“Then how exactly am I meant to replicate it?” demanded Harrow. “I can’t—oh. No.”
“You did Imaging and Response, right? You must have, you got the key for it. Same deal. I’m going to think about the key, and you’re going to see it through my eyes.”
“Sextus,” said Harrow darkly.
“Wait, wait,” put in Gideon, intrigued. “You’re going to read his mind?”
“No,” said both necromancers immediately. Then Palamedes said, “Well, technically, sort of.”
“No,” said Harrow. “You remember the construct challenge, Nav. I couldn’t read your mind then. It’s more like borrowing perceptions.” She turned back to Palamedes. “Sextus, this was bad enough when I did it to my own cavalier. You’re going to have to focus on that key incredibly hard. If you get distracted—”
“He doesn’t get distracted,” said Camilla, as if this had caused difficulties in the past.
Palamedes closed his eyes. Harrow gnawed on her lip furiously, then closed hers too.
Nothing happened for a good thirty seconds. Gideon was dying to make a joke, just to get a reaction, when the tiny lump of matter in Harrow’s palm twitched. It flexed and began to stretch, forming a long, thin, cylindrical rod. Another few seconds passed, and a spine of bone extruded slowly from near one end. Then another.
Gideon was honestly impressed. In all the time Harrow had tormented her back on Drearburh, she had only ever used bones as seeds and starters—stitching them together into trip wires, grasping arms, kicking legs, biting skulls. This was something new. She was using bone like clay—a medium she could shape not just into one of a bunch of predetermined forms, but into something that had never existed before. It looked like it was giving her trouble too: her brow was furrowed, and the first faint traces of blood sweat gleamed on her slim throat.
“Focus, Sextus,” her necromancer gritted out. The object on her palm was now clearly a key: Gideon could see three individual teeth, twisting and flexing as Harrow filled in the fine detail. The whole length of the key quivered, and looked for a moment as though it would jump off her hand and fall to the floor, but then it abruptly lay still. Harrow opened her eyes, blinked, and peered at it suspiciously.
“This won’t work,” she said. “I’ve never had to work with something so small before.”
“That’s what she said,” murmured Gideon, sotto voce.
Palamedes opened his eyes too, and breathed a long sigh of what sounded like relief.
“It’ll be fine,” he said unconvincingly. “Come on. Let’s try it out.”
He headed for the black stone door, followed by Harrow, both cavaliers, and the five skeletons that Harrow had refused point-blank not to conjure on their way up here. He took the newly formed bone key, examined it, fitted it in the lock, and then turned it decisively to the left.
The mechanism went click.
“Oh, my God,” said Harrow.
Sextus ran a hand convulsively through his hair. “All right,” he said. “No, I did not actually think that was going to happen. Masterful work, Reverend Daughter—” and he gave her a little mock-bow.
“Yes,” said Harrow. “Congratulations to you also, Warden.”
He pushed the door open onto total blackness. Harrow stepped closer to Gideon and muttered, “If anything moves—”
“Yaaas, I know. Let it head for Camilla.”
Gideon did not know how to handle this new, overprotective Harrowhark, this girl with the hunted expression. She kept looking at Gideon with the screwed-up eyes of someone who had been handed an egg for safekeeping and was surrounded by egg-hunting snakes. But now she stepped forward grandly, spread her palms wide in the necromantic gesture as threatening as a cavalier unsheathing a sword, and strode into the dark. Palamedes went after her, groped around on the wall for a few moments, and then hit the light switch.
Gideon stood in the laboratory and stared as Camilla carefully closed the door behind them. This Lyctoral lab was an open-plan bomb wreck. There were three long lab tables covered in old, disused tools, splotches of what looked to be russet fungus, abandoned beakers, and used-up pens. The floor underfoot was hairy carpet, and in one corner there was a hideous, slithery tangle of what Gideon realised must be sleeping bags. In another corner, an ancient chin-up bar sagged in the middle alongside a strip of towel left to hang for a myriad. Everywhere there were bits of paper or shaken-out clothes, as though somebody had left the place in a hurry or had simply been an unbelievable slob. Spotlights shone down hot on the ruined jumble.