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The stunningly useless postmortem of Pent and Quinn broke up like a body decomposing in fetid water, dropping apart aimlessly, each piece whirling away on its own current to rot in some hidden niche out of sight. The Third departed in a burst of their usual ceaseless babble; the Sixth led their myopic procession to the makeshift morgue; the Fourth drifted, heads close together, unmoored in the vastness of their grief. Harrowhark alone moved with purpose and decision, collecting her cavalier by sheer force of momentum as she swept out into the blessedly barren corridor.
Gideon's voice seemed to drift to her across an interplanetary gulf, though she walked only the regulated half-step behind. "You okay?"
"I'm sick of these people," Harrow said, turning down a random side passage with a brisk, unhesitating step. She was sick in body and mind. The trial and the long exertion of trying to summon the Fifth back from the River had cost her, and acknowledging the cost filled her with peevish despair. She was drained and abraded, with drying sweat itching on her skin under her robes and clots of blood flaking irritatingly along her hairline. "I am sick of their slowness…sick to death. I can't wait here for one of them to grasp the implications of everything they have been told, because we will be far ahead of them by then.” She was disgusted with herself only marginally less than with the rest of them. Even with the Fifth House dead at their feet, none of the other Lyctor candidates seemed to realize that they were fighting for their lives. Sextus alone had shown a glimmer of that understanding when he'd pulled her aside to growl at her about contingencies, but he lacked the urgency, the vision to understand what it meant. And if he, of all people, couldn't see it -- !
Rather than confuse her cavalier with the intricacies of her contempt, she merely added, “We have a door to open."
"Yes, tomorrow morning after at least eight hours' sleep," Gideon said.
"An admirable attempt at comedy in these trying times," Harrow retorted, though in fact the comment had been flat, with very little of Griddle's usual affected jocularity. Good; a subdued Gideon might be a tractable Gideon, and the more biddable she was the easier it would be to keep her from ending up in a knot of mangled limbs at the bottom of some remote staircase.
The death itself had been gruesome, but not so much as to disturb the Reverend Daughter. It was not the first death by sudden deceleration she had seen. The central shaft of Drearburh was deeper than Canaan House was tall, its stone lip had been crumbling for several hundred years, and aging penitents often had poor balance. What unnerved Harrow about the demise of the Fifth was not the manner of their execution, but the silence of their spirits. To bind the ghost of an accomplished spirit magician who would no doubt be highly motivated to reveal her murderer -- that would take the kind of power that made Harrowhark's stomach twist itself into a knot of pure animal fear.
But she was masked by her paint, and by the half-lit gloom, and Gideon was distracted. Gideon must not see that her adept felt fear, or she would use it as an excuse for rebellion, and more variables at this point would only increase the danger. So all Harrowhark said was, "Let's go."
She found a suitable alcove and buried herself in the shadows and in the leaves of her journal, posting Gideon as a lookout to keep her busy. Though it was unlikely they would be stalked by any danger so sloppy as to be visible to unaugmented sight.
Her own sight was swimming with the queasy silver retina-shadows of burst blood vessels. Her hands she kept draped in her sleeves, so Gideon would not see that they were trembling. There was no time for this execrable weakness. She had fainted once already down in the facility. If she did it again now, with an unknown monster or their murderous competitors stalking the halls, the consequences might be horrible. She needed to get to the door that matched the scarlet key, plunder it and retreat to shelter before the next death. And she needed to be sure the next death would not be hers, or her cavalier's; and the only way to do that was to get her hands on more data.
Her extremities were cold. Not an encouraging sign. She could have ignored it, if it hadn't been for the palpable warmth of her cavalier at her back. Gideon remained at an appropriate half-step’s distance, if not a little farther, but it wasn’t far enough. Not even the last hour’s parade of murder and incompetence could completely smother the roaring pyre of triumph in Harrow’s heart, and that triumph was all bound up with Gideon Nav; with the infuriatingly graceful arc and slice of her sword, the ease with which her hulking body translated will into force and movement, the way her heart thudded so much more strongly and at alien rhythms to Harrow’s own. She had never, she thought vaguely, had any sort of appreciation for the craft of swordplay before, let alone the meat that moved the blade. Her brief experience inside her cavalier had revealed vast landscapes totally opaque to her; and mysteries were the Reverend Daughter’s natural sustenance. She hungered to feel that warmth and strength again, if only to dissect it, to understand —
But there would be time for that later, if they lived. She needed to focus. If she let herself be swamped by the kind of sordid staticky nonsense that apparently filled Gideon’s head from morning to night, they were both as good as corpses already.
