the slab: “Princess Coronabeth. Is she speaking the truth? And did you, at any point, attempt to stop her, or know as a necromancer what act she was committing?”
“Poor Corona!” said Ianthe. “Don’t get on her case, you little white excuse for a human being. What could she have done? Don’t you know my sister has a bad, sad secret? Everyone looks at her and sees what they want to see … beauty and power. Incredible hair. The perfect child of an indomitable House.”
The Crown Princess of Ida was not acknowledging the fact that anyone was speaking to her. Her sister continued: “Everyone’s blind. Corona? A born necromancer? She was as necromantic as Babs. But Dad wanted a matched set. And we didn’t want anything to separate us—so we started the lie. I’ve had to be two necromancers since I was six. It sharpens your focus, I tell you what. No … Corona couldn’t’ve stopped me becoming a Lyctor.”
Palamedes said, vaguely, “This can’t be right.”
“Of course it’s right, goosey, the Emperor himself helped come up with it.”
“So that is Lyctorhood,” said Silas. He sounded quiet, almost fretful, lost in thought. Gideon thought—just for a moment—that she could see Colum Asht’s throat working, that his pupils had dilated just a very, very little. “To walk with the dead forever … enormous power, recycled within you, from the ultimate sacrifice … to make yourself a tomb.”
“You understand, don’t you?” said Ianthe.
“Yes,” said Silas.
Colum closed his eyes and was still.
“Yes,” repeated Silas. “I understand fallibility … and fallibility is a terrible thing to understand. I understand that if the Emperor and King Undying came to me now and asked me why I was not a Lyctor, I would fall on my knees and beg his forgiveness, that any of us had ever failed this test. May I be burnt one atom at a time in the most silent hole in the most lightless part of space, Lord—Kindly Prince—should I ever contemplate betraying the compact you appointed between him, and you, and me.”
Colum opened his eyes again.
“Silas—” he began.
“I will forgive you eventually, Colum,” said his purse-mouthed uncle, “for assuming I would have been prey to this temptation. Do you believe me?”
“I want to,” said his nephew fervently, with a thousand-yard stare and his missing finger twitching around his shield. “God help me, I want to.”
Ianthe said, contemptuously: “Come off it, you’d drain him dry if you thought it would keep your virtue intact. This is the same thing, just more humane.”
“Do not speak to me anymore,” said Silas. “I brand you heretic, Ianthe Tridentarius. I sentence you to death. As your cavalier is no more, you must stand in for him: make your peace with your House and your Emperor, because I swear to the King Undying you will find no more peace in this life, anywhere, in any world you care to travel to. Brother Asht—”
Harrow said, “Octakiseron, stop it. This is not the time.”
“I will cleanse everything here, Ninth, to stop the Houses from finding out how we have debased ourselves,” said Silas. His cavalier drew his great sword and slipped his calloused, stumped-up fingers into his targe: he had stepped before them all with an expression of something that was too deep into relief for Gideon to really translate it. His adept said: “Colum the Eighth. Show no mercy.”
“Somebody stop him,” said Ianthe. “Sixth. Ninth. I don’t intend for anyone’s blood to be spilled. Well, you know, any more.”
Harrow said, “Octakiseron, you fool, can’t you see—” and Camilla was saying “Everyone back off—”
But Colum Asht did not back off. He came down on Ianthe like a wolf on the fold. He was terrifically fast for such a big, ragged-looking man, and he hit her with such kinetic force that she should have been flung back to splatter on the wall like a discarded sandwich. His arm was true and steady; there was no hesitation in his hand or in his blade.
Neither was there any hesitation in Ianthe’s. Gideon had seen the exquisite sword of the Third House lying in a smear of blood next to the body of its cavalier: now it was suddenly in the hand of its necromantic princess. She met his blade with a flat parry—it knocked away that titanic blow as though Ianthe were not a head shorter and a third of his weight—and she eased back into perfect, surefooted precision.
It was Naberius Tern’s movement that tucked Ianthe’s arm behind her back, and Naberius Tern’s perfect,