by Tamsyn Muir
He was not altogether succeeding. The space was in flux. As Harrow watched, the floor beneath her feet began shimmering into close-set slabs of black lacquered stone, but the slabs faded like mist almost as soon as they appeared, and the metal tiles returned. The Sleeper whipped her baton into the side of Nonius’s face, sending him staggering, and followed up with a vicious knife thrust to his belly; he turned it with the thick part of his blade, but awkwardly, and the Sleeper managed to knee him in the flank and score the knife’s point down his sword arm for good measure before he shoved her away and fell back into guard.
They paused, breathing hard. Blood showed plainly on the bizarre orange armour, blooming in startling curls and petals; less so on the black Drearburh leathers, but the floor around Nonius’s feet was spattered red. The Sleeper’s golden mask remained smooth and perfect, whereas Nonius had gained a gash down his cheek and a split lip.
“Few have I fought so ferocious. To match you in arms is to stand against fully a hundred unworthy,” he said, which was exactly the kind of thing he was supposed to say.
“You’re good, but you’re just another fucking zombie,” she said, which wasn’t. The voice still sounded husky and blurred, even without the haz suit mouthpiece.
“Who was your master in life? Whose banner and blade did you bear?” he asked. Nonius always displayed an unhealthy curiosity about the people trying to kill him. “What mission compels you to face me?”
“My master in life was revenge,” said the Sleeper. “My mission is one of— Goddamn it, I’m not going to start talking like this.”
“Enter the River with pride,” he said, and there was something genuinely sad in his voice. “Go back to its turbulent waters … Fain would I spare such a fighter.”
She rushed him, low and fast. The baton rang against his sword, and she struck upward with her knife, as if to impale his throat—but she flipped the blade somehow in her hand as it came, so his parry with the dagger caught empty air. The butt of her knife struck him under the chin, snapping his head back. A long, slender filigree of blood sprayed from his mouth and hung in the air for what seemed like half a second too long. Even as he fell back, his failed parry flexed in the space between them and flicked past her ribs, the dagger’s tip trailing a thin and perfect arc of red.
Across the room, beyond the duel, Harrow saw Dulcie Septimus trying to limp out the doorway. Her cavalier, who had propped himself upright against its frame, shot out an arm and pulled her back, sparking indignant outrage on her face. He glanced at Ortus, and they gave each other a grim, soldierly little nod of understanding.
Harrow murmured: “Septimus has the right idea. If I raise a construct now—close in on the Sleeper from behind—Dyas wasn’t badly hurt, and she still has her sword…”
“Nonius doesn’t fight in a crowd,” Ortus said tightly.
“Nigenad, you do realise this is not literally a poem.”
“You saw what happened to the guns,” he said. “Rules are everything here, Harrowhark; if we break them, I am certain we are lost.”
Harrow gnawed her lip. The more ragged and brutal the fight became, the more it seemed to favour the Sleeper. Nonius could not get the space to bring his rapier properly to bear; he was increasingly holding it against his body, using it more like a shield than the scalpel she knew it was meant to be. The floor between the fighters was one great smear of blood in which their feet skidded for purchase. As Harrow watched, Nonius did something clever with his dagger and one of the Sleeper’s strikes flew wide; she lost her footing for a moment and he took the opportunity to step back, free the sword, turn it for a thrust—
She brought the baton down on the inside of his elbow with all the graceless force of a butcher chopping meat. Nonius cried out, and the black rapier of Drearburh fell from nerveless fingers and clanged to the floor. She stepped in close, drew her head back, and smashed her golden mask into his unprotected face with a dreadful crunch. He reeled backward and half-fell against the empty coffin, his newly free hand coming up to his eyes. The Sleeper advanced, her mask’s impassive gaze twisted into a sneer by fresh blood.
“Fancy footwork, shitbird,” she said, and raised the knife.
