Gideon the Ninth

Palamedes had been wiping Dulcinea’s mouth very gently with a white cloth. He laid his hand at her neck. She was still. Her face was now the thin blue-white colour of Canaan House’s milk, and for a moment Gideon expected him to add her to the already dead list. She would decide to go out with an audience, with her hair done, and with her miserable secrets revealed. Now she knew that Dulcinea had always been alone, carrying on an even greater farce than Gideon’s, knowing the impossibility of the odds. But the dying necromancer sucked in a sudden, rattling, popped-balloon breath, her whole body surging in spasm. Gideon’s heart started up again. Before she could move, Palamedes was there, and with terrible tenderness—as though they were alone in the room and the world alike—he kissed the back of Dulcinea’s hand.

Gideon looked away, blushing with a shame she didn’t interrogate, and found Teacher in the doorway with his hands folded before his gaudy rainbow sash. Nobody had heard him enter.

“Maybe later, Lady Judith,” he said.

She said, “You’ll need to contact the Seventh House and have her sent back home. It’s morally and legally out of the question to leave her this way. Is that clear?”

“I cannot,” said Teacher. “There was only ever a single communications channel in Canaan House, my Lady … and I cannot call her House on it. I cannot call the Fifth, nor the Fourth, nor now the Seventh. That is part of the sacred silence we keep. There will be an end to all this, and there will be a reckoning … but Lady Septimus will stay with us until the last.”

The Second’s adept had stopped all of a sudden. For a moment Gideon thought she was going to lose her carefully buttoned rag. But she cocked her dark head and said, “Lieutenant?”

“Ready,” said Marta the Second, and they both marched out as though they were in parade formation. They did not give the rest of the room a backward glance.

Teacher looked at the tableau before him: the bed, the blood, the Third. Palamedes, still clutching Dulcinea’s fingers within his own, and Dulcinea out cold.

“How long does Lady Septimus have?” he asked. “I can no longer tell.”

“Days. Weeks, if we’re lucky,” said Palamedes bluntly. Dulcinea made a little hiccupping noise on the bed that sounded half like a giggle and half like a sigh. “That’s if we keep the windows open and her airways clear. Breathing recyc at Rhodes probably took ten years off her life. She’s been sitting on the brink without shifting one way or the other—the woman has the stamina of a steam engine—and all we can do is keep her comfortable and see if she doesn’t decide to pull through.”

Harrow said to him, slowly: “Undoing the cavalier’s bodywork should have killed her. It would have been an incredible shock to her system.”

“Spreading it between multiple casters may have diluted the feedback.”

“That is not remotely how it works,” said Ianthe.

“Oh, God, here comes the expert,” Naberius said.

“Babs,” said Ianthe’s sister hurriedly, “you’re getting hangry. Let’s go find some food.”

Gideon watched her necromancer’s gaze fix on Ianthe Tridentarius. Ianthe did not notice, or affected not to notice; her eyes were as pale and purple and calm as they ever were, but Harrowhark was quivering like a maggot next to a dead duck. As the Third traipsed out—as noisy as if they were leaving a play, not a sickroom—Harrow’s eyes went with them. Gideon said aloud, “Hey. Palamedes. Do you need someone to stay with her?”

“I will,” said Teacher, before Palamedes could respond. “I will move my bed here. I will not leave her alone again. Whenever I must leave my post one of the other priests will take my place. I can do that much, at least … I am not afraid, nor do I have better things to do with my time. Whereas—I am very much afraid—you do.”

Gideon allowed herself a lingering look at Dulcinea, who made for a more beguiling corpse than her stolid dead cavalier ever did: lying on the bed looking nearly transparent with streaks of drying, bloodied mucus on her chin. She wanted to help, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Harrow moving out of the doorway and into the corridor—staring after the disappearing Third—and she steeled herself to say, “Then we’re out. Can you—let us know if anything changes?”

“Someone will come for you,” said Teacher gently.

“Cool. Palamedes—”

He met her eye. He had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them with one of his innumerable handkerchiefs.

“Ninth,” he said, “if she were capable of anything, in order to become a Lyctor—don’t you think she’d be one already? If she really wanted to watch the world burn—wouldn’t we all be alight?”

“Stop flattering her. But—thanks,” said Gideon, and she darted off into the corridor after Harrow.

Chapter 31