Gideon the Ninth

This Lyctoral door was the same as the others had been—gaping obsidian eye sockets in carved obsidian temporal bones: black pillars and no handle, and a fretwork symbol to differentiate it from the other two doors Gideon had seen. This one looked like three rings, joined on a line.

“We have no key,” Harrow was saying. “This is not entering a locked door with permission.”

Palamedes waved a hand. “I completed this challenge. We have the right to the key. That’s basically the same thing.”

“That is absolutely not the same thing.”

“Look. If we’re keeping track, which I am, the key for this room currently belongs to Silas Octakiseron. Lady Septimus had it, and he took it off her. That means the only way either of us ever gets inside is by defeating Colum the Eighth in a fair duel—”

“I can take Colum,” said Camilla.

“Pretty sure I can also take Colum,” added Gideon.

“—and then relying on Octakiseron to hand it over. Which he won’t,” concluded Palamedes triumphantly. “Reverend Daughter, you know as well as I do that the Eighth House wouldn’t let a little thing like fair play get in the way of its sacred duty to do whatever it wants.”

Harrow looked conflicted. “This is no ordinary lock. We’re not just going to—pick it with a bit of bone, Sextus.”

“No, of course not. I told you. Lady Septimus let me hold the key. I’m an adept of the Sixth. She might as well have let me make a silicone mould of the damn thing. I can picture every detail of that key right down to the microscopic level. But what am I going to do by myself, carve a new one out of wood?”

Harrow sighed. Then she rummaged in her pocket and took out a little nodule of bone, which she placed in the palm of her right hand. “All right,” she said. “Describe it for me.”

Palamedes stared at her.

“Hurry up,” she prompted. “I’m not waiting for the Second to find us.”

“It—I mean, it looked like a key,” he said. “It had a long shaft and some teeth. I don’t—I can’t just describe a molecular structure like it’s someone’s outfit.”

“Then how exactly am I meant to replicate it?” demanded Harrow. “I can’t—oh. No.”

“You did Imaging and Response, right? You must have, you got the key for it. Same deal. I’m going to think about the key, and you’re going to see it through my eyes.”

“Sextus,” said Harrow darkly.

“Wait, wait,” put in Gideon, intrigued. “You’re going to read his mind?”

“No,” said both necromancers immediately. Then Palamedes said, “Well, technically, sort of.”

“No,” said Harrow. “You remember the construct challenge, Nav. I couldn’t read your mind then. It’s more like borrowing perceptions.” She turned back to Palamedes. “Sextus, this was bad enough when I did it to my own cavalier. You’re going to have to focus on that key incredibly hard. If you get distracted—”

“He doesn’t get distracted,” said Camilla, as if this had caused difficulties in the past.

Palamedes closed his eyes. Harrow gnawed on her lip furiously, then closed hers too.

Nothing happened for a good thirty seconds. Gideon was dying to make a joke, just to get a reaction, when the tiny lump of matter in Harrow’s palm twitched. It flexed and began to stretch, forming a long, thin, cylindrical rod. Another few seconds passed, and a spine of bone extruded slowly from near one end. Then another.

Gideon was honestly impressed. In all the time Harrow had tormented her back on Drearburh, she had only ever used bones as seeds and starters—stitching them together into trip wires, grasping arms, kicking legs, biting skulls. This was something new. She was using bone like clay—a medium she could shape not just into one of a bunch of predetermined forms, but into something that had never existed before. It looked like it was giving her trouble too: her brow was furrowed, and the first faint traces of blood sweat gleamed on her slim throat.

“Focus, Sextus,” her necromancer gritted out. The object on her palm was now clearly a key: Gideon could see three individual teeth, twisting and flexing as Harrow filled in the fine detail. The whole length of the key quivered, and looked for a moment as though it would jump off her hand and fall to the floor, but then it abruptly lay still. Harrow opened her eyes, blinked, and peered at it suspiciously.

“This won’t work,” she said. “I’ve never had to work with something so small before.”

“That’s what she said,” murmured Gideon, sotto voce.

Palamedes opened his eyes too, and breathed a long sigh of what sounded like relief.

“It’ll be fine,” he said unconvincingly. “Come on. Let’s try it out.”

He headed for the black stone door, followed by Harrow, both cavaliers, and the five skeletons that Harrow had refused point-blank not to conjure on their way up here. He took the newly formed bone key, examined it, fitted it in the lock, and then turned it decisively to the left.

The mechanism went click.

“Oh, my God,” said Harrow.