Gideon did not look at her, and Harrow did not look at Gideon. Gideon very slowly put her hand on her sword, but for nothing. Harrow was looking at Palamedes.
She expected pretty much anything, but she didn’t expect him to say—
“Nonagesimus—why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t trust you,” she said simply. “My original theory was that you’d done it. Septimus wasn’t capable on her own, and it didn’t seem far-fetched that you were working in concert.”
“Will you believe me when I say we aren’t?”
“Yes,” she said, “because if you were that good you would have killed my cavalier already. I hadn’t even intended to hurt him, Sextus, the head fell off the moment I pushed.”
What?
“Then we go,” said Palamedes. “We get everyone. We talk to her. I won’t have any more conversations in the dark, or doubting of my intentions.”
Gideon said helplessly, “Someone enlighten me, I am just a poor cavalier,” but nobody paid her the slightest damn bit of attention even though she had her hand very forbiddingly on her sword. Harrow was ignoring her entirely in favour of Palamedes, and she was saying:
“I wasn’t sure you’d be willing to go that far, even for the truth.”
Palamedes looked at her with an expression as grey and airless as the ocean outside the window.
“Then you do not know me, Harrowhark.”
* * *
They all crowded into Dulcinea’s little hospital room: it was them and the priest with the salt-and-pepper braid, who scuttled out as though affrighted as they lined the room in stony array. The whole gang had arrived for party times. Palamedes had sent for all the survivors, though considering their current group-wide interest in killing one another the fact that they had bothered coming was nothing short of a miracle. The Second stood against the wall, their jackets less creased than their faces; Ianthe and Coronabeth sat fussily crowded up on each other’s knees, with their cavalier close behind. Silas stood inside the door, Colum stood just behind him, and if anyone had wanted to take them all out then and there it would have been as simple as shutting the door and letting them all asphyxiate on Naberius Tern’s pomade. It seemed so strange that this was now all of them.
The necromancer of the Seventh House was propped up on a bundle of fat cushions, looking calm and transparent. With every stridorous breath her shoulders shook, but her hair was perfectly brushed and her nightgown nightmarishly frilly. She had in her lap the box that contained Protesilaus’s head, and when she drew it gently out—wholly unspoiled as if he were still alive—there were several indrawn breaths. Hers was not among them.
“My poor boy,” she said, sincerely. “I’ll never be able to put him back together now. Who took him apart? He’s a wreck.”
Palamedes steepled his fingers and leaned forward, greyly intent.
“Lady Septimus, Duchess of Rhodes,” he said, very formally, “I put to you before everyone here—that this man was dead before you arrived, by shuttle, at the First House, and appeared alive only through deep flesh magic.”
There was an immediate hubbub, uncalmed by his impatient be quiet gestures and the shoving of his spectacles up his nose. Among the collective mutters, Ianthe Tridentarius’s acid drawl was loudest: “Well, this is the only interesting thing she’s ever done.”
Nearly as piercing was Captain Deuteros: “Impossible. He’s been with us for weeks.”
“It’s not impossible at all,” said Dulcinea herself. She had been gravely meeting Protesilaus’s murky stare, as though trying to find something out, and now she settled the head on her lap. “The Seventh House have been perfecting the way of the beguiling corpse for years and years and years. It’s just—not entirely allowed.”
“It is unholy,” said Silas, flatly.
“So is soul siphoning, my child,” she said, in tones of deliberately celestial sweetness. “And it’s not unholy—it’s entirely useful and blameless; just not when you do it like this, which is the very old way. The Seventh aren’t just soul-stoppers and mummifiers. Yes, Pro was dead before we even landed.”
Gideon said, just as flatly as Silas: “Why?”
Those enormous flower-blue eyes turned to Gideon as though she were the only person in the room. There was no laughter in them, or else Gideon might have started to yell. Suddenly, the dying necromancer seemed enormously old; not with wrinkles, but with the sheer dignity and quiet with which she sat there, totally serene.
“This competition caught out my House,” she said baldly. “Let me tell you the story. Dulcinea Septimus was never intended to be here, Gideon the Ninth … they would have preferred she be laid up at home and have another six months wrung out of her. It’s an old story of the House. But there wasn’t another necromantic heir. And there was a very good cavalier primary … so even if the necromantic heir was one bad cold away from full lung collapse … it was thought that he might even the odds. But then he had an accident.”
Dulcinea fretted the dull hair of the head with her fingertips, then smoothed it out as if it were a doll’s. “Hypothetically. If you were the Seventh House, and all your fortunes were now represented in two dead bodies, one breathing a little bit more than the other, wouldn’t you consider something far-fetched? Let’s say, by utilizing the way of the beguiling corpse, and hoping that nobody noticed that your House was DOA? I’m sorry for deceiving you, but I’m not sorry I came.”
“That doesn’t add up.”
Harrow was stiff as concrete. Her eyes were huge and dark, and though only Gideon could tell, very agitated. “The spell you’re talking about is not within the range of a normal necromancer, Septimus. Impossible for a necromancer in their prime, let alone a dying woman.”
“A dying woman is the perfect necromancer,” said Ianthe.
“I wish I could get rid of that idea. Maybe for the final ten minutes,” said Palamedes. “The technical fact that dying enhances your necromancy is vitiated considerably by the fact that you can’t make any use of it. You might have access to a very personal source of thanergy, but considering your organs are shutting down—”
“It’s not possible,” insisted Harrow, words hard and clipped in her mouth.
“You seem to know a lot about it. Well, I put it to you: Would it be possible for all the heads of the Seventh House,” said Dulcinea calmly, “adepts of the perfect death—a Seventh House mystic secret, one that’s been ours forever—working all in concert?”
“Perhaps initially, but—”
“King Undying,” said Silas, primly disgusted. “It was a conspiracy.”
“Oh, sit on it,” said Dulcinea. “I know all about you and your house, Master Silas Octakiseron … the Emperor himself never bothered to speak out against beguiling corpsehood, but he did say that siphoning was the most dangerous thing any House had ever thought up, and ought only to be done with the siphoner in cuffs.”
“That does not mitigate the penalty for performing a necromantic act of transgression—”
“I’ve no interest in meting out the justice of the tome,” said Captain Deuteros, gruffly. “I know that’s the Eighth House’s prerogative. But at the same time, Master Octakiseron, we cannot afford this right now.”