Gideon, as usual, seemed totally oblivious to anything her adept might be thinking. She was engaged instead in the diverting pastime of staring down the corridor as though a horde of ghosts might come galloping around the nearest bend at any second. Not, Harrow had to admit, that it was an entirely unfounded fear.
Harrow stared at the maps in her journal without seeing them, or really needing to. She had committed them to memory long since. Instead she became preoccupied with the textures of the flimsy pages of her diary, rough Drearburh-milled stuff, and with the key itself, which was dense and cold and a vivid unrealistic scarlet, like a child's painting of fresh blood. Her brain twitched like a dead thing hooked up to an electric current, mere flesh and chemicals jumping in response to random jolts. Her mouth seemed to be filled with ash. She could feel the pulse beating at her wrists, and for a moment became confused by the imaginary discordance of Gideon’s overlapping it.
She was getting nowhere. The diary held nothing new for her, the key itself was uncommunicative, and every turn seemed a blind avenue. In desperation, she resorted to the only untapped resource available. She half-straightened from her brooding hunch, held the key up, and commanded, “Look.”
Gideon turned to look at her.
She wasn't wearing her abominably idiotic glasses. Harrow couldn't remember if she'd been wearing them in the atrium or not, and was suddenly disconcerted by the fact that she couldn't remember. Gideon’s face paint, inexpertly applied to begin with, had been bleared and smeared by sweat until the skull was totally unrecognizable, and there were little divots of bare skin at the bridge of her nose and at her temples where the glasses had rubbed it away (she must have been wearing them, then). God, how Harrow hated those things. She wished Gideon would put them back on. Her unobscured gaze was irritating, and long familiarity had turned irritation to pain, as mortifying to Harrow’s spirit as a flail of solid gold.
Actually it was worse than that. A flail or a whip merely inflicted pain. Gideon’s unblinking stare gave Harrow the deeply appalling sensation of being illuminated, like light stabbing through crumbling stonework into a sealed and airless crypt.
Panic gripped her like electrified clamps along her spine. For one hot, nauseating half-second Harrow was standing on the landing pad back on the Ninth, stripped of all osseous ornamentation, sick with fear and fury, dizzy with the throb of her sleepless brain and her mangled hands. She was twelve and drenched with blood sweat, gritting her teeth until she felt the dentin and enamel start to split, heaving wave after wave of skeletons against the great doors of Drearburh to keep Griddle from reaching them. She was five years old, gripping the leg of Gideon’s trousers to pull her down as she tried to climb up the central heating shaft to the surface and freedom. She was five years old and screaming, trying to expel the feeling inside her like the sucking cold of the salt pool, throwing Gideon to the dirt with wobbly skeletal hands and standing over her. She was pushing on Gideon’s shoulders with flesh hands as well as bone, keeping her down, keeping her, and Gideon was looking at her, just like that. Angry, yes, but then something else — hesitant, almost thoughtful, almost pitying. A look that did what no other power in the universe could and stripped away all the layers of Ninth House ceremony, mystery and vestments alike, from the Reverend Daughter. A look that probed its way towards what lay shrouded in Harrow’s heart with as much effortless contempt as Harrow herself might search out the shapes of the bones in a stranger’s flesh.
Griddle had been the only one who ever looked at her like that. And Harrow knew with a deep, dreadful certainty that if Gideon looked too long then she would see, and then Harrow’s last hold on her would be broken, and she would be gone forever, gone beyond hope of return —
Had they been children still in Drearburh, Harrow would have summoned a construct to punch Gideon in the face to break that intrusive, searching amber stare. But too much force now would tip her hand, and she had learned subtler methods.
“At the key, moron, not at me,” Harrow said irascibly, heart pounding, key cold and heavy in her sweat-prickled palm.
The moron looked at the key (thanks be to the Kindly Prince and all his holy Saints, and the Beast He had blessed to sleep forever), but she did give Harrow the middle finger.
Then the moron gave Harrow the clue she needed and had not been able to reach with her own pathetically inadequate faculties, and she turned her attention again to the task of keeping them both alive and moving down the perilously narrow path to Lyctorhood.
When she looked at Gideon again the shaded glasses were back in place, sealing those disquieting eyes away as securely as the stone before the Tomb. Harrow was grateful. In token of her gratitude, she let Gideon approach the great locked Lyctoral door first, and behind her back murmured a prayer of thanks for secrets unrevealed.