24
EVERYONE’S HEADS FOLLOWED THE SOUND—except for Ianthe Tridentarius, who was lounging in her chair with one eyebrow raised, and Naberius Tern, who had issued the challenge. He vaulted to the table in one lustrous movement, swinging himself up to stand on it, even as Judith Deuteros very carefully eased her cavalier down into an empty seat. He looked down at them all with a hard sneer and the one stupid curl that he always managed to get right in the middle of his forehead.
“No, you don’t,” said Coronabeth faintly.
“Yes, he does,” said Ianthe, rising to stand. “You need a facility key, don’t you? Here’s our chance. I suspect we won’t be given a better.”
There was an expression of grim alarm rising on Judith Deuteros’s face. She had both hands across the oozing slit on her cavalier’s chest, and she had paused in her work out of sheer annoyance.
“You have no cause,” she said.
“Neither did you, if we’re all being honest with ourselves. Sextus was perfectly right.”
“If you want to cast me as the villain, do it,” said the captain. “I’m trying to save our lives. You’re giving in to chaos. There are rules, Third.”
“On the contrary,” Ianthe said, “you’ve amply demonstrated that there are no rules whatsoever. There’s only the challenge … and how it’s answered.”
When she looked at her sister’s stricken face—Corona was somewhere beyond fury and shame now, and had lost every atom of her poise—she only said, quite softly: “This is for you, dear, don’t be picky. This may be the only chance we have. Don’t feel bad, sweetheart—what can you do?”
Corona’s face changed—the struggle gave way to exhaustion, but at the same time there was a weird relief in her. Her teeth were gritted, but one of her hands tangled in her sister’s long, thin, ivory-blond locks and she drew their heads close. “I can do nothing,” she said, and Gideon realised they’d just lost her, somehow.
“Then let’s do this together. I need you.”
“I need you,” echoed her twin, rather piteously.
Camilla hauled herself up to stand. She had taken Palamedes’s handkerchief and bound her arm, but the blood was already showing through and she held it in a funny way. Palamedes looked close to vibrating out of his skin from fear or anger. “Right,” she said laconically, “second round.”
But Gideon was experiencing one powerful emotion: being sick of everyone’s shit. She unsheathed her sword. She slid her gauntlet over her hand, and tightened the wrist straps with her teeth. 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. Gideon silently willed her necromancer to put her knucklebones where her mouth was and, for the first time in her life—for the first real time—do what Gideon needed her to do.
And Harrowhark rose to the occasion like an evening star.
“The Ninth House will represent the Sixth House,” she said, sounding cold and bored, as though this had been her plan all along. Gideon wanted to sing. Gideon wanted to dance her up and down the corridor. She broke out in a broad, unnervingly un-Ninth smile, and Naberius Tern—who had gone from greasy villainy to aggrieved caution—was having to force his smirk.
Ianthe just looked a little amused. “The plot congeals. Since when has the Ninth been bosom with the Sixth?”
“We’re not.”
“Then—”
Harrowhark said, in the exact sepulchral tones of Marshal Crux: “Death first to vultures and scavengers.”
Unable to bear it any longer, Jeannemary hopped up on the table too: she held her shining Fourth House rapier before her, the beautiful navy-and-silver fretwork of her dagger gripped in an altogether professional way at her hip. Although her puffy eyes and corrugated, unbrushed hair proved that she had not slept more than a few hours in the last few days, she looked intimidatingly ready. Gideon was coming to the conclusion that despite an overworked pituitary gland, there was really something in the Chatur name after all.
“Once you face her, you face the Fourth House,” she said ringingly. “Fidelity, and the Emperor!”
Naberius Tern sheathed his sword and his neat, gleaming knife, rolling his eyes so hard that they ought to have fallen backward into his sinuses. He sighed explosively and swung himself down from the table, wiping that stupid curl off his forehead with an airy head toss.
“I should’ve stayed home and gotten married,” he said resentfully.
“As though anyone was even offering,” snapped Ianthe.
“If you have all finished,” said Silas Octakiseron with his deep, tyrannically servile politeness, “Brother Asht and I are going to go and look for Protesilaus the Seventh. He is, after all, still missing.”
“Which will somehow involve trying those keys you’ve taken in doors you’ve never been able to open,” said Palamedes. “What a coincidence.”
“I have no interest in talking to you anymore,” said Silas. “The Warden of the Sixth House is an unfinished inbred who passed an examination. Your companion is a mad dog, and I doubt her legal claim to the title of cavalier primary. I would not even bother to thrash her. Enjoy the patronage of the shadow cult, while it lasts; I am sorry that it came to this. Brother Asht, we leave.”
When they dispersed, it was with the manner of people reluctantly turning their backs on their enemies. The Eighth Master swept out with his cavalier like a legion retreating from a battlefield. The Second—the unsteady cavalier supported by the captain’s arm—looked even more so, with something of the tattered refugee thrown in. The three Houses that were left looked at one another.
Palamedes rounded on Harrowhark, his hands bloody and his shining eyes a little wild. He had torn off his spectacles, and there were greasy red thumbprints over the lenses.
“There’s only one more key,” he said.
Harrow frowned. “One more to claim?”
“No, they’ve all been claimed. I’ve been through every challenge except the one I won’t play ball with.”
Harrow’s frown deepened fractionally, but Gideon was putting the pieces together. So too, apparently, was the necromantic teen Isaac. “If there’s only one of each key,” he said slowly, “what happens when you do a challenge someone else already completed?”
Palamedes shrugged. “Nothing. I mean, you can do the challenge, but you get nothing at the end of it.”
Jeannemary said, “So it’s just a huge waste of time,” and Gideon could not imagine how she’d have felt after the avulsion room if the plinth at the other end had been empty.
“Sort of. The challenge itself is still—instructional. It makes you think about things in a new way. Right, Nonagesimus?”
“The challenges so far,” said Harrow carefully, “have encouraged me to consider some … striking possibilities.”
“Right. But it’s like—imagine if someone showed you a new sword move, or whatever, but then you never actually got to sit down and read up on how it worked. It might give you ideas, but you wouldn’t really learn it. D’you follow?”