Matthias Nonius came off the coffin like the Emperor’s wrath. He crashed into her bodily, driving her back, and then swung his knife at her exposed side. She blocked it with the baton and he kneed her in the gut, grabbed the back of her head in his empty hand, and kneed her again in the throat. They grappled—Harrow could hear her coughing wetly through the mask—and she managed to shoulder him away, but he came straight back in with a knife slash that nearly unstitched her guts. Harrow caught a glimpse of his face, now mostly blood: his nose was broken, and his lips and chin were wet with gore. There was blood in his eyes and under his hair, and his expression was one of cold and perfect murder. It was as though losing the rapier had snapped some invisible shackle. He didn’t even look angry; he looked like an ending given human form.
The Sleeper struck out with the baton. He grabbed her arm, twisted, and brought his elbow’s point down hard. The arm snapped wetly. Then he caught her by the back of the neck like he was pulling her in for a kiss, and jammed his dagger into her belly.
She dropped her knife, which joined her baton on the tiles, and seized his throat with both hands. He drove her all the way back against the wall, and they wrestled there for a second. Then he broke free of her hold and stumbled clear, leaving the black dagger’s hilt protruding obscenely from the orange fabric at her gut.
As she grasped it with her hand and tried to pull it free, Protesilaus the Seventh left his doorway and came forward a few steps; he had detached his sheathed sword from its belt, and he flung out his arm and sailed the whole thing through the air. Nonius caught the exquisitely patterned scabbard in one bloodied hand. He drew the lovely sword of the Rose Unblown, and as the Sleeper dragged herself off the wall, brandishing the dagger, which steamed with her blood, he ran his blade through her heart.
He skewered the Sleeper up to the hilt; and as she fell, jerking, he slid down to the ground with her, supporting her with his other arm. Only when the Sleeper stopped moving did he withdraw the sword with a silken wet whisper.
The candles flared with a last burst of black flame, and then sank to a glimmer. All around them, there were sounds like sausages flung from a height as the draped tubes and ligaments fell to the ground, bouncing damply before dissolving into pinkish powder. The icicles fell, one by one, slush before they hit the tiles. There was a humming noise and a plink, and the electric lights in the ceiling came suddenly on, pouring down blank white light: the unkindness of hot filament. Harrowhark crossed over and crouched down next to the ghost swordsman of her House as he gently prised the mask from the Sleeper’s face.
The features were slack now. They were smeared with blood from nose and mouth, but not otherwise obscured by damage. A bound-back mass of hair had been tucked into the collar, but some strands and wisps had escaped and plastered themselves in red whorls on the forehead and cheeks. That dead, proud, unforgiving face beheld them all until Nonius closed the sightless eyes, and Harrowhark was bewildered; she did not understand.
The blue flames no longer licked at Abigail’s palms and skirts. She kneeled on the hard metal grille, careless of discomfort, and she asked: “Harrow, do you know her?”
The Sleeper had the unmistakable face of the portrait in the shuttle, on the planet she had killed. The woman plastered behind Corona and Judith—the familiar woman with the pitiless eyes—had fought to usurp Harrowhark’s soul.
“Not at all,” she said.
Nonius pushed himself to stand. He wiped the borrowed sword on his thigh, turning the blade this way and that, then presented it to Protesilaus, who was either supporting Dulcie or being supported by her; it wasn’t clear, and it was ridiculous either way.
“’Tis dirtier than it deserves,” he said. “Such a blade would I sooner return with better than blood and my best thanks.”
&nbs
p; Protesilaus said, “I wish that my whole House knew of my privilege. If I lived again, I would advise all the Seventh to travel to Drearburh if they sought instruction in the art. If I had but five minutes of life again, I would spend them praising you. I would speak of nothing but my reverence for you, and the Ninth House, and its nonpareil swordplay.”
“I’d call that a waste of five minutes,” muttered his necromancer, sotto voce. Harrowhark’s cavalier was smirking with barely concealed glee.
“My lady,” Nonius said.
He had turned toward her; he neatly bowed. She bowed back, and said, “I hope that your bones are blessed in the Anastasian, for your service.”
“My bones fell far from home,” said the cavalier, with a faint smile. “Never, I think, will a wanderer happen upon where they now lie, far though he travel. ’Tis blessing enough that I see such a Reverend Daughter and know that my House stands stalwart and dauntless, proud in the face of its foes. But I still don’t know why I’m talking in meter.”
