the pockets of her robes and heading out in the opposite direction from where Magnus and the crap Fourth House youths had gone, down a short flight of stairs. Gideon had nowhere to go and nothing to be, and no orders and no goals: her black robe flapping at her ankles and the light getting stronger all the time, she decided to wander.
Canaan House was a nest of rooms and corridors, of sudden courtyards and staircases that dripped down into lightless gloom and terminated in big, rusting doors beneath overhangs, ones that looked as though they would go clang no matter how quietly you tried to shut them. More than once Gideon turned a corner and found she was back at some landing she thought she had travelled miles and miles away from. Once she paused on a blasted terrace outside, gazing at the rusting, hulking pillars that stuck up in a ring around the tower. The sea on one side was broken up with flat concrete landings like stepping-stones, set wet and geometric in the water, mummified in seaweed: the sea had covered up more structures long, long ago, and they looked like square heads with long, sticky hair, peering up suspiciously through the waves. Being outside made her feel dizzy, so she headed back inside.
There were doors—a multiplicity of doors—a veritable warehouse of doors: cupboard doors, metal autodoors, barred doors to dimly lit passageways beyond, doors half her height with no handles, doors half-rotted so you could voyeuristically look through their nakedness to the rooms they didn’t hide. All these doors must have been beautiful, even the ones that led only to broom cupboards. Whoever had lived in the First House had lived in beauty once. The ceilings were still high and gracious, the plaster mouldings still graceful ornaments; but the whole thing creaked and at one point Gideon’s boot went clean through a particularly soft bit of floorboard to empty space below. It was a death trap.
She went down a short flight of cramped metal stairs. The house often seemed to split its level without letting her travel very far, but this was farther down and darker than any steps had taken her before. They led to a tiled vestibule where the lights fizzed disconsolately and refused to come on all the way; she pushed open two enormous, groaning doors, which led into an echoing chamber that made her nostrils flare. It smelled badly of chemicals, and most of the smell came from the huge, filthy, perfectly rectangular pit that dominated the centre of the room. The pit was lined with dull tile, and it gave the filthiest and oldest parts of the Ninth House a run for their money. There were metal ladders going down into the pit, but why would you though.
Gideon abandoned the pit and peered through a set of grubby glass double doors. From the other side of the room beyond, a hunched, cloaked figure peered back at her, and she reflexively went for her rapier: the hunched figure swiftly—identically—went for its own.
Good going, dickhead! thought Gideon, straightening up. It’s a mirror.
It was a mirror, an enormous one that covered the far wall. She pressed her face closer to the glass door. The room beyond had a flagstone floor, stones worn smooth from years and years of feet. There was a rusting basin and tap, where one love-abandoned towel had sat for God only knew how long, decayed to a waterfall of spiderous threads. Corroded swords were bolted to corroded panels on the wall. Through a window somewhere high up, the sunbeams poured down dust in golden torrents. Gideon would have dearly loved this training room in its prime, but she wouldn’t touch those rusted blades now if you paid her.
Going back to the vestibule with the spitting lights, she noticed another door, set close to the staircase. She hadn’t seen it before because a tapestry covered it almost entirely, but one of the corners had slipped and hinted at the frame beneath. She pushed the mouldering old tapestry aside to find a dark wooden door; she tried its handle, pulled it open, and stared. A long tiled corridor stared back, windowless, a succession of square lights in the ceiling whirring to life with a clunk … clunk … clunk … and tracing a path to an enormous door at the other end, totally out of place. Bracketed by heavy pillars, set with forbidding stone supports, the overall effect was not exactly welcoming.