“I said a Lyctor’s rights. Not a Lyctor’s prowess, sir—Captain?”
“Marshal,” Aiglamene corrected, but— “I ranked Captain, before discharge.”
“Territorials?”
“Strike force, for my sins.”
“You look too sensible for a Brandishment Baby,” said Pyrrha, her most winning smile in her voice, and the old soldier made a noise that was second cousin to a laugh.
“An’ there’s a term I haven’t heard since I was a child.” Then Aiglamene bristled, as though she had dropped her guard too far, and said: “Can you save us, or not?”
“If you let us through to the rock, maybe.”
“But where’s the Reverend Daughter, who we have taken as Saint and Lyctor? Why the Tomb?”
There was no smile in Pyrrha’s voice now; in fact, she sounded a lot like We Suffer, with her best radio voice on. “Captain, perhaps you’ll understand me if I tell you this is a matter of the Emperor’s Intelligence.”
But this just made Aiglamene laugh again, and not with a bit of humour in it.
“Hah! Don’t come over all intelligence agent with me, you young fool. The Bureau’s not welcome in the House of the Ninth. Last one we had—thirty years back—we dropped off eleven hours from the prison with ten hours’ worth of air and told ’em to hurry up.”
Aiglamene looked at Nona. Nona felt unhappy again, hot in her cheeks and under her shirt. The old soldier looked at her critically, like a stranger, and added: “Take her in. Get her to a heater—slowly—and warm her through. She’s taking a chill.”
“Nona doesn’t chill,” said Pyrrha. But she shifted Nona around in her arms, and in a slightly different voice said, “Fuck me. Nona, you are cold.”
Before Nona could protest that in fact she felt quite warm now—too warm for her jacket—Pyrrha moved into the depths of the room. It was a long oblong, and resembled nothing so much as a graveyard for rusting swords and things; rocky niches carved into the walls were filled with old, tarnished rubbish, and long fearsome slabs of rock, only there were robed people of all kinds perching on top of them, which gave them a kind of picnic aspect. Dim overhead lights hung in cages just like the machines of before, and bright lamps—no candlelight, though Nona could see branches of old, dribbly candles with black tapers and horrible brownish tallow—made weird shadows of everyone. Pyrrha shouldered her through surprised skeleton faces and surprised skeleton people. Nona was deeply horrified to see actual walk-around skeletons mixed in with the crowd, when she had mistaken them in the dark for people who were very thin. When they turned around they were skulls with pinprick red lights dancing in the hollows of their eye sockets—she was fascinated, horribly so, but had no time to be. Pyrrha broke the soft, worried hush by saying: “Palamedes—Paul,” and then Nona was laid down next to a glowing red bar heater that smelled like oil and burning hair, displacing a couple of creaking old people who couldn’t get out of the way fast enough because they kept bowing to her. One kissed her shoe. Even Kevin knew better than that. She said reproachfully, “That’s unhygienic—there’s germs,” but they were gone already.
The terrible old man was there too; he was being tended to by Paul and continuing to heap great curses upon their head, which Paul was taking with calm imperturbability. Another, shorter person stood alongside, holding a knife as though they wished very much that they weren’t.
Nona was laid down on the hard, cold rock—Pyrrha had taken her hands and was warming them between her own. Nona’s were a strange, livid colour. Nona could see confusion in the shape of Pyrrha’s eyebrows and mouth, and when she ran her hands up Nona’s forearms, the confusion changed.
“When did you get this?” she demanded.
She was pointing at the very slight mark on Nona’s forearm, still a little pink from where the skin had lifted. “I got it off your zip,” she said, and then she realised—
“My first wound.”
“Paul,” said Pyrrha, desperately, but Paul had already transferred his attentions from the old man to Nona. Paul was touching the back of her neck—checking her eyes, behind her ears, sticking a finger briefly in her mouth—moving down to slide a hand underneath her armpits. Nona looked away, and found the hideous old man looking directly at her, with that same expression in his bleary, pain-trammelled eyes of—recognition. He wanted something, from her specifically.