and she pressed, both leaning hard into the blow. The cav in grey’s eyes were only mildly surprised.
“Camilla!” She only distantly registered the call. Gideon was stronger; the girl’s arm was buckling—she brought up her rapier to harass Gideon’s blocking arm, stabbing at the ebon cuff of the knuckle-knife, the tiny torch spotlight wavering drunkenly from face to face, turning their pupils into big black wells—“Camilla the Sixth, disengage!”
“Camilla” brought her elbow forward, sliding her sword down Gideon’s, jabbing it away with the hilt. Momentarily discombobulated, Gideon backed into the stairs and reset her stance; by then the cavalier in grey was already backing off, sword held high, offhand held low. The necromancer in matching grey was standing; the darkness in the small room was banded with hot shimmers, as though with heat. She thrust her arm forward—
—and stumbled back. Her heart was panicking in her chest, seized as though in the midst of a cardiac arrest, and her hand seemed to wither around the hilt of her sword—the flesh melting before her eyes, the fingernails going black and curling close to the skin as though burnt. She snatched her fist back and found that, clutched close, it was whole and unaffected again, but she did not press onward. She wasn’t a total goon. She backed away from the necromantic seal and sheathed her sword instead, hands held out in the universal ceasefire! gesture. The necromancer in grey, torch hand outstretched, exhaled: he wiped faintly pinkish sweat from his face.
“It’s the other one,” he said tersely, not sounding at all as though he’d just raised a massive thanergetic barrier and broken out in minor blood sweat. She was amazed it was only minor: the whole space before her shimmered like the oily surface of a bubble, fully three bodies high and three wide. “We don’t want an interhouse incident—not that it wouldn’t give our policy wonks back on the Sixth something to think about. You too”—this was to Gideon, a little more formally—“I offer apology that my cavalier engaged you in an unscheduled bout, Niner, but I don’t apologise for her drawing on someone sneaking around dressed all in black. Be reasonable.”
Gideon peeled the knuckle-knife off her hand and latched it back to her belt, and she surveyed the scene before her. Both cavalier and necromancer stood before the black hulk of the trapdoor, robes charcoal in the dimness, both of their eyes and hair mellowed to no colour in the thin light from the hallway. The little torch was quickly flicked off, plunging the whole into further gloom. She yearned to talk, beginning with: How did you do a little flip like that? but the necro brought her up short with:
“You’re here about Nonagesimus, aren’t you?”
The stupefied blankness on Gideon’s face must have been mistaken for something else. Face paint was good for masking. The necromancer scrubbed his hands together in sudden, fretful activity, wringing his fingers together hard. “Assumed she’d just—well. Have you seen her since the night before last?”
Gideon shook her head so emphatically no that she was surprised her hood didn’t fall off. The cavalier’s face was turned toward him, expressionless, waiting. The young man strummed his fingers together before coming to some unknown decision.
“Well, you’re cutting it fine,” he said abruptly. He pulled his thick, nerdy spectacles off his long nose and shook them as though wicking them free of something. “She was down there last night too and, if I’m correct, never surfaced. Her blood’s on the floor down there.” Because necromancers lived bad lives, he added: “To clarify. Her intravenous blood. Her intravenous blood.”
At this clarification, a very strange thing happened to Gideon Nav. She had already exhausted neurons, cortisol, and adrenaline, and now her body started moving before her head or her heart did; she strode past the boy and yanked so hard on the top of the hatch that it damn near broke her wrists. It was shut tighter than Crux’s ass. At this embarrassing heaving, the boy sighed explosively and threw his zipped-up bag to Camilla, who caught it out of midair.
“Cavaliers,” he said.
Camilla said, “I wouldn’t have left you alone for twenty-seven hours.”
“Of course not. I’d be dead. Look, you simpleton, it’s not going to open,” he told Gideon, swinging his sights on her like a man levelling a blade. “She’s got your key.”
Up close, he was gaunt and ordinary looking, except for the eyes. His spectacles were set with lenses of spaceflight-grade thickness, and through these his eyes