Читаем Gideon the Ninth полностью

It didn’t seem to be a proper bedroom; more like a place to stay overnight while doing something else. More lab than living space. Gideon ended up staring at the photo-lithograph, elbows pressed into the countertop, studying faceless bodies gathered primly in their chairs. A rainbow of arms and robes; low-resolution hands clasping low-resolution knees. The hands without faces seemed solemnly posed, almost anxious.

“All I know,” said Harrowhark eventually, “is that they created the theorem, and were responsible for the experiment downstairs. I wish I knew more. I yearn to know more … But I don’t. I’m going to study this spell, Griddle, and learn it, and then I will be one step closer to knowing. We cannot suffer the same fate as Quinn and Pent.”

Gideon was amazed at how badly it hurt, all of a sudden.

“He’s really dead,” she said aloud.

“Yes. I will be more upset if he suddenly changes condition,” said Harrow. “He was a stranger, Nav. Why does it affect you so much?”

“He was nice to me,” she found herself saying. She was very tired. She tried to wake herself up by stretching, dropping down to touch her toes and feeling the blood rush into her head. “Because he was a stranger, I think … He didn’t have to bother with me, to make time for me or remember my name, but he did. Hell, you treat me more like a stranger than Magnus Quinn did and I’ve known you all my life. Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Harrow’s hand, peeled and naked without a glove and stained with ink all the way up to her cuticles, appeared in front of her. Gideon found her shoulder drawn back so that she had to look Harrow square in the face. The necromancer regarded her with a strangely fierce eye: mouth a worn-down line of indecision, forehead puckered as though she was thinking her entire face into a wrinkle. There was still blood flaking out of her eyebrows, which was gross.

“I must no longer accept,” she said slowly, “being a stranger to you.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Gideon, sudden sweat prickling the back of her neck, “yes you can, you once told me to dig myself an ice grave. Stop before this gets weird.”

“Quinn’s death proves that this is not a game,” said Harrow, moistening her ashy lips with her tongue. “The trials are meant to winnow out the wheat from the chaff, and it is going to be exceptionally dangerous. We are all the sons and daughters that the House of the Ninth possesses, Nav.”

“I’m not anybody’s son or daughter,” said Gideon firmly, now in no small panic.

“I need you to trust me.”

“I need you to be trustworthy.”

In the thick dimness of the room she watched the black-garbed girl in front of her struggle around a thing that had settled over them like a net; a thing that had fused between them like a badly broken limb, shattered numerous times, healing gnarled and awful. Gideon recognised these strictures all of a sudden: the rope tying her to Harrow and back to the bars of the House of the Ninth. They stared at each other with shared panic.

Harrow said finally, “In what way can I earn your trust?”

“Let us sleep for eight bloody hours and never talk like this again,” said Gideon, and her necromancer relaxed, very minutely. Her eyes were so lightlessly black that it was hard to see the pupil; her mouth was thin and waspish and unsure. She remembered when Harrow was nine, when she had walked in at just the wrong moment. She remembered that nine-year-old Harrow’s mouth falling slightly slack. There was something curious about Harrow’s face when it was not fixed into the bland church mask of the Reverend Daughter: something thin and desperate and quite young about it, something not totally removed from Jeannemary’s desperation.

“Eight and a half,” Harrow said, “if we start again immediately in the morning.”

“Done.”

“Done.”

Several hours later, Gideon turned over in her bed, chilled by the realisation that Harrow had not promised to never talk like that again. Too much of this shit, and they’d end up friends.

As they walked back, the halls were as lonely as they ever had been—emptier, somehow, as though with the Fifth’s untimely end Canaan House had managed to expunge what little self it had. There was only one exception. A quiet pattering of steps drew both of them pressed flat into an alcove, staring out at the thin grey pre-morning light: on very nearly silent feet, the Fourth teens passed before them, rapidly crossing an empty and dilapidated hall on some mission. Jeannemary led with her rapier drawn, and her necromancer stumbled behind, head bent, blue hood over his hair, looking like a penitent. Another second and they were gone. Gideon found herself thinking: poor little buggers.

* * *