Palamedes said, though he sounded as though he were ten thousand years away, “Princess, whatever you think you’ve done, you haven’t done it.”
“Oh, haven’t I?” said Ianthe.
She rose to stand, but Gideon did not see her move. Ianthe came back to solidity all at once, more real now than anything around her. The room faded into insignificance. She glowed from the inside out, like she had eaten a fistful of lightbulbs. “Do you really deny it, even now?” she said. “God, it makes so much sense. Even the rapiers—light swords, light enough to be held by an amateur … a necromancer. Each challenge—fusing, controlling, binding, utilising—utilising whom? Did you notice that none of those challenges could be completed by yourself? No, you didn’t, and yet that was the biggest red flag. I had to reverse-engineer the whole thing, just from looking at it … all alone.”
Silas sounded quite normal now when he turned and addressed the monotonously crying girl by the slab: “Princess Coronabeth. Is she speaking the truth? And did you, at any point, attempt to stop her, or know as a necromancer what act she was committing?”
“Poor Corona!” said Ianthe. “Don’t get on her case, you little white excuse for a human being. What could she have done? Don’t you know my sister has a bad, sad secret? Everyone looks at her and sees what they want to see … beauty and power. Incredible hair. The perfect child of an indomitable House.”
The Crown Princess of Ida was not acknowledging the fact that anyone was speaking to her. Her sister continued: “Everyone’s blind. Corona? A born necromancer? She was as necromantic as Babs. But Dad wanted a matched set. And we didn’t want anything to separate us—so we started the lie. I’ve had to be two necromancers since I was six. It sharpens your focus, I tell you what. No … Corona couldn’t’ve stopped me becoming a Lyctor.”
Palamedes said, vaguely, “This can’t be right.”
“Of course it’s right, goosey, the Emperor himself helped come up with it.”
“So that is Lyctorhood,” said Silas. He sounded quiet, almost fretful, lost in thought. Gideon thought—just for a moment—that she could see Colum Asht’s throat working, that his pupils had dilated just a very, very little. “To walk with the dead forever … enormous power, recycled within you, from the ultimate sacrifice … to make yourself a tomb.”
“You understand, don’t you?” said Ianthe.
“Yes,” said Silas.
Colum closed his eyes and was still.
“Yes,” repeated Silas. “I understand fallibility … and fallibility is a terrible thing to understand. I understand that if the Emperor and King Undying came to me now and asked me why I was not a Lyctor, I would fall on my knees and beg his forgiveness, that any of us had ever failed this test. May I be burnt one atom at a time in the most silent hole in the most lightless part of space, Lord—Kindly Prince—should I ever contemplate betraying the compact you appointed between him, and you, and me.”
Colum opened his eyes again.
“Silas—” he began.
“I will forgive you eventually, Colum,” said his purse-mouthed uncle, “for assuming I would have been prey to this temptation. Do you believe me?”
“I want to,” said his nephew fervently, with a thousand-yard stare and his missing finger twitching around his shield. “God help me, I want to.”
Ianthe said, contemptuously: “Come off it, you’d drain him dry if you thought it would keep your virtue intact. This is the same thing, just more humane.”
“Do not speak to me anymore,” said Silas. “I brand you heretic, Ianthe Tridentarius. I sentence you to death. As your cavalier is no more, you must stand in for him: make your peace with your House and your Emperor, because I swear to the King Undying you will find no more peace in this life, anywhere, in any world you care to travel to. Brother Asht—”
Harrow said, “Octakiseron, stop it. This is not the time.”
“I will cleanse everything here, Ninth, to stop the Houses from finding out how we have debased ourselves,” said Silas. His cavalier drew his great sword and slipped his calloused, stumped-up fingers into his targe: he had stepped before them all with an expression of something that was too deep into relief for Gideon to really translate it. His adept said: “Colum the Eighth. Show no mercy.”
“Somebody stop him,” said Ianthe. “Sixth. Ninth. I don’t intend for anyone’s blood to be spilled. Well, you know, any more.”
Harrow said, “Octakiseron, you fool, can’t you see—” and Camilla was saying “Everyone back off—”
But Colum Asht did not back off. He came down on Ianthe like a wolf on the fold. He was terrifically fast for such a big, ragged-looking man, and he hit her with such kinetic force that she should have been flung back to splatter on the wall like a discarded sandwich. His arm was true and steady; there was no hesitation in his hand or in his blade.
Neither was there any hesitation in Ianthe’s. Gideon had seen the exquisite sword of the Third House lying in a smear of blood next to the body of its cavalier: now it was suddenly in the hand of its necromantic princess. She met his blade with a flat parry—it knocked away that titanic blow as though Ianthe were not a head shorter and a third of his weight—and she eased back into perfect, surefooted precision.
It was Naberius Tern’s movement that tucked Ianthe’s arm behind her back, and Naberius Tern’s perfect, precise footwork. It was profoundly weird to see Naberius Tern’s moves restrung in Ianthe Tridentarius’s body—but there they were, recreated right down to the way she held her head. Colum moved in for advantage, a high vertical cut to her naked collarbones. She avoided his move with boyish contempt and countered. Colum had to scramble to meet her.
It was only then that it hit home to Gideon what Ianthe had done. The bizarre sight of a necromancer holding a sword—a ghost fighting inside the meat suit of his adept—made it real that Naberius was dead, but that he was dead inside Ianthe. It was not that he had taught her how to fight: it was him fighting. There was Naberius’s instant counterstrike; there was Naberius’s gorgeous deflection, the tiny movement knocking Colum’s shield away. Normally Gideon would have been fascinated to watch the cavalier of the Eighth at work—he was as light on his feet as a feather, and yet his blows were all heavy as lead—but her gaze was locked on Ianthe, only Ianthe, who was moving more Naberius than Naberius ever could, whose body was agile and lithe and as suprahuman as a wisp.
But there was one catch. The sword of the Third House must have weighed at least a kilogram, and Naberius’s muscle memory could not quite account for Ianthe’s arms. Some power must have been compensating for her body—her elbow should have been locking like a door—but whatever she was doing to wield that thing, it was just a fraction not good enough. She was sweating. There was a pucker in the middle of that preternaturally calm forehead, a wince in the eyes, the slight drunken lolling of the head that she had suffered from before. As she faded, Colum took the advantage. She shook herself, and he raised his foot and kicked her sword out of her hand. It spun over to the wall where Palamedes had been, and clattered there miserably, far out of reach. Colum raised his sword.
The Princess of the Third House raised her hand to her mouth, gored a chunk of flesh from the heel of her palm, and spat it at him like a missile. Ianthe disappeared beneath a greasy, billowing tent—cellular, fleshy, coated all over with neon-yellow bubbles and thin pink film. Colum bounced off this thing as though he had hit a brick wall. He went ass-over-teakettle and rolled over and over, only at the last skidding back up to stand, locking himself into position, panting. Where there had been a necromancer, there was instead a semitransparent dome of skin and subcutaneous fat, baffling to the eye. Nothing loath, Colum charged again, smashing his shield down on it with a bad wet noise like squirk. It was rubbery: it bounced back against him. He gave a mighty slash downward with his sword: the flesh-bubble tore and bled, but did not give.