by Tamsyn Muir
The back of her head said: It’s above you. Gideon slipped her grip down the handle of her sword, her forearm alarmed with the effort, tip wavering as the leg shifted and hesitated above her. The back of her head said: Now.
This one was harder. She didn’t have as much purchase. Gideon rammed her sword upward, getting a grip on the pommel and shoving into the limb again, as plates of bone splintered overhead and dried flakes of marrow spun down like confetti. The leg tumbled down like a cut tendon.
Yet another skeleton appeared next to her and, as she withdrew the sword, plunged into the shining gap. It too dissolved into the hot, foul muck that slid inside the construct’s body and enrobed the rest of the leg, dripping down into the floor, cooling rapidly. The hard shine of it and the suppressed agony of triumph in the back of Gideon’s head made her eyes water, and she was filled with a weird pride that was all her own. Holy shit. Perpetual bone. Harrow had actually cracked it.
She was too busy admiring her necromancer to catch the thick rope of vertebrae that looped around her waist and cinched tight.
The connection in her mind stuttered and disappeared, then her vision sharpened, rendering everything happening to her in bloody clarity. Before Gideon could say OH MY FUCKING WORD she was plucked off her feet, hoisted upward, and flung bodily into the air.
For one vertigo-inducing moment she was above the battlefield. She sailed past the huge, masklike face of the bone construct, a thick coating of regenerating bone seeping down its legs in rivulets—free-falling, with an aerial view as Camilla danced through the chaos toward the calm and fragile figure of Cytherea the First, who stood watching her approach. Gideon tried to twist in the air—if she could just contrive to hit a window, rather than the wall—
She was caught with a force that jangled her teeth in her mouth. A spindly pillar of skeletal arms had risen up from the maelstrom to stop her in midcareer, a hundred bone fingers scoring bloody ribbons over her back; but she was not splattered against the wall, which was the main thing.
The pillar of arms was destroyed by a long, sweeping blow from one of the construct’s innumerable bone whips, and she fell to earth again, gravity arrested by the hands helpfully piling themselves up to reduce her fall to terrible from obituary. She landed in a pile next to her necromancer, and her knee went crunch.
“I have bested my father,” said Harrow to nobody, staring upward at nothing, alight with fierce and untrammelled triumph. They were both lying supine on a pile of what felt like feet. “I have bested my father and my grandmother—every single necromancer ever taught by my House—every necromancer who has ever touched a skeleton. Did you see me? Did you behold me, Griddle?”
This was all said somewhat thickly, through pink and bloodied teeth, before Harrow smugly passed out.
* * *
The dust was clearing. The construct could not move. It was making low, plaintive grunts as it thrashed in its half coffin of regenerating ash: with its tentacles, it picked and smashed at the bone cocoons on its back legs, but as soon as it broke some off the stuff simply crumbled back into being. Now that it was concentrating so completely on itself, Gideon could find the cavalier of the Sixth.
Camilla, as she’d seen from above, had caught up with Cytherea the First. She had one hand in the Lyctor’s singed curls, dragging her head back. The other hand pressed a knife against the smaller woman’s throat. This would have been a commanding position, except that the knife blade was quivering in place. Its edge creased the pale skin, but it hadn’t drawn blood, even though Camilla seemed to be leaning on it as hard as she could. Whatever terrible force was holding the knife at bay was also slowly peeling the skin from the cavalier of the Sixth’s hand.
“You’re a nice girl,” the Lyctor said. “I had a nice girl as a cavalier too … once. She died for me. What can you do?”
Camilla said nothing. Her face was slick with sweat and blood. Her crop of dark, blunt-cut hair was powdered grey with bone. Cytherea looked faintly amused by the blade that was a finger’s breadth away from being buried in her jugular. She drawled, “Is this meant to kill me?”
“Give me time,” said Camilla, through gritted teeth.
Cytherea gave this due consideration. “I’d rather not,” she said.