Ortus was saying to Abigail, “Lady, it’s you who should be praised. Your act of necromancy should reverberate through the Nine Houses like—like the dying refrain of a song. I would that I were still alive, so that I could complete my great work and begin the next one afresh—and call it The Pentiad, and perhaps alternate between five-foot and nine-foot verses—a total departure from my first work, but reflective of it—I would make you the poem, Lady Abigail, that you already are.”
“I did ask you to stop flirting with my wife,” said Magnus, and at Ortus’s face, said instantly: “Joke, man! Joke! Do they not have them on the Ninth? That would explain a lot—”
“Ortus,” Abigail said gravely. This was the first time Harrow had ever seen her even slightly disarrayed. Her hair, normally brushed to mirror smoothness, looked as though she had been dragged backward through the oss. She was wet with sweat. She kept rubbing her hands discreetly, and Harrow saw that they were singed. “Ortus, it should not have worked. We had no right to call the soul of Matthias Nonius. Your sword had no viable link to him—we had no thanergetic connection—we had nothing but the manuscript you gave me, in which I took the liberty of correcting a few spellings, I hope you don’t mind.” (Harrowhark was certain Pent had no idea how terribly she had just wounded Ortus’s gratitude to her; looking at the brief, stricken expression that crossed his face, it would perhaps have been kinder to make him eat the book.) “I find myself in the astonishing position of having created a revenant link through—well—sheer passion.”
That revenant turned to Ortus now. Standing together, Ortus towered head and shoulders above him. Harrow expected that same stricken horror to show on her cavalier’s face; but as Ortus looked at the ghost he had spent his whole life worshipping—yet another thing she and he had in common—he flushed deeply.
“I am unworthy,” he said simply.
“Clearly, that cannot be true,” said Matthias Nonius. “If the Fifth speaks aright—if your art was the anchor that rendered me whole here, and gave me a body and blade for the battle—your art, not my strength, was the ultimate source of our victory.”
Harrow looked away. From far off in the facility, there were more sounds: of melting ice, of snapping viscera. She found her layered robes heavy; so were the others, and they shed coats and gloves even as she watched. The air felt lighter. That reeking fog had gone. As she unwound lengths of fabric from around her neck, she found herself drawn back to the dead face of the Sleeper.
The woman had not died tranquil; her features had settled into an expression closer to determination than the peace of the grave. When rigor mortis developed—would it develop, in this parody of a world?—the whole might harden further into despair. The chin was firm; the jaw stubborn in its lines, the nasofrontal angle of the nose barely present, with flared nostrils like a large cat’s. It was the jaw, and something about the eyes and brows, that kept distracting Harrow.
Something grey protruded from beneath a flap of the orange collar, against the dead skin of the Sleeper’s throat. She crouched down and used one finger to hook it. It was a loop of thin chain. She tugged, carefully, and the rest emerged: plain metal links, unadorned except for a flat steel tag about the length of her thumb. She turned the tag over. The other side had been neatly etched with a single word:
AWAKE.
“Reverend Daughter,” Nonius said courteously.
She stood and turned back to him. The long-dead ghost of her House still looked a mess; he had returned his rapier and dagger to their respective sheaths, but his face and throat were ghastly with drying blood streaked here and there with sweat. His dark eyes were bloodshot, his hair was matted, and his split lip was swelling up. He left sticky red footprints wherever he walked.
He said, “Does aught of the foe yet remain? Are there enemies still who would hasten to harm you?”
“If there are, I don’t know about them,” she said. “Pent, can you sense anything left of the invasive presence?”
“Your soul is your own again, but the ghost will still, I suspect, have a corporeal foothold on the other side. Defeating it here will not have destroyed it there. The only sure way to banish a revenant is to destroy the physical anchor it inhabits before it can escape the shell. Inanimate objects can be destroyed; corpses too, if you remove the brain. But, Harrow, we have other problems on our hands,” said Abigail.
