Naberius Tern lay awkwardly sprawled on the ground. His expression was that of a man who had suffered the surprise of his life. There was something too white about his eyeballs, but otherwise he looked perfectly real, perfectly alive, perfectly coiffed. His lips were still a little parted, as if he were going to crossly demand an explanation any minute now.
They were stock-still. Only Palamedes had the presence of mind to move: he bypassed Ianthe entirely and crossed to where the cavalier lay, stretched out and stiffening. There were blood spatters down his front, a great tear ripped in his shirt. The blade had come through his back. Palamedes reached down, grimaced at something, and shut the man’s staring eyes.
“She’s right. He’s gone,” he said.
At this, Silas and Colum came to themselves. Colum drew. But Ianthe gave a sudden shrill trill of a laugh—a laugh with too many edges.
“Eighth! Sword away,” she said. “Oh, Eighth. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Ianthe suddenly tucked her knees into her chest and moaned: it was the low, querulous moan of someone with a stomach pain, almost comical.
“This is not how I had envisioned this,” she said afterward, teeth chattering. “I am merely telling you. I won.”
Gideon said, slowly: “Princess. None of us here speaks crazy lady.”
“A very hurtful name,” said Ianthe, and yawned. Her teeth started chattering again halfway through, and she bit her tongue, yowled, and spat on the floor. A thin wisp of smoke arose from the mingled spit and blood. They all stared at it.
“I admit it, this smarts,” she said, broodingly. “I had my speech all planned out—I was going to brag somewhat, you understand. Because I didn’t need any of your keys, and I didn’t need any of your secrets. I was always better than all of you—and none of you noticed—nobody ever notices, which is both my virtue and my downfall. How I hate being so good at my job … You noticed, didn’t you, you horrible little Ninth goblin? Just a bit?”
The horrible little Ninth goblin stared at her with tight-pressed lips. She had inched away from Gideon toward the theorem plate, and with no sense of shame began to look it over.
“You knew about the beguiling corpse,” Harrow said. “You knew how impossible it was.”
“Yee-ee-s. I knew the energy transferral didn’t add up. None of the thanergy signatures in this building added up … until I realised what we were all being led to. What the Lyctors of old were trying to tell us. You see, my field has always been energy transferral … large-scale energy transferral. Resurrection theory. I studied what happened when the Lord our Kindly God took our dead and dying Houses and brought them back to life, all those years ago … what price he would have had to pay. What displacement, the soul of a planet? What happens when a planet dies?”
“You’re an occultist,” said Palamedes. “You’re a liminal magician. I thought you were an animaphiliac.”
“That’s just for show,” said Ianthe. “I’m interested in the place between death and life … the place between release and disappearance. The place over the river. The displacement … where the soul goes when we knock it about … where the things are that eat us.”
Harrow said, “You make it sound a lot more interesting than it really is.”
“Stop being such a bone adept,” said Ianthe. She coughed and laughed again, fretfully. She closed her eyes and let her head loll suddenly downward. When she opened them again the pupil and the iris were gone, leaving the terrible white of the eyeball. They all flinched as Ianthe cried aloud. She closed her eyes tight and shook her head like a rattle, and when she opened them back up, she was panting with exertion, as though she’d just run a race. Gideon remained in a state of flinch.
Neither of her eyes were their original colour. Both the pupil and the iris were intermingled shades of brown, purple, and blue. Ianthe closed her eyes a third time, and when the pale lashes opened, both had returned to insipid amethyst.
Palamedes had moved to the wall behind Ianthe, flanking her. She did not even bother to turn or notice. She just curled in on herself. Behind Sextus, YOU LIED TO US stretched out in vast array.
“Step one,” she said, singsong, “preserve the soul, with intellect and memory intact. Step two, analyse it—understand its structure, its shape. Step three, remove and absorb it: take it into yourself without consuming it in the process.”
“Oh, fuck,” said Harrow, very quietly. She had moved back to Gideon’s side now, slipping her journal back into her pocket. “The megatheorem.”
“Step four, fix it in place so it can’t deteriorate. That’s the part I wasn’t sure of, but I found the method here, in this very room. Step five, incorporate it: find a way to make the soul part of yourself without being overwhelmed. Step six: consume the flesh. Not the whole thing, a drop of blood will do to ground you. Step seven is reconstruction—making spirit and flesh work together the way they used to, in the new body. And then for the last step you hook up the cables and get the power flowing. You’ll find that one a walk in the park, Eighth, I suspect it was your House’s contribution.”
Palamedes said: “Princess. You never had any keys. You never saw any of these rooms, except this one.”
“Like I said,” said Ianthe, “I am very, very good, and moreover I’ve got common sense. If you face the challenge rooms, you don’t need the study notes—not if you’re the best necromancer the Third House ever produced. Aren’t I, Corona? Baby, stop crying, you’re going to get such a headache.”
“I came to the same conclusion you did,” said Palamedes, but his voice was cold and inflexible. “I discarded it as ghastly. Ghastly, and obvious.”
“Ghastly and obvious are my middle names,” said the pale twin. “Sextus, you sweet Sixth prude. Use that big, muscular brain of yours. I’m not talking about the deep calculus. Ten thousand years ago there were sixteen acolytes of the King Undying, and then there were eight. Who were the cavaliers to the Lyctor faithful? Where did they go?”
Palamedes opened his mouth as though to answer this question; but he had bumped against something on the back wall, and had gone still. Gideon had never known him to be still. He was a creature of sudden movement and twitchy fingers. Camilla was watching him with obvious suspicion; one of his thumbs was tracing the edge of a black-painted letter, but the rest of his body was rigid. He looked as though someone had turned his power switch off.
But Silas was saying—
“None of this explains why you have killed Naberius Tern.”
Ianthe cocked her head to one side, drunkenly, to take him in. The violet of her eyes was dried-up flowers; her mouth was the colour and softness of rocks.
“Then you weren’t listening. I haven’t killed Naberius Tern. I ate Naberius Tern,” she said, indifferently. “I put a sword through his heart to pin his soul in place. Then I took it into my body. I’ve robbed Death itself … I have drunk up the substance of his immortal soul. And now I will burn him and burn him and burn him, and he will never really die. I have absorbed Naberius Tern … I am more than the sum of his half, and mine.”
Her head hung close to her chest again. She gave a hiccup that sounded a little bit like a sob, and a little bit like a laugh. As she did she appeared blurry and indistinct before them—rocking out of her edges, somehow, unreal. Gideon’s skin had already been crawling, but now it was trying to sprint.