasonable source of thanergy would be—you.”
“You can’t move thanergy from place to place like that,” said the Seventh, with very careful gentleness. “It has to be life to death.… or death to a sort of life, like the Second do. You’d have to take my thalergy.” She raised a wasted hand, and then let it flutter back to her face like a drifting paper plane. “Me? I could get you maybe—ten metres.”
“We adjourn,” said Harrowhark.
Harrow grasped Gideon hard around the arm and practically dragged her back up the stairs, out past the foyer and into the hallway. The noise of the door slamming behind them echoed around the corridor. Gideon found herself staring straight down the barrel of a loaded Harrowhark Nonagesimus, hood shaken back to reveal blazing black eyes in a painted white face.