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Palamedes said, “There are two things I want to know.”
“You can have more than two, if you want. I’ve got all day.”
“I don’t need more than two,” he said calmly. “The first is: Why the Fifth?”
There was a puzzled pause. “The Fifth?”
“The Ninth and Eighth houses posed the most clear and present danger,” he said. “The Ninth due to Harrow’s sheer ability, the Eighth due to how easily they could have outed you—any slip would have shown an Eighth necromancer that you weren’t what you claimed. He would only have had to siphon you to know. I even wonder why I’m still walking around, if you don’t find that arrogant. But it was the Fifth House that scared you.”
“I don’t—”
“Don’t lie to me, please.”
Dulcinea said, “I have never lied to any of you.”
“Then—why?”
A tiny, fluttering sigh, like a butterfly coming to rest. Gideon heard her say: “Well, think about it. Abigail Pent was a mature speaker to the dead. That’s no good. It’s not insurmountable—but it’s a problem. But while that was a factor, it wasn’t the reason … that was her hobby.”
“Hobby?”
“I didn’t think anybody would care about the distant past … but Pent had an unwholesome interest in history. She was interested in all the old things she was finding in the library, in the rooms. Letters, notes … pictures … the archaeology of a human life.”
“Abigail Pent may have been a necromancer, but she was also a historian—a famous one, I might add. You didn’t do your research.”
“Oh, I’ve been kicking myself, believe me. I should have gone and swept the whole place first thing. But—I was nostalgic.”
“I see.”
“Gosh, I’m glad you didn’t. I didn’t comprehend your mastery of the ghost-within-the-thing. Sixth psychometry.” There was a sudden, tinkling laugh. “I think you ought to be really glad I didn’t comprehend that. Pent by herself gave me such a fright.”
“And you put the key inside her—why?”
“Time,” said Dulcinea. “I couldn’t afford anybody catching me with it. Hiding it in her flesh obscured its traces. I thought you’d find it earlier, honestly … but it gave me time to gum up the lock. Who got rid of that? I’d thought I’d made it absolutely unusable.”
“That was the Ninth.”
“That’s more than impressive,” she said. “The Emperor would love to get hold of her … thank goodness he never will. Well, that’s another blow to my ego. If I’d thought the lock could have been broken and the key found, I would have cleaned out the place, I wouldn’t have left it to be found … but that’s why we’re having this conversation now, aren’t we? You used your psychometric tricks on the message. If you hadn’t gone in there, you never would have known that I’d been in there too. Am I right?”
“Maybe,” said Palamedes. “Maybe.”
“What’s your second question?”
Gideon struggled again, but she was caught as fast as if the very air around her were glue. Her eyes were streaming from her total inability to blink. She could breathe, and she could listen, and that was it. Her brain was full of sweet fuck-all.
Palamedes said, very quietly: “Where is she?”
There was no answer.
He said, “I repeat. Where is she?”
“I thought she and I had come to an understanding,” Dulcinea admitted easily. “If she had only told me about you … I could have taken some additional precautions.”
“Tell me what you have done,” said Palamedes, “with Dulcinea Septimus.”
“Oh, she’s still here,” said the person who wasn’t Dulcinea Septimus, dismissively. “She came at the Emperor’s call, cavalier in tow. What happened to him was an accident—when I boarded her ship he refused to hear a word of reason, and I had to kill him. Which didn’t have to happen … not like that, anyway. Then she and I talked … We are very much alike. I don’t mean just in appearance, though that was the case, except in the eyes, as the Seventh House is awfully predictable for looks—but our illness … she was very ill, as ill as I was, when I first came here. She might have lived out the first few weeks she was here, Sextus, or she mightn’t have.”
He said, “Then that story about Protesilaus and the Seventh House was a lie.”
“You’re not listening. I never lied,” said the voice. “I said that it was a hypothetical, and you all agreed.”
“Semantics.”
“You should have listened more closely. But I never ever lied. I am from the Seventh House … and it was an accident. Anyway, she and I talked. She was a sweet little thing. I really had wanted to do something for her—and afterward, I kept her for the longest time … until someone took out my cavalier. Then I had to get rid of her, quickly … the furnace was the only option. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not a monster. Septimus was dead before the shuttle landed at Canaan … she hardly suffered.”
There was a very long pause. Palamedes’s voice betrayed nothing when he said: “Well, that’s something, at least. I suppose we’re all to follow now?”
“Yes, but this wasn’t really about any of you,” said the woman in the room with him. “Not personally. I knew that if I ruined his Lyctor plans—killed the heirs and cavaliers to all the other eight Houses—I’d draw him back to the system, but I had to do it in a subtle enough way that he wouldn’t bring the remaining Hands with him. If I had arrived in full force, he’d have turned up on a war footing, and sent the Lyctors to do all the dirty work like always. This way he’s lulled into a false sense of … semisecurity, I suppose. And he won’t even bother coming within Dominicus’s demesne. He’ll sit out there beyond the system—trying to find out what’s happening—right where I need him to be. I’ll give the King Undying, the Necrolord Prime, the Resurrector, my lord and master front-row seats as I shatter his Houses, one by one, and find out how many of them it takes before he breaks and crosses over, before he sees what will come when I call … and then I won’t have to do anything. It will be too late.”
A pause.
“Why would one of the Emperor’s Lyctors hate him?”
“Hate him?” The voice of the girl whom Gideon had known as Dulcinea rose, high and intent. “Hate him? I have loved that man for ten thousand years. We all loved him, every one of us. We worshipped him like a king. Like a god! Like a brother.”
Her voice dropped, and she sounded very normal and very old: “I don’t know why I’m telling you this … you who have been alive for less than a heartbeat, when I have lived past the time when life loses meaning. Thank your lucky stars that none of you became Lyctor, Palamedes Sextus. It is neither life nor death—it’s something in between, and nobody should ever ask you to embrace it. Not even him. Especially not him.”
“I wouldn’t have done that to Camilla.”
