Chapter the Twelfth

The storm had grown from nothing at all: the sky had been blue as they entered the Paper City, very cold, and very blue, like a sheet of ice across Lake Fomhar in East Knamisgrad. The sky rather looked as though one could walk upon it now as they had once walked upon the frozen lake. In the winters, the Lane Keepers had thrown frost fairs out on that lovely blue floor, and the Brotherhood had allowed the youngest of their congregation, the unconfirmed, out amongst the stalls and the dance circles. She had pleaded to go and the Császárs had only ever let her go but reluctantly: four years before she had been called Ildikó, the ice had given way, faithless as a lover and splintering like bone. Sixteen had drowned in the dark and the deep, choking on cold.

It was not concern which so motivated Bálint and Renáta to keep their daughter far from the festivities, of course, but a puritanical sense of propriety: sixteen bodies had been lain out in the antechamber of the Blue Cathedral, wreathed in lakeweeds, and such was the family's status that the Császárs had taken third pick of them. Ildikó's mother had inherited a dour drowned girl that morning, no older than her daughter and bloated with water, blackened with it. She had dripped lakewater across all the fine glass floors of the family chapel for the first ten days she had served with them. It had been Ildikó's first knowledge of a drowned dead: all of their other corpses were skeletons, as favoured by the devout, and there was something lovely and personless about them when they were excarnated of all flesh. The drowned girl still had a face and weeping eyes and arms that were all open abscess.

She had been so young. As young as Rezscő had been, when first Ildikó had left him. Neither of them had yet shorn their hair.

Ildikó could not but think of the drowned girl that day: the storm had practically driven them in her wake. Ildikó had been limping heavily on her wounded leg and Razili had clung to her as the wind whipped up around them. A tsunami would not have overwhelmed them so much as this did: the brute cold of the gale felt like they were being flayed; the rain that fell was dense and burning, as though the sky wept oil. They had been at the walls of the palace then, and Ildikó had gouged six little holes in her palm, so tightly did she clutch her bone beads in her scholarly hand.

The storm had rather complicated – if not entirely scuppered – her initial plan, which Razili had resisted anyway: the girl was as comfited around necromancy as anyone raised outwith the Brotherhood could hope to be, and yet even so her old mentor's suggestion had afrighted her. She wore her fear like a physical garment: Ildikó could practically see it radiated around her, buckled tightly about her chest. She had nothing to fear, this time of all times. Ildikó had said, "it is as simple as falling asleep," and Raz had said, "I have never heard of death described otherwise, Auntie."

This storm might have killed them. That would not have been like falling asleep at all; it would have bruised them to death. The river at the edge of the city had burst its banks, and swamped the lower reaches of the Paper City – a name which did not bode well for the floods, Ildikó thought.

And as they approached the castle, they could see other peaceless dead here and there: discarded on the ground where the storm had overwhelmed them or manning the ramparts of the Paper Castle sleeplessly, comically underarmoured. As disposable as chevaliers, the lot of them: Ildikó could not muster much sympathy, so wide and black the sockets of their missing eyes, but she mustered what she could, and armed herself with it, and forced herself forward through the relentless zephyr. The storm had stripped all patience from her: when the old prayers rose in her, she recited them as a scream which seemed somehow breathless, so quickly did the wind tear it from her teeth half-birthed.

Pyromancy was born in the throat and lungs, but necromancy belonged to the ribs and liver: Ildikó felt the very fibre of her bones creak with the prayer and a dull hurt set into her abdomen. It was a heartache, this necromancy – it put its fingers into half-healed wounds, and twisted.

Dead, Ildikó had wept long ago, dead.

She returned some of these skeleton guards now to death as well. They had been raised by a bonesmith of lesser talent than she: usually one body could not be wrested from another, but Ildikó was – had once been – a Császár of the Brotherhood and her prayer tore through the thin threads which so bound the drones to their deadworking queen. Razili made a sound that was too soft to be a cry and too panicked to be anything else as the skeletons aloft the wall burst into tiny shards – as their ribs caved inwards and their skulls shattered beneath the weight of Ildikó's attention – as their spines fractured and folded and they collapsed to join their brethren on the ground. Something invisible – something in the sky – ran fingertips along her scalp and toyed with the roots of her hair.

