Camilla said, “I don’t play guessing games.”
“Surely you can make an exception.”
Crown said quickly, “Camilla, don’t bother. Everything’s going to be fine,” and Ianthe said pettishly, “Honey, stop telling people things are going to be fine. Things are, I promise you, not going to be fine. Things are, frankly, going to be antonyms of fine.”
“You want the Sixth House back,” said Camilla.
“Not I,” said Ianthe. “I’ve read Sixth House juvenile moral novels about very smart children who save the day with logic, and I think you can all go drown. No, God wants the Sixth House back … badly. It was unfortunate timing, you know. First, we hear that the Sixth House facility is missing. Teacher assumes it melted as result of a little domestic drama, which sets him off wallowing all over again. Then we find out it really is missing, not burned. Who knew the whole station was portable and built to propel itself wherever it wanted? Not a thing to feed the troops on, I must say. How’d you get it through a stele? With the weight of that thing, you’d never survive River displacement.”
“Five hundred and thirty-two obelisks,” said Camilla.
“Really? I’d guessed in the six hundred range.”
“Deleterious effects past five-fifty.”
“What’d you compensate with, purely out of curiosity?”
“Prefer not to say,” said Camilla.
“Boo to that,” said Ianthe Naberius. “Oh, well, I’ll have to ask one of the members of your Oversight Body … whichever one I pick for asking questions, that is. We really don’t need all of them.”
Nona’s eyes were beginning to itch. It was very hard not to rub them. She focused instead on Crown, who was saying in tones that sounded very reasonable and deliberate: “Ianthe, you can’t get away with killing off the entire governance and administration of the Sixth House.”
“Watch me.”
“No. I’ve told you before, if you’re already dealing with morale failure … you’re much better off leaving them in place. Put them under secret House arrest if you have to, come up with some incentive, get them to see reason. If you kill them, everyone will know…”
“Nobody will know,” said Ianthe. “Nobody knew that you and Deuteros and Hect didn’t die at Canaan House. But everyone knows about the day Dominicus flared. The Houses will celebrate any scrap of the Sixth they get back. Very tragic that all sixteen members of the Sixth House leadership died, but that’s how it is.”
“Don’t be a dolt. The Sixth are so clannish, so set on systems, you’ll never truly have them again—”
“It’s called the boot, my darling,” the Prince said patiently. “Did they teach you nothing in that terrorist cell of yours? It’s called applying the fucking boot, and I’m going to teach God all about it. He’s been very hands-off for the past myriad … lazy, frankly … and now he’s reaping what he’s sowed. It’s called fear … I have seen fear and understand it now, and I am going to become wonderfully versed in its transmission. I am the Saint of Awe. Hect, you’re smiling.”
Nona, astonished, turned to Camilla without thinking; she tilted her head back immediately, afraid of being caught out, but by then she had seen Camilla’s face. Camilla was smiling: an easy, loose little smile, as though she were listening to a story. She said, “Yes.”
“Share the joke with the rest of the class,” Ianthe demanded.
“Does God know why the Sixth House left?”
“I’m assuming some grisly moral reason that you’re about to impart,” said Ianthe, “and I want to warn you against sounding like a tract.”
“The Sixth House,” said Camilla, “doesn’t move for moral philosophy.”
Ianthe Naberius spread her hands wide in impatient supplication. “Then for what—so much panic and mess and drama for what—”
“Cassiopeia the First left us instructions years ago,” said Camilla. “We left for a Lyctor.”
For the first time, Prince Ianthe Naberius’s mouth dropped open, giving Nona a dim view of exquisitely white and even teeth. She flounced up the dais, threw herself back into her chair—the dead bodies jerked their left hips convulsively, all in unison, like the kind of dance move Born in the Morning thought he was good at but wasn’t—and then she flung over her shoulder to Pyrrha: “You all said she was dead!”