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“Don’t do this to me.”
“I owe you your life,” said Harrowhark, “I owe you everything.”
Harrow let go of her shirt and subsided to the floor. Her paint had all come off. She kept choking and sniffling on the thick rivulets of blood coming out her nose. Gideon tilted the wet, dark head so that her necromancer did not die untimely from drowning in her bloodied mucus, and tried desperately to think of a plan.
WHAM. One of the tentacles battered a crack in the shield: daylight streamed in from outside. Harrow looked even worse in the light. Camilla said steadily: “Let me out. I can provide the distraction.”
“Cram it already, Hect,” said Gideon, not looking away from her necromancer, who was painfully serene as even her eyebrows bled. “I’m not getting haunted by Palamedes Sextus’s crappy-ass revenant all telling me doctor facts for the rest of my life, just because I let you get disintegrated.”
“The other plan isn’t going to work,” said Camilla evenly. “If we could hold her off and wait on the shore, yes. But we can’t.”
Harrow sighed, stretched out on the floor.
“Then we hold her off as long as we can,” she said.
The crack knitted itself back together with painful, guttering slowness. Harrow snarled from the effort. They were plunged into darkness again, and the sounds from outside stopped, as though the construct was considering its next move.
Camilla closed her eyes and relaxed. Her long dark fringe fell over her face. It was that—Camilla in motion now Camilla at rest—that made the tiny voice inside Gideon’s head say, amazed: We really are going to die.
Gideon looked down at her necromancer. She had the heavy-lidded expression of someone who was concentrating in the knowledge that when they stopped concentrating, they would fall abruptly asleep. Harrow had gone unconscious once before: Gideon knew that the second time she let Harrow go under, there would probably not be any awakening. Harrow reached up—her hand was trembling—and tapped Gideon on the cheek.
“Nav,” she said, “have you really forgiven me?”
Confirmed. They were all going to eat it.
“Of course I have, you bozo.”
“I don’t deserve it.”
“Maybe not,” said Gideon, “but that doesn’t stop me forgiving you. Harrow—”
“Yes?”
“You know I don’t give a damn about the Locked Tomb, right? You know I only care about you,” she said in a brokenhearted rush. She didn’t know what she was trying to say, only that she had to say it now. With a bad, juddering noise, a tentacle had started to pound their splintering shelter again: WHAM. “I’m no good at this duty thing. I’m just me. I can’t do this without you. And I’m not your real cavalier primary, I never could’ve been.”
WHAM. WHAM. WHAM. The crack reopened at this punishment. The sunlight got in, and fragments of bone dissolved in a shower of grey matter. It held, but Gideon didn’t care. The construct wasn’t there: the shelter wasn’t there. Even Camilla, who had turned away to politely investigate something on the opposite wall, wasn’t there. It was just her and Harrow and Harrow’s bitter, high-boned, stupid little face.
Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound.
“Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House,” she said hoarsely, “you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.”
That was enough. Gideon the Ninth stood up so suddenly that she nearly bumped her head on the roof of the bone shield. Her arm complained loudly; she ignored it. She paced back and forth—Harrow watched her with only mild concern—studying the little space they were boxed into. The dead leaves. The cracked flagstones. Camilla—Camilla looked back at her, but she was already moving on. She couldn’t do this to Camilla. The powdery grey drifts of bone. The iron spikes of the railings.
“Yeah, fuck it,” she said. “I’m getting us out of here.”
“Griddle—”
Gideon limped over near the dusty flowerbeds. WHAM—WHAM—WHAM— She didn’t have much time, but she only had one shot anyway. She struggled out of her black robe and thought about taking off her shirt, in one mental blurt of panic, but decided she didn’t need to. She peeled her gloves off her wet red palms and rolled up her sleeves for no reason, except that it gave her something to do with her shaking hands. She made her voice as calm as possible: in a way, she was calm. She was the calmest she had ever been in her entire life. It was just her body that was frightened.
“Okay,” she said. “I understand now. I really, truly, absolutely understand.”
Harrowhark had leant back on her elbows and was watching her, black eyes lightless and soft. “Nav,” she said, the gentlest she had ever heard Harrow manage. “I can’t hold this for—much longer.”
WHAM—WHAM—WHAM!
“I don’t know how you’re holding it now,” said Gideon and she backed up, looked at what she was backing toward, looked back at her necromancer.
She sucked in a wobbly breath. Harrow was looking at her with a classic expression of faint Nonagesimus pity, as though Gideon had finally lost her intellectual faculties and might wet herself at any moment. Camilla watched her with an expression that showed nothing at all. Camilla the Sixth was no idiot.
She said, “Harrow, I can’t keep my promise, because the entire point of me is you. You get that, right? That’s what cavaliers sign up for. There is no me without you. One flesh, one end.”
A shade of exhausted suspicion flickered over her necromancer’s face. “Nav,” she said, “what are you doing?”
“The cruellest thing anyone has ever done to you in your whole entire life, believe me,” said Gideon. “You’ll know what to do, and if you don’t do it, what I’m about to do will be no use to anyone.”
Gideon turned and squinted, gauged the angle. She judged the distance. It would have been the worst thing in the world to look back, so she didn’t.
She mentally found herself all of a sudden in front of the doors of Drearburh—four years old again, and screaming—and all her fear and hate of them went away. Drearburh was empty. There was no Crux. There were no godawful great-aunts. There were no restless corpses, no strangers in coffins, no dead parents. Instead, she was Drearburh. She was Gideon Nav, and Nav was a Niner name. She took the whole putrid, quiet, filth-strewn madness of the place, and she opened her doors to it. Her hands were not shaking anymore.
WHAM—WHAM—WHAM. The structure bowed and creaked. Big chunks were falling away now, letting in wide splotches of sunlight. She felt movement behind her, but she was faster.
“For the Ninth!” said Gideon.
And she fell forward, right on the iron spikes.
ACT FIVE
37
“OKAY,” SAID GIDEON. “Okay. Get up.”
Harrowhark Nonagesimus got up.
“Good!” said her cavalier. “You can stop screaming any moment now, just an FYI. Now—first make sure nothing’s going to ice Camilla—I meant it about not wanting an afterlife subscription to Palamedes Sextus’s Top Nerd Facts.”
