Gideon the Ninth

There was another note atop the paint box, which some skeletal servant had helpfully placed on one of the less precarious sideboards:

Do not try to find me. I am working. Keep your head down and stay out of trouble. I reiterate the order that you do not talk to anybody .
Another note was stuck beneath, belatedly:

To clarify, anybody is a word that refers to any person alive or dead.
Inside the box, yet another:

Paint your face adequately .
Gideon said aloud, “Your parents must have been so relieved to die.”

Back in the bathroom, she smeared cold wads of alabaster on her face. The nun’s-paint went on in pale greys and blacks, swabbed over the lips and the hollows of her eyes and cheeks. Gideon comforted herself by recoiling at her reflection in the cracked mirror: a grinning death’s-head with a crop of incongruously red hair and a couple of zits. She pulled her sunglasses out of the pocket of her robe and eased them on, which completed the effect, if the effect you wanted was “horrible.”

The gangling silence focused on a robed skeleton who carried over a small chest made entirely of wood. It was no wider than a book and no deeper than two books stacked on top of each other, estimated Gideon, who thought of all books as being basically the same size.

How difficult is it for a normal swordswoman to switch from a double-handed blade to a cavalier rapier?”

“For a normal swordswoman? To reach the standard of a House cavalier primary? You’d need years. For Nav? Three months—” (here Gideon died briefly of gratification; she revived only due to the rising horror consequent of everything else) “—and she’d be up to the standard of the meanest, most behind-hand cavalier alive.”