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“Do you ever think it’s funny, you being here with me?” she asked once, when Gideon sat, black-hooded, holding a ball of wool for Dulcinea’s crocheting. When Gideon shook her head, she said: “No … and I like it. I send Protesilaus away a good deal. I give him things to do: that’s what suits him best. But I like to see you and make you pick up my blankets and be my scullion. I think I’m the only person in eternity to make a Ninth House cavalier slave away for me … who’s not their adept. And I’d like to hear your voice again … one day.”
Fat chance. The one half-glimpsed vision of Harrow Nonagesimus was all that Gideon had seen, after that first spar. She didn’t appear again, in the training room or at the Ninth quarters. Her pillow was rumpled in a different way each morning, and black clothes heaped themselves untidily in the laundry basket that the skeletons took away at intervals, but she did not darken Gideon’s door.
Gideon went back to the training room regularly—and so did the cavaliers of Fourth and Fifth, and Second and Third—but the Sixth and Seventh cavaliers avoided it, even now that it was laminated to a high shine and smelled of seed oils. The skeletons had moved their efforts to cleaning the floors now. The burly Eighth cavalier had come in once when she was there, but on seeing Gideon, bowed politely and left posthaste.
Gideon still preferred to train by herself. It was her habit of long years to wake and wedge her feet under some piece of furniture, and do sit-ups until she had counted them out in their hundreds, and then press-ups: a hundred normal, a hundred clapping. Standing upside down, on her arms with her feet in the air. Sitting on the heels of her hands with her legs extended, testing to what degree she could stretch her toes. You didn’t need half of what she’d done to gain medical entry to the Cohort, but she had fed her entire life into the meat grinder of hope that, one day, she’d blitz through Trentham and get sent to the front attached to a necromancer’s legion. Not for Gideon a security detail on one of the holding planets, either on a lonely outpost on an empty world or in some foreign city babysitting some Third governor. Gideon wanted a drop ship—first on the ground—a fat shiny medal saying INVASION FORCE ON WHATEVER, securing the initial bloom of thanergy without which the finest necromancer of the Nine Houses could not fight worth a damn. The front line of the Cohort facilitated glory. In her comic books, necromancers kissed the gloved palms of their front-liner comrades in blessed thanks for all that they did. In the comic books none of these adepts had heart disease, and a lot of them had necromantically uncharacteristic cleavage.
This had all played out in Gideon’s imagination on many solitary nights, and often she had indulged in a wilder flight of fancy where Harrowhark would open an envelope galaxies and galaxies away, and read the news that Gideon Nav had won a bunch of medals and a huge percentage of prize money for her role in the initial strike, a battle in which she was both outstanding and very hot. Harrow’s lip would curl, and she would drawl something like, Turns out Griddle could swing a sword after all. This fantasy often got her through a hundred reps.
Back in the Ninth she would have ended the day with a jog around the planting fields, as the photochemical lamps dimmed for the end of their cycle, running through the fine moisture mist spritzed out at even times to wet the soil. The mist was recyc water and smelled ureal. It was a before-bedtime smell to her. Now the scent was old wood, and the sulfide reek of the sea, and water on stone.
But not even Gideon could train all the time. She amused herself by exploring the huge, sinuous complex of Canaan House, often getting profoundly lost. That you could only explore so far was her first discovery. There must have been floors beneath floors all the way down, many hundreds of feet of building, but as you descended the prevalence of *** CAUTION *** printed on yellow plastic tape and crosses spray-painted onto big iron blast doors only grew. You could only get about fifty metres below the dock layer before all ways were closed. You could only go up so far too, about an equivalent hundred metres up: there was a broken lift you could walk into, and there was a staircase up the tower that branched off in two directions. To the left was where Teacher and the other two priests of Canaan House slept, in a whitewashed network of corridors where potted succulent plants grew lasciviously in long tendrils. She had not yet tried the right.
After two silent, ironed-out days of exploring and squats, Gideon did not exactly get bored. It took a hell of a lot more to bore a denizen of the House of the Ninth. It was a lack of change at the microscopic level that made her suspicious: one morning she realised that the rumples on Harrow’s bed and the top layer of black clothes in the laundry hamper had not changed for over twenty-four hours. Two nights had passed without Harrow sleeping in the Ninth quarters, or changing out of dirty clothes, or refreshing her paint. Gideon cogitated:
1.â??â??â??Harrow had been prevented from coming home for reasons, e.g., that
â??â??â??(i)â??â??â??She was dead;
â??â??(ii)â??â??â??She was too impaired;
â??(iii)â??â??â??She was busy.
2.â??â??â??Harrow had chosen to live elsewhere, leaving Gideon free to put her shoes on Harrow’s bed and indiscriminately rifle through all her things.
3.â??â??â??Harrow had run away.
#3 could be discounted. If Harrow were the type, Gideon’s childhood would have been a hell of a lot smoother. #2 was an exciting prospect in that Gideon longed to put her shoes on Harrow’s bed and to indiscriminately rifle through all Harrow’s things, but given that those things were still there, this seemed unlikely. Given twenty-four hours to break a bone ward, Gideon would have immediately made plans to get into Harrow’s wardrobe and do up all the buttons on her shirts, making sure that each button went into the hole above the one it was meant to go into. It was an inevitability that the Reverend Daughter never would have allowed for.
This left #1. (iii) relied on Harrow being so busy doing whatever she was doing that she’d forgotten to come back, though given previous reasoning and the sheer availability of buttons to be tampered with this was a nonstarter. (i) was contingent on either the world’s happiest accident or murder, and if it was murder, what if the murderer was, like, weird, which would make their subsequent marriage to Gideon pretty awkward? Maybe they could just swap friendship bracelets.
In the end, (ii) had the most traction. The paint supplies were all here. She had never seen Harrowhark Nonagesimus’s naked face. With a deep resentment of heart and weariness of soul, Gideon threw on her robe and embarked upon a long, disconsolate day of searching.
Harrow was not in the central atrium, or in the dining room, or in the increasingly clean pit full of industriously scrubbing skeletons. Magnus the Fifth was standing watch over them with a furrowed expression of good-natured bewilderment, right next to his trig and glossy-haired adept, and he managed an “Er—Ninth! Hope you’re enjoying the … room!” before she bolted out of it.
Harrow was not on the long and sun-swept docking bay, its concrete an eye-sizzling white in the sweltering light of morning. Gideon tracked all across it—standing next to the weathered magnetic locks, listening to the churning water far below where the shuttles rested somewhere. Harrow was not on the terrace where Dulcinea Septimus often read, and neither was Dulcinea Septimus, though a few novels sat abandoned beneath a chair. It was lunchtime by the time she had walked the whole eastern wing leading up from a glorious, rotten old staircase to the left of the atrium, terminating in a door with a freshly chiselled plaque marked EIGHTH HOUSE that she backed away from in record time. Gideon went back to the dining hall and brooded over her cheese and bread and decided to give up.
