“The next time we meet,” he said beneath his breath, as monolithic and impassive as when she’d arrived, “I think it’s likely one of us will die.”
“Yeah,” Gideon said, “yeah,” instead of “I’m sorry.”
Colum picked up the knuckle-knife and handed that to her as well. “Get away from here,” he said, and it sounded more warning than command.
He moved away from her again. Gideon was sorely tempted to take him with her and away from Silas, sitting still and pale in his great white room, but she felt that probably that wasn’t going to happen. She also thought about skidding off a couple middle fingers to Silas around Colum’s shoulders, but concluded the moral high ground was sometimes worth holding on to. So she left.
As she walked away, she braced for a sudden burst of angry voices, yelling, recriminations, maybe even a cry of pain. But there was only silence.
29
IN A WELTER OF stupefaction Gideon wandered the halls of Canaan House, unwilling to go home. She walked down the neglected halls and dimly realised she could no longer smell the mould, having smelled it for so long that it had become indistinguishable from the air around her. She stood in the cool shadows of putrefied doorways, trailing her fingers over the porous bumps and splinters of very old wood. Skeleton servitors rattled past her, holding baskets or ancient watering cans, and when she looked out through a filth-streaked window she saw a couple of them standing on the battlements, lit up by white sunshine, holding long poles over the side. Her brain registered this as making total sense. Their ancient finger bones gleamed on the reels, and as she watched one pulled a jerking, flapping fish to the apex of its extreme journey from ocean to phalange. The construct carefully put it in a bucket.
She passed the great atrium with the dry, dubious fountain, and she found Teacher there. He was sitting in front of the fountain, in a chair with a ruptured cushion, praying, or thinking, or both. His shining head was drooping, but he gave her a weary smile.
“How I hate the water,” he said, as though this conversation was one they’d had before and he was simply continuing it. “I’m not sorry that this has dried up. Ponds … rivers … waterfalls … I loathe them all. I wish they had not filled the pool downstairs. It’s a terrible portent, I said.”
“But you’re surrounded by sea,” said Gideon.
“Yes,” said Teacher unexpectedly, “it is a bit of a pisser.”
Gideon laughed—slightly hysterical—and he joined in, but his eyes filled with tears.
“Poor child,” he said, “we’re all sorry. We never intended this to happen, none of us. The poor child.”
Gideon might’ve been the child in question; she might’ve not. She strongly did not care either way. She soon found herself wandering through the little vestibule and past the gently lapping pool that Teacher hated: the low whitewashed ceiling, the softly gleaming tiles. Past the glass-fronted doors, which stood open, lay abandoned towels on the floor of the training room where the cavaliers practised their art, and what was unquestionably Naberius’s prissily pinned-up jacket. And inside the training room was Corona.
Her lovely golden hair was stuck up in sweaty tendrils atop her head, and she had stripped down to her camisole and her shorts, which Gideon was far too befuddled to appreciate but not too befuddled to overlook. Her long tawny limbs were leprous here and there with chalk dust, and she held a rapier and a knife. She was fixed in the classic training attitude, arm coming down in a slowly controlled arc through the movements of thrust—half step—knife thrust—retreat, and there was a deep red flush of exertion on her face. Her necromantic robe lay abandoned in a thin filmy heap at the side, and Gideon watched, fascinated, through the open door.
Coronabeth spun to face her. Her stance was good: her eyes were very beautiful, like amethysts.
“Have you ever seen a necromancer hold a sword before?” she asked gaily.
“No,” said Gideon, “I thought their arms would all flop around.”
The Third princess laughed. The flush on her cheeks was a little bit too hot and pink. “My sister’s do,” she said. “She can’t hold her arms up long enough to braid her hair. Do you know, Ninth, I’ve always wanted to challenge you?” This was said with a low, intense breathlessness, ruined by the addendum: “Babs said it was incredible.”
This was maybe the worst statement of a day so filled with terrible statements that they crowded one another, like spectators at a duel. Once Gideon would have loved to hear Corona talk to her with that low, breathy intensity, maybe saying “Your biceps … they’re eleven out of ten,” but right now she did not want anyone to talk to her at all.