The sounds of the flesh strings hitting the floor had resolved into background noise. But now, Canaan House rumbled again: not with any great ferociousness, but with a sort of timid, rattling unease, as though more of its facade was falling away. A sheet of dust fell from the ceiling, glittering softly in the white lights that winked off and on. The others looked up at the tumbling dust with varying shades of alarm, except for Abigail, who looked grimly expectant.
“Everyone, listen. We don’t have much time. The bubble is deforming,” she said swiftly. “After multiple separate evolutions there are too many places where it doesn’t agree with itself.”
Magnus said, “Another rearrangement? Will it cause a new scenario?”
“No,” said his wife. “The memories have squared themselves away, and the intruder is gone. There is no more grit for the clam to worry into a pearl. And depending on what’s happening outside with— All those external factors are driving the bubble to its natural end. We ghosts must head back to the River, or risk getting absorbed or expelled by Harrow’s soul.”
Another low rumble from somewhere else. The far-off, musical crash of some wall or partition slowly crumbling in on itself, a great particle mass sliding to a heap.
Nonius said instantly: “If I have discharged my duty to you and my House, I am bound by another; a debt from of old that I would repay, if I can. May I leave these halls with your blessing, my lady?”
Ortus said intently: “A debt?”
“A dread beast haunts this course of the River, a king among monsters,” he said. “A rival and ally is fighting against it, alone, and I grudge him the glory of such an impossible combat. Free me to aid him.”
A terrible conviction seized Harrowhark’s heart. She had been here for what seemed like such a long time that she had put to one side the pressing issues of now: the reality that was out there still, and the fact that she was still alive, despite her last coherent moments. A king among monsters in the River. And, perhaps worse, the realisation that she had lost a cherished and decade-long fight.
“You mean a Lyctor,” said Harrow. “You actually fought a Lyctor.”
“The third of the saints who serve as the Hands of the Emperor Undying,” he confirmed. And then, in case she’d missed the point, “The saint who is titled for duty.”
“Why is he fighting alone?” she demanded. A rising panic, strangely detached, was moving up the base of her spine. “Where are Augustine and Mercy? Where’s Ianthe?”
“I do not know these names. Even his own is beyond me. We met long ago, and I fought him,” said Nonius. She very specifically did not look at Ortus.
He was being good enough not to say anything; but if he looked at her with anything close to smugness, she was going to kick his ankle.
Another rumble from above, sounding much more insistent. Harrow said, “But you’re half-dead already—the Resurrection Beast terrifies ghosts—”
“I am not half-dead,” he said. “I am dead, nothing more; but I am not afraid. This fight has sharpened my edge and awoken my senses. I am, if you like, warmed up—which in context, I realise, is not the best word choice.”
Ortus said, “I will go with you,” and instantly, Protesilaus said: “So will I.”
“Ortus,” said Harrowhark, “no. You have no idea what you’re speaking of. The Beast in the River is the soul of a dead planet, come to destroy the Emperor. If there’s only one Lyctor standing against it—he’s dead, Nigenad.”
She could not have said anything worse. His eyes shone as he said, “I have lived so much of my life in fear, my Lady Harrowhark. I will not waste my death in it. I now find that I am no longer afraid of anything … of death … of laws … of monsters. I will advance before I can change my mind and become, again, a coward. Even if I cannot do anything more than watch, let me go.” In the face of her stupefaction, he added gently: “What else is there for me, Harrow?”
And she knew that it was useless to hold him. Fearful, Ortus had proved enormously stubborn; it was inevitable that he would be even worse in bravery. She did not know what to say. Should she thank him? Thank him now? Cordially request he not go and waste his ghostly adrenaline on a creature he could not hope to understand?
But Pent, more tactfully, was already speaking: “I genuinely believe the River can be crossed, Nigenad. Come with me and Magnus. We could use your help in finding Jeannemary and Isaac…”
“If there is a way through, you will undoubtedly find it,” he said calmly. “I am relieved that, in my unworthy death, I was able to meet you. I will still write The Pentiad. It may just have to be a shorter poem … very short, if what Harrow says is right. My heart is set to go with the hero of my own House and the hero of the Seventh.”