Gideon saw, as Camilla could not, the tentacle of bone that wound silently upward from the mess behind the cavalier, tipped with a vicious point the length of a duellist’s dagger. Even if she’d had a pristine knee and no necro to haul, Gideon was too far away to save her. The barb drew back, like a poised stinger, and Gideon yelled, “Cam!”
Perhaps it was the yell; perhaps it was Camilla’s extraordinary instincts. The Sixth cav twisted sideways, and the hook that should have punched through her spine drove into the meat of her shoulder instead. Her eyes went wide with shock, and the knife fell from her half-flayed hand. Cytherea took the opportunity to shove her contemptuously in the chest, and Camilla toppled backward onto the ground, the sharpened bone still buried in her flesh.
Cytherea took up her rapier. In a panic, Gideon began trying to kick her futile way through a jungle of yellow bone, but putting her weight on her bad leg made her stagger and almost drop. Camilla was struggling herself free of the bone skewer, but another tendril had snaked up across her thighs, trapping her against the floor. The Lyctor stood above her with her green sword gleaming in the light.
“You can’t hurt me,” said Cytherea, almost despairingly. “Nothing can hurt me anymore, cavalier.”
The sword glittered. Gideon thrashed through a mesh of bones that her adept could have parted mid-yawn. As the Lyctor drew back her arm for a clean thrust into Camilla’s heart, four inches of bloodied steel emerged from her belly.
Camilla stared up at her as though trying to work out why everything hadn’t gone black. A red stain was spreading across the thin bedsheet. The Lyctor’s face didn’t change, but she turned her head slightly. A pale head was now nearly pillowed on her shoulder, peeking over, as though to make sure the sword had hit home. Colourless fair hair spilled over Cytherea’s collarbone like a waterfall: the figure behind her smiled.
“Spoke too soon, old news,” said Ianthe.
“Oh,” said Cytherea, “oh, my! A baby Lyctor.”
The construct was stuck fast in the trap that Harrowhark had laid for it, and behind them Gideon could hear its central bulk straining to see what had pained its mistress, like a great skull swivelling in its web. It was held fast, but it still had range, and it lifted its spines to even the fight.
Ianthe ran her free hand over the blood trickling down Cytherea’s hip. She flicked hot drops over her shoulder, where they hung in the air, sizzling. They ran together like quicksilver—spread out, widened and flattened into a shimmering, transparent pink sheet. Ianthe narrowed her watercolour eyes and pointed her free hand upward. The sheet tightened, a wide, watery disc of blood, separating the two Lyctors from the construct.
A barbed bone stinger drove straight at Ianthe’s head, hit the shimmering disc, and dissolved. Gideon bodychecked her way clear, hauling herself to a corner of the room as far away from the construct as possible. She wasn’t thrilled about approaching the embracing Lyctors, but if she played her cards right, she could still get Harrowhark and Camilla out of here. Another stinger, then another, hurtled into the blood disc and evaporated. Despite herself, she turned to watch: the construct stiffened a dozen of its tendrils, two dozen, aiming them like javelins at Ianthe’s tiny form, and Gideon remembered Isaac Tettares, impaled on fifty spines at once.
As Gideon passed it, Ianthe’s blood pool spun even wider, an aegis, a shield. The construct struck from its stuck position, with its whole gathered array of swift spears, enough of them to reduce Ianthe to a double handful of chopped meat. Every single one went up in a cloud of bad-smelling steam.
The remaining stumps drew back in confusion. The construct swayed, and bones dropped free from its superstructure here and there, rattling down to join the general debris around its trapped l
egs. There was suddenly a lot more space; injured as well as pinned, the construct seemed to be drawing back on itself, pulling in its remaining limbs as if trying to keep them away from Ianthe.
Gideon snuck past the foot of the dais in time to see Cytherea smile. “I’ve always wanted a little sister,” she said.