She had to temper herself: this rashness was that same tendency which had driven her from the Brotherhood and deprived her of all she had known and all she had been and all she had created in this world. Whatever mercenary necromancer had trudged south-east to serve in this castle had prowess that was pathetic enough: she tightened her fingers around her rosary beads and screwed shut her eyes, focusing intently on the physical sensation of the bone beads beneath her fingers even as Razili's arms tightened around her waist and threatened to draw her back to tangible life, blood in her veins and breath in her lungs. Ildikó resisted the urge to shrug off her ward's tight grip, even as her skin roiled to feel such contact while her ribs creaked and tightened and flexed with the effort of holding in whatever shape her prayers had found around her tongue. She had to find a dead man she could take over; she had to find a corpse she could hijack. What use was it to she, if they removed all guards and left themselves safely outside the Keep?

"Auntie," Razili hissed, her voice creaking upwards with panic.

Ildikó ignored her except for reaching her spare hand to touch Raz's wrist, in what she hoped would be a reassuring gesture. Her mind spun along with the storm. What was a door for, if not for opening? Why would a lock exist, if not to be unlocked? That nature of being was to risk unbeing – as all of these corpses had unbeen.

The door creaked open; a guard had opened it. In the churning rain and storm, she could barely make out his shape but started towards it, quite instinctively, dragging Raz with her – she had taken five steps before she realised. This damnable storm had worked its way into her head and thrown all of her thoughts into a hurricane: she might have taken another five steps before she had realised that this was not a corpse under her control, if the living guard had not reached and drawn his dagger.

He ran towards them with the kind of implacable courage so utterly atypical of his ilk. If Ildikó had not known better, she might have mistaken hm for a dead man.

"Auntie," said Razili, considerably more plaintive and panicked.

Ildikó's blade flashed in her hand. "Trust me," she said, "trust me," and Razili had only enough time to look at her mentor, wide-eyed, before the necromancer had put a hand over her face, and a blade to her neck, and Ildikó was wondering why the dagger jumped so in her hand – twitched and jerked and shook with guilt – even as she drew it in a long line across her girl's throat and dragged it skywards.

"I did tell you," Ildikó said. "Like falling asleep."

Razili glared at her silently from the flagstones. Her heart was still finding its tempo again; she endeavoured not to gasp for air, but her throat and chest burned with every bit of breath she managed to draw in. Her mentor, standing over her, was characteristically smug. The scion said, begrudgingly, "a little undignified, don't you think?"

"I cannot imagine what you mean."

"All that wailing," said Razili. "All that screaming."

She levered herself up onto her elbows, and rubbed impatiently at her throat. Her fingers came away red and faintly tingling, stained with the remnants of the baneberry that Ildikó had spread across the whole of her throat. It was too bright a red to truly ape a fatal wound, but in the storm and stress she suspected no one had inspected her injuries too closely or wondered why her blood was so very fragrant. Raz always wore a vial of the stuff around her neck, and they had wasted it already. It boded ill for the Selection, to use up so much for so little.

She had not realised Ildikó had a theatrical side, but her performance had been full-throated and earnest. Dead, Ildikó had wept, clutching Razili in her arms, dead. Her grief had sounded so authentic; Razili might have been tempted to reassure her, to sit upwards, to touch her teacher's face and say don't worry, auntie, I am here, I am alive, we are doing this together, but her heart had been beating too slowly and all of the strength had sapped from her limbs and she had felt herself dying.

She had known that she was dying: it had been like naming one of her favourite flowers, how elemental that information had seemed in the moment. She had been dying. Dead, Ildikó had wept, and her arms had been as cold as ever they were, dead.

"You were not," Ildikó said, "actually dead."

"No," Raz said wryly, "I did detect as much."

Her chevalier smiled, and crouched beside her to profer a red-stained hand. Her rosary beads, wound around her wrist, were well-worked; one of the beads had splintered beneath the necromancer's rigid grip, so enormously had the storm thrown off her concentration on the simple task of infiltration.

"I cannot believe that worked," Raz said, and accepted Ildikó's grasp when it was offered.

"They knew what I was up to." She pulled Razili to her feet quite effortlessly; the seventeen-year-old might as well have been a dried autumn leaf for all the strength Ildikó had to put into the gesture.

"Well," said Raz. "They did let us in."

Ildikó said, "if they had not, you would have died out there and the Fifth House would have sent another scion. An older scion, perhaps – a more educated man, a braver woman. It was not in their interests to allow that to happen."

