“Stand in front of a window now and I’ll do the hard part,” said Gideon.
“Oh, take a nap,” snapped Harrowhark.
Gideon very nearly did lay hands on her then, and probably should have.
“If you don’t need me, release me to the Seventh House,” she said, very slow and very calm, like she was reading at a service. “I’d rather serve—Dulcinea dying—than the living Reverend Daughter.”
Harrowhark turned to leave—airily, casually really, as though she and Gideon had finished a conversation about the weather. But then she inclined her head back to Gideon a little, and the fragment of her expression that Gideon saw was as wheezing and airless as a blow to the solar plexus.
“When I release you from my service, Nav,” her necromancer said, “you will know about it.” And she walked away.
Gideon decided, then and there, her betrayal.
28
HALF AN HOUR LATER, Gideon Nav stood before the doors of the Eighth House quarters, in front of an extremely befuddled Colum the Eighth. In the misty red recesses of her mind this traitorous act was the correct thing to do, though she couldn’t yet quite decide why.
“Your uncle wanted me,” she said. “So. Here I am.”
The cavalier looked at her. She had obviously interrupted him in the middle of some domestic housekeeping, which would have been extremely funny at any other time. The flawless white leather and scale mail pauldrons were gone; he was in his white breeches and a slightly dingy undershirt and he was holding a very oily cloth. The shabbiness of the cloth and the undershirt looked even dingier against the scintillating Eighth whiteness of the trousers. She had never been alone with Colum the Eighth before. Outside his uncle’s shadow he was just as patchy and discoloured, as though he had a liver inflammation; he was still a leathery yellow-brown, and his hair was similar, which made him look the same all over. It was startling to realise that he was maybe a little younger than Magnus. He looked worn-out and secondhand.
“You came alone?” he said, in his perpetually scratchy voice.
“You’d know if my necromancer was here.”
“Yes,” said Colum. He looked as though he were on the verge of saying something, and then decided against it. Instead he said, “Sword and second, please.”
“What? I’m not disarming—”
“Look,” he said, “I’d be a fool not to make you. Bear with me.”
“That’s not part of the deal—”
“There’s nothing in here to hurt you,” said Colum. “I swear it by my honour. So—give over.”
There was nothing likeable about the wiry, rue-eyed man, but there was something sincere about him, and also he had maybe the worst job in the history of the world. Gideon did not trust him. But she handed over her rapier and she handed over her glove, and she trotted after him unwillingly.
The red fog was clearing a little, and now Gideon was regretting the rage that had taken her from Harrow to Teacher and from Teacher’s directions to the rooms that housed the Eighth House. They had been put in high-vaulted, squarish rooms with very high windows, airy and gracious; what furniture they had been given would remain a mystery, because they’d gotten rid of it all. The living space had been mopped until it hurt. It was baffling to see such cleanliness in Canaan House; someone had even given them a pot of furniture polish, and the wooden floorboards beneath Gideon’s feet smelled oiled and fresh. They had kept a writing desk and chair, and a table and two stools, and that was all. The table was covered with a white cloth. There was a book on the writing desk. The rest was prim and sparse.
The only splash of colour was an enormous portrait of the Emperor as Kindly Master, with an expression of beatific peace. It was placed directly opposite the table, so that anyone sitting there would have him as an unavoidable dinner guest. In one corner was a polished metal box with Colum’s targe sitting precariously on a nest of hand weights.
Her sword and glove were both placed carefully next to the door, which she appreciated. Colum disappeared into another room. He reappeared a few minutes later with Silas in tow, kitted out in his perpetual uniform of cornea-white silk and silver-white chain, and his long floating wings of a robe. Gideon must have caught him mid-ablutions, because his chalk-coloured hair was wet and tousled as though it had just been rubbed with a towel. It seemed frivolously long, and she realised she had never seen it except pinned back. He pulled over the chair from the writing desk and sat while his cavalier produced a comb from somewhere, sorting out the still-damp locks of thin white.