Gideon the Ninth, who would have paid cash to be called absolutely anything else, rose as her mistress rose. They exchanged glances that even through one layer of veiling and one layer of tinted glass were violently hostile, but there was too much going on to stand and pull go-to-hell faces at each other. Gideon saw other white-robed figures darting to and fro between the shuttles, coming out of open double doors, but it took a moment to realise that these were skeletons in plain white, with white knots at their waists. They were using long metal poles to work the mechanisms that held the shuttles safely coupled to their latches, with that strange lockstep oneness in which the dead always worked. And then there were the living, waiting in twos, awkwardly shuffling their feet next to their ships. She had never seen so many different people—so many people not of the Ninth—and it almost dizzied her, but not enough so that she couldn’t pick out when something was amiss.

“I only count six shuttles,” said Gideon.

Harrowhark shot her a look for speaking out of turn, but the little priest Teacher cackled as though he were pleased.

“Oh, well noticed! Very good! Yes, there’s a discrepancy,” he said. “And we don’t much like discrepancies. This is holy land. We might be called over-careful, but we hold this House as sacred to the Emperor our Lord … we do not get many visitors, as you might think! There is nothing that much the matter,” he added, and with a confiding air: “It’s the House of the Third and the House of the Seventh. No matter, no matter. I’m sure they will be given clearance any moment now. We needed clarification. An inconsistency in both.”

“Inconsistency,” repeated Harrowhark, as though she were rolling the word around her mouth like a sweet.

“Yes; the House of the Third will, of course, push the boundaries … of course they would. And the House of the Seventh … well, it’s well known … Look; they’re landing now.”

Most of the other heirs and cavaliers had left their shuttles, and the skeletons were busy pulling luggage out from their holds. The last two shuttles slowly spiralled down to earth, a fresh gust of warm wind scything over everyone as they came to their fluttering rest. Skeletons with poles were already there to greet them, and other living priests, one for each arriving shuttle. They were alive and well, dressed in identical vestments to Teacher’s. This made just three priests total, which made Gideon wonder why the Ninth always scored so much geriatric attention. The two new shuttles had both alighted next to the Ninth’s, the Seventh’s closest and the Third’s one over, which was close enough to see who or what was inside as the Third’s hatch opened.

Gideon was hugely interested to see three figures emerge. The first was a rather sulky young man with an air of hair gel and filigree, an ornate rapier at the belt of his buttoned coat. The cavalier. The other two were young women, both blond, though the similarity ended there: one girl was tall and statuesque, with a star-white grin and masses of bright gold curls. The other girl seemed smaller, insubstantial, with a sheet of hair the anaemic colour of canned butter and an equally bloodless smirk. They were actually the same height, Gideon realised; her brain had just deemed that proposition too stupid to credit on first pass. It was as though the second girl were the starved shadow of the first, or the first an illuminated reflection. The boy just looked a bit of a dick.

Gideon rubbernecked until a white-robed priest with another parti-coloured belt hurried over from the trio to them, tapping on Teacher’s shoulder and murmuring in worried half-heard snatches: “—were inflexible—the household’s backing—born at the exact—both the adept—”

Teacher waved it off with an indulgent hand and a wheezing laugh: “What can we do, what can we do?”

“But it’s impossible—”

“Only trouble at the end of the line,” he said, “and a trouble confined to them.”

Once the other priest had gone, Harrowhark said repressively: “Twins are an ill omen.”

Teacher seemed tickled. “How delightful to hear someone say an ill omen could come from the Mouth of the Emperor!”

From the shuttle that carried the Seventh House came consternation. The skeletons had pried the hatch open, and someone tottered out. In what felt like painful slow-motion—like time had decided to slow to a gruesome crawl to show itself off—they had fainted dead away into the arms of the waiting priest, an old man who was singularly unprepared for it. His legs and arms were buckling. The figure was dragging on the ground, threatening to spill entirely. There was red blood on the priest’s front. He cried out.

Gideon never ran unless she had to, and Gideon ran now. Her legs moved as swiftly as her awful judgement, and all of a sudden she was scooping the crumpled, drooping figure out of the priest’s buckling arms, lowering his cargo to the ground as he murmured in amazement. In response, the ice-cold point of a blade bit gently through her hood to the back of her neck, right up to the base of her skull.

“Yo,” said Gideon, her head absolutely still. “Step off.”

The sword did not step off.

“This isn’t a warning,” she said. “I’m just saying. Give her some air.”

For the person folded up in Gideon’s arms seemed a her. It was a slender young thing whose mouth was a brilliant red with blood. Her dress was a frivolous concoction of seafoam green frills, the blood on it startling against such a backdrop. Her skin seemed transparent—horribly transparent, with the veins at her hands and the sides of her temples a visible cluster of mauve branches and stems. Her eyes fluttered open: they were huge and blue, with velvety brown lashes. The girl coughed up a clot, which ruined the tableau, and those big blue eyes widened in dismay.

“Protesilaus,” said the girl: “stand down.” When the sword didn’t move an inch, she coughed again and said unhappily: “Stand down, you goof. You’re going to get us in trouble.”

Gideon felt the pressure and the edge remove itself from her neck, and she let out a breath. Not for long, though; it was replaced with a gloved hand pressing over the place where the blade had been, a hand which was pressing down as though its owner would quite like to punch her occipital bone into crumbs. That hand could belong to only one person. Gideon braced to be dropped headfirst into the shitter, and Harrowhark’s voice emerged as though it had been dredged up from the bottom of a charnel house.

“Your cavalier,” said the Lady of the Ninth quietly, “drew on my cavalier.”

As Gideon died gently of shock, buoyed back to this life only by the weird bruises forming at the top of her spine, the other girl broke out into miserable coughs. “I’m so sorry!” she said. “He’s just overprotective— He never would have meant— Oh my God, you’re black vestals— Oh my God, you’re the Ninth cav!”

The girl in Gideon’s lap covered her face and seemed to break into sobs, but it became apparent that they were gurgles of mirth. “You’ve done it now, Pro!” she gasped. “They could demand satisfaction, and you’d end up a mausoleum centrepiece! Lady or Lord of the Ninth, please accept my heartfelt apologies. He was hasty, and I was a fool.”

“Come on,” said Gideon, “you fainted.”

“I do do that,” she admitted, and gave another wicked chuckle of delight. This appeared to be the greatest thing that had ever happened to her. She fluttered her hands like she was having the vapours. “Oh, God, I was rescued by a shadow cultist! I’m so sorry! Thank you! This is one for the history books.”