“Good!” she said, when Gideon mutely shook her head no, sucked completely under this mad, bubbling riptide. “I love a captive listener. I know you’re only doing this because you feel bad for me. And you do look like a nice kid. Sorry,” she added hastily, “you’re not a child. But I feel so old right now. Did you see the pair from the Fourth House? Babies. They have contributed to me feeling ancient. Tomorrow I might feel youthful, but today’s a bad day … and I feel like a gimp. Take off your glasses, please, Gideon the Ninth. I’d like to see your eyes.”

At the juxtaposition of Gideon with obedient many people would have rocked with laughter and gone on chuckling and gurgling for quite some time. But she was helpless now in the face of this extraordinary request; she was helpless at the thin arms and rosebud smile of the woman-girl in front of her; she was utterly helpless at the word gimp. She slid her sunglasses off her nose and obligingly presented her face for inspection.

And she was inspected, thoroughly and immediately. The eyes narrowed with intent, and for a moment the face was all business. There was something swift and cool in the blueness of those eyes, some deep intelligence, some sheer shameless depth and breadth of looking. It made Gideon’s cheeks flare, despite her mental reproach to Slow down, Nav, slow down.

“Oh, singular,” said Dulcinea quietly, more to herself than to Gideon. “Lipochrome … recessive. I like looking at people’s eyes,” she explained suddenly, smiling now. “They tell you such a lot. I couldn’t tell you much about your Reverend Daughter … but you have eyes like gold coins. Am I embarrassing you? Am I being a creep?”

At the head-shake no, she settled back more into her chair, tilting her head to the seat back and fanning herself with the frivolous hat. “Good,” she said, with satisfaction. “It’s bad enough that we’re stuck in this burnt-out old hovel without me scaring you. Isn’t it fantastically abandoned? Imagine all the ghosts of everyone who must have lived here … worked here … still waiting to be called, if we could figure out how. The Seventh doesn’t do well with ghosts, you know. We offend them. We’re worrisome. The old division between body and spirit. We deal too much with the body … crystallising it in time … trapping it unnaturally. The opposite of your House, don’t you think, Gideon the Ninth? You take empty things and build with them … We press down the hand of a clock, to try to stop it from ticking the last second.”

This was all so far over Gideon’s head that it sat somewhere out in space, but there was something soothing about it anyway. Gideon had only ever been clotheslined this way with Harrowhark, who explained herself seldom and as you would only to a very stupid child. Dulcinea had the dreamy, confiding manner of someone who, despite spouting grade-A horseshit, was confident you would understand everything she was saying. Also, as she talked she smiled widely and prettily, and moved her lashes up and down.

Thus hypnotised, Gideon could only watch with a mouth full of teeth as the blue-eyed necromancer laid one slight, narrow hand on her arm; her skin stretched thin over very marked metacarpals, and wrist bones like knots in a rope. “Stand up for me,” said Dulcinea. “Indulge me. Lots of people do … but I want you to.”

Gideon pulled away and stood. The sunlight dappled over the hem of her robe in rusty splotches. Dulcinea said, “Draw your sword, Gideon of the Ninth.”

Grasping the smooth black grip beneath the black nest of the knuckle bow, Gideon drew. It seemed as though she had drawn this damn thing a thousand times—that Aiglamene’s voice had taken permanent residence in her head now, just to keep up the charade. Draw. Lean on the right foot. Arm bent, not collapsed, naked blade angled at your opponent’s face or chest. You’re guarding the outer side of your body, Nav, you’re on your right foot, and you’re not weighting forward like a goddamned piece of freight—you’re centred, you can move backward or forward at will. The rapier blade, away from its black home in Drearburh, burned a lightless, opaque metal colour, a long slender absence of hue. Gideon acknowledged its beauty, grudgingly—how it looked like a needle, an ebon ribbon. Offhand up and high. She relaxed into position, triumphant in the new body memory that her teacher had beaten into her, and wanted to fight again.

“Oh, very good!” said Dulcinea, and she clapped like a child seeing a firework. “Perfect … just like a picture of Nonius. People say that all Ninth cavaliers are good for is pulling around baskets of bones. Before I met you I imagined that you might be some wizened thing with a yoke and panniers of cartilage … half skeleton already.”

This was bigoted, assumptive, and completely true. Gideon relaxed her sword and her stance, at her ease—and saw that the fragile girl engulfed by her chair had stopped playing with her frivolous hat. Her mouth was quirked in a quizzical little smile, and her eyes said that she had calculated two plus two and ended up with a very final four.

“Gideon the Ninth,” said Dulcinea, slowly, “are you used to a heavier sword?”

Gideon looked down. She looked at her rapier, pointed skyward like a black arrow, her off hand cupped and supporting what should have been more grip but now was the long knob of pommel, the way you’d hold—a fucking longsword.

She sheathed it immediately, sliding it home to its scabbard in a tight iron whisper. A cold sweat had broken out beneath her clothes. The expression on Dulcinea’s face was simply bright-eyed, mischievous interest, but to Gideon it was the Secundarius Bell chiding a child already ten minutes late for prayer. For a moment a lot of stupid stuff felt very ready to happen. She nearly confessed everything to Dulcinea’s mild and denim-coloured gaze: she nearly opened her mouth and begged wholeheartedly for the woman’s mercy.

It was in this moment of charged stupidity that Protesilaus turned up, saving her bacon by dint of being very large and ignoring her. He stood with his muddy hair and bleary skin and blocked the shaft of sunlight that was pattering over his adept’s hands, and he said to her in his dreary, rumbling voice: “It’s shut.”

No time to figure out that one. As Dulcinea’s eyes flickered between her cavalier and the cavalier of the Ninth, Gideon took the opportunity to turn tail and—not run, but slope extremely fast in the direction of anywhere but there. There were cracks in the plex and the wind was coming in hot and salty, rippling her robes and her hood, and she had nearly escaped when Dulcinea called—“Gideon the Ninth!”

She half-turned her head back to them, dark glasses crooking down over her eyebrows. Protesilaus the Seventh stared at her with the empty eyes of someone who would watch with equal heavy disinterest if part of the wall were kicked out and she were punted down into the sea, but his adept was looking at her—wistfully. Gideon hesitated by the door for that look, in the shadows of the archway, buffeted by the wind from the water.

Dulcinea said: “I hope we talk again soon.”

Hell! thought Gideon, taking the stairs blindly two at a time. She didn’t. She had said too much already, and all without speaking a single word.

11

THOSE EARLY DAYS AT Canaan House spaced themselves out like beads on a prayer string, dilated. They consisted of big, empty hours, of eating meals in unoccupied rooms, of being alone amid very strange strangers. Gideon couldn’t even rely on the familiarity of the dead. The skeletons of the First were too good, too capable, too watchful—and Gideon didn’t feel truly at her ease anywhere except shut up in the dim rooms that the Ninth had been given, doing drills.