“They had names, you lily-livered, tooth-coloured asshole,” she said, “and if you want to make a thing about it, I warn you that I’m in the kind of mood that can only be alleviated by walloping you.”

Colum blinked. His necromancer did not.

“I had heard that you were speaking now,” he said. “It seems a pity. Save your gaucherie for someone else, Gideon Nav. I’ve no interest in the frightened rantings of a Ninth House thrall.”

“What did you call me?”

“Thrall,” said Silas. “Serf. Servant.”

“I don’t want a bunch of synonyms, you smarmy cloud-looking motherfucker,” said Gideon. “You said Gideon Nav.”

“Villein,” continued the necromancer of the house of the Eighth, warming to his thesaurus. Colum was staring at Gideon, almost cross-eyed with disbelief. “Foundling. I am not insulting you, I am naming you for what you are. The replacement for Ortus Nigenad, himself a poor representative of a foetid House of betrayers and mystics.”

Gideon’s brain skidded to a halt: it went back again to Drearburh, sitting with a fat lip and wicked friction burns on her wrists. The cries of the dwindling faithful. Green lights in the powdery dark. The greasy smell of incense. A woman weeping. Someone stealing her getaway shuttle, a million years ago. Two someones. One sad, one sadder, immigrants to the Ninth House themselves.

She still has family back on the Eighth …

“You’ve been listening to Sister Glaurica,” she said slowly.

“I talked to Glaurica on her return to the mother house,” said Silas. “And now I’d like to talk to you.”

“Me. The thrall. The servant. The other five words you said.”

“Yes,” said the boy, “because you grew up servant to a murderer, in a tribe of murderers. You are, more than anything, a victim of the Ninth House.”

That stopped the tiny bone in Gideon’s soul snapping; that stopped her from striding forward and balling both hands in the exquisite linen and chill mail of his robes—that and the fact that she hadn’t been straight-up shield-bashed yet by Colum the Eighth and wasn’t in a hurry to experience this exciting time. She stepped forward. Silas did not step away, but he turned his head a little from her, as though she were a bad breath. He had very brown eyes, startlingly framed by thick, whitish lashes.

“Don’t pretend like you know what happened to me there,” she said. “Glaurica never remembered I was alive, didn’t care about me when she remembered, and she wouldn’t have said anything to you on the subject. You don’t know anything about me and you don’t know anything about the House of the Ninth.”

“You are wrong on both points,” said Silas, to somewhere over her shoulder.

“Prove it.”

“You are invited to come and take tea with myself and Brother Asht.”

She scrubbed both her dirty fists into her eyes and narrowly avoided gumming one up with the terrible orangey salve, which was so noxious that it apparently caused splinters to leap from her body rather than hang around near it. Her corneas misted up momentarily with the smell. “Sorry, didn’t hear you right,” she said, “because I thought you said, ‘Come and take tea with myself and Brother Asht,’ the dumbest thing to say, ever.”

“You are invited to come and take tea with myself and Brother Asht,” Silas repeated, with the kind of hard patience that indicated a mantra going on inside his pallid head. “You will not bring the daughter of the Locked Tomb, but you’ll bring yourself, and you will be ready to listen. No price. No hidden motive. Just an invitation to become more than what you are now.”

“Which is—?”

Silas said, “The tool of your oppressors. The lock on your own collar.”

She couldn’t handle any more, having already lived a long night and suffered a number of emotional torments, among them supernatural murder and petty interpersonal drama. Gideon shrugged her cloak over her shoulders, thrust her free hand into a pocket, and stalked down the corridor away from any uncles and nephews.

The necromancer’s voice drifted down after her: “Will you come and listen to what I have to say? Be decisive.”

“Eat me, milk man,” said Gideon, and staggered around the corner.

She heard Colum’s “Means yes, probably,” but not the murmured reply.

* * *

From that time on, Gideon could not outfight the nightmares. She willed her subconscious to sink into a pattern of random eye movement that did not involve her waking up in a lather of cold sweat, but like so many things in her life now, it had lost fitness and apt response. She was dumb before the body of her failures, unmanned by the barrage of her brain. Gideon only had to close her eyes to see her own personal, randomly selected shitshow.

Magnus Quinn, still drinking his grassy morning tea, stabbed until his chest was steaming chunks of meat because she could not make her tongue yell Look behind you—

—a steaming cauldron filled with fragrant grain and the silent, foetal corpse of Abigail Pent, sinking beneath the surface before Gideon’s blistering fingers could dig her clear—

—Isaac Tettares gulping and swallowing from an upturned jug of acid that she was unable to wrench from his febrile, trembling hands—

—Jeannemary Chatur, whose dismembered arms and legs kept turning up while Gideon made a bed that got stickier and wetter and more jumbled with bits of Jeannemary as the covers were turned; and—

—the old dream of her mother. Alive now, overlapping with her life in a way she hadn’t in reality, shrieking Gideon—Gideon—Gideon! while, as Gideon watched, crones of the Ninth gently levered her skull from the rest of her head with a big crunchy crack.

And Harrow, telling her to wake up. That had only happened the once: the Ninth necromancer sitting in the dark, wrapped in a mouldering duvet like a cloak, her face very naked and blank and shorn of its monochrome skull mural. Gideon had fallen back into an uneasy sleep almost immediately. She could never decide if she had dreamed that into being—Harrowhark was not exploding, or having her intestines drip out of her ears like streamers, or sloughing off her skin right down to her subcutaneous fat—but she had been looking at Gideon with a coal-eyed expression of absolute pity. There had been something very weary and soft about the way that Harrow Nonagesimus had looked at her then, something that would have been understanding had it not been so tired and cynical.

“It’s just me,” she’d said impatiently. “Go back to sleep.”

All signs pointed toward hallucination.

At that, Gideon had to sleep, because the consequences of waking were too hideous. But from then on she slept wearing her rapier, her gauntlet on her chest like a heavy obsidian heart.

27

“LET’S NEGOTIATE,” SAID PALAMEDES SEXTUS.

Harrow and Gideon sat in the Sixth House’s quarters, which was bizarre as hell as an experience. The Sixth had been housed in high, airy rooms tucked into the curve of the central tower. Their windows opened onto a sweeping view of the sea, or at least, they would’ve had the Sixth not covered them up with blackout curtains. The whole of the Sixth was huddled on the polar caps of a planet so close to Dominicus that exposure to the light side would melt the House clean away. The great libraries were set in a fat cake tin of a station, designed for the ongoing ordeal of not letting anything get too hot or too cold, which meant no windows at all whatsoever. Palamedes and Camilla had recreated that effect in here to the best of their ability, which meant a room with the airiness and lightness of a closet.