There was no key to the Locked Door. Maybe there had never been a key to the Locked Door. It simply didn’t open. What lay beyond would kill the trespasser before they’d cracked it wide enough to go through anyway, and what lay beyond that—long before ever getting to the tomb—would make them wish they were dead long before their final breath. The nuns dropped to their knees at the mere mention of what was through there. It was the brief delight of Gideon’s life that the unnecessarily beatified Harrowhark Nonagesimus chose to ditch her sainthood and unlock it, and that Gideon had been witness to that fact.
Out of everyone who found Gideon Nav repellent, Harrow’s parents had always found her particularly so. They were chilly, joyless Ninth House necromancers of the type that Silas Octakiseron seemed to think universally inhabited Drearburh: black in heart, power, and appearance. Once when she had touched a fold of Priamhark Noniusvianus’s vestments he had held her down with skeletal hands and whipped her till she howled. It was only out of the most desperate perversity that she ran straight to them to tell her tale: out of some baffling desire to show some evidence of House loyalty, to absolutely drop Harrow in the shit, to get the pat on the head she knew she’d earned for preserving the integrity and the fervid spirit of the House—precisely the qualities she was so ceaselessly accused of lacking. She felt no flicker of guilt or doubt. Just hours before, she’d wrestled Harrow down in the dirt, and Harrow had scratched until she’d had half of Gideon’s face beneath her fingernails.
So she told them. And they listened. They had not said a word, either in praise or in censure, but they had listened. They had called for Harrow. And they had made Gideon leave. She waited outside the great dark doors of their room for a very long time, because they hadn’t told her to go away, just go out of the room, and because she was a shitty trash child she wanted to relish the one chance she had of hearing Harrowhark raked over the coals. But she waited a whole hour and never heard a damn thing, let alone Harrow’s screams as she was confined to oss duty until she turned thirty.
And then Gideon couldn’t wait anymore. She pushed open the door and she walked in—and found Pelleamena and Priamhark hanging from the rafters, purple and dead. Mortus the Ninth, their huge and tragic cavalier, swung beside them from a rafter groaning with his bulk. And she walked in on Harrowhark, holding lengths of unused rope among the chairs her parents had kicked aside, with eyes like coals that had burnt away.
Harrow had beheld her. She had beheld Harrow. And nothing had ever gone right after that, never ever.
* * *
“I was eleven,” said Gideon. “And here I am, narking all over again.”
Palamedes did not say anything. He just sat there, listening as solemnly as if she had described some new type of novel necromantic theorem. Far from feeling cleansed by her impromptu confession, Gideon felt absolutely the opposite: dirty and muddy, terribly exposed, as though she had unbuttoned her chest and given him a good long look at what was inside her ribs. She was garbage from the neck to the navel. She was packed tight with a dry and dusty mould. She had been filled up with it since she was eleven, on the understanding that as long as she was attached to the House of the Ninth she could never make it go away.
Gideon took a long breath, then another.
“Harrow wants to become a Lyctor,” she said. “She would do anything to become a Lyctor. She’d easily have killed Dulcinea’s cavalier if she thought it would help her become a Lyctor. Nothing else matters to her. I know that now. In the last couple days, I sometimes thought—”
Gideon did not finish that sentence, which would have been “that she had stopped making it her top priority.”
Palamedes said very gently, “You really should not need me to tell you that an eleven-year-old isn’t responsible for the suicides of three grown adults.”
“Of course I’m responsible,” said Gideon disgustedly. “I made it happen.”
“Yes,” said Palamedes. “If you hadn’t told Harrow’s parents about the door, they would not have made the decision to end their lives. You inarguably caused it. But cause by itself is an empty concept. The choice to get up in the morning—the choice to have a hot breakfast or a cold one—the choice to do something thirty seconds faster, or thirty seconds slower—those choices cause all sorts of things to happen. That doesn’t make you responsible. Here’s a confession for you: I killed Magnus and Abigail.”
Gideon blinked at him.
“If, the second I stepped off my shuttle,” said the suddenly revealed double murderer blithely, “I had snatched Cam’s dagger and put it straight through Teacher’s throat, the Lyctoral trial could never have begun. There’d have been uproar. The Cohort would have arrived, I’d have been dragged away, and everyone else would have been sent safe back home. Because I didn’t kill Teacher, the trial began, and because the trial began, Magnus Quinn and Abigail Pent are dead. So: I did it. It’s my fault. All I ask is that you put some pen and flimsy in my cell so I can start on my memoirs.”
Gideon blinked a couple more times. “No, hold up. That’s stupid, they’re not the same.”
“I don’t see why not,” said the necromancer. “We both made decisions that led to bad things happening.”
She rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “Octakiseron said you guys loved to mess with what words mean.”
“The Eighth House thinks there’s right and there’s wrong,” said Palamedes wearily, “and by a series of happy coincidences they always end up being right. Look, Nav. You ratted out your childhood nemesis to get her in trouble. You didn’t kill her parents, and she shouldn’t hate you like you did, and you shouldn’t hate you like you did.”
He was peering at her through his spectacles. “Hey,” she objected lamely, “I never said I hated myself.”
“Evidence,” he said, “outweighs testimony.”
Awkwardly, and a bit brusquely, he took her hand. He squeezed it. They were both obviously embarrassed by this, but Gideon did not let go—not when she rummaged in the pocket of her robe with her other hand, and not when she passed over the scrumpled-up piece of flimsy that had bewildered her for so long.
He unscrumpled it, and read without reaction. She squeezed his hand like an oath, or a threat.
“This is from a Lyctor lab,” he said eventually. “Isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she admitted. “Is it—I mean—is it real?”
He looked at her. “It’s nearly ten thousand years old, if that’s what you mean.”
“Well, I’m not,” she said. “So … what the fuck, basically.”
“The ultimate question,” he agreed, returning his attention to the flimsy. “Can I borrow this? I’d like to look at it properly.”
“Do not show it to anyone else,” Gideon said, without really knowing why. Something about her name being on this ancient piece of garbage felt as dangerous as a live grenade. “I’m serious. It stays between us.”
“I swear on my cavalier,” he said.
“You can’t even show her—”
They were interrupted by six short knocks on the door, followed by six long. Both sprang up to pull apart the interlaced lattice of deadbolts. Camilla came through, and with her, upright and calm, was Harrow. For one wacky moment Gideon thought that she and Camilla had been holding hands and that today was one huge rash of interhousal hand fondling, but then she realised that their wrists were cuffed together. Camilla was nobody’s fool, though how she’d cuffed Harrow was going to be a tale of terror for another day.