“The Ninth House will represent the Sixth House,” she said, sounding cold and bored, as though this had been her plan all along. Gideon wanted to sing. Gideon wanted to dance her up and down the corridor. She broke out in a broad, unnervingly un-Ninth smile, and Naberius Tern—who had gone from greasy villainy to aggrieved caution—was having to force his smirk.
Ianthe just looked a little amused. “The plot congeals. Since when has the Ninth been bosom with the Sixth?”
“We’re not.”
“Then—”
Harrowhark said, in the
Unable to bear it any longer, Jeannemary hopped up on the table too: she held her shining Fourth House rapier before her, the beautiful navy-and-silver fretwork of her dagger gripped in an altogether professional way at her hip. Although her puffy eyes and corrugated, unbrushed hair proved that she had not slept more than a few hours in the last few days, she looked intimidatingly ready. Gideon was coming to the conclusion that despite an overworked pituitary gland, there was really something in the Chatur name after all.
“Once you face her, you face the Fourth House,” she said ringingly. “Fidelity, and the Emperor!”
Naberius Tern sheathed his sword and his neat, gleaming knife, rolling his eyes so hard that they ought to have fallen backward into his sinuses. He sighed explosively and swung himself down from the table, wiping that stupid curl off his forehead with an airy head toss.
“I should’ve stayed home and gotten married,” he said resentfully.
“As though anyone was even offering,” snapped Ianthe.
“If you have all finished,” said Silas Octakiseron with his deep, tyrannically servile politeness, “Brother Asht and I are going to go and look for Protesilaus the Seventh. He is, after all, still missing.”
“Which will somehow involve trying those keys you’ve taken in doors you’ve never been able to open,” said Palamedes. “What a coincidence.”
“I have no interest in talking to you anymore,” said Silas. “The Warden of the Sixth House is an unfinished inbred who passed an examination. Your companion is a mad dog, and I doubt her legal claim to the title of cavalier primary. I would not even bother to thrash her. Enjoy the patronage of the shadow cult, while it lasts; I am sorry that it came to this. Brother Asht, we leave.”
When they dispersed, it was with the manner of people reluctantly turning their backs on their enemies. The Eighth Master swept out with his cavalier like a legion retreating from a battlefield. The Second—the unsteady cavalier supported by the captain’s arm—looked even more so, with something of the tattered refugee thrown in. The three Houses that were left looked at one another.
Palamedes rounded on Harrowhark, his hands bloody and his shining eyes a little wild. He had torn off his spectacles, and there were greasy red thumbprints over the lenses.
“There’s only one more key,” he said.
Harrow frowned. “One more to claim?”
“No, they’ve all been claimed. I’ve been through every challenge except the one I won’t play ball with.”
Harrow’s frown deepened fractionally, but Gideon was putting the pieces together. So too, apparently, was the necromantic teen Isaac. “If there’s only one of each key,” he said slowly, “what happens when you do a challenge someone else already completed?”
Palamedes shrugged. “Nothing. I mean, you can do the challenge, but you get nothing at the end of it.”
Jeannemary said, “So it’s just a huge waste of time,” and Gideon could not imagine how she’d have felt after the avulsion room if the plinth at the other end had been empty.
“Sort of. The challenge itself is still—instructional. It makes you think about things in a new way. Right, Nonagesimus?”
“The challenges so far,” said Harrow carefully, “have encouraged me to consider some … striking possibilities.”
“Right. But it’s like—imagine if someone showed you a new sword move, or
whatever, but then you never actually got to sit down and read up on how
it worked. It might give you ideas, but you wouldn’t really
Jeannemary, Gideon, and Camilla all stared at him.
“What?” he said.
“The Sixth learns sword-fighting out of a book?” said Jeannemary, horrified.
“No,” put in Camilla, “the Warden just hasn’t been to Swordsman’s Spire since he was five and got lost—”
“Okay, okay!” Palamedes put his hands out. He was still holding the bloodstained spectacles. “That was clearly an inapposite comparison, but—”
“A challenge taken purely as a necromantic exercise,” said Harrow calmly, “suggests many things, but reveals none. Only the underlying theorem can lay bare the mystery.”
“And the theorems are behind the locked doors,” Isaac said meditatively, “aren’t they? You need the keys for the doors, or you’re screwed.”
