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“Oh, whoops, my bad,” said Gideon. “For a moment I thought you weren’t a huge bitch.”
“The field and the flooring are a few micrometres apart—maybe the Ninth could make a very very weeny construct to go through that gap,” said the Seventh helpfully. Harrow said, in bottom-of-the-ocean tones: “The Ninth House has not practised its art on—weeny—constructs.”
Gideon found herself staring straight down the barrel of a loaded Harrowhark Nonagesimus, hood shaken back to reveal blazing black eyes in a painted white face.
“What do you mean, ‘okay’—” “I mean okay, I’ll do it,” said Gideon, although most of her brain was trying to give the part of her brain saying that a nipple-gripple.
“I’d rather be your battery than feel you rummaging around in my head. You want my juice? I’ll give you juice.” “Under no circumstances will I ever desire your juice,” said her necromancer, mouth getting more desperate.
“The Second House is famed for something similar, in reverse. The Second necromancer’s gift is to drain her dying foes to strengthen and augment her cavalier—” “Rad—” “It’s said they all die screaming,” said Harrow. “Nice to know that the other Houses are also creeps,” said Gideon.
“Why?” “Probably because you asked.” The heavy eyelids shuttered open, revealing baleful black irises. “That’s all it takes, Griddle? That’s all you demand? This is the complex mystery that lies in the pit of your psyche?” Gideon slid her glasses back onto her face, obscuring feelings with tint. She found herself saying, “That’s all I ever demanded,” and to maintain face suffixed it with, “you asswipe.”
It felt like nothing, at first. Besides Harrow touching her neck, which was a one-way trip to No Town. But it was just Harrow, touching her neck.
It was like Harrow had tied a rope to all her pain receptors and was rappelling down a very long drop.
Gideon couldn’t say anything but blearrghhh, mainly because blood was coming enthusiastically out of every hole in her face.
Mildly startled, Gideon realised that she was starting to die. The colours wobbled before her face. The world revolved, then revolved the other way, aimlessly spinning. The air stopped coming. It would have been peaceful, only it sucked.
“Ha-ha,” said Gideon, “first time you didn’t call me Griddle,” and died. Well, passed out. But it felt a hell of a lot like dying.
It was all she could do to not deliquesce out of Harrow’s grip.
“Why did you want to be a Lyctor?” Gideon mumbled, “Harrow, you can’t just ask someone why they want to be a Lyctor,” but was roundly ignored.
Every so often she wondered if she had, in fact, kicked the bucket and this was her afterlife: wandering empty halls with a half-naked, chastened Harrowhark Nonagesimus who had no recourse but to be gentle with her, handling her as though at any moment she would explode into wet confetti giblets.
She bit off her words like meat from a bone.
Gideon reflexively checked her pulse in case she was still dead.
“How many fingers?” she demanded. Gideon blinked. “How many bent, or how many you’re showing, and do I count the thumb?” “Vision’s fine,” said Camilla to herself, and retracted the hand.
“Language is fine. Where are we? What did we come here for? What’s your name?” “What’s your mum’s name,” said Gideon.
“Caveats like?” “My permanent brain damage,” said Camilla shortly, “if he didn’t get it right immediately.” “But I’m healthy.” “Didn’t say your brain was.” “I’m taking that as a very witty joke and want it to be known that I laughed,” said Gideon.
She ignored the knife and fork that the skeleton carefully laid at either side of the plate, as nicely as anyone with a soul would have, and started cramming food into her mouth with her hands.
“Your vow of silence is conveniently variable, Ninth, I’m very grateful.” “Turns out I’m variably penitent.
“Poor dumb kids,” Gideon said, all of four years their elder.
“Princess Corona,” he said, “someone’s dead.” The lovely face of the Princess of Ida made the exact same expression Gideon’s had wanted to, which was: What?? “What??” she said.
His swimming shirt was a lot tighter than Coronabeth’s, and his fifty-seven abdominal muscles rippled under it importantly. He gave a long and rather obvious stretch, but stopped when he realised nobody was looking.
