Gideon contemplated the growing braid, and the sight of Palamedes squeezing the noxious contents of a blue dropper into Camilla’s wound, and Camilla kneeing him with beautiful abruptness in the thigh. Harrowhark lurked next to them, pointedly not looking at Gideon, head hidden deep inside her second-best hood. She still didn’t understand what she was meant to do or think or say: what duty really meant, between a cavalier and a necromancer, between a necromancer and a cavalier.
“It feels like forever,” she said honestly. Gideon slipped her dark-tinted glasses out of her pocket and slid them on, and she felt better for it. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Despite the fact that they now knew Gideon had a working pair of vocal
reeds and the will to use them, the trip down to the facility was spent
in silence. Any travel into the depths of the First House put both of
the teens on high alert: they were so paranoid that they would have been
welcomed into the dark bosom of the suspicious Ninth. Both startled at
every shadow and watched the passing-by of creaking skeletons with no
little hate and despair. They did not like the open terrace where the
waves howled far below, nor the cool marble hallway, nor the marble
stairwell that led down to the nondescript room with the hatch to the
facility. They only spoke when Gideon slipped her facility key into the
hatch and turned it with a sharp
“We still don’t have a key,” she said. “Maybe we—shouldn’t be here.”
“Abigail died, and she had permission,” said her counterpart sombrely. “Who cares?”
“I’m just saying—”
“I’ve been down without permission,” said Gideon, as she used one booted foot to ease the hatch open. Cold air wheezed out like a pent-up ghost. “The Sixth let me in once without a key, and I’m still breathing.”
Jeannemary seemed uncomforted and unconvinced. So she added, “Hey, look at it this way: you were down here just the other night, so if that’s the sticking point, you’re already totally boned.”
“You don’t talk like—how I thought you might talk,” said Isaac.
All three travelled down the cold, dark staple-ladder to the fluorescent lights and dead stillness of the landing. Gideon went first. The other two lagged behind a little, captivated by the increasingly old and bloody gobbets that still decorated the grille at the bottom. She had to herd them forward, down the tunnel that led to the radial room, to the ancient whiteboard and the signs above the warren of corridors.
She turned: Jeannemary and Isaac had not come with her. Jeannemary had stopped in the doorway, pressing herself flat against it, looking around at the strange, anachronistic tunnels of steel and plate metal and LED lighting.
“I thought I heard a noise,” she said, eyes darting back and forth.
“Coming from where?”
She didn’t answer. Isaac, who had pressed himself into the shadows where the side of the doorway met the wall, said: “Ninth, why were bone fragments found in Magnus’s body, and in Abigail’s?”
“Don’t know. It’s a good question.”
“At first I thought it meant the skeletons,” he said, in a sunken whisper, which made sense from the nonsense of why he and his cavalier had jumped at the creaking approach of each bone servant in the place. “There’s something unnatural about the constructs upstairs—like they’re listening to you…”
Gideon looked back at both of them. They had pressed themselves into either side of the corridor, not daring to come into the open space, pupils very dilated as though with adrenaline. They both looked at her: the young cavalier with her brown eyes muddy in the darkness, the young necromancer with his deep hazel eyes and spiderleggy mascara. Pressurized air from some cooling fan wheezed through a vent, making the ceiling creak.
“Come on, don’t just lurk there,” said Gideon impatiently. “Let’s find this guy. It shouldn’t be too hard, he’s massive.”
Neither wanted to be coaxed out. Their puff had seemed to leave them. They clustered close together, grave-faced and tense. Isaac raised a hand and faint, ghostlike flames appeared at his fingertips—bluish-greenish, giving off a sickly little light that did not do much to illuminate what was going on around them. He insisted on warding every single radiating doorway—daubing blood and his cavalier’s spit around the mouth of each corridor. He was nervous and crabby, and it was slow work applying teen gunge to every single exit. “His enclosures are good,” Jeannemary kept saying defensively.
“I thought the Fourth were meant to be all about headfirst dives and getting all crazy,” said Gideon, who stared hard into every shadow.
“It’s stupid to get killed if it doesn’t help,” said Isaac, tracing his thumb in curious shapes along the doorjamb. “The Fourth isn’t cannon fodder. If we’re first on the ground we need to stay alive … wards were the first thing I learned. When we get shipped out next year, we’ll get them scarified onto our backs.”
