All at once, he muttered crossly to himself and took his hand away. This time the grease went beneath the ring, and he started to ease it off the sad dead finger.

“I need more contact,” he said to his cavalier. “This touched the key ring, but there’s too much jumble.” And to Gideon: “Our reputation doesn’t precede us, I see. Thanergy attaches to more than just the body, Ninth. Psychometry can track the thanergy lingering in objects—when you get to it early and when there’s a strong association. Give me the scissors, I’m going to take some of his pockets.”

“What are you—”

“Quinn’s key ring, Ninth,” said Palamedes, as though her question was really hopelessly obvious. “There was nothing on the bodies yesterday. The Second came to look, but they haven’t got my resources.”

“That or they took the evidence,” said his cavalier gloomily, but her adept countered: “Not their style. Anyway, if I couldn’t find anything after yesterday’s examination, they wouldn’t.”

“Don’t get cocky, Warden.”

“I won’t. But I’m fairly sure, here.”

Gideon said, “But—hold up. Magnus had only just picked up his facility key the night—you know. He hadn’t reached any challenge labs. The facility key was all he had. Who’d take that?”

“That’s precisely what I want to know,” said Palamedes. He dropped the wedding ring into a small bleached pouch that Camilla was holding open, and then took a tiny pair of scissors and started clipping at the dead man’s trousers. “Your vow of silence is conveniently variable, Ninth, I’m very grateful.”

“Turns out I’m variably penitent. Hey, you should be talking to Nonagesimus.”

“If I wanted to talk to Nonagesimus, I’d talk to Nonagesimus,” he said, “or I’d talk to a brick wall, because honestly, your necromancer is a walking Ninth House cliché. You’re at least only half as a bad.”

Palamedes glanced up at her. His eyes really were extraordinary: like cut grey rock, or deep weather atmosphere. He cleared his throat, and he said: “How much would you do for the Lady Septimus?”

Gideon was glad of the paint; she was thrown off balance, unsure of her footing. She said, “Uh—she’s been kind to me. What’s your interest in Lady Septimus?”

“She’s—been kind to me,” said Palamedes. They stared at each other with a kind of commingled weariness and embarrassed suspicion, skirting around something juvenile and terrible. “The Eighth is both determined and dangerous.”

“Protesilaus the Seventh is uncomfortably hench, though. She’s not alone.”

Camilla spoke up: “The man’s a glorified orderly. His hand’s never on his rapier. First instinct’s to punch, and he moves like a sleepwalker.”

“Just bear witness,” said Palamedes. “Just—keep her in mind.”

The scissors went snip, snip and tiny squares of fabric were added to a new linen bag. With more reverence than she’d given him credit for—he had just given a corpse an invasive massage and stolen its jewellery—Palamedes softly pulled the sheet back over the abdomen and legs of Magnus the Fifth. He said, quite gently: “We’ll get to the bottom of this one, if you give us a little time,” and Gideon realised he was speaking to the body.

Gideon suddenly ached to hear one of the Fifth’s terrible jokes, if only because it would be a refreshing trip back to the status quo. She had to leave—her hand was on the door—but something in her made her look back and say: “What happened to them, Sextus?”

“Violent head and body trauma,” he said. For a moment he seemed to hesitate, and then he turned his laser-sharp gaze on her. “What I do know is—it wasn’t just a fall.”

His cavalier said lowly, warningly: “Warden.”

“What good is silence now?” he said to her. And then, to Gideon: “Their wounds contained extraordinarily tiny bone fragments. The fragments weren’t homogenous—they were samples from many different osseous sources, which is indicative of—”

What it was indicative of was interrupted by a small sound from beyond the door. The noise of skeletons packing things away had disappeared a long time ago: this was the noise of the door wheel being quietly spun. Gideon threw open the door to the cooling room, which Camilla burst into with her sidearm drawn: a hemline was escaping through the wheel-operated portal to the cooler, which had been left open in haste. Gideon and Palamedes stood, watching the door creak forlornly in the cold air. The hemline had been blue embroidery, and the pattering feet around the size of a crappy teen’s.

“Poor dumb kids,” Gideon said, all of four years their elder.

“Do you think so?” said Palamedes, surprising her. “I don’t. I often find myself wondering how dangerous they really are.”

22

THAT EVENING, HARROWHARK HAD still not returned. Gideon busied herself with catching up on her training exercises, frustrated by her sore muscles, which wanted to pack it in after the first hundred push-ups. She spent a long time doing her solo drills—the automatic litany of grip and guard, flexing into hand positions while staring out the window into the drooping black night—and then, pretty certain that Harrow wasn’t returning, she got out her longsword and did it all again. Having two hands on the grip was precisely the thing that Aiglamene had told her not to do, but it felt so good that by the end she was happy as a child.

Harrow never came back. Gideon was used to this by now. Seized with sudden experimental courage, she filled up the uncanny tub in the bathroom from the hot-liquid tap. When nothing jumped out at her, Gideon sat there in it with water all the way up to her chin. It was incredible—the strangest thing she’d ever felt in her life; like being buoyed on a warm current, like being slowly boiled—and she worried, irrationally, whether water could get inside you and make you sick. All her paint came off and floated in long, dirty flecks in the water. When she put soap in the water oily rainbow slicks shone across the top. In the end—suspicious of how clean it really got you—she went and stood in the sonic for twenty seconds, but she smelled incredible. When her hair dried it stood up on end, and it took a lot of effort to get it flat again.

The bath was soporific. For the first time since she’d come to Canaan House, Gideon was truly content to lie down in her nest, get out a magazine and do absolutely nothing for half an hour. Nine dreamless hours later she woke up with the pages stuck to her face via a thin sealant of drool.

“Ffppppp,” she said, peeling it off her face, and: “Harrow?”

As it turned out, in the next room Harrow was curled up in bed with the pillows over her head and her arms sticking out. Haphazardly flung laundry was piled next to the wardrobe door. The sight filled Gideon with a sensation that she had to admit was relief.

She said, “Wake up, assmunch, I want to yell at you about keys,” but this imperative did not have the desired effect.

“The white key is now with your precious Septimus, as per the agreement,” snapped Harrow, then pulled the covers over her head. “Now go away and shrivel.”