common. She tried to cheer herself up with the thought that this at least meant Harrow wasn’t around, a thought that would have cheered up anyone.
Gideon shrugged off her robe and wrestled out of her trousers and shirt, all of which had hot and damp insides from her sweat. She opened doors until she found the largest bathroom she had ever seen. It was so big she could walk around in it. She stretched out her arms on either side and still couldn’t touch the walls, which were of slippery stone, glowing like coals where they were whole and scored and dull where they weren’t. Maybe this pretending to be a cavalier gig wasn’t so bad after all. The floor was marble tile, sheen marred by only a few spots of black mould. There was a bowl with taps that Gideon knew to be a sink only because she’d read a lot of comics, and an enormous person-sized recess in the ground that she didn’t know what to do with at all. The sonic cleaner was set, gleaming gently, at either side of a rectangular chamber with a weird nozzle.
Gideon pulled a lever next to the tap. Water gushed from the nozzle, and she yelped and skittered away before she got over the sight and turned it off. Her survey identified a chubby cake of soap next to the sink (but Ninth soap had been made of human fat so no thanks) and a tub of antibac gel. She decided eventually to take a sonic and to use the gel to scrape the blurred paint off her face. Newly clean, with fresh clothes and her robe shaken out in the sonic, she was feeling good about herself until she espied another note stuck tersely on the autodoor:
Fix your face, idiot.
There was another note atop the paint box, which some skeletal servant had helpfully placed on one of the less precarious sideboards:
Do not try to find me. I am working. Keep your head down and stay out of trouble. I reiterate the order that you do not talk to anybody.
Another note was stuck beneath, belatedly:
To clarify, anybody is a word that refers to any person alive or dead.
Inside the box, yet another:
Paint your face adequately.
Gideon said aloud, “Your parents must have been so relieved to die.”
Back in the bathroom, she smeared cold wads of alabaster on her face. The nun’s-paint went on in pale greys and blacks, swabbed over the lips and the hollows of her eyes and cheeks. Gideon comforted herself by recoiling at her reflection in the cracked mirror: a grinning death’s-head with a crop of incongruously red hair and a couple of zits. She pulled her sunglasses out of the pocket of her robe and eased them on, which completed the effect, if the effect you wanted was “horrible.”
Feeling slightly more at ease with life, rapier bobbing at her hip, it was the cavalier of the Ninth who stalked down the dilapidated corridors of Canaan House. It was pleasantly quiet. She heard the far-off sounds of a lived-in place—footsteps, blurry moans from the autocooler, the unmistakable pitter-pat of foot bones on tattered rugs—and she retraced her steps to the original atrium. From there, she followed her nose.
Her nose led her to a hot, glass-topped hall, modern conveniences haphazardly pasted atop ancient riches, out of place among the tapestries and gone-black filigree. There was netting spread all over the rafters to keep out the birds, because the glass-topped roof had holes in it that you could jump through. A fountain of fresh water burbled at the wall, ringed in old concrete, with a filtration tank snuggled beside. And there were many long, worn tables—wooden slabs that had been freshened up with antibac and had legs that must have come from eight table sacrifices. The place could have seated fifty. The early light flooded down in electric yellow blasts, green where it touched the living plants and brown where it touched the dead ones, and she was grateful that she’d worn her glasses.
The room was nearly empty, but a couple of the others were there, finishing their meals. Gideon sat down three tables away and spied on them shamelessly. There was a man sitting close to a pair of ghastly teens: younger than Gideon, still in the midst of losing their fight with puberty. The boy wore trim navy robes and the girl had a jewelled scabbard on her back, and when Gideon entered they had looked up at the