A skeleton took Gideon and Harrow to the wing that had been set aside for the Ninth. They were led deep into the fortress of the First, past ruined statuary within the gorgeous wreck of Canaan House, the wraithlike, mansionlike hulk lying sprawled and chipped around them. They passed rooms with vaulted ceilings, full of green light where the sun shone through thick algae on the glass. They passed broken windows and windows wrecked with salt and wind, and open shadowed arches where reeked rooms too musty to be believed. They said absolutely jack to each other.
Except when they were taken down flights of stairs to their rooms, and Gideon looked out the windows now into the featureless lumps of blackness and said thoughtlessly: “The lights are broken.”
Harrow turned to her for the first time since they left the shuttle, eyes glittering like beetles beneath the veil, mouth puckered up like a cat’s asshole.
“Griddle,” she said, “this planet spins much faster than ours.” At Gideon’s continued blank expression: “It’s night, you tool.”
They did not speak again.
The removal of the light, strangely, made Gideon feel very tired. She couldn’t escape its having been there, even though Drearburh’s brightest was darker than the darkest shadows of the First. Their wing turned out to be low on the level, right beneath the dock; there were a few lights here outside the huge windows, making big blue shadows out of the iron struts that held up the landing platform above them. Far below the sea roared invisibly. There was a bed for Harrow—an enormous platform with feathery, tattered drapes—and a bed for Gideon, except that it was placed at the foot of Harrowhark’s bed, which she could not have noped at harder. She set herself up with a mass of musty bedding and pillows in front of a huge window in the next room, and left Harrow back in the bedroom with a black expression and probably blacker thoughts. Gideon was too tired even to wash her face or undress properly. Exhaustion had spread upward through her toes, spiking up her calves, freezing the bottom of her spine.
As she stared out the window into the bluish blackness of night after a day, she heard a huge, overhead grinding sound: a big velvety pull of metal on metal, a rhythmic scrape. Gideon watched, paralysed, as one of the very expensive shuttles fell hugely and silently over the landing platform: it dropped like a suicide and seemed to hang, grey and shining, in the air. Then it fell from sight. To its left, another; farther left, another. The scraping ceased. Skeletal feet pattered away.
Gideon fell asleep.
Act Two
Chapter 9
Gideon woke to an unfamiliar ceiling, a fuzzy taste on her tongue, and the exciting smell of mould. The light blazed in red slashes even through her eyelids, and it made her come to all at once. For long moments she just lay back in her nest of old bedding and looked around.
The Ninth quarters had low ceilings and wide, sweeping rooms, decaying away in magnificence before enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. The dock above their quarters cast a long shadow outside, cooling and dimming the light, which gleamed quietly off the chandeliers of festooned black crystals on wire. It would have been muted and peaceful to someone used to it, but to Gideon, on her first First morning, it was like looking at a headache. Someone had, a very long time ago, dressed these apartments lavishly in dead jewel colours: dark ruby, dark sapphire, dark emerald. The doors were set above the main level and reached by sloping stone ramps. There was not a great deal of furniture that wasn’t sighing apart. The meanest stick of it still outclassed the most exquisite Ninth heirlooms back home. Gideon took a particular fancy to the long, low table in the centre of their living room, inset with black glass.
The first thing she did was roll away and reach for her sword. Aiglamene had spent half of training simply convincing Gideon to reach for her rapier hilt rather than her two-hander, to the point where she’d been sleeping with her fingers on the thing to try to get used to it. There was a note crumpled between her hand and the basket—
Don’t talk to anybody.
“Guess I won’t talk to … any body,” said Gideon, but then read on:
I have taken the ring.
“Harrow,” Gideon bellowed, impotently, and slapped her hands down into her pockets. The ring was gone. There was no mistake greater or stupider than to let Harrowhark Nonagesimus at you when you were in any way vulnerable; she should have booby-trapped the threshold. It wasn’t like she even cared about the ring: it was just the cut, again and again, of Harrow considering all of Gideon’s property her property in common. She tried to cheer herself up with the thought that this at least meant Harrow wasn’t around, a thought that would have cheered up anyone.
Gideon shrugged off her robe and wrestled out of her trousers and shirt, all of which had hot and damp insides from her sweat. She opened doors until she found the largest bathroom she had ever seen. It was so big she could walk around in it. She stretched out her arms on either side and still couldn’t touch the walls, which were of slippery stone, glowing like coals where they were whole and scored and dull where they weren’t. Maybe this pretending to be a cavalier gig wasn’t so bad after all. The floor was marble tile, sheen marred by only a few spots of black mould. There was a bowl with taps that Gideon knew to be a sink only because she’d read a lot of comics, and an enormous person-sized recess in the ground that she didn’t know what to do with at all. The sonic cleaner was set, gleaming gently, at either side of a rectangular chamber with a weird nozzle.
Gideon pulled a lever next to the tap. Water gushed from the nozzle, and she yelped and skittered away before she got over the sight and turned it off. Her survey identified a chubby cake of soap next to the sink (but Ninth soap had been made of human fat so no thanks) and a tub of antibac gel. She decided eventually to take a sonic and to use the gel to scrape the blurred paint off her face. Newly clean, with fresh clothes and her robe shaken out in the sonic, she was feeling good about herself until she espied another note stuck tersely on the autodoor:
Fix your face, idiot.
There was another note atop the paint box, which some skeletal servant had helpfully placed on one of the less precarious sideboards:
Do not try to find me. I am working. Keep your head down and stay out of trouble. I reiterate the order that you do not talk to anybody.
Another note was stuck beneath, belatedly:
To clarify, anybody is a word that refers to any person alive or dead.
Inside the box, yet another:
Paint your face adequately.
Gideon said aloud, “Your parents must have been so relieved to die.”
Back in the bathroom, she smeared cold wads of alabaster on her face. The nun’s-paint went on in pale greys and blacks, swabbed over the lips and the hollows of her eyes and cheeks. Gideon comforted herself by recoiling at her reflection in the cracked mirror: a grinning death’s-head with a crop of incongruously red hair and a couple of zits. She pulled her sunglasses out of the pocket of her robe and eased them on, which completed the effect, if the effect you wanted was “horrible.”