Harrowhark turned around and said, curtly: “Well? Are we doing this or not, Lady Septimus?”
“Oh, thank you—thank you,” Dulcinea said.
Gideon was stupefied. Too many shocks in twenty-four hours shut down her thought processes. As Dulcinea stumped along the corridor, crutches clanging unharmoniously on the grille, and as Protesilaus hovered behind her a half step away as though desperate to just scoop her up and carry her, Gideon strode to catch up with her necromancer.
Only to find her swearing under her breath. Harrow whispered a lot of fuck-words before muttering: “Thank God we got to her first.”
“I never thought you’d actually help out,” said Gideon, grudgingly admiring.
“Are you dim,” hissed Harrow. “If we didn’t agree, that bleeding heart Sextus would, and he’d have the key.”
“Oh, whoops, my bad,” said Gideon. “For a moment I thought you weren’t a huge bitch.”
They followed the mismatched pair from the Seventh House to the dusty facility hub, filled with its dusty panelling and its whiteboard gleaming sadly beneath big white lights. Dulcinea turned abruptly down the passageway marked LABORATORY SEVEN–TEN, a tunnel identical to the one they had taken to LABORATORY ONE–THREE. This time the creaks and ancient moans of the building seemed very loud, their footsteps a huge addition to the cacophony.
In the middle of a passage past the first laboratory rooms the grille on the floor had been staved in, cracked right down the middle to come to rest on hissing pipes. Protesilaus picked up his adept and stepped her over this pit as lightly as thistledown. Gideon jumped the gap, and turned back to see her necromancer hesitating on the edge, stranded. Why she did it Gideon didn’t know—Harrow could have built herself a bridge of bones any second—but she grasped a railing, leaned over, and proffered her hand. Why Harrow took it was an even bigger mystery. After being helped across, Harrow spent a few moments officiously dusting herself off and muttering inarticulately. Then she strode off to catch up with—of all people—Protesilaus, apparently with the aim of engaging him in conversation. Dulcinea, who had taken a moment to fit herself back into her crutches, slipped one arm into Gideon’s instead. She nodded at the broad span of her cavalier’s back.
“Colum the Eighth is fixing to fight him tomorrow,” she said to Gideon, beneath her breath. “I wish Master Silas had just fought me. Not much can hurt me anymore … it would be an interesting sensation, is what I mean.”
In response Gideon’s grip tightened around the languid arm tucked in her own. Dulcinea sighed, which sounded like air being pushed through whistly sponges. (Up this close her hair was very soft, Gideon noted dimly.) “I know. I was an idiot to let it happen. But the Eighth are so touchy in their own way … and Pro was unpardonably bad. They couldn’t let the insult pass. I just let my worst instincts get the better of me … and yelped.”
The curly-haired necromancer paused to cough, as though simply remembering how she’d yelped was enough to send her into spasms. Gideon instinctively put an arm around her shoulders, steadying her so that the crutches did not give way, and found herself looking down where the edge of Dulcinea’s shirt met her bulging collarbones. A fine chain around her neck supported a rather less delicate bundle hanging tucked into her camisole: Gideon only saw them for a second, but she knew immediately what they were. The key ring was snapped around the chain, and on the key ring were two keys: the saw-toothed hatch key, and a thick grey key with unpretentious teeth, the kind you’d lock a cabinet with.
She made herself look anywhere else. By now they had reached the very end of the corridor, which terminated in a single door marked LABORATORY EIGHT. Wriggling free of Gideon’s arm, Dulcinea opened it onto a little foyer alike in indignity to LABORATORY TWO. There were hooks on the walls here, and a bunch of old, crumpled boxes made of thin metal, the type you might carry files in; these were dented and empty. Someone had taken the time and effort to affix a beautiful swirl of human teeth above the door in a widening spiral of size: in the centre, the neat little shovels of incisors, tessellated with arched canines and ringed all around with the long, racine tusks of molars. In neat print the label on the door read: #14–8 DIVERSION. PROCEDURAL CHAMBER.
Beneath the neat print, a more elaborate hand had written in fainter ink: AVULSION!
“Here we are,” said Dulcinea. “Before we go through, please give me a little bit of your blood. I have warded the place up and down and I’m dreadfully afraid you won’t be able to go through the door without giving me a shock.”
This little nod to paranoia made Harrow’s shoulders relax minutely. Gideon looked to her, and Harrowhark nodded. In the dim and dusty foyer both offered up their hands to be pricked: the necromancer of the Seventh tilted her head, beautiful brown ringlets spilling over her shoulders, and took blood from their thumbs and their ring fingers. Then she pressed the blood into her palm and spat delicately with what Gideon noticed was pink-tinged spittle; she pressed her thin hand to the door.
“It’s not a hold ward,” Dulcinea explained, “but it’s not just physical. The ward will alert me if the immaterial try to pass … if they’ve instantiated, I mean, if they’ve crossed over. I don’t want to stop them,” she added, when Harrowhark started fidgeting with a bone fragment from her pocket. “I want to see whatever would try to sneak in on us … I want to know what it looks like. Let’s go.”
Rather than the neatly sectional space that had constituted Laboratory Two, with its Imaging and Response chambers and orderly empty shelves, Laboratory Eight opened up on an enormous grate. A lattice of thick black steel barred the first part of the room from the second, which—espied through the holes—proved to be a long space with a claustrophobic ceiling. It was like stepping into a pipe. The door led to a metal platform on struts and a short flight of stairs leading down into the space, barred by the huge grate. The Seventh necromancer went to the wall and flicked a switch, and with a low vibrating moan, the grate slowly began to tuck itself up into the ceiling.
With the removal of the grate, the room seemed enormously grey and empty. Only two things broke up the vast monotony of grey metal and white light: far off at the other end of the chamber was a metal plinth, boxed on top with what looked like clear glass or plex; and at the bottom of the stairs, about a metre away from its base, was a yellow-and-black-striped line that had been painted horizontally from wall to wall.
It was easily a hundred metres from the stripe to the plinth: a long way to walk. It looked simple enough, which was how Gideon knew it was probably a huge pain in the ass.
And yet her adept was already gliding down the stairs, standing before the yellow-and-black-emblazoned line as though at the edge of a fire. Dulcinea came after, leaning more heavily on her crutches as she swung herself down the stairs. Protesilaus came last.
“If you put your hand through,” she said, “you’ll see—there.” Harrow had bitten off a cry of pain. She had stuck her gloved fingers tentatively over the line, and now she was yanking off her glove to see the damage. Gideon had been the victim of this once before, through Palamedes Sextus, but it was still a disquieting sight. Harrow’s fingertips had shrivelled: the nails had split horribly, and the moisture looked as though it had been siphoned forcibly out, wrinkling the skin like paper. Her adept shook her hand in the air like you would with a burn; the wrinkles smoothed out, slowly, and the nails knit themselves back together.