the Ninth? Not infants. But your peers, your age group.”
Not infants. Maybe Glaurica had kept some secrets after all. Or—more like—her spirit chose to shriek back into existence solely to complain about the two things that had been of utmost importance to her: her sad dead sack of a son, and the sacred bones of her sad dead husband. Gideon held her tongue. Silas pressed, “Yourself? The Reverend Daughter?”
“What do you want, a census?”
“I want you to think about why you and Harrowhark Nonagesimus now represent an entire generation,” he said, and he leant forward onto his elbows. His eyes were very intense. His nephew was still braiding his hair, which only somewhat lessened the effect. “I want you to think about the deaths of two hundred children, when you and she alone lived.”
“Okay, look, this is wacky,” said Gideon. “You’ve picked on exactly the wrong thing to slam Harrow with. If you want to talk about how she’s a corrupt tyrant, I’m all ears. But I know about the flu. She wasn’t even born yet. I was, what, one year old, so I didn’t do it. There was vent bacteria in the creche and the schoolroom hall, and it took out all the kids and one of the teachers before they found out what it was.”
This had made perfect sense to her, always: not only were the children of the Ninth unusually sickly and decrepit anyway—the Ninth House only seemed to truck with the pallid, defective, and upset—but among so much malign decay nobody would have noticed a ventilation problem until it was far too late. She had always privately suspected that she had lived due to the other children avoiding her. The youngest had gone first, and the eldest who were caring for the youngest, and then everyone was gone from the age of nineteen down. A whole generation of holy orders. Harrow had been the only birth amidst a sea of tiny tombs.
“Vent bacteria does not kill immunoefficient teenagers,” said Silas.
“You’ve never seen a Ninth House teenager.”
“Vent bacteria,” said Silas again, “does not kill immunoefficient teenagers.”
It made no sense. He didn’t know that Harrow was the last baby born. The Ninth House had been jealous of its dwindling population for generations. Bumping off any child, let alone its youngest crop of nuns and cenobites, would be a horrifying waste of resources. The creche flu had been an extinction event. “I don’t get it,” Gideon said. “Are you trying to make out like the Reverend Father and Mother killed hundreds of their own kids?”
He did not answer her. He took another long draw of his water. Colum had finished the braid and pinned it back, perfecting the usual severe silhouette of the Master’s pale head, after which he measured tiny spoonfuls of black tea into a jug to steep cold. He then lowered himself down onto a stool a little way away from the table, close to the door and face to the window like a true paranoid. The cavalier took a pile of what looked to be darning and began to run a nervous white seam up a pair of white trousers. The Eighth House must all be martyrs to stains, she thought.
“The Ninth House is a House of broken promises,” said Silas. “The Eighth House remembers that they were not meant to live. They had one job—one rock to roll over one tomb; one act of guardianship, to live and die in a single blessedness—and they made a cult instead. A House of mystics who came to worship a terrible thing. The ruling Reverend Father and Mother are the bad seeds of a furtive crop. I do not know why the Emperor suffered that shadow of a House. That mockery of his name. A House that would keep lamps lit for a grave that was meant to pass into darkness is a House that would kill two hundred children. A House that would kill a woman and her son simply for attempting to leave is a House that would kill two hundred children.”
Gideon felt grimy and unsettled. “I need a better motivation than the fact that the Ninth House sucks,” she said. “Why? Why kill two hundred kids? More importantly, why two hundred kids and not me or Harrow?”
Silas looked at her over steepled fingers.
“You tell me, Gideon the Ninth,” he said. “You are the one who tried to leave in a shuttle they planted a bomb in.”