until we do it. If it works, it gets you every single note on every theorem I’ve read, in return for yours, your cooperation, and the map. Are you in?”
There was a pregnant pause. As everyone had already known beforehand, Gideon’s necromancer was forced to admit that she was in. She rose to stand: the chair behind her teetered dangerously, and Gideon corrected it with her foot. “At least show me the door you told me about,” she commanded. “I despise this feeling that the Sixth House is taking my house for all it can get.”
“Most people would have looked upon this as a generous deal,” remarked Sextus, whose chair was being held back for him by the obliging Camilla, “but I did owe you one—for sticking by us when the Third House made its challenge. Not that we wouldn’t have won it—but we would have given more than I’m willing to give. So that’s the sticky sentiment part. Come with me for the cold hard facts.”
They all traipsed after him for the cold hard facts. When the Sixth House locked their front door, it was grimly amusing to see that as well as Palamedes’s wards they had hammered in five deadlocks, and reinforced the door so that it could not be taken off its hinges. Hearing Camilla shove all the bolts home was as good as an orchestra. The two necromancers drifted to the front—their long robes making them look like dreary grey birds—and Gideon and Camilla fell behind them, lingering beyond the mandated half step.
Camilla the Sixth’s shoulders were set. Her straight dark fringe fell out of the way as she half-turned her face to Gideon, briefly, expressionlessly, but that was all Gideon needed.
“Ask me how I am and I’ll scream,” she said.
“How are you,” said Camilla, who was a pill.
“I see you calling my bluff and I resent it,” said Gideon. “So, hey. What do you really use when you’re not pretending the rapier’s your main wield? Two short blades of equal length, or one blade and one baton?”
Her keen eyes narrowed into black-lined slits. “How did I mess up?” she asked, eventually.
“You drew your rapier and your dagger at the same time. And you’re ambidextrous. You keep cutting like both your blades are curved. Also, there’s six swords and a nightstick on your bed.”
“Should’ve tidied my mess,” admitted Camilla. “Two blades. Double-edged.”
“Why? I mean, that’s boss, but why?”
The other cavalier massaged her elbow gingerly, flexing her fingers as though to make sure there was no correlating pain. She seemed to be considering something, and then she came to an abrupt conclusion. “I applied to be the Warden’s cavalier primary when I was twelve,” she said. “Got accepted. We’d looked at the data on weapons, before. Decided that two short blades had—more general applications. I learnt the rapier,”—that was an understatement—“but I’ll be fighting with the blades, when the time comes to really fight.”
Before Gideon could get to grips with the disquieting implication this was not yet the time to really fight, Camilla got in an elbow jab: “Why are you acting like you and he are arguing?”
“Nooooo,” said Gideon brightly, followed up with a: “thaaaaanks.”
“Because you’re not arguing.” Beat. “You’d know if you were arguing.”
“Can you— I don’t know! Can you tell him that if he wants me to introduce him to Dulcinea, I can do it? Can you tell him I’m not trying to cramp his friggin’ style?”
“The last thing the Warden needs,” said Camilla, “is an introduction to Lady Septimus.”
“Then can you tell him to maybe stop acting like he read everyone’s feelings in a book ages ago? Because that would be completely sweet,” said Gideon.
Without another word, Camilla moved to bookend her adept as he paused before a large, gilt-framed picture: the gilt was mostly brown except where it had gone black, and the picture itself was so faded that it looked like a coffee stain. It was a curious image: a dusty expanse of rock, cracked into an enormous canyon running down the centre, a sepia river winding into flaked-off nothingness at the very bottom.
“I documented this one a long time back,” said Harrow.
“Let’s take another look.”
Palamedes and Camilla each shouldered one corner of the portrait, lifting it off some unseen tack. It seemed very light. The great Lyctoral door behind it—with its black pillars and its carved horned skulls, its graven images and grim stone—was not particularly well hidden. In all respects, it was a nearly exact match for the other