“Yes, she was always demanding,” said Palamedes. “In point of fact that’s not actually Crown’s boyfriend, Nona, it’s her sister, but I don’t think anyone could blame you for getting confused.” Nona felt a little surge of relief at the idea that Crown did not have a boyfriend. “Commander We Suffer, I don’t have a lot of time, so forgive me for railroading—my name is Palamedes Sextus. I’m the Master Warden of the Sixth House.”
We Suffer looked at him very, very hard.
“That is impossible,” she said. “Palamedes Sextus died during the Canaan operation.”
“But you saw me earlier,” he pointed out. “When I pulled the bullet out of Nona. Or did you think that was Camilla? She’s not an adept, Commander, she can’t do that kind of thing.”
“Then you are—what? Possessing her somehow? You cannot expect—”
“Look, it doesn’t matter,” said Palamedes. “If you prefer to think that Camilla’s got a psychological condition and sometimes flips her entire affect for no obvious reason, please believe whatever you find most comforting. The point is that there are some things you don’t know and I’m the one best placed to explain them. Listen. If we can get the body of Gideon Nav—the key to the Locked Tomb—out of that barracks, will you give us the Sixth House?”
“For the key to the Locked Tomb,” We Suffer said slowly, “I will give you almost anything that is in my power to give.”
“Great, but that’s not an answer.” Palamedes leant Camilla’s body forward like he wanted to spring out of the chair. “The Sixth House Oversight Body. Assuming you can get them, which I realise is nontrivial, will you hand them over? Yes or no.”
We Suffer sighed. “Yes,” she said.
Palamedes sat back. “Right,” he said. “Let’s talk details. Commander, Ianthe Tridentarius’s hand is nowhere near as formidable as it seems. She’s contrived to land on the planet by puppeting a dead body—controlling it at long range. That protects her from necromantic madness, but it also puts enormous constraints on her abilities. She’s in many ways less powerful right now than a regular necromancer. And she’s holed up in that barracks with a handful of bodyguards … and Pyrrha Dve, whom you don’t trust, but I very much do.”
As he talked, We Suffer’s face had begun to warm with recognisable traces of interest. “You are saying that we have her in the corner,” she said.
“Yes. Sort of. But in the same corner you have the body of Gideon Nav. I’ve got no idea why the hell Ianthe brought it along—presumably some sort of grisly power show, or maybe she was hoping to bait out Harrowhark—but everyone in this room needs that body. It’s your way to carry out your mission, and it’s our way to save Nona.”
We Suffer glanced over at Nona, then back to Palamedes, and said: “The child is—sick, somehow?”
“I’m dying,” Nona put in cheerfully. Having admitted it once, the words seemed a little lighter every time she said them, so she was quite keen to say them at every opportunity.
“Take this on trust, but yes, Nona is very unwell, and I—we—think the only way to save her is to get her near the corpse of Gideon Nav. It’s all a bit … theoretical, still, but our goals very much align here.”
“You are saying this as if it makes things worse, when from my chair things are looking only better,” said We Suffer. She was starting to perk up, by We Suffer standards, which meant that her eyes had narrowed a bit. “The same building contains both Gideon Nav—whom I want in a bag—and a Lyctor, now apparently neutered—whom I want in a box. And here I am, with a bag and a large number of boxes.”
Palamedes’s eyes flicked down to the watch on Camilla’s wrist. “No. There’s another thing. Lyctors can travel near-instantaneously across huge distances. I don’t know exactly what Ianthe can still manage, but there’s a chance that, if you spook her, she’ll use that method to get herself out of danger—and more important, to get Gideon out of danger. They’re not in a corner, Commander, they’re bobbing on the end of a string, and I have a nasty feeling that string can be jerked back at any time.”
“Then it is back to the cloak and the dagger. We must extract Nav quietly, before there can be any spooking of the Lyctor.”
“And that’s where you need us,” Palamedes concluded triumphantly. “With the best will in the world—how long will it take you to set up and stage some sort of commando raid on that barracks? More than twenty-four hours, I’d guess—”