The bones were all piled up outside a closed door, as though they had been trying to get through it. Palamedes led the way, crunching through the wreckage. Gideon put her hand on the hilt of her sword, and Palamedes threw open the door.
Inside, Captain Deuteros looked up, somewhat wearily. She was sitting in a chair facing the door. Her left arm hung uselessly at her side, wizened and crumpled. Gideon did not want to look at it. It looked like it had been put in a bog for a thousand years and then stuck back on. Her right arm was tucked up against her stomach. There was an enormous crimson stain spreading out onto the perfect white of her jacket, and her right hand was clasped, as though ready to draw, around the enormous bone shard shoved deep in her gut.
Teacher lay unmoving by her side. There was a rapier buried in his chest, and a dagger through his neck. There was no blood around the blades, only great splashes of it at his sleeves and his girdle. Gideon looked around for the lieutenant, found her, and then looked away again. She didn’t need a very long look to tell that Dyas was dead. For one thing, her skeleton and her body had apparently tried to divorce.
“He wouldn’t listen to reason,” said Judith Deuteros, in measured tones. “He became aggressive when I attempted to restrain him. Binding spells proved—useless. Marta used disabling force. He was the one to escalate the situation—he blew out her eye, so I was compelled to respond … This didn’t—it didn’t have to happen.”
Two professional Cohort soldiers, one a necromancer, one a cavalier primary; all this mess for one unearthly old man. Palamedes dropped to his knees beside the captain, but she pushed him away, roughly, with the tip of her boot.
“Do something for her,” she said.
“Captain,” said Camilla, “Lieutenant Dyas is dead.”
“Then don’t touch me. We did what we came to do.”
Gideon’s eyes were drawn to a machine in the corner. She hadn’t noticed it because it seemed ridiculously normal, but it wasn’t normal at all, not for Canaan House. It was an electric transmitter box, with headphones and a mic. The antenna was set out the window, glowing faint and blue in the afternoon sunshine.
“Captain,” said Palamedes, “what did you come to do?”
The Second necromancer shifted, grunted in pain, closed her eyes. She sucked in a breath, and a bead of sweat travelled down her temple.
“Save our lives,” she said. “I sent an SOS. Backup’s coming, Warden … it’s just up to you to make sure nobody else dies … He said I’d betrayed the Emperor … said I’d put the Emperor at risk … I entered the Emperor’s service when I was six.”
Captain Deuteros’s chin was drooping. She lifted it back up with some effort. “He wasn’t human,” she said. “He wasn’t like anything I’d ever seen before. Marta put him down—Marta … Go tell them she avenged the Fifth and the Fourth.”
Palamedes had ignored the kick and moved in again. The Second laid one booted foot on his shoulder in warning. He said, “Captain, you are no use to anyone dead.”
“It is my privilege to no longer be of use,” said the captain. “We fixed the problem none of the rest of you could … did what we had to do … and paid for it, dearly.”
Harrow had gone to stand over the quiet, punctured corpse of Teacher. She dropped to his side like a long-tailed crow. All Gideon could do was press herself back up against the wall, smell the blood, and feel absurdly empty. Her necromancer said, “You fixed nothing.”
“Harrow,” Palamedes said warningly.
“This man was a shell filled with a hundred souls,” said Harrow. The captain’s eyes flicked open, and stayed open. “He was a thing of ridiculous power—but he was a prototype. I doubt he had killed anyone before today. I would be astonished if he had a hand in the deaths of the Fourth and Fifth Houses, as he was created for the sole purpose of safeguarding the place. There is something a great deal more dangerous than an old experiment loose in the First House, and he could have helped us find out what it is. But now you’re going to die too, and you’ll never know the whole story.”
The whites of Judith’s eyes were very white, her carefully merciless face suddenly a picture of hesitation. Her gaze moved, more remorselessly than Gideon’s ever could have, to her cavalier; then she returned it to them, half-furious, half-beseeching. Palamedes moved in.
“I can’t save you,” he said. “I can’t even make you comfortable. A team of trained medics could do both. How far away is the Second? How long do we have to wait for Cohort backup?”
“The Second’s not coming,” said Captain Deuteros.
She smiled, tight and bitter. “There’s no communication with the rest of the system,” she said, hoarsely now. “He didn’t lie. There was no way to reach the Houses … I got through to the Imperial flagship, Sixth. The Emperor is coming … the King Undying.”
Next to Harrow, Teacher gurgled.
“You draw him back—to the place—he must not return to,” said the dead man, with a thin and reedy whistle of a voice around the blade in his vocal cords. His whole body wriggled. His dead eyes no longer twinkled drunkenly, but his tongue slithered. His spine arched. “Oh, Lord—Lord—Lord, one of them has come back—”
His voice trailed off. His body collapsed to the floor. The silence in the wake of his settling was huge and loathsome.
Palamedes said, “Judith—”
“Give me her sword,” she said.
The rapier was too heavy for her to hold. Camilla laid it over the necromancer’s knees, and Judith’s fingers closed around it. The steel of the hilt was bright in her hand. She squeezed down until her knuckles were white.
“At least let us get you out of here,” said Gideon, who thought it was a shitty room to die in.
“No,” she said. “If he comes back to life again, I will be ready. And I won’t leave her now … nobody should ever have to watch their cavalier die.”
The last Gideon ever saw of Captain Judith Deuteros was her propped up on the armchair, sitting as straight as she could possibly manage, bleeding out through the terrible wound at her gut. They left her with her head held high, and her face had no expression at all.
33
IT SEEMED AS THOUGH just when you least wanted them, the Eighth House were always there. They were striding down the whitewashed corridor outside Dulcinea’s room as the rest of the group made their way back to her, making the whitewash look off-colour and dirty with the spotlessness of their robes. Gideon nearly drew her sword; but they had come in need, rather than in warfare.
“The Third House have defiled a body,” said Silas Octakiseron, by way of hello. “The servants are all destroyed. Where’s the Second and the Seventh?”
Harrow said, “Dead. Incapacitated. So is Teacher.”
“That leaves us critically shorthanded,” said the Eighth House necromancer, who could not be accused of having the milk of human kindness running through his veins. He did not even have the thin and tasteless juice of feigned empathy. “Listen. The Third have opened up Lady Pent—”
Palamedes said, “Abigail?” and Harrow said, “Opened up?”