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Gideon shrugged off her robe and wrestled out of her trousers and shirt, all of which had hot and damp insides from her sweat. She opened doors until she found the largest bathroom she had ever seen. It was so big she could walk around in it. She stretched out her arms on either side and still couldn’t touch the walls, which were of slippery stone, glowing like coals where they were whole and scored and dull where they weren’t. Maybe this pretending to be a cavalier gig wasn’t so bad after all. The floor was marble tile, sheen marred by only a few spots of black mould. There was a bowl with taps that Gideon knew to be a sink only because she’d read a lot of comics, and an enormous person-sized recess in the ground that she didn’t know what to do with at all. The sonic cleaner was set, gleaming gently, at either side of a rectangular chamber with a weird nozzle.
Gideon pulled a lever next to the tap. Water gushed from the nozzle, and she yelped and skittered away before she got over the sight and turned it off. Her survey identified a chubby cake of soap next to the sink (but Ninth soap had been made of human fat so no thanks) and a tub of antibac gel. She decided eventually to take a sonic and to use the gel to scrape the blurred paint off her face. Newly clean, with fresh clothes and her robe shaken out in the sonic, she was feeling good about herself until she espied another note stuck tersely on the autodoor:
Fix your face, idiot.
There was another note atop the paint box, which some skeletal servant had helpfully placed on one of the less precarious sideboards:
Do not try to find me. I am working. Keep your head down and stay out of trouble. I reiterate the order that you do not talk to anybody.
Another note was stuck beneath, belatedly:
To clarify, anybody is a word that refers to any person alive or dead.
Inside the box, yet another:
Paint your face adequately.
Gideon said aloud, “Your parents must have been so relieved to die.”
Back in the bathroom, she smeared cold wads of alabaster on her face. The nun’s-paint went on in pale greys and blacks, swabbed over the lips and the hollows of her eyes and cheeks. Gideon comforted herself by recoiling at her reflection in the cracked mirror: a grinning death’s-head with a crop of incongruously red hair and a couple of zits. She pulled her sunglasses out of the pocket of her robe and eased them on, which completed the effect, if the effect you wanted was “horrible.”
Feeling slightly more at ease with life, rapier bobbing at her hip, it was the cavalier of the Ninth who stalked down the dilapidated corridors of Canaan House. It was pleasantly quiet. She heard the far-off sounds of a lived-in place—footsteps, blurry moans from the autocooler, the unmistakable pitter-pat of foot bones on tattered rugs—and she retraced her steps to the original atrium. From there, she followed her nose.
Her nose led her to a hot, glass-topped hall, modern conveniences haphazardly pasted atop ancient riches, out of place among the tapestries and gone-black filigree. There was netting spread all over the rafters to keep out the birds, because the glass-topped roof had holes in it that you could jump through. A fountain of fresh water burbled at the wall, ringed in old concrete, with a filtration tank snuggled beside. And there were many long, worn tables—wooden slabs that had been freshened up with antibac and had legs that must have come from eight table sacrifices. The place could have seated fifty. The early light flooded down in electric yellow blasts, green where it touched the living plants and brown where it touched the dead ones, and she was grateful that she’d worn her glasses.
The room was nearly empty, but a couple of the others were there, finishing their meals. Gideon sat down three tables away and spied on them shamelessly. There was a man sitting close to a pair of ghastly teens: younger than Gideon, still in the midst of losing their fight with puberty. The boy wore trim navy robes and the girl had a jewelled scabbard on her back, and when Gideon entered they had looked up at the cultist of the Ninth with unabashed interest close to awe. The man close to this horrible pair had a kind, jovial face and curly hair, with clothes of excellent cut and a gorgeously wrought rapier at his side. Gideon reckoned him well into his thirties. He had the guts to raise his hand to her in a tentative greeting. Before she could do anything in return, a skeleton placed a steaming bowl of sour green soup and a massive hunk of lardy yeast bread on the table, and she got busy eating.
These were sophisticated skeletons. Hers returned with a cup of hot tea on a tray and waited until she took it to retreat. Gideon had noticed that their fine motor control would have been the envy of any necromancer, that they moved with perfect concert and awareness. She was in a position of some expertise here. You couldn’t spend any time in the Ninth House without coming away with an unwholesome knowledge of skeletons. She could’ve easily filled in for Doctor Skelebone without practising a single theorem. The sheer amount of complex programming each skeleton followed would have taken all of the oldest and most gnarled necromancers of the Locked Tomb months and months to put together. Gideon would have been impressed, but she was too hungry.
The awful teens were muttering to each other, giving Gideon looks, giving each other looks, then muttering again. The wholesome older man leaned over and gave them some bracing rebuke. They subsided reluctantly, only casting the occasional dark glance her way over their soup and bread, not knowing that she was physically immune. Back in the Ninth she had endured each meal under Crux’s fantastically dismal stare, which had turned gruel into ash in her mouth.
A waiting white-robed bone servant relieved her of her bowl and her plate almost sooner than she was done. She was quietly sucking tea through her teeth, trying not to drink half a pint of face paint with it, when a hand was stuck out in front of her.
It was the hand of the kind-faced older man. Up close he had a strong jaw, the expression of the terminally jolly, and nice eyes. Gideon was genuinely surprised to find that she was shy, and more still to find she was relieved by Harrow’s diktat against talking. Gideon Nav, absolutely goddamn starved of any contact with people who didn’t have dark missals and advanced osteoporosis, should’ve yearned to talk. But she found that she couldn’t imagine a single thing to say.
“Magnus the Fifth,” he said. “Sir Magnus Quinn, cavalier primary and seneschal of Koniortos Court.”
From three tables over, the loathsome teens greeted his audacity with low moans: they lost all appearance of restrained respectability and instead chorused his name in slow, hurt-animal noises, lowing “Magnus! Maaaaagnus,” which he ignored. Gideon had hesitated too long in taking his hand, and with the very soul of manners he mistook her reluctance for refusal, and rapped his knuckles on the table instead.
“Do forgive us,” he said. “We’re a bit short on black priests in the Fourth and the Fifth, and my valiant Fourth companions are, er, a bit overcome.”
(“Nooooo, Magnus, don’t say we’re overcome,” moaned the nasty girl, sotto voce.
“Don’t mention us, Magnus,” moaned the other.)
Gideon clattered her chair back to stand. Magnus Quinn, Magnus of the Fifth, was too old and too well schooled to do anything so stupid as flinch, but some reputation of the Ninth House that Gideon had only barely begun to comprehend widened his eyes, just a bit. His clothes were so restrained and so beautifully made; he looked trim and tasteful without being intimidating. She hated herself for hearing Harrow’s voice, low and urgent, in her hindbrain: We are not becoming an appendix of the Third or Fifth Houses!
