When they were both lying in bed in the big warm dark, Harrow’s body perpendicular to Gideon’s body, Gideon said: “Did you try to kill me, back on the Ninth?”
Harrow was obviously startled into silence. Gideon pressed: “The shuttle. The one Glaurica stole.”
“What? No,” said Harrow. “If you’d gotten on that shuttle, you’d have made it safe to Trentham. I swear by the Tomb.”
“But—Ortus—Sister Glaurica—”
There was a pause. Her necromancer said, “Were meant to be brought back after twenty-four hours, in disgrace, with Ortus declared unfit to hold his post, relegated to the meanest cloister of the House. Not that Ortus would have minded. We had paid off the pilot.”
“Then—”
“Crux claimed,” said Harrow slowly, “that the shuttle had a fault, and blew up en route.”
“And you believed him?”
Another pause. Harrow said, “No.” And then: “Above all else, Nav … he couldn’t bear what he saw as disloyalty.”
So it was Crux’s mean, blackened revenge on his own House—his own zealous desire to burn it clear of any hint of insurrection—that had forced Glaurica’s ghost back to her home planet. She did not say this. Silas Octakiseron knew more than he should, but if Harrow discovered that now, she’d be off down the corridor in her nightdress with a sack of emergency bones and a very focused expression. “What a dope,” she said instead. “I was never loyal a day in my life and I still saw you in the raw.”
“Go to sleep, Gideon.”
She fell asleep, and for once didn’t dream of anything at all.
32
“THIS IS CHEATING,” SAID Harrowhark forbiddingly.
“We’re just being resourceful,” said Palamedes.
They were standing outside a laboratory door that Gideon had never seen. This one had not been hidden, just very inconveniently placed, at the topmost accessible point of the tower: it took more stairs than Gideon’s knees had ever wanted, and was situated plainly at the end of a terrace corridor where the sun slanted in through broken windows. The terrace in question looked so frankly about to disintegrate that Gideon tried to stay close to the corridor’s inside wall, in case most of the floor suddenly decided to fall off the side of Canaan House.
This Lyctoral door was the same as the others had been—gaping obsidian eye sockets in carved obsidian temporal bones: black pillars and no handle, and a fretwork symbol to differentiate it from the other two doors Gideon had seen. This one looked like three rings, joined on a line.
“We have no key,” Harrow was saying. “This is not entering a locked door with permission.”
Palamedes waved a hand. “I completed this challenge. We have the right to the key. That’s basically the same thing.”
“That is absolutely not the same thing.”
“Look. If we’re keeping track, which I am, the key for this room currently belongs to Silas Octakiseron. Lady Septimus had it, and he took it off her. That means the only way either of us ever gets inside is by defeating Colum the Eighth in a fair duel—”
“I can take Colum,” said Camilla.
“Pretty sure I can also take Colum,” added Gideon.
“—and then relying on Octakiseron to hand it over. Which he won’t,” concluded Palamedes triumphantly. “Reverend Daughter, you know as well as I do that the Eighth House wouldn’t let a little thing like fair play get in the way of its sacred duty to do whatever it wants.”
Harrow looked conflicted. “This is no ordinary lock. We’re not just going to—pick it with a bit of bone, Sextus.”
“No, of course not. I told you. Lady Septimus let me hold the key. I’m an adept of the Sixth. She might as well have let me make a silicone mould of the damn thing. I can picture every detail of that key right down to the microscopic level. But what am I going to do by myself, carve a new one out of wood?”
Harrow sighed. Then she rummaged in her pocket and took out a little nodule of bone, which she placed in the palm of her right hand. “All right,” she said. “Describe it for me.”
Palamedes stared at her.
“Hurry up,” she prompted. “I’m not waiting for the Second to find us.”
“It—I mean, it looked like a key,” he said. “It had a long shaft and some teeth. I don’t—I can’t just describe a molecular structure like it’s someone’s outfit.”