Silas looked up, nearly foetal, from the floor. He still glowed like a pearl in a sunbeam, but he’d lost his focus. Ianthe stepped out of his spell disdainfully, flesh plumping, colour coming back to her face, and she itched herself. There were lights beneath Colum the Eighth’s skin: things pushed and slithered along his muscles as he walked, heavy-footed, rocking from side to side.
Silas wiped the blood away from his nose and mouth and said calmly: “Brother Asht, listen to the words of the head of your House.”
Colum advanced.
“Come back,” said Silas, unruffled. “I bid you return. I bid you return. Colum—I bid you return. I bid you return. I bid you return. I bid. I bid, I bid, I bid— Colum—”
The thing that lived in Colum raised Colum’s sword, and drove the point through Silas Octakiseron’s throat.
Gideon moved. She heard Harrow shout a warning, but she couldn’t help it. She drew her rapier from its scabbard, and she threw herself at the grey thing wearing a person skin. It was not a cavalier: it did not meet the arc of her sword with a parry. It just clouted her with Colum’s shield with a strength no human being ever had. Gideon staggered, very nearly fell, ducked out of the way of a sword gracelessly slammed downward. She took advantage of his movement, got up close, pinned his arm between her body and her sword and shattered his wrist with a meaty crack. The thing opened its mouth and opened its eyes, right up in her face. Its eyeballs were gone—Colum’s eyeballs were gone—and now the sockets were mouths ringed with teeth, with little tongues slithering out of them. The tongue in his original mouth extended out, down, wrapping itself around her neck—
“Enough,” said Ianthe.
She appeared behind the grey-thing-that-had-been-Colum. She took its twisted neck in her hands as calmly and easily as though it were an animal, and she tilted it. The neck snapped. Her fingertips dipped inside the skin; the eye-mouths shrilled, and the tongue around Gideon’s neck flopped away, and both those mouths dissolved into brackish fluid. The body dropped to the floor—
—and it was Colum again, face disfigured, neck on the wrong way, sprawled over the pierced shell of his young dead uncle. There was no solace in that big, beat-up body, clutched around his necromancer’s in morbid imitation of the whole of their lives. Neither of them wore white anymore: they were stained all the way through, yellow, red, pink.
The lights buzzed again dismally. The air cleared. Ianthe was left among the gore looking like a moth, fairylike. She picked up the hem of her skirts delicately and shook them. The blood and muck came off like it was powder.
The Princess of Ida beheld the mess around her: then she slapped herself very lightly, like you would to wake someone up.
“Get it together,” she told herself. “You nearly lost that.”
She turned to Gideon, Camilla, and Harrow, and she said—
“There are worse things than myself in this building. Have that one for free.”
Then she stepped backward, into the puddled spray of Silas’s blood, and disappeared. They were left alone in the room, with the quiet, stretched-out corpses of Silas Octakiseron, Colum Asht, and Naberius Tern; and the low, dreary breathing of Coronabeth Tridentarius, looking like chopped-up jewellery.
Gideon lurched toward her, out of desperation to move—to move away from the middle and what was in it, to move toward the abandoned Third twin. Corona looked up at her with tears on her beautiful lashes and eyes swollen from crying. She threw herself into Gideon’s arms, and she sobbed, silently now, utterly destroyed. Gideon was soothed by the fact that someone in this madhouse was still human enough to cry.
“Are you okay—I mean, are you all right,” said Gideon.
Corona recoiled from Gideon and looked up at her, her golden hair smeared to her forehead with sweat and tears. “She took Babs,” she said, which seemed fair enough.
But then Corona started crying again, big tears leaking out of her eyes, her voice thick with misery and self-pity. “And who even cares about Babs? Babs! She could have taken me.”
Chapter 35
They left the lonely twin to her bitter, alien grief. Camilla and Harrow and Gideon stood together out in the hallway, reeling. Gideon was rotating her shoulder in its socket to make sure nothing had graunched out of place, and Harrowhark was flicking gobs of something unspeakable off her sleeves, when Camilla said: “The Warden. Where’s the Warden?”
“I lost track of him during the fight,” said Gideon. “I thought he was behind you.”
Harrow said, “He was—and I was by the door. I saw him only a few minutes ago.”
“I lost sight of him,” Camilla said. “I never lose sight of him.”
“Slow your roll,” said Gideon, with far more assurance than she actually felt. “He’s a big boy. He’s probably gone to make sure Dulcinea’s okay. Harrow says I’m a weenie over Dulcinea—” (“You are,” said Harrow, “a weenie over Dulcinea,”) “—but he’s six hundred per cent weenier than I am, which I still don’t get.”
Camilla looked at her and brushed her dark, slanted fringe out of her eyes. There was something in her gaze starker than impatience.
“The Warden,” she said, “has been exchanging letters with Dulcinea Septimus for twelve years. He’s been—a weenie—over her. One of the reasons he became the heir of the House was to meet her on even footing. His pursuit of medical science was entirely for her benefit.”
This turned all the fluids in Gideon’s body to ice-cold piss.
“She—she never mentioned him at all,” she said, stupidly.
“No,” said Camilla.
“But she—I mean, I was spending so much time with her—”
“Yes,” said Camilla.
“Oh, God,” said Gideon. “And he was so nice about it. Oh my God. Why the fuck did he not say anything? I didn’t—I mean, I never really—I mean, she and I weren’t—”
“He asked her to marry him a year ago,” said Camilla ruthlessly, some floodgate down now, “so that she could spend the rest of her time with someone who cared about her comfort. She refused, but not on the grounds that she didn’t like him. And they weren’t going to relax Imperial rules about necromancers marrying out of House. The letters grew sparser after that. And when he arrived here—she’d moved on. He told me he was glad that she was spending time with someone who made her laugh.”
Five people had died that day; it was weird how the small things ballooned out in importance, comparatively. The tragedy saturated the stiffening bones and static hearts lying in state at Canaan House, but there was also deep tragedy in the flawed beams holding up their lives. An eight-year-old writing love letters to a terminally ill teenager. A girl falling in love with the beautiful stiff she’d been conceived solely to look after. A foundling chasing the approval of a House disappointed with her immunity to foundling-killing gas.
Gideon lay on the floor, facedown, and became hysterical.
Her necromancer was saying, “None of this makes any sense.”
“Nope,” said Camilla heavily, “but it never has the whole time I’ve known them both.”
“No,” said Harrow. “I mean that Dulcinea Septimus twice spoke of Palamedes Sextus to me as a stranger. She told me that she didn’t know him well at all, after he had turned down her offer for the siphoning challenge.”
Gideon, facedown on the dusty ground, moaned: “I want to die.”