She walked away from Ianthe’s sword with a bad, liquid sound. Camilla was still wriggling in place, trying to tug herself free of the spike in her shoulder, and Cytherea stepped on her, treading on her collarbone as thoughtlessly as on a ridge in the carpet. Once she was a couple of paces clear, she turned and fell into a beautiful fluid ready stance. She kept running her fingers over the blood at her abdomen, apparently amazed by her capacity to bleed. Gideon wished she was less interested and more dying, but you had to take victories where you could get them.
The other, much newer Lyctor raised Naberius’s sword, kicking bones away for footing.
“I’ve tried the sister thing already,” said Ianthe, circling around to one side, “and I wasn’t any good at it.”
“But I have so much to teach you,” said Cytherea.
They both charged. Once upon a time it would have been pretty cool to watch the perfect showman’s sword of the Third House compete against an ancient and undiluted warrior of the Seventh, but Gideon was crouching down next to Camilla and trying to gauge whether or not her own kneecap was trying to slide off somewhere weird. She had laid down the unconscious Harrowhark behind a pillar on a pile of the softest-looking bones, with her longsword for company, and was wishing fervently that her necromancer was awake. She grabbed Camilla’s shoulder in one hand and the slick bone spur in the other, said, “Sorry,” and pulled.
Camilla screamed. Gideon flung the bloodied spike away, got her arms under Camilla’s armpits, and pulled. Camilla bit her tongue so hard that blood squirted out her mouth, but Gideon heartlessly dragged her away from the ongoing brawl and into cover next to Harrowhark.
Gideon started to look her over to see if her intestines were fountaining out, or something, but Camilla grabbed her sleeve. Gideon looked down into her solemn, obstinate face, and Camilla said—
“He say anything?”
Gideon wavered. “He said to tell you he loved you,” she said.
“What? No, he didn’t.”
“Okay, no, sorry. He said—he said you knew what to do?”
“I do,” said Camilla with grim satisfaction, and laid herself back down among the bones.
Gideon looked back at the fight. It was not like watching Ianthe and Silas go at it. Ianthe had wiped the floor with Silas while simultaneously skirmishing with Naberius’s soul. A fight between two Lyctors was a swordfight on a scale beyond mortal. They moved almost faster than the eye could see, each clash of their swords sending great shockwaves of ash and smoke and aerosolized bone billowing outward.
The spacious atrium of Canaan House had been built to last, but not through this. The floor splintered and bowed dangerously wherever the construct had dragged itself—the tentacles dug through the floorboards, burrowed out again in showers of rotten timber and bone—and as Ianthe and Cytherea fought, parts of the room exploded at their passing, ancient beams and pillars giving up with screams of falling rock and wood. Brackish water from the fountain had spattered the floor and trickled into the cracks—
Cracks. Shit. The floor was cracking. Everything was cracking. Huge fissures separated Gideon from the doors. Ianthe—a lock of her colourless hair in her mouth, chewing furiously—raised her hand, and a gushing column of black arterial blood burst upward, lifting Cytherea twenty feet into the air and dropping her. She hit the ground awkwardly, and as she staggered to her feet again Ianthe stepped up, hand sparking and flickering with harsh white light, and hit her with a tremendous right hook.
The punch would have spun Marshal Crux’s scabrous, plate-clad bulk around three times like a top and left him on the floor seeing little skeletal birdies. It knocked Cytherea clean through the wall. The wall was already feeling pretty sorry for itself, and at this last insult it gave up entirely and collapsed, with a terrific rumble and crash of rock and brick and bursting glass slumping outward onto the garden terrace. Daylight flooded through, and the smell of hot concrete and wood mould filled the air. The potholed floor groaned as if threatening to follow suit. Camilla, who had guts of steel and the pain tolerance of a brick, wobbled to stand; Gideon wove her arm beneath Camilla’s sword arm before the Sixth cavalier could protest, retrieved the bird-bone bundle of her necromancer, and staggered outside as fast as this crippled procession could manage. There was simply nowhere else to go.
