Despite everything, Gideon was starting to get interested. “Okay. Then what?”
“Then in the morning I retrieved the key ring,” said Harrow.
“Hold up, hold up. My key ring, more correctly, but let’s be clear here, you’d counted two hundred doors before the first morning?”
“A head start,” said her necromancer, “is the only advantage one can claim by choice. My other advantage is in workforce. In this case I’m fairly sure that Sextus started a mere two hours after me, and that Eighth House zealot not long after.”
All of this said a lot about the psyche of Harrowhark Nonagesimus, something about Palamedes Sextus, and a little about the mayonnaise uncle, but Gideon was given no time to interrupt. Harrow was continuing, “And I’m not at all sure about the Third. Never mind. Anyway, I’ve spent the majority of my time down the access hatch in the facility. Here.”
Another dry, crackly page was turned. This one was stained with unmentionable fluids and brown patches, which could have been tea and could have been blood. The diagram was much less detailed than the three for the upper levels. In a fat-leaded pencil Harrow had drawn a network of question marks, and some of the rooms were vague sketches rather than the perfectly ruled mazes of the first maps.
Here there were familiar labels: LABORATORY ONE through to LABORATORY TEN. PRESSURE ROOM. PRESERVATION. MORT. WORK ROOM ONE through to WORK ROOM FIVE. And SANITISER, though also: CONTROL ROOM?, CONSOLE? and DUMP ROOM?. It was set out neatly, with corridors all the same width and doors in expected places. It reminded Gideon of some of the oldest parts of the Ninth House, the bits secluded deep below the more modern twisty little hallways and crooked walls with squints.
“It’s very old,” Harrow said, quietly, more to herself than to Gideon. “Considerably older than the rest of Canaan House. It’s pre-Resurrection—or made to look pre-Resurrection, which is just as curious. I know Sextus is obsessed with dating the structure, but as usual, he’s getting caught up in the details. What’s important is the function.”
“So what was it for?”
Harrow said, “If I knew that, I’d be a Lyctor already.”
“Do you know who used it?”
“That’s a much better question, Nav.”
“And why,” said Gideon, “were you down there with your ass kicked to hell, hiding in a bone?”
The Reverend Daughter sighed heavily, then had a fit of coughing, which served her right. “Whoever left the facility also left the majority of their work behind and intact. No theorems or tomes, unless they’ve been removed—and I doubt Teacher removed them—but, as I’ve discovered, it’s possible to trigger … tests. Theorem models that they would have used. Most of the chambers down there were used to prepare for something, and they were left in a state where anyone who comes across it can re-enact the setup. Someone left—challenges—down there for any necromancer talented enough to understand what they were doing.”
“Stop being opaque, Nonagesimus. What do you mean by challenges?”
“I mean,” said Harrowhark, “that I have lost one hundred and sixty-three skeletons to a single laboratory construct.”
“What.”
“I’m prevented from seeing whatever destroys the skeletons I raise,” came the terse answer. “I haven’t worked out how to properly outfit them yet. If the priests have managed to engineer a scaffolded skeleton of the type they use as servants—my God, Nav, have you seen the bonework on them?—then I surely can, but I haven’t worked out how to disassemble one of the First House corpus yet and I can’t do enough just by looking. Don’t get me wrong; I will. I get closer every day. You found me when I’d exhausted myself, that’s all.”
“But what the hell’s it all for?”
“As I have repeated to excess, Griddle, I’m still working on the theory. Nonetheless—look back at the maps.”
The necromancer fell to brooding, staring through swollen eyelids down at the journal. Somewhat astonished still, Gideon leaned over and, ignoring her adept’s dumb mystic despond, flipped the pages back to the three-level plan for Canaan House. A few of the X-marked doors were circled with scratchy black ink and marked with crabbed symbols that she did not recognise. These seemed to be distantly distributed throughout the First House building, tucked away or secreted.
Gideon flipped another page. There was a pencil sketch of an animal’s skull with long horns. The horns curved inward into points that almost touched but not quite, and the sockets were deep holes of black pencil lead. An electric thrill of recognition