“Because I am placing my trust in you,” said Palamedes. “Yes, even though you’re a black anchorite and loyal only to the numinous forces of the Locked Tomb. If you’d wanted my keys through chicanery you would have challenged me for them a long time ago. I don’t trust Silas Octakiseron, and I don’t trust Ianthe Tridentarius, but I trust the Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus.”
Beneath the paint, Gideon could see that Harrow had changed colours a number of times through this little speech. She went from being a rather ashen skeleton to a skeleton who was improbably green around the gills. To an outsider, it would have just been a blank Ninth House mask twinging from darque mystery to cryptique mystery, giving nothing away, but to Gideon it was like watching fireworks go off.
Her necromancer said gruffly: “Fine. But we’ll watch over the Seventh House. I’m not going down the ladder with your invalid cavalier.”
Palamedes said, “Fine. Perhaps that’s better use of our talents, anyway. Fourth, are you all right to go with Gideon the Ninth? I realise I am presupposing that our motives all align—but all I can assure you is that they really do. Search the facility, and if you find him—or come up short—come back to us, and we’ll move from there. Get in and get out.”
The bleary necromantic teen looked to his bleary cavalier. Jeannemary said immediately, “We’ll go with the Ninth. She’s all right. The stories about the Ninth House seem probably bullshit, anyway.”
She’s all right? Gideon’s heart billowed, despite the fact that she had her own suspicions as to why her necromancer didn’t want her sitting with Dulcinea Septimus, and they were all extremely petty. The Sixth House adept adjusted his glasses again and said, “Sorry. Ninth cavalier, I should ask you your thoughts on all of this.”
She cracked the joints in the back of her neck as she considered the question, stretching out the ligaments, popping her knuckles. He urged again, “Thoughts?”
Gideon said, “Did you know that if you put the first three letters of your last name with the first three letters of your first name, you get ‘Sex Pal’?”
The dreadful teens both stared with eyes so wide you could have marched skeletons straight through them.
“You—do you talk?” said Isaac.
“You’ll wish she didn’t,” said Camilla.
Her wound had opened again. Palamedes was searching his pockets and the sleeves of his robe for more handkerchiefs to staunch it. As the Fourth conducted a quick conversation in what they thought were whispers, Harrow came to Gideon and unwillingly passed over the great iron ring that their keys jingled on, bodies almost pressing so that she could keep them out of sight of Palamedes.
“Come back with these or having choked on them,” she whispered, “and don’t get complacent around the Fourth. Never work with children, Griddle, their prefrontal cortexes aren’t developed. Now—”
Gideon put her arms around Harrowhark. She lifted her up off the ground just an inch and squeezed her in an enormous hug before either she or Harrow knew what she was about. Her necromancer felt absurdly light in her grip, like a bag of bird’s bones. She had always thought—when she bothered to think—that Harrow would feel cold, as everything in the Ninth felt cold. No, Harrow Nonagesimus was feverishly hot. Well, you couldn’t think that amount of ghastly thoughts without generating energy. Hang on, what the hell was she doing.
“Thanks for backing me up, my midnight hagette,” said Gideon, placing her back down. Harrow had not struggled, but gone limp, like a prey animal feigning death. She had the same glassy thousand-yard stare and stilled breathing. Gideon belatedly wished to be exploded, but reminded herself to act cool. “I appreciate it, my crepuscular queen. It was good. You were good.”
Harrow, at a total loss for words, eventually managed the rather pathetic: “Don’t make this weird, Nav!” and stalked off after Palamedes.
Jeannemary sidled up alongside Gideon, rather shyly. Isaac was parasitically drifting with her: he was in the process of braiding her curly hair safely up with a tatty blue ribbon. She said, “Have you two been paired a very long time?”
(“Don’t just ask them that,” her necromancer hissed. “It’s a weird thing to ask.”
“Shut up! It was just a question!”)
Gideon contemplated the growing braid, and the sight of Palamedes squeezing the noxious contents of a blue dropper into Camilla’s wound, and Camilla kneeing him with beautiful abruptness in the thigh. Harrowhark lurked next to them, pointedly not looking at Gideon, head hidden deep inside her second-best hood. She still didn’t understand what she was meant to do or think or say: what duty really meant, between a cavalier and a necromancer, between a necromancer and a cavalier.
“It feels like forever,” she said honestly. Gideon slipped her dark-tinted glasses out of her pocket and slid them on, and she felt better for it. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Chapter 25
Despite the fact that they now knew Gideon had a working pair of vocal reeds and the will to use them, the trip down to the facility was spent in silence. Any travel into the depths of the First House put both of the teens on high alert: they were so paranoid that they would have been welcomed into the dark bosom of the suspicious Ninth. Both startled at every shadow and watched the passing-by of creaking skeletons with no little hate and despair. They did not like the open terrace where the waves howled far below, nor the cool marble hallway, nor the marble stairwell that led down to the nondescript room with the hatch to the facility. They only spoke when Gideon slipped her facility key into the hatch and turned it with a sharp click. It was Jeannemary, and she was troubled.
“We still don’t have a key,” she said. “Maybe we—shouldn’t be here.”
“Abigail died, and she had permission,” said her counterpart sombrely. “Who cares?”
“I’m just saying—”
“I’ve been down without permission,” said Gideon, as she used one booted foot to ease the hatch open. Cold air wheezed out like a pent-up ghost. “The Sixth let me in once without a key, and I’m still breathing.”
Jeannemary seemed uncomforted and unconvinced. So she added, “Hey, look at it this way: you were down here just the other night, so if that’s the sticking point, you’re already totally boned.”
“You don’t talk like—how I thought you might talk,” said Isaac.
All three travelled down the cold, dark staple-ladder to the fluorescent lights and dead stillness of the landing. Gideon went first. The other two lagged behind a little, captivated by the increasingly old and bloody gobbets that still decorated the grille at the bottom. She had to herd them forward, down the tunnel that led to the radial room, to the ancient whiteboard and the signs above the warren of corridors.
She turned: Jeannemary and Isaac had not come with her. Jeannemary had stopped in the doorway, pressing herself flat against it, looking around at the strange, anachronistic tunnels of steel and plate metal and LED lighting.
“I thought I heard a noise,” she said, eyes darting back and forth.
“Coming from where?”