The Lord and Lady she looked at too, though she honestly didn’t want to. Lady Pelleamena and Lord Priamhark sat side by side, one gloved hand placed on a knee, the other joined to their partner’s as they prayed simultaneously on a string of ornate bones. Black cloth swathed them toe to neck, and their faces were mostly obscured by dark hoods: Gideon could see their pale, waxy profiles, streaked with luminescent powder, the mark of Harrow’s handprint still visible on both. Their eyes were closed. Pelleamena’s face was still frozen and fine as it had been the last time Gideon had seen her, the dark wings of her brows unsilvered, the thin fretwork of lines next to each eye uncrowded by new. Priam’s jaw was still firm, his shoulder unstooped, his brow clear and unlined. They were utterly unchanged; less changed, even, than the shitty great-aunts. This was because they’d both been dead for years.
Their mummified faces did not yield to time because—as Gideon knew, and the marshal, and the captain of the guard, and nobody else in the universe—Harrowhark had frozen them forever. Ever the obsessive and secretive scholar, she had derived at great cost some forgotten way of preserving and puppeting the bodies. She had found a nasty, forbidden little book in the great Ninth repositories of nasty, forbidden little books, and all the Houses would have had a collective aneurysm if they knew she’d even read it. She hadn’t executed it very well—her parents were fine from the shoulders up, but from the shoulders down they were bad—though she had, admittedly, been ten.
Gideon the Ninth - Act One, Chapter Three
