“It’s the other one,” he said tersely, not sounding at all as though he’d just raised a massive thanergetic barrier and broken out in minor blood sweat. She was amazed it was only minor: the whole space before her shimmered like the oily surface of a bubble, fully three bodies high and three wide. “We don’t want an interhouse incident—not that it wouldn’t give our policy wonks back on the Sixth something to think about. You too”—this was to Gideon, a little more formally—“I offer apology that my cavalier engaged you in an unscheduled bout, Niner, but I don’t apologise for her drawing on someone sneaking around dressed all in black. Be reasonable.”
Gideon peeled the knuckle-knife off her hand and latched it back to her belt, and she surveyed the scene before her. Both cavalier and necromancer stood before the black hulk of the trapdoor, robes charcoal in the dimness, both of their eyes and hair mellowed to no colour in the thin light from the hallway. The little torch was quickly flicked off, plunging the whole into further gloom. She yearned to talk, beginning with: How did you do a little flip like that? but the necro brought her up short with:
“You’re here about Nonagesimus, aren’t you?”
The stupefied blankness on Gideon’s face must have been mistaken for something else. Face paint was good for masking. The necromancer scrubbed his hands together in sudden, fretful activity, wringing his fingers together hard. “Assumed she’d just—well. Have you seen her since the night before last?”
Gideon shook her head so emphatically no that she was surprised her hood didn’t fall off. The cavalier’s face was turned toward him, expressionless, waiting. The young man strummed his fingers together before coming to some unknown decision.
“Well, you’re cutting it fine,” he said abruptly. He pulled his thick, nerdy spectacles off his long nose and shook them as though wicking them free of something. “She was down there last night too and, if I’m correct, never surfaced. Her blood’s on the floor down there.” Because necromancers lived bad lives, he added: “To clarify. Her intravenous blood. Her intravenous blood.”
At this clarification, a very strange thing happened to Gideon Nav. She had already exhausted neurons, cortisol, and adrenaline, and now her body started moving before her head or her heart did; she strode past the boy and yanked so hard on the top of the hatch that it damn near broke her wrists. It was shut tighter than Crux’s ass. At this embarrassing heaving, the boy sighed explosively and threw his zipped-up bag to Camilla, who caught it out of midair.
“Cavaliers,” he said.
Camilla said, “I wouldn’t have left you alone for twenty-seven hours.”
“Of course not. I’d be dead. Look, you simpleton, it’s not going to open,” he told Gideon, swinging his sights on her like a man levelling a blade. “She’s got your key.”
Up close, he was gaunt and ordinary looking, except for the eyes. His spectacles were set with lenses of spaceflight-grade thickness, and through these his eyes were a perfectly lambent grey: unflecked, unmurked, even and clear. He had the eyes of a very beautiful person, trapped in resting bitch face.
Gideon hauled again at the hatch, as though offering up the universe’s most useless act might endear her to the physics of a locked door. His sigh grew sadder and more explosive as he watched her. “You’re winners, you and Nonagesimus both. Hang on—Cam, do a perimeter, please—Ninth, listen. It’s well above freezing down there. That means blood stays wet for an hour, let’s say an hour and a half. Hers hadn’t skeletonised altogether. You with me? She might have spilt it deliberately—although, she’s an osseo, she’s not going to do blood ritual on herself—right, you’re not even pretending to pay attention.”
Gideon had stopped paying attention somewhere around wet and was now bracing both feet to pull: she was pressing down the frame with a foot, distantly taking in every fifth word. Blood. Skeletonised. Osseo. The necro called out, “Camilla, any sign she left while—”
Camilla was on the stairs.
“No, Warden.”
He said to Gideon, gruffly: “Odds are she’s still down there.”
“Then get off your ass and help me,” said Gideon Nav.
This did not surprise or alarm him. In fact, his tightly-wound shoulders relaxed a fraction from black-hole stress fracture to pressure at the bottom of the ocean. He sounded almost relieved when he said, “Sure.”
A jangling object sailed through the air, visible more as sound and movement than as thing. The necromancer failed to catch it: it banged him hard on his long, scrabbling hands. Gideon recognised it as the iron loop that she had been given on the very first day in Canaan House. As he squatted beside her, smelling like dust and mould, she could see that a long key had been put through the loop and was clanking there untidily. There was another, smaller key dangling off to one side, gleaming golden, with an elaborately carved shank and deep pockmarks instead of cuts in the shaft. A key ring? They’d all been given key rings?