eaten breakfast, and was given a meal of pallid white meat and a bunch of leaves. It was good that she was alone. She had no clue what to do with it. She ate the meat with a fork—you didn’t need a knife; it was so tender that it flaked away if you touched it—and ate the leaves one by one with her fingers. She realised partway through that it was probably a salad. Raw vegetables in the Ninth came in the form of pitiable cairns of grated snow leek, stained through with as much salty black sauce as it would absorb. She filled up on the bread, which was really very good, and stuck a piece in her robe for later.
A skeleton had brought her food; a skeleton had taken it away, with the same pinpoint accuracy the others had shown. There were no cheap tricks with them, she noticed—nobody had jammed pins through the joints so that they’d stick together easier, or slabbed on big gobs of tendon. No, whoever had raised them had been extraordinarily talented. She suspected it was Teacher. Harrow wouldn’t like that. The House of the Ninth was meant to have cornered the market on perfect reconstruction, and here were a whole bunch of them probably made by a little man who clapped his hands together unironically.
Just as Gideon had shaken the crumbs off her lap and was rising to leave, two more novitiates entered. When they saw Gideon, both they and she stopped dead.
One of the pair was a wan, knife-faced kid dressed in antiseptic whites and chain mail you could cut with a fork, it was so delicate. He was draped in it even down to a kilt, which was strange: necromancers didn’t normally wear that type of armour, and he was definitely the necromancer. He had a necromancer build. Pale silk fluttered from his slim shoulders. He gave the impression of being the guy fun sought out for death. He was prim and ascetic-looking, and his companion—who was older, a fair bit older than Gideon herself—had the air of the perpetually disgruntled. He was rather more robust, nuggety, and dressed in chipped bleached leathers that looked as though they’d seen genuine use. At least one finger on his left hand was a gross-looking stump, which she admired.
The reason why they had stopped dead was unclear. She had stopped dead because the necromancer was staring at her with an expression of naked hostility. He looked at her as though he had finally come face-to-face with the murderer of a beloved family pet.
Gideon had spent too long in the depths of Drearburh not to know when to, put scientifically, get outie. It was not the first time she had received that look. Sister Lachrimorta had looked at her that way almost exclusively, and Sister Lachrimorta was blind. The only difference in the way that Crux had looked at her was that Crux had managed also to encapsulate a complete lack of surprise, as though she already had managed to disappoint his lowest expectations. And a very long time ago—painfully folded in the back of her amygdala—the Reverend Mother and the Reverend Father had also looked at her like that, though in their case, their diffidence had been cut through with a phobic flinch: the way you’d look at an unexpected maggot.
“Please deal with the shadow cultist,” said the whey-faced boy, who had the deepest, weariest, most repressive voice she had ever heard in her life.
“Yes, Uncle,” said the bigger man.
Gideon was raw for a fight. She wanted nothing more than for the cross-faced man in boiled leather to draw on her. He was strong-boned and weathered, deeply creased, yellow-brown and yellow-coarse all over. Next to his almost daintily dressed necromancer in white, he looked dusty and ferocious. He looked tough. Thank God. She wanted to fight bloody. She wanted to fight until bone adepts had to be called to put people’s feet back on. She knew the price—waking up mummified in aggressive notes, or maybe dying—but didn’t care anymore. Gideon was measuring, in her mind’s eye, the length of her rapier to the collarbones of the cavalier opposite.
He disappointed her viscerally by standing a few steps away, putting his hands together, and bowing over them to her. It was polite, though not apologetic. He had a lighter, rougher voice than his necromancer, somewhat hoarse, like he suffered from a lifelong cold or a smoker’s cough.