Just as Gideon had shaken the crumbs off her lap and was rising to leave, two more novitiates entered. When they saw Gideon, both they and she stopped dead.

One of the pair was a wan, knife-faced kid dressed in antiseptic whites and chain mail you could cut with a fork, it was so delicate. He was draped in it even down to a kilt, which was strange: necromancers didn’t normally wear that type of armour, and he was definitely the necromancer. He had a necromancer build. Pale silk fluttered from his slim shoulders. He gave the impression of being the guy fun sought out for death. He was prim and ascetic-looking, and his companion—who was older, a fair bit older than Gideon herself—had the air of the perpetually disgruntled. He was rather more robust, nuggety, and dressed in chipped bleached leathers that looked as though they’d seen genuine use. At least one finger on his left hand was a gross-looking stump, which she admired.

The reason why they had stopped dead was unclear. She had stopped dead because the necromancer was staring at her with an expression of naked hostility. He looked at her as though he had finally come face-to-face with the murderer of a beloved family pet.

Gideon had spent too long in the depths of Drearburh not to know when to, put scientifically, get outie. It was not the first time she had received that look. Sister Lachrimorta had looked at her that way almost exclusively, and Sister Lachrimorta was blind. The only difference in the way that Crux had looked at her was that Crux had managed also to encapsulate a complete lack of surprise, as though she already had managed to disappoint his lowest expectations. And a very long time ago—painfully folded in the back of her amygdala—the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father had also looked at her like that, though in their case, their diffidence had been cut through with a phobic flinch: the way you’d look at an unexpected maggot.

“Please deal with the shadow cultist,” said the whey-faced boy, who had the deepest, weariest, most repressive voice she had ever heard in her life.

“Yes, Uncle,” said the bigger man.

Gideon was raw for a fight. She wanted nothing more than for the cross-faced man in boiled leather to draw on her. He was strong-boned and weathered, deeply creased, yellow-brown and yellow-coarse all over. Next to his almost daintily dressed necromancer in white, he looked dusty and ferocious. He looked tough. Thank God. She wanted to fight bloody. She wanted to fight until bone adepts had to be called to put people’s feet back on. She knew the price—waking up mummified in aggressive notes, or maybe dying—but didn’t care anymore. Gideon was measuring, in her mind’s eye, the length of her rapier to the collarbones of the cavalier opposite.

He disappointed her viscerally by standing a few steps away, putting his hands together, and bowing over them to her. It was polite, though not apologetic. He had a lighter, rougher voice than his necromancer, somewhat hoarse, like he suffered from a lifelong cold or a smoker’s cough.

“My uncle can’t eat with your kind around,” he said. “Please leave.”

Gideon had a million questions. Like: Your kind? And: Why do you have such a baby uncle, one the colour of mayonnaise? And: Is “your kind” people who aren’t nephews and who have middle fingers? But she said nothing. She stared him down for a few seconds; he stared back—his face did not hold the same brand of hate, but it held a bullish, deadened expression that seemed to go right through her. If it had been Crux she would have given him the finger. As it was, she nodded and pushed past with her mind an indignant whirl.

Gideon felt awfully suckered by the whole thing. She had longed for the Cohort, in part, due to being heartily sick of her time alone in the dark; she’d wanted to be a part of something bigger than encroaching dementia and snow-leek husbandry. What was she now? An unwelcome spectre roaming the halls without a necro to pursue—the stinging slap in the face that she didn’t even have Harrow—still alone, just in better lighting. She had cherished the tiny delusion that the Lyctor trials would see her being useful for more than spying on conversations and spoiling breakfasts. Even Swords II would have been a sweet reprieve from idleness. It was in this frame of mind, reckless with disappointment, that she pushed her way at random through a collection of dark, empty antechambers and up a flight of damp brick steps; and then suddenly she found herself outside, in a terraced garden.

The sun blazed down through a canopy of glass or some thick, transparent plex. It was admittedly a garden only in a very sad sense of the word. Wherever the First House grew its food leaves, they didn’t grow them here. The salt was thick on each metal strut. The planters were full of shrubby, stunted green things, with long stems and drooping blossoms, bleached from the thick white light overhead. Weird fragrances rose like heat above them, heavy smells, strange smells. Nothing that grew on the Ninth had a real scent: not the moss and spores in its caves, and not the dried-out vegetables cultivated in its fields. The plex ended in a genuinely open area where the wind ruffled the wrinkled leaves of some wrinkled old trees, and there—under an awning in the undulating sun, looking like a long-stemmed, drooping blossom herself—was Dulcinea.

She was entirely alone. Her man-hulk was nowhere to be seen. Lying in a chair, she looked flimsy and tired: fine lines marked the corners of the eyes and the mouth, and she was wearing a fashionable and inane hat. She was dressed in something light and clingy that she had not yet hawked blood upon. It looked as though she were sleeping, and Gideon, not for the first time, felt a spike of pity; she tried to backtrack, but it was too late.

“Don’t go,” said the figure, her eyes fluttering open. “Thought so. Hello, Gideon the Ninth! Can you come and put this chair’s back up straight for me? I’d do it myself, but you know by now that I’m not well and some days I don’t feel entirely up to it. Can I beg you that favour?”

There was a fine sheen of sweat on the translucent brow under the frivolous hat, and a certain shortness of breath. Gideon went to the chair and fiddled with the fastening, immediately emasculated by the difficulty of working out a simple chair-latch. The Lady Septimus waited passively for Gideon to pull it flush, smiling at her with those big gentian eyes.

“Thank you,” she said, once she had been propped up. She took the silly hat off her damp, fawn-coloured curls and set it in her lap, and her expression was somewhat conspiratorial. “I know that you’re doing penance and can’t talk, so you don’t have to figure out how to tell me through charades.”

Gideon’s eyebrows shot up over her sunglasses’ rims before she could stop them. “Oh, yes,” said the girl, dimpling. “You’re not the first Ninth nun I’ve ever met. I’ve often thought it must be so hard being a brother or sister of the Locked Tomb. I actually dreamed of being one … when I was young. It seemed such a romantic way to die. I must have been about thirteen … You see, I knew I was going to die then. I didn’t want anyone to look at me, and the Ninth House was so far away. I thought I could just have some time to myself and then expire very beautifully, alone, in a black robe, with everyone praying over me and being solemn. But then I found out about the face paint you all have to wear,” she added fretfully, “and that wasn’t my aesthetic. You can’t drape yourself over your cell and fade away beautifully in face paint— Does this count as a conversation? Am I breaking your penance? Shake for no and nod for yes.”