The Cohort necromancer closed her eyes and seemed to count slowly to five. Then she said: “I’m not interested in veiled threats or vagaries. Will you answer honestly, if I ask you how many keys you have?”
“I would be a fool to answer,” he said, “but I can tell you that I have fewer than you think. I am not the only one who came here wanting to be a Lyctor, Captain. You’ve just been too damned slow on the uptake.”
Lieutenant Dyas’s fingers closed slowly and deliberately around the hilt of her functional rapier. Camilla’s fingers were already on hers; her other hand was on the hilt she kept at her left hip, the unembossed grip of her dagger. Gideon, who had just eaten one and a quarter dinners, felt unbelievably unready for whatever was about to go down. She was relieved when the necromancer of the Second said, “Leave it. The die is cast,” and both women pushed past them.
Palamedes led the other two cavaliers through the nondescript door to another nondescript room past the cooling larder. This room held big shelves at one end, stacked one atop the other; a few tables with wheels from which the rubber was peeling off in big strips were parked in a corner. These tables were high and long enough to hold a whole person, lying flat. It was the morgue, though a more impersonal and featureless morgue Gideon could not imagine.
Gideon said, “How long have you known about the keys?”
“Long enough,” said Palamedes, hooking his fingers underneath the lid of a morgue shelf. “Your Nonagesimus confirmed it with me after the Fifth were killed. Yes, I know you’ve known the whole time.”
Oh, exquisite! Harrowhark had kept Palamedes Sextus in a loop that didn’t include Gideon. She felt angry; then she felt bereft; then she felt angry again. This felt like being hot and cold at once. Totally heedless of her, the Sixth necromancer continued: “I meant what I said though. There are precious few keys left. The faeces hits the fan starting now. Cam, did you bring the box?”
Gideon said, “What do you mean?”
Camilla had dropped her heavy bag next to her necromancer, and he was riffling through it with one hand, pulling the shelf out with the other. Well-greased struts smoothly produced a body covered with a thin white sheet, murmuring into view feetfirst. Palamedes pulled the sheet up from the feet all the way to the abdomen and started carefully feeling the legs through the clothes. It was Magnus, and he had not improved since Gideon had last seen him. She regretted again eating one and a quarter dinners.
“Put it this way,” he said eventually, palpating a hip. “Up till now I’d assumed everyone was being remarkably civil. If the initial method of obtaining keys was cleverness and hard work, the way forward from here will be either what you just saw—heavy-handed alliance attempts—or worse. Why do you think the Eighth picked a fight with the Seventh?”
“Because he’s a prig and a nasty weirdo,” said Gideon.
“Intriguingly put,” said Palamedes, “but although he is a prig and a nasty weirdo, Dulcinea Septimus has two keys. Silas has made her a target.”
This was all getting unreaclass="underline" a weird mathematics that she hadn’t even been counting. But she was still Ninth enough to hold her tongue. She said instead: “No offense, but what the hell are you doing?”
He had taken a fingerful of jelly out of a little tub Camilla had proffered. He was rubbing it over, bizarrely enough, the dull gold hoop of Magnus Quinn’s wedding ring. With a stick of grease he made two marks above and below the band of metal, and then held his hand over it like someone cupping a flame. Palamedes closed his eyes, and—after a pregnant pause—steam began to curl above his knuckles.
All at once, he muttered crossly to himself and took his hand away. This time the grease went beneath the ring, and he started to ease it off the sad dead finger.
“I need more contact,” he said to his cavalier. “This touched the key ring, but there’s too much jumble.” And to Gideon: “Our reputation doesn’t precede us, I see. Thanergy attaches to more than just the body, Ninth. Psychometry can track the thanergy lingering in objects—when you get to it early and when there’s a strong association. Give me the scissors, I’m going to take some of his pockets.”
“What are you—”
“Quinn’s key ring, Ninth,” said Palamedes, as though her question was really hopelessly obvious. “There was nothing on the bodies yesterday. The Second came to look, but they haven’t got my resources.”
“That or they took the evidence,” said his cavalier gloomily, but her adept countered: “Not their style. Anyway, if I couldn’t find anything after yesterday’s examination, they wouldn’t.”
“Don’t get cocky, Warden.”
“I won’t. But I’m fairly sure, here.”
Gideon said, “But—hold up. Magnus had only just picked up his facility key the night—you know. He hadn’t reached any challenge labs. The facility key was all he had. Who’d take that?”
“That’s precisely what I want to know,” said Palamedes. He dropped the wedding ring into a small bleached pouch that Camilla was holding open, and then took a tiny pair of scissors and started clipping at the dead man’s trousers. “Your vow of silence is conveniently variable, Ninth, I’m very grateful.”
“Turns out I’m variably penitent. Hey, you should be talking to Nonagesimus.”
“If I wanted to talk to Nonagesimus, I’d talk to Nonagesimus,” he said, “or I’d talk to a brick wall, because honestly, your necromancer is a walking Ninth House cliché. You’re at least only half as a bad.”
Palamedes glanced up at her. His eyes really were extraordinary: like cut grey rock, or deep weather atmosphere. He cleared his throat, and he said: “How much would you do for the Lady Septimus?”
Gideon was glad of the paint; she was thrown off balance, unsure of her footing. She said, “Uh—she’s been kind to me. What’s your interest in Lady Septimus?”
“She’s—been kind to me,” said Palamedes. They stared at each other with a kind of commingled weariness and embarrassed suspicion, skirting around something juvenile and terrible. “The Eighth is both determined and dangerous.”
“Protesilaus the Seventh is uncomfortably hench, though. She’s not alone.”
Camilla spoke up: “The man’s a glorified orderly. His hand’s never on his rapier. First instinct’s to punch, and he moves like a sleepwalker.”
“Just bear witness,” said Palamedes. “Just—keep her in mind.”
The scissors went snip, snip and tiny squares of fabric were added to a new linen bag. With more reverence than she’d given him credit for—he had just given a corpse an invasive massage and stolen its jewellery—Palamedes softly pulled the sheet back over the abdomen and legs of Magnus the Fifth. He said, quite gently: “We’ll get to the bottom of this one, if you give us a little time,” and Gideon realised he was speaking to the body.
Gideon suddenly ached to hear one of the Fifth’s terrible jokes, if only because it would be a refreshing trip back to the status quo. She had to leave—her hand was on the door—but something in her made her look back and say: “What happened to them, Sextus?”
“Violent head and body trauma,” he said. For a moment he seemed to hesitate, and then he turned his laser-sharp gaze on her. “What I do know is—it wasn’t just a fall.”
His cavalier said lowly, warningly: “Warden.”
“What good is silence now?” he said to her. And then, to Gideon: “Their wounds contained extraordinarily tiny bone fragments. The fragments weren’t homogenous—they were samples from many different osseous sources, which is indicative of—”