And she looked over her shoulder at Harrowhark, who was apparently breaking out of a blue funk to experience her own dominant emotion of oh, not again.
Beneath the paint, Gideon could see that Harrow had changed colours a number of times through this little speech. She went from being a rather ashen skeleton to a skeleton who was improbably green around the gills. To an outsider, it would have just been a blank Ninth House mask twinging from darque mystery to cryptique mystery, giving nothing away, but to Gideon it was like watching fireworks go off.
He urged again, “Thoughts?” Gideon said, “Did you know that if you put the first three letters of your last name with the first three letters of your first name, you get ‘Sex Pal’?” The dreadful teens both stared with eyes so wide you could have marched skeletons straight through them. “You—do you talk?” said Isaac. “You’ll wish she didn’t,” said Camilla.
“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.
Jeannemary kept kicking in her arms. “Put me down,” she wept. “Let me go back. He needs me. He could still be alive.” “He’s seriously not,” said Gideon. Jeannemary the Fourth screamed again. “I want to die,” she said afterward. “Tough luck.”
When she breathed, it sounded like custard sloshing around an air conditioner.
“Do I look like I’m at the queenhood of my power?” This would’ve made anyone sweat. “Uh—” “If you lie I’ll mummify you.” “You look like a bucket of ass.”
She indulged herself in storming out past the Warden of the Sixth, and in careering down the hallway like a bomb. It was about the least dignified way to leave a perfectly normal conversation, but it was also really satisfying, and it got her out of there in record time.
The only thing that saved Gideon from howling like an animal was the relief that, finally, she would get the chance to shove one of Octakiseron’s feet so deep into his ass he’d be gargling with his calcaneus.
She scrubbed both her dirty fists into her eyes and narrowly avoided gumming one up with the terrible orangey salve, which was so noxious that it apparently caused splinters to leap from her body rather than hang around near it.
There had been something very weary and soft about the way that Harrow Nonagesimus had looked at her then, something that would have been understanding had it not been so tired and cynical. “It’s just me,” she’d said impatiently. “Go back to sleep.” All signs pointed toward hallucination.
For a moment Gideon’s anger and remorse were overwhelmed by, Did you legit just say ‘pure humbuggery’?
“Ask me how I am and I’ll scream,” she said. “How are you,” said Camilla, who was a pill. “I see you calling my bluff and I resent it,” said Gideon.
“Why are you acting like you and he are arguing?” “Nooooo,” said Gideon brightly, followed up with a: “thaaaaanks.”
“Pardon?” “I said saddle up, sunshine. Come on. You know what to do.” “I manifestly don’t, and never tell me to saddle up, sunshine ever again.”
He let his finger rest on the lock. “Did you hide the last key too?” he asked it quietly. “Or are we racing you to it? Well, move faster, dickhead.” Camilla cleared her throat, maybe because her necromancer was talking to a door.
Palamedes suddenly grinned. It was a curious act of alchemy that turned his raw-boned, plain face into something magnetic: very nearly good looking, instead of being the act of three jawbones meeting a chin.
“I have indulged myself in apathy while you attached yourself to every weirdo in Canaan House.” (“You cannot possibly call anyone a weirdo,” said Gideon.)
They should be alive and we should be bacteria food. Two big bags of algor mortis.
Harrow’s mouth twisted so much that it should have been a reef knot.
“How I hate the water,” he said, as though this conversation was one they’d had before and he was simply continuing it. “I’m not sorry that this has dried up. Ponds … rivers … waterfalls … I loathe them all. I wish they had not filled the pool downstairs. It’s a terrible portent, I said.” “But you’re surrounded by sea,” said Gideon. “Yes,” said Teacher unexpectedly, “it is a bit of a pisser.”
Things were happening too much.
They set elaborate traps, sieges, and assaults, and grew up in each other’s pockets, even if it was generally while trying to grievously injure the other one.
Gideon said helplessly, “Someone enlighten me, I am just a poor cavalier,” but nobody paid her the slightest damn bit of attention even though she had her hand very forbiddingly on her sword.
