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Teacher said gently: “Ah, ah, that is also not correct. The owner is Naberius the Third. If it is being held for him by Princess Ianthe—it’s still his. One key for the Third House and one only, I am afraid.”
“Then the Fifth’s key should be given to me. Magnus wouldn’t mind—wouldn’t have minded.”
“Magnus the Fifth had asked for his own facility key, and I do not know where it is,” said Teacher.
Scalded by the bright orange light of the setting sun coming down through the great ceiling windows, Corona looked like a grief-stricken king: her lovely chin and shoulders were thrust out defiantly, and her mouth was hard and remorseless as glass. Her violet eyes looked as though she had been crying, though perhaps from anger.
Palamedes’s chair clattered as he rose, saying courteously to this vision: “Princess, if you wish it, I’ll escort you down to the facility right now.”
Gideon caught Camilla’s low “The hell you will.”
More chairs scraped on the tiled floor. Gideon hadn’t noticed the duo from the Second House at the table farthest away, drinking hot coffee and looking, as they ever did, as though they had just trimly stepped from the pages of a military magazine. Captain Deuteros said: “I am surprised that the Warden of the Sixth House would break compact like this. You’ve said yourself that this can’t be solved communally.”
“And I was right, Captain,” said Palamedes, “but this is harmless.”
Coronabeth had crossed the floor to Palamedes, and though he was tall she towered a full half a head over him if you included the hair. Camilla had edged around the room to stand half a step behind her necromancer, Gideon sloping helplessly behind, but war was not on the Third’s mind. Corona was not smiling, but her mouth was fine and frank and eager, and she rested her hand on his shoulder: “Do this for me,” she said, “and the Third House will owe the Sixth House a favour. Help me get the same keys as my sister—and the Third House will go down on its knees for the Sixth House.”
Captain Deuteros said, icily: “‘Harmless.’”
“Princess,” said Palamedes, who had had to blink his extremely lambent grey eyes under this assault, “I can’t. What you’re asking is impossible.”
“I mean it. Wealth—military prizes—research materials,” she said, intent on encroaching into Palamedes’s personal space. Gideon was in awe of the Sixth at this point, as under the same treatment she would have breathed so hard that she fainted. “The Third’s thanks will be as gracious as you need them to be.”
“Corona. This is rank bribery. The Second won’t stand for it, and the Sixth is too wise to buy into it.”
“Oh, shut up, Judith,” she said. “Your House would give bribes in a heartbeat if you had any money.”
Judith said slowly, “You insult the Second.”
“Don’t toss the gauntlet at me,” said Corona, “Naberius would just treat it as an early birthday present— Sixth, believe me, I’m good for it.”
“It’s not that I don’t want what you’re offering. It’s that you’re asking for the impossible,” said Palamedes, with a touch more impatience in his voice. “You can’t get the keys your sister has. Each key is unique. Frankly, there are only one or two left in all Canaan House that haven’t been claimed already.”
The room fell silent. The Second’s carefully placid faces were frozen. Corona had gone still. Gideon’s own face must have been doing something, because the rangy necromancer of the Sixth looked at her, and then looked at the Second, and said: “You must have realised this.”
Gideon wondered why she hadn’t realised this: she wondered why she had assumed that—that maybe there were infinity keys, or enough for a full set each. She sat down hard on the closest chair at the closest table, counting the keys mentally—the red and white keys that she and Harrow had won, the second of them half Dulcinea’s by right. At another look at everyone’s faces, Palamedes said, more irascibly: “You must have realised this.”
The golden hand had not dropped from his shoulder, but instead fisted in his shirt. “But that means—that means the challenge must be communal,” said Corona, with an exquisite furrow of her brow. “If we’re all only given pieces of this puzzle, refusing to share the knowledge means that nobody can solve it. We need to pool everything, or none of us will be ever be Lyctor. That has to be it, hasn’t it, Teacher?”
Teacher had sat with his hands around his cup of tea as though enjoying the heat, breathing in its curls of fragrant steam. “There is no law,” he said.
“Against teaming up?”
“No,” said Teacher. “What I mean is, there is no law. You could join forces. You could tell each other anything. You could tell each other nothing. You could hold all keys and knowledge in common. I have given you your rule, and there are no others. Some things may take you swiftly down the road to Lyctorhood. Some things may make the row harder to plough.”
“We still come under Imperial law,” said Marta the Second.
“All of us come under the sway of Imperial law,” agreed her necromancer, whose expression was now a shade doubtful. “Rules exist. Like I’ve said before, the First House falls under Cohort jurisdiction.”
“Where you got that idea from,” said Teacher tartly, and it was the first time Gideon had heard him give even a little reproof, “I do not know. We are in a sacred space. Imperial law is based on the writ of the Emperor, and here the Emperor is the only law. No writ, no interpretation. I gave you his rule. There is no other.”
“But natural law—the laws against murder and theft. What prevents us from stealing one another’s keys through intimidation, blackmail, or deception? What would stop someone from waiting for another necromancer and their cavalier to gather a sufficient number of keys, then taking them by force?”
Teacher said, “Nothing.”
Coronabeth had finally dropped her hand from Palamedes’s shoulder. She looked over at the Second House—a sombre understanding was dawning on Captain Deuteros’s face, and Lieutenant Dyas’s was as inscrutable as ever—and then she looked at Palamedes, whose expression was that of a soldier who had just heard the call to the front. There was a shields-up twist to his mouth and eyes.
Corona breathed, “Ianthe has to know,” and fled from the room. Her leaving was a little like an eclipse: the evening sun seemed to cool with her, and the duller electric lights vibrated to life with her passing.
In an almost inexcusably banal act, a white-belted skeleton appeared from the kitchen with two steaming plates of the poached pale meat and root vegetables. One of these was put in front of Gideon, and she remembered that she was ravenous. She ignored the knife and fork that the skeleton carefully laid at either side of the plate, as nicely as anyone with a soul would have, and started cramming food into her mouth with her hands.
Teacher was still bracing his hands around his cup, his expression more final than troubled: too serene to be worried, but still somehow thoughtful, a little woebegone.
“Teacher,” said Palamedes, “when did Magnus the Fifth ask you for a facility key?”
