She was nudged with a foot, not unkindly. “Get up, Griddle.”
“Why was I born so attractive?”
“Because everyone would have throttled you within the first five minutes otherwise,” said her necromancer. Her attention was on Camilla: “Yet why her about-face, if it’s all how you say it was? I still don’t understand.”
“If I did,” said the Sixth cavalier restlessly, “my quality of life, my sleep, and my sense of well-being would improve. Ninth, get up. He doesn’t hate you. You didn’t ruin anything. He and she were always more complicated than that. He never even met her in person until he came here.”
Gideon emerged from her prone position and sprang to her feet. Her heart was a dry cinder, but it still seemed ridiculously important that Palamedes Sextus be okay with her: that at the end of this whole world, right before their divine intervention, all the little muddles of their personal lives be sorted out.
“I’ve got to catch up with him,” she said, “please give me a couple minutes alone. Harrow, go get my two-hander, it’s in the false bottom of my trunk.” (“Your what?” said Harrow, affrighted.) “Cam, please, do me a massive solid here and keep an eye on her. I’m sorry I’m a homewrecker.”
Gideon turned and sprinted away. She heard Harrow yell, “Nav!” but paid her no attention. Her rapier swung awkwardly into her hip, and her arm twinged in its socket, and her neck still felt weird, but all she could do was run as hard and as fast as she could to the place where she knew she’d find her last two living allies: the sickroom where Dulcinea Septimus lay dying.
She found the Warden standing at the midpoint along the long corridor, staring at the shut door to her room. The hem of his grey robe whispered on the ground, and he seemed lost in thought. Gideon took a breath, which alerted him to her presence. He took off his glasses, wiped the lens with his sleeve, and looked back at her as he perched them back on his long nose.
It seemed as though they looked at each other for such a long time. She took a step forward, and opened her mouth to say, Sextus, I’m sorry—
He folded his fingers together as you would a piece of paper. Her body stopped where it stood, as though steel needles had pierced her hands and her legs. Gideon felt cold all over. She tried to speak, but her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth and she tasted blood. She struggled—an insect pinned to its backing—and he looked at her, cold and dispassionate, unlike himself.
Palamedes surveyed his work, and he saw that it was good. Then he opened Dulcinea’s door. Gideon tried to flail against her invisible bonds, but her bones felt rigid in her body, like she was just the meat sock around them. Her heart struggled against her inflexible rib cage, her terror rising in her mouth. He smiled, and with that strange alchemy he was made lovely, his grey eyes bright and clear. Palamedes entered the sickroom.
He did not shut the door. There were soft noises within. Then she heard his voice, distinctly:
“I wish I had talked to you right at the start.”
Dulcinea’s voice was quiet but audible—
“Why didn’t you?”
“I was afraid,” he said frankly. “I was stupid. My heart was broken, you see. So it was easier to believe—that things had simply changed between us. That Dulcinea Septimus had been trying to spare my feelings—coddling an ignorant child who had tried to save her from something she understood far better than I ever could. I cared about her, and Camilla cared about us. I thought Dulcinea was saving us both the heartache of watching her fail, and die, during our task.”
There was silence in the room. He added, “When this started I was eight and you—you, Dulcinea—were fifteen. My feelings were intense, but for God’s sake, of course I understood. I was an infant. And yet I was shown endless tact and sympathy. My feelings were always taken as deadly serious, and I was treated as someone who knew what he was talking about. Does that run in the Seventh House?”
Gideon could hear the faint smile in Dulcinea’s voice. “I suppose it does. They have been letting young necromancers die for a very, very long time. When you grow up awfully ill, you’re used to everyone making those decisions for you … and hating it … so you do tend to want to take everyone’s feelings as seriously as yours aren’t.”
Palamedes said, “There are two things I want to know.”
“You can have more than two, if you want. I’ve got all day.”
“I don’t need more than two,” he said calmly. “The first is: Why the Fifth?”
There was a puzzled pause. “The Fifth?”
“The Ninth and Eighth houses posed the most clear and present danger,” he said. “The Ninth due to Harrow’s sheer ability, the Eighth due to how easily they could have outed you—any slip would have shown an Eighth necromancer that you weren’t what you claimed. He would only have had to siphon you to know. I even wonder why I’m still walking around, if you don’t find that arrogant. But it was the Fifth House that scared you.”
“I don’t—”
“Don’t lie to me, please.”
Dulcinea said, “I have never lied to any of you.”
“Then—why?”
A tiny, fluttering sigh, like a butterfly coming to rest. Gideon heard her say: “Well, think about it. Abigail Pent was a mature speaker to the dead. That’s no good. It’s not insurmountable—but it’s a problem. But while that was a factor, it wasn’t the reason … that was her hobby.”
“Hobby?”
“I didn’t think anybody would care about the distant past … but Pent had an unwholesome interest in history. She was interested in all the old things she was finding in the library, in the rooms. Letters, notes … pictures … the archaeology of a human life.”
“Abigail Pent may have been a necromancer, but she was also a historian—a famous one, I might add. You didn’t do your research.”
“Oh, I’ve been kicking myself, believe me. I should have gone and swept the whole place first thing. But—I was nostalgic.”
“I see.”
“Gosh, I’m glad you didn’t. I didn’t comprehend your mastery of the ghost-within-the-thing. Sixth psychometry.” There was a sudden, tinkling laugh. “I think you ought to be really glad I didn’t comprehend that. Pent by herself gave me such a fright.”
“And you put the key inside her—why?”
“Time,” said Dulcinea. “I couldn’t afford anybody catching me with it. Hiding it in her flesh obscured its traces. I thought you’d find it earlier, honestly … but it gave me time to gum up the lock. Who got rid of that? I’d thought I’d made it absolutely unusable.”
“That was the Ninth.”
“That’s more than impressive,” she said. “The Emperor would love to get hold of her … thank goodness he never will. Well, that’s another blow to my ego. If I’d thought the lock could have been broken and the key found, I would have cleaned out the place, I wouldn’t have left it to be found … but that’s why we’re having this conversation now, aren’t we? You used your psychometric tricks on the message. If you hadn’t gone in there, you never would have known that I’d been in there too. Am I right?”
“Maybe,” said Palamedes. “Maybe.”
“What’s your second question?”
Gideon struggled again, but she was caught as fast as if the very air around her were glue. Her eyes were streaming from her total inability to blink. She could breathe, and she could listen, and that was it. Her brain was full of sweet fuck-all.