Harrowhark looked out at the people of the Ninth. So did Gideon. There were all the assorted nuns and brethren; old pilgrims and ageing vassals; every gloomy, severe, and stern face of adept and mystic, of joyless and wasted men and women, of the grey and monotonous population that had made up Gideon’s life and never shown her one single moment of sympathy or kindness. Harrow’s face was bright with elation and fervour. Gideon would have sworn there were tears in her eyes, except that no such liquid existed: Harrow was a desiccated mummy of hate.

“You are my beloved House,” she said. “Rest assured that wherever I go, my heart is interred here.”

It sounded like she really meant it.

Harrow began, “We pray the tomb is shut forever…” and Gideon found herself reciting simply because it was the only prayer she’d ever known, enduring the words by saying them as sounds without meaning. She stopped when Harrowhark stopped, her hands clasped, and added: “I pray for our success for the House; I pray for the Lyctors, devoted Hands of the Emperor; I pray to be found pleasing in his eyes. I pray for the cavalier…”

At this Gideon caught the dark, black-rimmed eye, and could imagine the mental accompaniment:… to choke to death on her own vomit.

“Let it be so,” said the Lady of the Ninth House.

The rattling of the assorted prayer bones very nearly drowned out the clank of the shuttle, docking. Gideon turned away, not meaning to make any kind of goodbye; but she saw Aiglamene, hand crooked into a stiff salute, and realised for the first time that she might never see the woman again. God help her, she might never come back. For a moment everything seemed dizzyingly unsure. The House continued on in grand and grisly majesty because you were always looking at it; it continued because you watched it continue, changeless and black, before your eyes. The idea of leaving it made it seem so fragile as to crumble the moment they turned their backs. Harrowhark turned toward the shuttle and Gideon realised with an unwelcome jolt that she was crying: her paint was wet with tears.

And then the whole idea became beautiful. The moment Gideon turned her back on it, the House would die. The moment Gideon walked away, it would all disappear like an impossibly bad dream. She mentally staved in the sides of the enormous, shadowy cave and buried Drearburh in rock, and for good measure exploded Crux like a garbage bag full of soup. But she saluted Aiglamene as crisply and as enthusiastically as a soldier on her first day of service, and was pleased when her teacher rolled her eyes.

As they pulled themselves into the shuttle, the door mechanism sliding down with a pleasingly final whunk, she leaned into Harrow: Harrow, who was dabbing her eyes with enormous gravity. The necromancer flinched outright.

“Do you want,” Gideon whispered huskily, “my hanky.”

“I want to watch you die.”

“Maybe, Nonagesimus,” she said with deep satisfaction, “maybe. But you sure as hell won’t do it here.”

7

FROM SPACE, THE HOUSE of the First shone like fire on water. Wreathed in the white smoke of its atmosphere, blue like the heart of a gas-ignited flame, it burned the eye. It was absolutely lousy with water, smothering it all in the bluest of blue conflagrations. Visible even up here were the floating chains of squares and rectangles and oblongs, smudging the blue with grey and green, brown and black: the tumbled-down cities and temples of a House both long dead and unkillable. A sleeping throne. Far away its king and emperor sat on his seat of office and waited, a sentinel protecting his home but never able to return to it. The Lord of the House of the First was the Lord Undying, and he had not come back in over nine thousand years.

Gideon Nav pressed her face up to the plexiform window of the shuttle and looked as if she couldn’t ever get enough of looking, until her eyes were red and streaming and huge migraine motes danced along the edge of her vision. All the other shutters were closed up tight and had been for most of the trip, which had taken about an hour of rapid travel. They had been surprised to find that, behind the plex privacy barrier Harrowhark had coolly slid up the moment they were inside, there was no pilot on board. The ship was being remotely piloted at great expense. There was no clearance for anybody to land at the First House without explicit invitation. There was a button to press if you needed to talk to the remote navigator, and Gideon had been eager to hear another voice, but Harrow had slid the barrier back down with an air of distinct finality.

She looked worn and exhausted, even vulnerable. For the journey’s length she had kept her prayer knuckles in her hands and moodily clinked them into each other. In Gideon’s comics, Cohort adepts always sat on plackets of grave dirt to ameliorate the effects of deep space and the loss of their power source; trust Harrowhark not to take the placebo. Gideon had warmed herself with the thought that it was the perfect time to kick her ass up and down the shuttle, but in the end, the natural embarrassment of arriving with one’s necromancer’s elbows on backward saved Harrow’s life. All thoughts of ass-kicking had subsided as the approach of the First House reflected light through the open window, light that spilled into the passenger bay in fiery gouts; Gideon had to turn her face away, half-blind and breathless. Harrow was tying a piece of black voile around her eyes, as calm and uninterested as if what hung outside the window was dreary Ninth sky.

Gideon cupped her hands over her eyes to shade them and looked again, getting her fill of the explosive brilliance outside: the velvety blackness of space, with innumerable pinprick white stars; the First, a searing circle of incandescent blue, strewn with dazzling white; and—the outsides of seven more shuttles, lining up in orbit. Gideon gave a low whistle to see them. To an inhabitant of the sepulchrous Ninth House it seemed amazing that the whole thing didn’t just combust and crumble into flame. There were other Houses that made their homelands on planets closer to the burning star of Dominicus—the Seventh and the Sixth, for instance—but to Gideon they could not imaginably be anything else than 100 percent on fire.

It was incredible. It was exquisite. She wanted to throw up. It seemed stolid insanity that Harrowhark’s only reaction was to slide up the plexiform barrier and hold down the communication button to ask: “How long must we wait?”

The navigator’s voice crackled back: “We are securing your clearance to land, Your Grace.”

Harrow didn’t thank him. “How long?”

“They are scanning your craft now, Your Grace, and we’ll move the moment they have confirmed you’re free to leave orbit.”

The Reverend Daughter sank back into her chair, stuffing her prayer bones into a fold of her robe. Quite unwillingly Gideon caught her eye. The expression on the other girl’s face wasn’t disinterest or distraction, as she’d assumed; even through a layer of veiling, she could tell that Harrow was near-incapacitated with concentration. Her mouth was pinched in a tight ripple, worrying the black-painted blotch on the lower lip into blood.

It took less than five minutes for the thrusters to creak to life again, for the ship to slowly glide out of orbit. Next to them, in a line, seven other shuttles were drifting to one side, sliding into the atmosphere like dominoes falling. Harrow shook her head back into her hood and pinched the bridge of her nose, and said in tones between pleasure and pain: “This planet’s unbelievable.”