Gideon had noticed the absence of the ex-Reverend Father and Mother, but hadn’t thought anything of it. She was too busy thinking about her itchy secondhand clothes and the rapier buckled at her side, and the paint that was now a second skin on her face. But she was still surprised when Harrow said: “Brothers and sisters, listen. My mother and father will not be with you. My father has sealed shut the passageway to the tomb that must always be locked, and they have decided to continue their penitence behind that wall until I return. The marshal will act as seneschal for me, and my captain will act as marshal.”
Testament to Harrow’s timing for drama, the Secundarius Bell began ringing. From above the drillshaft the shuttle started to make its descent, blotting out the ever-fainter light of the equinox. For the very first time Gideon did not feel the overwhelming sense of dread and suspicion: a pinprick of anticipation curled in her gut instead. Round two. Go.
Harrowhark looked out at the people of the Ninth. So did Gideon. There were all the assorted nuns and brethren; old pilgrims and ageing vassals; every gloomy, severe, and stern face of adept and mystic, of joyless and wasted men and women, of the grey and monotonous population that had made up Gideon’s life and never shown her one single moment of sympathy or kindness. Harrow’s face was bright with elation and fervour. Gideon would have sworn there were tears in her eyes, except that no such liquid existed: Harrow was a desiccated mummy of hate.
“You are my beloved House,” she said. “Rest assured that wherever I go, my heart is interred here.”
It sounded like she really meant it.
Harrow began, “We pray the tomb is shut forever…” and Gideon found herself reciting simply because it was the only prayer she’d ever known, enduring the words by saying them as sounds without meaning. She stopped when Harrowhark stopped, her hands clasped, and added: “I pray for our success for the House; I pray for the Lyctors, devoted Hands of the Emperor; I pray to be found pleasing in his eyes. I pray for the cavalier…”
At this Gideon caught the dark, black-rimmed eye, and could imagine the mental accompaniment:… to choke to death on her own vomit.
“Let it be so,” said the Lady of the Ninth House.
The rattling of the assorted prayer bones very nearly drowned out the clank of the shuttle, docking. Gideon turned away, not meaning to make any kind of goodbye; but she saw Aiglamene, hand crooked into a stiff salute, and realised for the first time that she might never see the woman again. God help her, she might never come back. For a moment everything seemed dizzyingly unsure. The House continued on in grand and grisly majesty because you were always looking at it; it continued because you watched it continue, changeless and black, before your eyes. The idea of leaving it made it seem so fragile as to crumble the moment they turned their backs. Harrowhark turned toward the shuttle and Gideon realised with an unwelcome jolt that she was crying: her paint was wet with tears.
And then the whole idea became beautiful. The moment Gideon turned her back on it, the House would die. The moment Gideon walked away, it would all disappear like an impossibly bad dream. She mentally staved in the sides of the enormous, shadowy cave and buried Drearburh in rock, and for good measure exploded Crux like a garbage bag full of soup. But she saluted Aiglamene as crisply and as enthusiastically as a soldier on her first day of service, and was pleased when her teacher rolled her eyes.
As they pulled themselves into the shuttle, the door mechanism sliding down with a pleasingly final whunk, she leaned into Harrow: Harrow, who was dabbing her eyes with enormous gravity. The necromancer flinched outright.
“Do you want,” Gideon whispered huskily, “my hanky.”
“I want to watch you die.”
“Maybe, Nonagesimus,” she said with deep satisfaction, “maybe. But you sure as hell won’t do it here.”
7
FROM SPACE, THE HOUSE of the First shone like fire on water. Wreathed in the white smoke of its atmosphere, blue like the heart of a gas-ignited flame, it burned the eye. It was absolutely lousy with water, smothering it all in the bluest of blue conflagrations. Visible even up here were the floating chains of squares and rectangles and oblongs, smudging the blue with grey and green, brown and black: the tumbled-down cities and temples of a House both long dead and unkillable. A sleeping throne. Far away its king and emperor sat on his seat of office and waited, a sentinel protecting his home but never able to return to it. The Lord of the House of the First was the Lord Undying, and he had not come back in over nine thousand years.