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The hallways of Canaan House sprawled and wheezed like an open grave. Camilla the Sixth followed her necromancer.
They had observed the time-honoured tradition of leaving the Ninth House to its own devices and headed from the facility entrance back to their rooms. Neither spoke. There was no need to: Camilla could hear the gears turning in Palamedes’ head from her half-step behind him, but knew his main thought was, like hers, What the fuck?
They found their door as they’d left it and entered to the familiar dark. Once the last bolt was secured, they discarded their soiled cloaks into the laundry basket and washed the dust from their hands. It was only after Palamedes had sat at one of the tables and leaned back, crossing his legs, that he spoke.
“Well,” he said. “That was certainly odd.”
Camilla poured two glasses of water and took one to him. She drank half of hers standing at the end of the table.
“She’s not a typical Ninth House cav,” she said.
“I dare say she isn’t,” said Palamedes, with a gleam of interest. “And she now knows that you are not a typical Sixth House cav. Don’t apologise for drawing on her, it was quite within reason, and I suspect your technique is the least of her concerns at this point.”
The Don’t apologise was a formality. Camilla said, “The rapier’s not her main wield, either.”
“No?”
“Something bigger and heavier.”
Palamedes searched the table for fresh flimsy and a pencil. “Extremely suspicious. Relative to the usual Ninth House level, I mean, that is. My expectations of them have far been exceeded. What do you make of it?”
Camilla rolled her head around, first one way, then the other. “Maybe they’re not such traditionalists any more,” she said.
“That’d make two of us,” said Palamedes. “They certainly look it, though. I think I’ve had about three heart attacks so far just from seeing either of them across a room.”
A few people back on the Sixth with interests even more unwholesome than Palamedes’ had been deeply envious of the chance to meet anyone from the Ninth in person. Camilla intended to tell them that the Ninth had been seen only to eat, and never to drink; that they had passed through doorways only when they were in shadow; that the hilt of the Ninth House rapier was carved from a single human fibula.
Camilla shrugged. “Did you see her offhand?”
“Not well,” her necromancer admitted.
“Knuckle-knife.”
Palamedes raised an eyebrow. “That’s interesting.”
“I’d fight her again,” Camilla said. “She was—authentic.” She rolled her shoulders next, then her wrists. Her hand was probably going to bruise where the Ninth cavalier had authentically smashed it into a wall.
Palamedes took his glasses off and started cleaning them on his sleeve. “I got the impression,” he said, “and this may be uncharitable—”
“You, Warden?”
“—that she might have had slightly more on her mind than her mind could hold.”
“Poetic, Warden,” Camilla said.
“You know what I mean, though,” Palamedes said, slipping his glasses back on. “And one can only imagine what they think of us. Personally I intend to avoid taking on either of them. That bone cocoon! My God.”
“Is it a new theory?” Camilla asked. Seeing it, combined with the questions they’d been asking before Gideon the Ninth had barreled in, seemed to have flicked all the switches in her necromancer’s brain at once.
“No,” Palamedes said, finally finding a blank page and writing a few lines, “but it would have taken tremendous effort and skill. She must have been practising it for years and years.”
Palamedes’ medical interest in bones meant that his own necromantic ability with them was more than respectable for a Sixth House adept. Camilla had once helped him string a skeleton together with wire, an exercise she thought should be formally instituted as necromancer-cavalier team building. The skeleton now hung on a stand in one of Palamedes’ offices and was used for the purpose of making his rivals suspicious. For Camilla's part, she could tell a trapezium from a trapezoid when she needed to, but had secretly always wanted to know what it was like to club somebody with a femur.
“I take it I shouldn’t expect to find you in a bone cocoon in the near future, Warden?” she asked.
“Would that I had any chance of doing it,” her necromancer said. His voice had a touch of wistfulness to it, like a sigh. “Tell you what, if I successfully complete these trials and ascend to Lyctorhood, I’ll make a hundred. If Nonagesimus also succeeds she may even teach me.”
A hundred bone cocoons seemed unambitious given the breadth of Lyctoral power. Camilla expected that she would wake up in one at some point, and escape it only to find that all of her possessions were also in one. She rearranged the books on one of the chairs and sat, draining her glass. She looked at her necromancer until he took the hint and drank from his.
“I don’t know, Warden,” she said. “Teaching you something might give her the impression that she's superior to you.”
