and guard, flexing into hand positions while staring out the window into the drooping black night—and then, pretty certain that Harrow wasn’t returning, she got out her longsword and did it all again. Having two hands on the grip was precisely the thing that Aiglamene had told her not to do, but it felt so good that by the end she was happy as a child.
Harrow never came back. Gideon was used to this by now. Seized with sudden experimental courage, she filled up the uncanny tub in the bathroom from the hot-liquid tap. When nothing jumped out at her, Gideon sat there in it with water all the way up to her chin. It was incredible—the strangest thing she’d ever felt in her life; like being buoyed on a warm current, like being slowly boiled—and she worried, irrationally, whether water could get inside you and make you sick. All her paint came off and floated in long, dirty flecks in the water. When she put soap in the water oily rainbow slicks shone across the top. In the end—suspicious of how clean it really got you—she went and stood in the sonic for twenty seconds, but she smelled incredible. When her hair dried it stood up on end, and it took a lot of effort to get it flat again.
The bath was soporific. For the first time since she’d come to Canaan House, Gideon was truly content to lie down in her nest, get out a magazine and do absolutely nothing for half an hour. Nine dreamless hours later she woke up with the pages stuck to her face via a thin sealant of drool.
“Ffppppp,” she said, peeling it off her face, and: “Harrow?”
As it turned out, in the next room Harrow was curled up in bed with the pillows over her head and her arms sticking out. Haphazardly flung laundry was piled next to the wardrobe door. The sight filled Gideon with a sensation that she had to admit was relief.
She said, “Wake up, assmunch, I want to yell at you about keys,” but this imperative did not have the desired effect.
“The white key is now with your precious Septimus, as per the agreement,” snapped Harrow, then pulled the covers over her head. “Now go away and shrivel.”
“This does not satisfy me. Nonagesimus.”
Harrow slithered more deeply underneath the covers like a bad black snake, and refused to get up. It was hopeless pushing further. This freed Gideon to dress in relative peace and quiet, paint without critique, and leave their quarters feeling unusual amounts of peace with the world.
She realised she was being followed somewhere down the long, sweeping staircase that led to the atrium. A peripheral blur huddled in doorways, still when she was still, making tiny movements when she was in motion. The mouldering floorboards creaked wetly underfoot. At last, Gideon spun around, her rapier drawn in one long fluid line forward and her gauntlet already half-snapped onto her fingers, and was presented with the wild young face of Isaac.
“Stop,” he said. “Jeanne wants you.”
He looked ghastly. His hands were sooty, the metallic thread on his embroidered robe soiled, and somewhere along the way he’d lost at least three earrings. Previously he had contrived to brush his hair up in that bleached avian crest on the top of his head, but now everything was crumpled flat. His mouth and eyes seemed emptied out, and his pupils were dilated with an amount of cortisol that said: I’ve been on edge for three days. The sweet puppy fat at his cheeks only served to make him a more awful sight.
Gideon cocked her head. “Jeanne wants you,” he repeated. “Someone’s dead. You’ve got to come with me.”
For a moment Gideon hoped that this was a terrifically misplaced cry for attention, but Isaac had already turned away from her, dark eyes like stones. She had no choice but to follow in his wake.
Isaac led her down through the dilapidated great hall, and then down the stairs to the vestibule that led through to the sparring room, and he flinched at the sight of every white-belted skeleton that crossed their path. The tapestry was still securely in place, the door still hidden. He shouldered through the other door—it must have given his elbow a hell of a bang—and pushed into the room where electric lights poured down on what had previously been a filthy, reeking pit. It was now a square of glimmering water. Gideon had seen skeletons unrolling great tracts