Razili glared at her. "Thank you for that."

Ildikó's voice dropped dangerously low, smoke-husky. "One should not correct an enemy in the middle of making a mistake, Razzi."

They were still standing under the view of the old attendant who had let them into the Keep; Ildikó had abandoned the pretence just as soon as they had crossed the threshold and the Selection had come to rest upon them like a mantle; she had lowered Razili to the ground, just as gently as she could manage, and placed a fingertip onto the scales of life to force her student back to full and gasping life. It was one of Ildikó's preoccupations, this concept of welcoming death into the room but avoiding his embrace: she seemed to relish in these practices, how slow she could force a heart, how little breath she could allow you, and still, in the end, wheedle a reprieve from the veiled hangman. Razili had always observed such practices with a vague sense of fascination. Now that she had experienced it, she could not say that she was all that impressed.

Keenly aware that the retainer of the First House was watching them, Raz put her fingers back to her throat and then licked the ersatz blood from the tips of her fingernails, relishing the way that her tastebuds seemed to kick back to life one-by-one as the bitter flavour struck them.

Ildikó, looking badly bedraggled, was gazing the way they had come, at the depths of the storm which was, gradually, unwinding its rage. She said, "a squall-stitcher has arrived, then?"

The attendant said nothing. He only raised a hand to gesture that they should proceed down the hall, and through the double doors to the grand hall beyond. Not even a chance to wash themselves? Razili raised an eyebrow, and made a point of smearing the red on her hands across her torn trousers and bodice as she followed her chevalier down the corridor.

She could not help but think of the dead man who had attacked them on the boundary of the Fifth Land. They were about to meet those who despatched him to kill them. Would she be able to see it in their eyes? Would they be surprised to see her?

Would they be able to taste the baneberry she would slip into their tea at her first opportunity?

Ildikó set a hand on the door. "Remember," she said, quite drily. "You've used up your dying quota for the week."

"I didn't actually die, Ildi."

"Much of a muchness," said Ildikó. "Greyed my hair nevertheless."

Razili smiled. "It is understood."

"Good girl."

She pushed open the door, and Razili followed her through – the chevalier led and the scion followed. There was safety in second place; there was a vulnerability in forging forward. One flesh, one end, the scion thought ruefully, except for when the chevalier was made to go first. She put her hand onto the door, and held it open as Ildikó stepped out and stared across the floor at the other chevaliers, her eyes cold and calculating. They had emerged onto a small steps of white steps which overlooked the enormous banqueting space. There was quite a crowd of people assembled, although the scale of the space made their numbers seem deceptively small: she tallied nine in all. Razili's eyes drifted across them, searching for something to focus on.

She released her grip on the door. It swung most of the way shut, before someone caught it on his way across the threshold. The man made a polite sound low in his throat that might have been apologetic, and proceeded ahead of them down the stairs, his black hair and his black sword dripping with rain.

"We will have to remain here," Ildikó said, "until the scions finish assembling. Get dry."

Razili blinked up at her mentor. "How much longer do you think it will take?"

"Depends," she said, "on how dramatic the other Houses are."

Raz focused on the assembled Selected, trying to divine which Houses were missing. There were two Mkhedari women – Seventh House – and a Burning Scholar – Second Land – but the others were quite indecipherable without better knowledge. How stupid she felt, standing in front of them all like this: covered in false blood and dishevelled with falsified storm, searching the faces of these strangers for any hint of the kind of killers they might be.

"Go," Ildikó hissed again. "Get dry."

Razili nodded, and hurried down the steps towards the fire in the hearth. She smoothed her hair – quite hopelessly – and turned her back to the flames, so she could warm her back and scan the room again.

Everywhere she turned her face, she found staring eyes awaiting her. Was this the Selection? She smiled, quite hestitantly, and thrilled to see where it was returned: first by the girl nearest here, practically invisible in the enormous armchair into which she had subsumed herself, drowning in pale pink fabric, and then the brown-skinned boy at the banqueting table who was sitting with his legs drawn up under him, and finally his strong chevalier beside him – he had been sharpening his sword, but the smile he offered Raz was gentle.

They were good at this, Razili thought. If she didn't know any better, she might have thought them friendly. As it was – and the look Ildikó cast her confirmed that her chevalier felt precisely the same way – she marked them out in her mind as the ones she ought to keep the closest eye on for now. A blade was overt, but smiles inevitably hid poison.