Palamedes snorted. “She’s quite dedicated to that idea, isn’t she? What else can you expect. Genius attracts insult, Cam, as we know.”
“Indisputable, Warden.”
Palamedes narrowed his eyes. There was some blood sweat left on his temple from earlier. Camilla would have to make sure he washed it off before they went anywhere.
Camilla looked across to the windows, to the great big curtains that separated the light from the darkness. “Do you think she could do it?” she asked, rotating her glass on its base.
“The trials?”
Camilla nodded.
Palamedes drummed his fingers on the table as though he were deciding which exam question to answer first. “It would help if I had the full bloody picture of all of this,” he said. “I contrive no hypotheses as to the extent of her skill, but I suspect that if or when the two of them start working together properly I would be a fool to underestimate them.”
“That would require them to take your advice.”
“God forbid anyone should exercise sanity,” Palamedes said. “Why would Nonagesimus go down there by herself? Why would her cavalier let her?”
The only convincing answer was that the Ninth didn’t properly comprehend how dangerous the facility was. That raised a lot of its own questions about things like their intuition, their grasp on reality, and their ability to understand things that other people said.
“Don’t know, Warden. They don’t seem like a standard Ninth House pair to me.”
“Nor me, but that was obvious,” Palamedes said. “But what else could they be?”
Camilla sat back in her chair, cracking all of her knuckles except one. “Foreign and domestic agitators? Smugglers? Malcontents?”
Her adept raised the other eyebrow this time. “Smugglers,” he said.
"They could be."
“Of what?”
“If we knew what it was they wouldn’t be very good smugglers,” Camilla said.
Palamedes looked back down at his page. “Well, I hope it’s something useful and they give some to us in an unprecedented gesture of good will.”
Before today, Camilla might have wondered at the ability of the Ninth House to give anyone anything that wasn’t bones, dust, or bone dust, or maybe just the creeps. But there was something in the Ninth cavalier that she’d understood.
Palamedes had put down his pencil and set the flimsy to one side. At the top of the page, in the code they had designed together, were the basic details of their encounter with the Ninth. Most of the rest was theory in Palamedes’ own necromantic shorthand. Under this he had written three slanting words: Obscuris vera involvens.
Camilla watched him read it over. “In the meantime, Warden,” she asked, “what should we do?”
“You can start by cracking your other knuckle,” said Palamedes.
“Of course, Warden,” Camilla said, and cracked it twice.
Palamedes looked at her sideways. Then he said, “We continue as we have been.” He pushed his glasses up his nose. “Keep paying them the attention they’re due. With any luck we might arrive at something approaching the facts.”
“Incontestable, Warden,” Camilla said. “How much attention would you say they’re paying to us?”
“Oh, as much as we’re due,” said Palamedes.
Camilla couldn’t be sure how much of their earlier conversation the Ninth cavalier had heard, but it wouldn’t be anything Nonagesimus couldn’t have figured out by herself. Presumably they’d be doing their own speculating once Nonagesimus was conscious. This was fine by the Sixth House, who were not strictly trying to be obscure, but were not strictly avoiding it.
“Back to it, then, Warden?” asked Camilla.
“Back to it,” said Palamedes.
Camilla the Sixth followed her necromancer.
Several hours later, Palamedes said, “Cam, how far do you think the Ninth House might have gotten with the Transference/Winnowing theory?”
There was a silence.
“Can’t answer that, Warden,” Camilla said. “But there’s one thing I do know.”
“What’s that?”
“Sharing a room with you was a mistake,” said Camilla.
They were in bed. This tended to mean little to Palamedes, whose brain was no respecter of sleep. Camilla figured he was a minute or two from getting up to add to the whiteboard.
“You’ve said that before,” said Palamedes, with no hint of offence.
Camilla turned to face Palamedes, where he was lying diagonally across one half of the bed. “I think they’re going to get a lot further once they start working together,” she said. “But we can really only predict at this point, and I know what you have to say about that.”
Palamedes said into the darkness, “Truth needs more than correct predictions.”
“Precisely, Warden,” Camilla said. “Let’s see if they show up tomorrow. That’ll tell us enough as it is.”
“So it will,” said Palamedes. He shifted around a little, and touched one knee to her thigh, just briefly. “Goodnight, Cam.”
“Goodnight, Warden.”
The Sixth House slept.