“But Gideon—”
“Is not your business.”
Dulcinea’s hands came to rest in her lap, and she tilted her head. “I see,” she said, smiling and somewhat crestfallen.
A barefoot Harrow grunted under her breath as she continued to try to haul Gideon up the short flight of stairs, panting for breath by the top step. Gideon could only watch, willing herself to come to full consciousness, astonished by the unreceptivity of her body. It was all she could do to not deliquesce out of Harrow’s grip. At the top of the stairs they stopped, and the Reverend Daughter looked back searchingly.
She said abruptly, “Why did you want to be a Lyctor?”
Gideon mumbled, “Harrow, you can’t just ask someone why they want to be a Lyctor,” but was roundly ignored.
The older woman was leaning against Protesilaus’s arm. She looked extraordinarily sad, even regretful; when she caught Gideon’s eye, a tiny smile tugged on the corners of her mouth, then drooped again. Eventually, she said: “I didn’t want to die.”
Walking back through the chilly foyer out to the corridor was bad: Gideon had to break away from Harrow and rest her cheek on the cold metal panelling next to the door. Her necromancer waited with uncharacteristic patience for her to regain some semblance of consciousness, and they stumbled onward—Gideon drunken, Harrow flinching her bare feet away from the grille.
“You didn’t have to be a dick,” she found herself saying, thickly. “I like her.”
“I don’t like her,” said Harrowhark. “I don’t like her cavalier.”
“I still don’t get why you’re all up in arms against what is a very basic man hulk. Did you get the key?”
The key appeared in Harrow’s other hand, shining silvery white, austerely plain with a single loop for a head and three simple teeth on the shaft. “Nice,” said Gideon. She rummaged in an inner pocket and removed the ring; the key slid next to the hatch key and red Response key with an untidy musical tinkle. Then she said: “Sorry your clothes melted.”
“Nav,” said Harrow, with the slow deliberation of someone close to screaming, “stay quiet. You’re not—you’re not … entirely well. I underestimated how long it would take me. The field was vicious, much more so than Septimus communicated. It had started to strip the moisture from my eyeballs before I refined on the fly.”
“By which point it had eaten your underwear,” said Gideon.
“Nav.”
“I just had a near-death experience,” she said, “let me have my little moment.”
How they got all the way up the ladder, Gideon later had no idea; it was with strange, dreamlike precision that Harrowhark bullied and bolstered her down the long, winding halls of Canaan House and back to the quarters that the Ninth House occupied, without a flicker of magic, Harrow wearing nothing but a big black overcloak. Every so often she wondered if she had, in fact, kicked the bucket and this was her afterlife: wandering empty halls with a half-naked, chastened Harrowhark Nonagesimus who had no recourse but to be gentle with her, handling her as though at any moment she would explode into wet confetti giblets.
She even let Harrow steer her toward the blankets that constituted her bed. Gideon was too exhausted to do anything but lie down and sneeze three times in quick succession, each sneeze a migraine gong through sinus and skull bone.
“Quit looking at me like that,” she eventually commanded Harrow, wiping bloody muck onto her hanky. “I’m alive.”
“You nearly weren’t,” said Harrow soberly, “and you’re not even aggrieved about it. Don’t price your life so cheaply, Griddle. I have absolutely no interest in you losing your sense of self-preservation. What are these theorems for?” she suddenly exploded. “What did we gain from that? What was the point? I should have walked away, like Sextus—but I don’t have the luxury! I need to become Lyctor now, before—”
She bit off her words like meat from a bone. Gideon waited to know before what, but no more was forthcoming. She closed her eyes and waited, but opened them when she panicked and realised that she had forgotten how long it had been since she had shut them. Harrowhark was sitting there with that same curious expression on her paintless face, looking thoroughly unlike herself.
“Get some rest,” she said imperiously.
For the first time, Gideon obeyed her without compunction.
Chapter 21
When Gideon woke up later, Dominicus had made the room wet and orange with evening light. She was cramped from hunger. When she rolled over, she was assaulted with a series of increasingly aggressive notes.
I have taken the keys and gone to examine the new laboratory. DO NOT come and find me.
This was plainly unfair, even if the delights locked behind a Lyctoral door could only really be enjoyed by someone who gurgled over necromantic theorems, but anyway–
DO NOT leave the quarters. I will ask Sextus to look at you.
Willingly go to Palamedes? Harrow must have had a hell of a fright. Gideon reflexively checked her pulse in case she was still dead.
DO NOT go anywhere. I have left some bread for you in a drawer.
Yum.
“Go anywhere” in this case is defined as leaving the quarters to go to any other location in Canaan House, which you are banned from doing.
“I’m not eating your nasty drawer food,” said Gideon, and rolled out of bed.
She felt terrible—like she hadn’t slept for days and days—then remembered that she hadn’t, really, excepting last night. She felt feeble as a kitten. It took all her strength just to get to the bathroom, wash her scabrously painted face, and lap at the tap like an animal. The mirror reflected a haggard girl whose blood probably resembled fruit juice, with anaemia all the way up to her ears. She combed through her hair with her fingers, and thought of Dulcinea, and for some reason blushed deeply.
The water was fortifying. The bread in the drawer—which she ate, ravenously, like a wraith—was not. Gideon searched around in her pockets just in case she had left something there—an apple, or some nuts—and found herself startled when she found the note, and then wondered why she was startled. Her memory caught up a laggard step behind her comprehension: the piece of flimsy was still there, though the piece of flimsy had been there all the time, so there was a horrible possibility inherent.
There was a knock on the door. Nonplussed, unpainted, and hungry, she opened it. Nonplussed, much-tried, and impatient, Camilla the Sixth stared back.
She sighed, obviously tired of Gideon’s bullshit already, and raised a hand with three digits bent. “How many fingers?” she demanded.
Gideon blinked. “How many bent, or how many you’re showing, and do I count the thumb?”
“Vision’s fine,” said Camilla to herself, and retracted the hand. She elbowed into the room as though she had licence, and let a heavy bag drop to the floor with a thud, kneeling down to riffle through it. “Language is fine. Where are we? What did we come here for? What’s your name?”
“What’s your mum’s name,” said Gideon. “Why are you here?”
The compact, grey-clad cav of the Sixth did not even look up at this question. It was interesting to see her in the light: her fine sheets of slate-brown hair were cut sharply below her chin, giving a general air of scissor blades. She glanced up at Gideon without seeming very perturbed. “Your necromancer talked to my necromancer,” she said. “My necromancer said you should be a corpse. You breathing?”