The people mostly sat in the transept, veiled nuns and solitaires, shaven heads and cropped, the weary and scant inhabitants of the Ninth House. Mostly priests of the Locked Tomb, now; there hadn’t been soldiers or military friars since she was very young. The only member left of that order was Aiglamene, who’d left her leg and any hope of getting the hell out of here on some far-off front line. The clatter in the transept was occasionally interrupted by a wet, racking cough or the haggard clearing of somebody’s throat.
In the apse was a long bench, and there sat the last handful of the nobles of the House of the Ninth: Reverend Daughter Harrowhark, sitting modestly to the side, face dusted with a handful of luminescent powder that had stuck to the blood trails coming out her nose; her ghastly great-aunts; and her parents, the Lord and Lady of the House, the Reverend Father and the Reverend Mother. The latter two had pride of place, before the altar, side-on to the congregation. Crux had the honour of sitting on a chair in one of the dank chevets amid a sea of candles, half of them already out. Next to him sat the only house cavalier, Ortus, a wide and sad Ninth youngster of thirty-five, and next to Ortus sat his lady mother, an absolutely standard Ninth crone who kept fussing at his ear with a handkerchief.
Gideon blinked so that her vision would stop wobbling and focused on the apse. They hadn’t managed to cozen her inside Drearburh for a good two years, and she hadn’t seen the hideous great-aunts nor the Lord and Lady for a while. Blessed Sister Lachrimorta and Blessed Sister Aisamorta were unaltered. They were still tiny, their faces still tight, grey-painted dribbles, and as the Ninth was free from miracles, they were still blind. They had black bands tied over their faces with white, staring eyes painted on the front. Each preferred to pray two sets of beads, one string in each shrivelled hand, so they sat there clicking a four-part percussion with their suspiciously agile fingers.
Ortus hadn’t changed either. He was still lumpy and sad. Being the primary cavalier to the House of the Ninth had not for eras been a title of any renown. Cavaliers in other Houses might be revered and noble men and women of long genealogy or particular talent, frequent heroes of Gideon’s less prurient magazines, but in the Ninth everyone knew you were chosen for how many bones you could hump around. Ortus was basically a morbid donkey. His father—cavalier to Harrow’s father—had been an enormous, stony man of some gravity and devotion, with a sword and two huge panniers of fibulae, but Ortus wasn’t made in his mould. Coupling him to Harrow had been rather like yoking a doughnut to a cobra. Aiglamene had probably focused her frustrations on Gideon because Ortus was such a drip. He was a sensitive, awful young man, and his mother was obsessed with him; each time he caught a cold he was swaddled and made to lie still until he got bedsores.
The Lord and Lady she looked at too, though she honestly didn’t want to. Lady Pelleamena and Lord Priamhark sat side by side, one gloved hand placed on a knee, the other joined to their partner’s as they prayed simultaneously on a string of ornate bones. Black cloth swathed them toe to neck, and their faces were mostly obscured by dark hoods: Gideon could see their pale, waxy profiles, streaked with luminescent powder, the mark of Harrow’s handprint still visible on both. Their eyes were closed. Pelleamena’s face was still frozen and fine as it had been the last time Gideon had seen her, the dark wings of her brows unsilvered, the thin fretwork of lines next to each eye uncrowded by new. Priam’s jaw was still firm, his shoulder unstooped, his brow clear and unlined. They were utterly unchanged; less changed, even, than the shitty great-aunts. This was because they’d both been dead for years.
Their mummified faces did not yield to time because—as Gideon knew, and the marshal, and the captain of the guard, and nobody else in the universe—Harrowhark had frozen them forever. Ever the obsessive and secretive scholar, she had derived at great cost some forgotten way of preserving and puppeting the bodies. She had found a nasty, forbidden little book in the great Ninth repositories of nasty, forbidden little books, and all the Houses would have had a collective aneurysm if they knew she’d even read it. She hadn’t executed it very well—her parents were fine from the shoulders up, but from the shoulders down they were bad—though she had, admittedly, been ten.
Gideon had been eleven when the Lord and Lady of the House of the Ninth had slipped into death in sudden, awful secret. It was such a huge bag of ass how it had happened: what she’d found, what she’d seen. She hadn’t been sad. If she’d been stuck being Harrow’s parents she would have done the same years ago.