Gideon Nav pressed her face up to the plexiform window of the shuttle and looked as if she couldn’t ever get enough of looking, until her eyes were red and streaming and huge migraine motes danced along the edge of her vision. All the other shutters were closed up tight and had been for most of the trip, which had taken about an hour of rapid travel. They had been surprised to find that, behind the plex privacy barrier Harrowhark had coolly slid up the moment they were inside, there was no pilot on board. The ship was being remotely piloted at great expense. There was no clearance for anybody to land at the First House without explicit invitation. There was a button to press if you needed to talk to the remote navigator, and Gideon had been eager to hear another voice, but Harrow had slid the barrier back down with an air of distinct finality.
She looked worn and exhausted, even vulnerable. For the journey’s length she had kept her prayer knuckles in her hands and moodily clinked them into each other. In Gideon’s comics, Cohort adepts always sat on plackets of grave dirt to ameliorate the effects of deep space and the loss of their power source; trust Harrowhark not to take the placebo. Gideon had warmed herself with the thought that it was the perfect time to kick her ass up and down the shuttle, but in the end, the natural embarrassment of arriving with one’s necromancer’s elbows on backward saved Harrow’s life. All thoughts of ass-kicking had subsided as the approach of the First House reflected light through the open window, light that spilled into the passenger bay in fiery gouts; Gideon had to turn her face away, half-blind and breathless. Harrow was tying a piece of black voile around her eyes, as calm and uninterested as if what hung outside the window was dreary Ninth sky.
Gideon cupped her hands over her eyes to shade them and looked again, getting her fill of the explosive brilliance outside: the velvety blackness of space, with innumerable pinprick white stars; the First, a searing circle of incandescent blue, strewn with dazzling white; and—the outsides of seven more shuttles, lining up in orbit. Gideon gave a low whistle to see them. To an inhabitant of the sepulchrous Ninth House it seemed amazing that the whole thing didn’t just combust and crumble into flame. There were other Houses that made their homelands on planets closer to the burning star of Dominicus—the Seventh and the Sixth, for instance—but to Gideon they could not imaginably be anything else than 100 percent on fire.
It was incredible. It was exquisite. She wanted to throw up. It seemed stolid insanity that Harrowhark’s only reaction was to slide up the plexiform barrier and hold down the communication button to ask: “How long must we wait?”
The navigator’s voice crackled back: “We are securing your clearance to land, Your Grace.”
Harrow didn’t thank him. “How long?”
“They are scanning your craft now, Your Grace, and we’ll move the moment they have confirmed you’re free to leave orbit.”
The Reverend Daughter sank back into her chair, stuffing her prayer bones into a fold of her robe. Quite unwillingly Gideon caught her eye. The expression on the other girl’s face wasn’t disinterest or distraction, as she’d assumed; even through a layer of veiling, she could tell that Harrow was near-incapacitated with concentration. Her mouth was pinched in a tight ripple, worrying the black-painted blotch on the lower lip into blood.
It took less than five minutes for the thrusters to creak to life again, for the ship to slowly glide out of orbit. Next to them, in a line, seven other shuttles were drifting to one side, sliding into the atmosphere like dominoes falling. Harrow shook her head back into her hood and pinched the bridge of her nose, and said in tones between pleasure and pain: “This planet’s unbelievable.”
“It’s gorgeous.”
“It’s a grave,” said Harrowhark.
The shuttle broke orbit, haloed by coruscating light. This burn-off meant there was nothing to see but sky, but the sky of the First House was the same improbable, ludicrous blue as the water. Being on the outside of the planet was like living in a kaleidoscope. It was a lurching blur for long moments—a whine, as air pockets in the thick atmosphere made the engines scream, a jolt as the craft repressurized to match—and then the shuttle was a slingshot bullet, an accelerating shell. The brightness was too much to bear. Gideon got the impression of a hundred spires rising, choked with green stuff from blue-and-turquoise waters, before she had to squeeze her eyes shut and turn away wholesale. She pressed the fabric of the embroidered Ninth robes to her face and had to breathe through her nose.