drama. Gideon shrugged her cloak over her shoulders, thrust her free hand into a pocket, and stalked down the corridor away from any uncles and nephews.
The necromancer’s voice drifted down after her: “Will you come and listen to what I have to say? Be decisive.”
“Eat me, milk man,” said Gideon, and staggered around the corner.
She heard Colum’s “Means yes, probably,” but not the murmured reply.
* * *
From that time on, Gideon could not outfight the nightmares. She willed her subconscious to sink into a pattern of random eye movement that did not involve her waking up in a lather of cold sweat, but like so many things in her life now, it had lost fitness and apt response. She was dumb before the body of her failures, unmanned by the barrage of her brain. Gideon only had to close her eyes to see her own personal, randomly selected shitshow.
Magnus Quinn, still drinking his grassy morning tea, stabbed until his chest was steaming chunks of meat because she could not make her tongue yell Look behind you—
—a steaming cauldron filled with fragrant grain and the silent, foetal corpse of Abigail Pent, sinking beneath the surface before Gideon’s blistering fingers could dig her clear—
—Isaac Tettares gulping and swallowing from an upturned jug of acid that she was unable to wrench from his febrile, trembling hands—
—Jeannemary Chatur, whose dismembered arms and legs kept turning up while Gideon made a bed that got stickier and wetter and more jumbled with bits of Jeannemary as the covers were turned; and—
—the old dream of her mother. Alive now, overlapping with her life in a way she hadn’t in reality, shrieking Gideon—Gideon—Gideon! while, as Gideon watched, crones of the Ninth gently levered her skull from the rest of her head with a big crunchy crack.
And Harrow, telling her to wake up. That had only happened the once: the Ninth necromancer sitting in the dark, wrapped in a mouldering duvet like a cloak, her face very naked and blank and shorn of its monochrome skull mural. Gideon had fallen back into an uneasy sleep almost immediately. She could never decide if she had dreamed that into being—Harrowhark was not exploding, or having her intestines drip out of her ears like streamers, or sloughing off her skin right down to her subcutaneous fat—but she had been looking at Gideon with a coal-eyed expression of absolute pity. There had been something very weary and soft about the way that Harrow Nonagesimus had looked at her then, something that would have been understanding had it not been so tired and cynical.
“It’s just me,” she’d said impatiently. “Go back to sleep.”
All signs pointed toward hallucination.
At that, Gideon had to sleep, because the consequences of waking were too hideous. But from then on she slept wearing her rapier, her gauntlet on her chest like a heavy obsidian heart.
27
“LET’S NEGOTIATE,” SAID PALAMEDES SEXTUS.
Harrow and Gideon sat in the Sixth House’s quarters, which was bizarre as hell as an experience. The Sixth had been housed in high, airy rooms tucked into the curve of the central tower. Their windows opened onto a sweeping view of the sea, or at least, they would’ve had the Sixth not covered them up with blackout curtains. The whole of the Sixth was huddled on the polar caps of a planet so close to Dominicus that exposure to the light side would melt the House clean away. The great libraries were set in a fat cake tin of a station, designed for the ongoing ordeal of not letting anything get too hot or too cold, which meant no windows at all whatsoever. Palamedes and Camilla had recreated that effect in here to the best of their ability, which meant a room with the airiness and lightness of a closet.
This was not helped by the fact that nearly every square inch was covered by flimsy: Palamedes’s scribbles were tacked up like wallpaper across every bare surface. They were taped to tables. They clustered over the mirror. Fat books lay in serried rows on the arms of every chair, stacked haphazardly, as though nobody ever sat down without bringing another one to bear. Gideon had peeked through the open door of the bedroom, into a dark nest where a huge whiteboard stared down at the ancient, wheezing four-poster bed, very neatly made. There was no question about whether or not Camilla inhabited the horrible cot attached to the end, cavalier-style. It sagged beneath assorted weapons and tins of metal polish.