Their unseemly interest never quenched, both of the Sixth House immediately peered into the wound. Camilla flicked on her pocket torch. Harrow crowded in beside them while Gideon stayed to watch the Eighth. Silas looked as wan and uncomfortable as Abigail did; his cavalier was as impassive as ever, and he did not meet Gideon’s eye.
“The cut was made with Tern’s triple-knife,” said Palamedes. He had laid his hand over the wound. He eased his fingers into the hole without any hint of a wince, and he held them there for a second. “And removed the—no, the kidney’s still present. Cam, there was something here.”
“Magnifier?”
“Don’t need it. It was metal—Camilla, it was here for a while … the flesh had sealed over it. It would—fuck!”
The rest of the room jumped. But nothing had bitten Palamedes, except maybe internally: he was staring off into the middle distance, horrified. He looked as though he had just been given a piece of chocolate cake and found, after two bites, half a spider.
“My timing was wrong,” he said softly, to himself, and again more waspishly: “Nonagesimus. My timing was wrong.”
“Use your words, Sextus.”
“Why didn’t I investigate Abigail before—The Fifth went down into the facility—they must have completed a challenge. The night of the dinner. Pent was nobody’s fool. They were caught out on the top of the stairs coming back. Something was hidden inside her to avoid detection—God knows why she did it, or why anyone did it—three inches long, metal, shaft, teeth—”
“A key,” said Silas.
“But that’s insane,” said Gideon.
“Someone wanted to hide that key very badly—it may have been Lady Pent herself,” said Palamedes. Finally, he withdrew his hand from her insides, and crossed to wash it in the sink, which Gideon thought was the civilised thing to do. “Or it may have been the person who killed her. There is one room that someone has made every attempt to keep us from. Octakiseron, this wasn’t defilement for the sake of defilement, it was someone breaking open a lockbox.”
Silas said calmly, “Are those rooms worth carrying such a sin?”
Harrow stared at him.
“You took two keys off the Seventh House,” she demanded, “won one from a challenge, and never bothered to open their doors?”
“I won the first key to see what I was up against, and took possession of two more to preserve them from misuse,” said Silas. “I hate this House. I despise the reduction of a holy temple to a maze and a puzzle. I took the keys so that you wouldn’t have them. Nor the Sixth, nor the Third.”
Palamedes wiped his hands dry on a piece of towelling and pushed his glasses up his nose. They had fogged up from his breath, in that cold and quiet place.
“Master Octakiseron,” he said, “you are an intellectual cretin and a dog in a manger, but at least you’re consistent. I know which door this opens, as does the Ninth. And, we have to assume, so does the Third. I know where they’ll be, and I want to see what they’ve found—”
“Before it is too late,” said Harrow.
She went over to the racks of bodies, and she opened up one last slab that Gideon had forgotten about entirely. It was the sad pile of cremains and bone that they had found in the furnace. The biggest bits of the corpses were no bigger than a thumbnail. Surprising Gideon—yet again—it was Colum who moved opposite to Harrow, gesturing to the bones and the ashes almost impatiently.
“This one,” he said. “Half of it. It’s the Seventh cavalier.”
“I had assumed as much,” said Harrow. “There was no skull. The time of death only made sense if it was Protesilaus.”
“The other half is someone else,” said Silas.
“We can’t do anything for them yet,” said Palamedes. “The living have to take precedence here, if we want to keep living.”
As it turned out, he was wrong.
Chapter 34
Six of them walked the dim hallways of Canaan House: three necromancers, three cavaliers. Every so often they would come across the fallen-down body of a skeletal servant, still and grinning emptily up at the ceiling, the chains that had bound them to this tower finally broken. Gideon found the sight of the little heaps and piles weirdly distressing. They had been walking around for ten thousand years, probably, and after two moments of panic and tragedy it was all over. The priests of the First House were gone. Maybe it was relief, or maybe it was sacrilege.
Gideon wondered what her state of mind would be after a whole myriad: bored as hell, probably. Desperate to do anything or be anyone else. She would have done everything there was to do, and if she hadn’t seen it, she could probably imagine what it looked like.
They followed Harrow’s map to the hallway of the stopped-up Lyctor door. The lock still carried the mark of the regenerating bone that had been such a bastard to remove. The stark painting of the waterless canyon had been taken away, and now all three necromancers stood silently before the great black pillars and bizarre carvings above. Silas said, “I feel no wards here.”
Harrow said, “It’s a lure.”
“Or carelessness,” said Palamedes.
“Or they just didn’t give a shit, guys,” said Gideon, “given that the key is still inside the lock.”
It was the third door that day they had opened with absolutely no knowledge of what would lie within. The yellow light flooded out into the corridor, and inside—
The other two laboratories Gideon had seen were caves. They were practical places to work and sleep and train and eat, homely at best, cheerless at worst, laboratories in the real sense of the word. This room was something else. It had been light and airy, once. The floors were made of varnished wood, and the walls were great whitewashed panels. The panels had been painted lovingly, a long time ago, with a sprawling expanse of fanciful things: white-skinned trees with pale purple blossoms trailing into orange pools, golden clouds thick with flying birds. The room was sparsely furnished—a few broad desks with pots of neatly arranged pencils and books; a polished marble slab with a tidy array of knives and pairs of scissors; what looked to be an ancient chest freezer; some rolled-up mattresses and embroidered quilts, decaying in an open locker at one end.
This was all immaterial. Three things caught Gideon’s attention immediately:
On one of the sweetly painted frescoes, fresh paint marred the blossom-decked trees. Over them, on the wall, black words a foot high proclaimed:
YOU LIED TO US
Someone was crying in the slow, dull way of a person who had been crying for hours already and didn’t know how to stop.
And Ianthe sat in the centre of the room, waiting. She had taken up position on an ancient and sagging cushion, reclining on it like a queen. Joining a growing trend, her pale golden robes were spattered with blood, and her pallid yellow hair was spattered with more. She was trembling so hard that she was vibrating, and her pupils were so dilated you could have flown a shuttle through them.
“Hello, friends,” she said.
The source of the crying became apparent a little way into the room. Next to the marble slab, Coronabeth was huddled, her arms wrapped around her knees as she rocked backward and forward. Next to her on the ground—
“Yes,” said Ianthe. “My cavalier is dead, and I killed him. Please don’t misunderstand, this isn’t a confession.”