In the hope of attaining Lyctoral understanding. All glory and love to the Necrolord Prime.
The Ninth necromancer said, “Now there’s a helpful postscript if ever I saw one.”
“Yeah, and the fact that there are two beds upstairs and a bunch of swords also help,” said Gideon. “They were living in each other’s pockets. They studied weird Lyctoral theorems. There’s a seriously old Second House sign in one of the top drawers.”
They both took the time to roam around the room. Harrow flicked through notebooks and narrowed her eyes over the contents. Gideon picked up another book and squinted at the faded message on the flyleaf, written in black ink forever ago and frozen in time:
ONE FLESH, ONE END.
G. & P.
They combed over the detritus of two strangers’ lives; inside a forgotten tin Gideon found two expired toothbrushes. They were electronic ones, with revolving heads and push buttons.
“These aren’t just seriously old, they’re super unbelievably seriously old,” she said.
“Yes,” said Harrow. “Sextus could tell us how old, but I’ve no desire to ask him. Something has been done to preserve this room. It has not wasted away into a natural death. We’re probably the first people to step inside since its previous occupants left.”
It didn’t seem to be a proper bedroom; more like a place to stay overnight while doing something else. More lab than living space. Gideon ended up staring at the photo-lithograph, elbows pressed into the countertop, studying faceless bodies gathered primly in their chairs. A rainbow of arms and robes; low-resolution hands clasping low-resolution knees. The hands without faces seemed solemnly posed, almost anxious.
“All I know,” said Harrowhark eventually, “is that they created the theorem, and were responsible for the experiment downstairs. I wish I knew more. I yearn to know more … But I don’t. I’m going to study this spell, Griddle, and learn it, and then I will be one step closer to knowing. We cannot suffer the same fate as Quinn and Pent.”
Gideon was amazed at how badly it hurt, all of a sudden.
“He’s really dead,” she said aloud.
“Yes. I will be more upset if he suddenly changes condition,” said Harrow. “He was a stranger, Nav. Why does it affect you so much?”
“He was nice to me,” she found herself saying. She was very tired. She tried to wake herself up by stretching, dropping down to touch her toes and feeling the blood rush into her head. “Because he was a stranger, I think … He didn’t have to bother with me, to make time for me or remember my name, but he did. Hell, you treat me more like a stranger than Magnus Quinn did and I’ve known you all my life. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Harrow’s hand, peeled and naked without a glove and stained with ink all the way up to her cuticles, appeared in front of her. Gideon found her shoulder drawn back so that she had to look Harrow square in the face. The necromancer regarded her with a strangely fierce eye: mouth a worn-down line of indecision, forehead puckered as though she was thinking her entire face into a wrinkle. There was still blood flaking out of her eyebrows, which was gross.
“I must no longer accept,” she said slowly, “being a stranger to you.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Gideon, sudden sweat prickling the back of her neck, “yes you can, you once told me to dig myself an ice grave. Stop before this gets weird.”
“Quinn’s death proves that this is not a game,” said Harrow, moistening her ashy lips with her tongue. “The trials are meant to winnow out the wheat from the chaff, and it is going to be exceptionally dangerous. We are all the sons and daughters that the House of the Ninth possesses, Nav.”
“I’m not anybody’s son or daughter,” said Gideon firmly, now in no small panic.
“I need you to trust me.”
“I need you to be trustworthy.”
In the thick dimness of the room she watched the black-garbed girl in front of her struggle around a thing that had settled over them like a net; a thing that had fused between them like a badly broken limb, shattered numerous times, healing gnarled and awful. Gideon recognised these strictures all of a sudden: the rope tying her to Harrow and back to the bars of the House of the Ninth. They stared at each other with shared panic.
Harrow said finally, “In what way can I earn your trust?”
“Let us sleep for eight bloody hours and never talk like this again,” said Gideon, and her necromancer relaxed, very minutely. Her eyes were so lightlessly black that it was hard to see the pupil; her mouth was thin and waspish and unsure. She remembered when Harrow was nine, when she had walked in at just the wrong moment. She remembered that nine-year-old Harrow’s mouth falling slightly slack. There was something curious about Harrow’s face when it was not fixed into the bland church mask of the Reverend Daughter: something thin and desperate and quite young about it, something not totally removed from Jeannemary’s desperation.
“Eight and a half,” Harrow said, “if we start again immediately in the morning.”
“Done.”
“Done.”
Several hours later, Gideon turned over in her bed, chilled by the realisation that Harrow had not promised to never talk like that again. Too much of this shit, and they’d end up friends.
As they walked back, the halls were as lonely as they ever had been—emptier, somehow, as though with the Fifth’s untimely end Canaan House had managed to expunge what little self it had. There was only one exception. A quiet pattering of steps drew both of them pressed flat into an alcove, staring out at the thin grey pre-morning light: on very nearly silent feet, the Fourth teens passed before them, rapidly crossing an empty and dilapidated hall on some mission. Jeannemary led with her rapier drawn, and her necromancer stumbled behind, head bent, blue hood over his hair, looking like a penitent. Another second and they were gone. Gideon found herself thinking: poor little buggers.
In her nest of blankets, the light comingb in yellow and unwelcome from the cracks around the curtains, Gideon was too tired to take off her clothes and almost too tired to sleep. She kept rustling when she turned over, trying to find a comfortable spot, and then she remembered the crinkled note in her pocket. In the dim light she smoothed it open and stared at it, blearily, pillow still sticky with bits of the cold cream she used to take off her paint.
ut we all know the sad + trying realit
is that this will remain incomplete t
the last. He can’t fix my deficiencies her
ease give Gideon my congratulations, howev
Chapter 20
An inauspicious nine hours later Gideon and Harrow were making their way down the long, cold staples of the facility ladder, the air thick with last night’s blood. Having been woken up just thirty-five minutes previous (Harrow always lied), Gideon climbed down into the dark with the distinct sensation that she was still asleep: somewhere in a dream, a dream she’d had a long time ago and suddenly remembered. She had mechanically downed the mug of cooling tea and the bowl of congealing porridge that Harrow had brought her that morning—Harrow arranging her breakfast was a concept so disagreeable there was no space left in her head for it—and now it sat leadenly in her stomach. The crumpled note lay hastily interred at the very bottom of Gideon’s pocket.