“I thought he was, perhaps, the most boring man alive,” supplied her twin, languidly, wiping her hands. Corona flinched. “And not even a classic Seventh House bore; he hasn’t subjected us to even one minimalist poem about cloud formations.”
“Consider this: maybe there’s no motive,” said Jeannemary Chatur, who refused to sheathe her rapier. She had positioned herself and Isaac nearly back-to-back, as though united they could take all comers. “Consider this: they went through the hatch, just like Magnus and Abigail, and now he’s dead and she’s about to kick the bucket.”
“Would the Fourth drop this insane monster theory—”
“Not insane,” said Teacher to Naberius, “oh, no, not insane.”
Captain Deuteros, who had been scribbling in her notepad, leant back in her chair and tossed down her pencil. “I’d like to supply a more human mens rea. Yes, the Duchess Septimus and her cavalier had accessed the facility. Did they have any keys?”
“Yes,” said a voice at the door.
Gideon hadn’t noticed the chain mail–skirted, whitewashed figure of Silas Octakiseron leave, but she noticed him come back in. He entered the eating-atrium from the kitchen side looking pallid and unruffled, his bladed face as pitiless as ever, free from a normal human emotion. “Yes, she does,” he repeated, “or rather, she did.”
“What the hell did you just do,” said Palamedes quietly.
“Your aggression is unseemly and unwarranted,” said Silas. “I went to see her. I felt a certain responsibility. I was the one who asked for satisfaction, and Brother Asht had been ready to duel her missing cavalier. I did not want bad blood between us. I feel nothing but pity for the Seventh House, Warden Sextus.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
Silas felt about in his pocket and raised his hand to display its contents. It was one of the iron key rings, and on it were two keys, one grey, one a familiar white.
“If foul play has befallen her cavalier,” he said, in his curiously deep voice, “then the culprit will get no joy of it. I found her conscious, keeping hold of this. She’s surrendered it to me for safekeeping.”
“That’s dubious in the extreme,” said Captain Deuteros. “Surrender them to me now in a show of good faith, Master Silas. If you please.”
“I cannot in good conscience, until I know the fate of Protesilaus the Seventh. Anyone here could be guilty. Brother Asht. Here.” The chain mail–kirtled boy tossed the ring to his cavalier, who caught it out of the air and fished his own heavy key ring out of his pocket. Gideon noticed that their ring held a facility key and one other, in black wrought iron with curlicues. Colum the Eighth locked the two rings together with a very final click. “I’ll keep these until such a time as she wants them. Judging by our conversation, that may well be never.”
This was received with a brief silence.
“You callous bastard,” shouted Naberius, “you just went and heavied a nearly dead girl for her keys.”
Jeannemary said, “You’re just sorry you didn’t think of it first.”
“Chatur, if you say one more bloody word I’ll make sure you never get through puberty—”
“Hold your tongue, Prince Tern,” said Captain Deuteros. “I have bigger fish to fry than listening to you abuse a child.”
She stood. She took them all in, with the face of a woman who had come to a final conclusion.
“This is where the tendon meets the bone. This—key hoarding—cannot continue. I told you before that the Second House would take responsibility if nobody else had the stomach for it. That begins now.”
The slender necromancer in his pure Eighth whites had slid into a chair proffered by his nephew, and he sat straight-backed and thoughtful.
“Is that a challenge to me, then, Captain?” he said sorrowfully.
“You’ll keep.” The Second adept thrust her chin toward Palamedes, who had been sitting with fingers steepled beneath his jaw, staring through the walls as though discord was so intensely distasteful that he could only distance himself from it. “Warden, the Sixth is the Emperor’s Reason. I asked you earlier, and I’m telling you now: hand over what keys you’ve won for my safekeeping.”
The Sixth, the Emperor’s Reason, blinked.
“With all respect,” he said, “piss off.”
“Let the record state that I was forced into a challenge,” said Lieutenant Dyas, and she peeled off one white glove. She threw it down on the table, looking Palamedes dead in the eye. “We duel. I name the time, you name the place. The time is now.”
“Duel the Sixth?” squawked Jeannemary. “That’s not fair!”
A perfect babel broke out. Teacher rose with a curious, resigned expression on his face: “I will not be party to this,” he said, as though that was going to stop anyone, and he left the room. In the vacuum of his exit, Corona slapped both of her hands down on the table: “Judith, you coward, pick on someone your own size—”
“This is what happens, isn’t it?” The bad necromancer teen was in a stupor, stilclass="underline" he sounded wondering, not angry. “This is what happens with Magnus and Abigail gone.”
“Yes, I’m sure Magnus the Fifth would have issued us a strongly worded memorandum—”
“Ianthe! Not helping!—Sixth, you mustn’t accept—the Third will represent the Sixth in this, if they’ll consent. At arms, Babs.”
Her twin sister’s voice was thin and soft as silk: “Don’t unsheathe that sword, Naberius.”
“Ianthe, what—are—you—doing.”
“I want to see how this plays out,” she said with a pallid shrug, heedless of the growing ire in her twin’s voice. “Alas. I have a bad personality and a stupefying deficit of attention.”
“Well, Babs, thank God, has much better sense than to listen to you—Babs?”
Naberius’s hand was hesitating hard on the hilt. He had not sprung into action as proposed, nor had he flanked the commanding twin. He was staring at her pale shadow, knuckles white, hand still, with a resentment very near hate. Corona’s smile flickered. “Babs?”
Through all this, Palamedes had slopped the weight of his head into one hand, then into the other, scrubbing his fingers down his long face. He had taken his glasses off and was tapping the thick frames against the table. His nail-grey stare had not left Judith Deuteros, whose own gaze was as resolute as concrete.
“Default, Warden,” said the captain. “You are a good man. Don’t put your cavalier through this.”
Palamedes seemed to snap out of it all at once, squeaking his chair legs horribly on the tiled floor as he scooted it backward and away from the table’s edge.
“No, we’re doing this,” he said abruptly. “I pick here.”
The captain said, “Sextus, you’re mad. Give her some dignity.”
He did not even stand; just crooked his fingers at his cavalier. Rather than tensing up in anticipation, as Gideon might have, Camilla had relaxed. She shook her dark fringe off her forehead, shivered out of her hood and her cloak, swung her neck back and forth like someone limbering up to dance.
“Oh, I am,” he said. “Cam?”
Camilla Hect stepped on to the wooden table with one long, lean movement. She wore a long grey shirt and grey slacks beneath her cloak, and she looked less like a cavalier than an off-duty librarian. Still, this startled her audience except for Lieutenant Dyas, who vaulted up to the opposite side of the table, which creaked crossly beneath the strain. Dyas had not bothered to take off her jacket. She slid her utilitarian and bone-sharp knife out of its cross-hip sheath and laid it there for display. With her main hand she drew her rapier, plain-hilted, polished until it hurt.