The room fell silent. The Second’s carefully placid faces were frozen. Corona had gone still. Gideon’s own face must have been doing something, because the rangy necromancer of the Sixth looked at her, and then looked at the Second, and said: “You must have realised this.”
Gideon wondered why she hadn’t realised this: she wondered why she had assumed that—that maybe there were infinity keys, or enough for a full set each. She sat down hard on the closest chair at the closest table, counting the keys mentally—the red and white keys that she and Harrow had won, the second of them half Dulcinea’s by right. At another look at everyone’s faces, Palamedes said, more irascibly: “You must have realised this.”
The golden hand had not dropped from his shoulder, but instead fisted in his shirt. “But that means—that means the challenge must be communal,” said Corona, with an exquisite furrow of her brow. “If we’re all only given pieces of this puzzle, refusing to share the knowledge means that nobody can solve it. We need to pool everything, or none of us will be ever be Lyctor. That has to be it, hasn’t it, Teacher?”
Teacher had sat with his hands around his cup of tea as though enjoying the heat, breathing in its curls of fragrant steam. “There is no law,” he said.
“Against teaming up?”
“No,” said Teacher. “What I mean is, there is no law. You could join forces. You could tell each other anything. You could tell each other nothing. You could hold all keys and knowledge in common. I have given you your rule, and there are no others. Some things may take you swiftly down the road to Lyctorhood. Some things may make the row harder to plough.”
“We still come under Imperial law,” said Marta the Second.
“All of us come under the sway of Imperial law,” agreed her necromancer, whose expression was now a shade doubtful. “Rules exist. Like I’ve said before, the First House falls under Cohort jurisdiction.”
“Where you got that idea from,” said Teacher tartly, and it was the first time Gideon had heard him give even a little reproof, “I do not know. We are in a sacred space. Imperial law is based on the writ of the Emperor, and here the Emperor is the only law. No writ, no interpretation. I gave you his rule. There is no other.”
“But natural law—the laws against murder and theft. What prevents us from stealing one another’s keys through intimidation, blackmail, or deception? What would stop someone from waiting for another necromancer and their cavalier to gather a sufficient number of keys, then taking them by force?”
Teacher said, “Nothing.”
Coronabeth had finally dropped her hand from Palamedes’s shoulder. She looked over at the Second House—a sombre understanding was dawning on Captain Deuteros’s face, and Lieutenant Dyas’s was as inscrutable as ever—and then she looked at Palamedes, whose expression was that of a soldier who had just heard the call to the front. There was a shields-up twist to his mouth and eyes.
Corona breathed, “Ianthe has to know,” and fled from the room. Her leaving was a little like an eclipse: the evening sun seemed to cool with her, and the duller electric lights vibrated to life with her passing.
In an almost inexcusably banal act, a white-belted skeleton appeared from the kitchen with two steaming plates of the poached pale meat and root vegetables. One of these was put in front of Gideon, and she remembered that she was ravenous. She ignored the knife and fork that the skeleton carefully laid at either side of the plate, as nicely as anyone with a soul would have, and started cramming food into her mouth with her hands.
Teacher was still bracing his hands around his cup, his expression more final than troubled: too serene to be worried, but still somehow thoughtful, a little woebegone.
“Teacher,” said Palamedes, “when did Magnus the Fifth ask you for a facility key?”
“Why, the night he died,” said Teacher, “he and little Jeannemary. After the dinner. But she didn’t take hers. Magnus asked me to hold on to it … for safekeeping. She was not happy. I thought perhaps the Fourth would come and ask for it today. Then again—if I could prevent either of those two children from going down to that place, I would.”
He looked up through the skylight at the deepening dusk, the curls of steam from his mug slowly thinning away.
“Oh, Emperor of the Nine Houses,” he said to the night, “Necrolord Prime, God who became man and man who became God—we have loved you these long days. The sixteen gave themselves freely to you. Lord, let nothing happen that you did not anticipate.”
There came the noisy clatter of bowls. It was the Second, who—instead of sitting back down—were collating their cutlery and pushing in their chairs. They left in taut silence, single file, without a glance back at anyone remaining. Camilla sat down opposite Gideon as the skeleton put the second plate in front of her, and she used her knife and fork, though not with any great elegance.
The necromancer of the Sixth was rubbing at his temples. His cavalier looked at him, and he offhandedly took a few bites of his meat and his vegetables, but then he stopped pretending and put down his fork.
“Cam,” he said. “Ninth. When you’re finished, come with me.”
It didn’t take long for Gideon to finish, as in any case she hadn’t much bothered to chew. She stared with glassy eyes at Camilla the Sixth’s plate—Camilla, who had finished most of hers, rolled her eyes and pushed her leftovers to Gideon. This was an act for which she was fond of Camilla forever after. Then they both followed a stoop-shouldered Palamedes as he pushed through the door that the Second had left from—down a corridor and a short flight of steps—turning a wheel on an iron door, its glass window rimed thickly with frost.
This appeared to be where the priests stored anything perishable. Strings of startle-eyed, frozen fish with their scales and tails intact hung like laundry on lines above steel countertops, bewildering Gideon with the reality of what she had been eating. Other, even weirder meats were stacked in alcoves to one side of the room, expiration dates labelled with spidery handwriting. A fan blasted the area with toe-curlingly cold air as Gideon wrapped her cloak more thickly around her. Barrels lined some of the other walls: fresh vegetables, obviously just picked for tonight’s chopping, lay on a granite board. A skeleton was packing linen-wrapped wheels of some waxy white substance into a box. A door led away from this fridge—it opened, and the Second emerged. They did not look happy to see the newcomers.
Captain Deuteros said heavily, “You’re a fool, Sextus.”
“I don’t deserve that,” said Palamedes. “You’re the one who just found nothing for the second time.”
“The Sixth House is welcome to succeed where the Second has failed.” She tugged her already perfect gloves into even glassier unwrinkled smoothness, and flakes of ice settled on her braided head. “The community needs this over and done with,” she said. “It needs someone who can take command, end this, and send everyone back in one piece. Will you consider working with me?”
“No,” said Palamedes.
“I’m not bribing you with goods and services. I’m asking you to choose stability.”
“I can’t be bribed with goods and services,” said Palamedes, “but I can’t be bribed with moral platitudes, either. My conscience doesn’t permit me to help anyone do what we have all embarked upon.”
“You don’t understand—”
Palamedes said savagely, “Captain, God help you when you understand. My only consolation is that you won’t be able to put any responsibility on my head.”