The word Palamedes wanted turned out to be with Harrow; he plucked her sleeve and beckoned her off to the corner of the room, and she went without a cavil. Gideon was left alone, watching Teacher join the whey-faced Silas as he knelt before his cavalier. His lips moved in silent prayer. Colum was now greyish all over, and his eyes had the thousand-yard stare of a man in a stupor. Silas did not appear to be worried. He had clasped one of those big hard-bitten hands between his own and murmured to him, and Gideon caught some of the words: I bid you return.
Teacher was saying: “He’ll have a hard fight to come back, Master Octakiseron … harder than he may have anticipated. Is he used to the journey?”
“Brother Colum has fought harder and in colder climes,” said Silas calmly. “He has come back to me through stranger ghosts. He has never once let his body become corrupted, and he never shall.” Then he went back to the mantra: I bid … I bid …
For some reason that image stayed with her: the mayonnaise magician and his thickset nephew, older than him by far, staring out of empty eyes as Teacher watched with the air of a man with front-row seats to back-alley dental surgery. Gideon watched too, fascinated by an act she couldn’t understand, when a hand closed around her wrist.
It was Jeannemary Chatur, her eyes red-rimmed, sticky and stained, her hair in a frizz. There was no sign of pluck in her now, except maybe a wild hardness around the eyes as she looked at Gideon.
“Ninth,” she said hoarsely, “if you know anything, tell me now. If you—if you know anything, I’ve got to— They meant too much to us, so if you know—”
Gideon felt very sad. She put her hand on the bad teen’s shoulder, and Jeannemary flinched away. She shook her head no, and when Jeannemary’s big eyes—lashes clumped with last night’s makeup, irises an inky brown—filled with tears she tried to furiously blink away, Gideon stopped being able to even slightly deal. She put her hand on top of the other cavalier’s head, which was damp and curly like a sad puppy’s, and said: “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
“I believe you,” said Jeannemary thickly, not seeming to register the fact that the Ninth had spoken. “Magnus likes you … liked … He wouldn’t have let anything happen to Abigail,” she added all in a rush. “She hated heights. She never would’ve risked falling. And she was a spirit magician. If it was ghosts, why couldn’t she—”
From before them, Colum gave such a racking and explosive cough that it made both Jeannemary and Gideon jump. His eyes rolled back in his head as he choked, staccato gasps, pulling in reeking smoke, while his adept said merely: “Fifteen minutes. You’re getting tardy,” and nothing more.
* * *
Gideon would have liked Jeannemary to finish her sentence, but Harrow was limping over with an expression like trouble. She had the distant, brow-puckered frown of a woman untying gruesomely knotted shoelaces. Gideon watched the cavalier of the Fourth walk away with hunched shoulders and a hand clasped around the grip of her rapier, and she fell into Harrow’s wake, a half step behind her.
“You okay?”
“I’m sick of these people,” said Harrowhark, ducking down a passageway and away from the central atrium. “I am sick of their slowness … sick to death. I can’t wait here for one of them to grasp the implications of everything they have been told”—Gideon couldn’t wait to grasp those implications either, but it didn’t seem likely anytime soon—“because we will be far ahead of them by then. We have a door to open.”
“Yes, tomorrow morning after at least eight hours’ sleep,” Gideon suggested without hope.
“An admirable attempt at comedy in these trying times,” said Harrowhark. “Let’s go.”
19
THE KEY THEY HAD purchased so dearly from the construct gave very little away, other than its unusual colour. It was big; the shaft was as long as Gideon’s middle finger, and the clover head satisfactorily heavy to hold, but it had no helpful tag saying, e.g., FIRST FLOOR. This did not seem to give Harrowhark pause. She whipped out her stained journal and brooded over her maps, hiding in a dark alcove and making her cavalier keep watch. Considering that there were exactly zero people around, this seemed stupid.
Then again, the idea that there might not be zero people around—that there was something horrible infesting Canaan House, something that had killed Abigail and Magnus for a perceived slight—well, Gideon did not stand there as easily as she might have yesterday. The First House was no longer a beautiful and empty shell, buffeted by the erosion of time. Now it seemed more like the blocked-up labyrinths beneath the Ninth House, kept sealed in case something became restless. When she was young she used to have nightmares about being on the wrong side of the door of the Locked Tomb. Especially after what Harrow had done.