to leave a perfectly normal conversation, but it was also really satisfying, and it got her out of there in record time. Gideon staggered down the hallway picking orange goo out of her fingernails, and it was in this scratchy frame of mind that she nearly knocked down Silas Octakiseron in his floaty, bactericidal Eighth House whites. Colum the Eighth flanked him automatically, looking more like jaundice than ever in the same colour.
“They are dead, then,” his uncle said, by way of hello.
The only thing that saved Gideon from howling like an animal was the relief that, finally, she would get the chance to shove one of Octakiseron’s feet so deep into his ass he’d be gargling with his calcaneus.
“They had names, you lily-livered, tooth-coloured asshole,” she said, “and if you want to make a thing about it, I warn you that I’m in the kind of mood that can only be alleviated by walloping you.”
Colum blinked. His necromancer did not.
“I had heard that you were speaking now,” he said. “It seems a pity. Save your gaucherie for someone else, Gideon Nav. I’ve no interest in the frightened rantings of a Ninth House thrall.”
“What did you call me?”
“Thrall,” said Silas. “Serf. Servant.”
“I don’t want a bunch of synonyms, you smarmy cloud-looking motherfucker,” said Gideon. “You said Gideon Nav.”
“Villein,” continued the necromancer of the house of the Eighth, warming to his thesaurus. Colum was staring at Gideon, almost cross-eyed with disbelief. “Foundling. I am not insulting you, I am naming you for what you are. The replacement for Ortus Nigenad, himself a poor representative of a foetid House of betrayers and mystics.”
Gideon’s brain skidded to a halt: it went back again to Drearburh, sitting with a fat lip and wicked friction burns on her wrists. The cries of the dwindling faithful. Green lights in the powdery dark. The greasy smell of incense. A woman weeping. Someone stealing her getaway shuttle, a million years ago. Two someones. One sad, one sadder, immigrants to the Ninth House themselves.
She still has family back on the Eighth …
“You’ve been listening to Sister Glaurica,” she said slowly.
“I talked to Glaurica on her return to the mother house,” said Silas. “And now I’d like to talk to you.”
“Me. The thrall. The servant. The other five words you said.”
“Yes,” said the boy, “because you grew up servant to a murderer, in a tribe of murderers. You are, more than anything, a victim of the Ninth House.”
That stopped the tiny bone in Gideon’s soul snapping; that stopped her from striding forward and balling both hands in the exquisite linen and chill mail of his robes—that and the fact that she hadn’t been straight-up shield-bashed yet by Colum the Eighth and wasn’t in a hurry to experience this exciting time. She stepped forward. Silas did not step away, but he turned his head a little from her, as though she were a bad breath. He had very brown eyes, startlingly framed by thick, whitish lashes.
“Don’t pretend like you know what happened to me there,” she said. “Glaurica never remembered I was alive, didn’t care about me when she remembered, and she wouldn’t have said anything to you on the subject. You don’t know anything about me and you don’t know anything about the House of the Ninth.”
“You are wrong on both points,” said Silas, to somewhere over her shoulder.
“Prove it.”
“You are invited to come and take tea with myself and Brother Asht.”
She scrubbed both her dirty fists into her eyes and narrowly avoided gumming one up with the terrible orangey salve, which was so noxious that it apparently caused splinters to leap from her body rather than hang around near it. Her corneas misted up momentarily with the smell. “Sorry, didn’t hear you right,” she said, “because I thought you said, ‘Come and take tea with myself and Brother Asht,’ the dumbest thing to say, ever.”
“You are invited to come and take tea with myself and Brother Asht,” Silas repeated, with the kind of hard patience that indicated a mantra going on inside his pallid head. “You will not bring the daughter of the Locked Tomb, but you’ll bring yourself, and you will be ready to listen. No price. No hidden motive. Just an invitation to become more than what you are now.”
“Which is—?”
Silas said, “The tool of your oppressors. The lock on your own collar.”
She couldn’t handle any more, having already lived a long night and suffered a number of emotional torments, among them supernatural murder and petty interpersonal