The salt wind from the sea blew hot and hard through holes in the glass that sheltered the expanse where mouldering plants continued to dry out on their great trellises. Insensitive to the situation, Dominicus shone down on them, cradled in the unreal cerulean of the First’s sky. Gideon laid Harrowhark down in the shadow of a broken-ass wall that seemed as though it wouldn’t crumple down and squash her yet. Camilla slumped next to her, swords crossed over her knees. At least this place had significantly fewer bones.
Ianthe strode down a low flight of stairs, sword in hand, hair rippling white-yellow in the breeze. Dead leaves and plant matter drifted down around her, disturbed by the crumbling wall. Cytherea was picking herself up off the flagstones where she’d been hurled, and as Ianthe lunged at her again it was obvious she was on the defensive. She was not as quick as Ianthe; she was not as reactive. She would still have speared Gideon through in the first ten seconds of a fair fight, but against another Lyctor, things seemed to be going wrong. Ianthe grew more vicious with each hit. As Cytherea’s blood flew into the air, she was freezing it in place, manipulating it, stitching long red lines through the space around and between them. Every time Cytherea got hurt—and she was getting hurt now, bleeding like a normal person, with none of her earlier invulnerability—the web of blood grew in size and complexity, until it looked like she was duelling in a cage of taut red string.
Nor was that the worst of it. As Gideon watched, somewhere between horror and fascination, the earlier wounds—the ones Palamedes had inflicted when he blew up the sickroom—began to reopen. Strips of skin along the Lyctor’s arms blackened and curled; a big, messy gouge split down her thigh, independent of Ianthe’s blade. Even the curly hair started to sizzle and crisp back up.
“What the hell?” objected Gideon, more to relieve her feelings than in hope of an answer.
“She hadn’t healed,” said Camilla weakly from beside her. Gideon glanced around; the other cav had dragged herself up into a sitting position against the wall and was watching the fight with grim, professional eyes. Of course, cavaliers from Houses with more than one living necromancer probably saw necromancers duel all the time. “She’d just skinned over the damage—a surface fix, hides the cracks. To really heal, she needs thalergy—life force—and she hasn’t got any to spare.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Gideon. “Sextus gave her turbo cancer.”
Camilla nodded with enormous personal satisfaction. “Well,” she said, “that’ll do it.”
Ianthe’s magic was as efficient and lean as Naberius’s swordsmanship—neat and contemptuous, clean and too perfect, not a beat missed or a second’s hesitation. Cytherea stumbled away from her onslaught, and Ianthe closed the trap. The cage of blood suddenly contracted, tightened, clinging to the older Lyctor like a net. Cytherea stood tangled in it, not even bothering to try to fight free, eyes closed to slits. Her hair was scorched almost down to stubble. She was struggling to breathe. Her shrapnel wounds were gaping red and fresh, and her knees were buckling. The smell of blood and leaves was overpowering.
Ianthe stood before her, panting now herself. She kept shaking her head as though to clear it—kept rubbing her temples fretfully—but she was gleaming and triumphant, sweating, smug. “Tired?” she said.
Cytherea opened her eyes and coughed. “Not particularly,” she said. “But you’re exhausted.”
The filmy r
ed net dissolved to nothing. It didn’t even fall away from her; it seemed almost to be absorbed back through her skin. She straightened up, stepped forward, and grabbed Ianthe’s throat in one fine-boned, delicate hand. Ianthe’s eyes bulged, and her hands flew up to clutch at the other woman’s wrist.
“Just like a child … all your best moves first,” said Cytherea.
Ianthe squirmed. A thread of blood coiled in the air around her, uselessly, and then spattered to the ground. The ancient Lyctor said, “You aren’t completed, are you? I can feel him pushing … he’s not happy. Mine went willingly, and it hurt for centuries. If I’m old news … you’re fresh meat.”
She tightened her grip on Ianthe’s throat, and the dreadful, bone-deep suction of siphoning sent an icy ripple throughout the sheltered terrace. The trees and trellises shook. This was soul siphoning as Gideon had never felt it before. Colourless at the best of times, Ianthe was now as blank and tintless as a sheet. Her eyes rolled back and forth in her head, and then there was no eye to roll: she jerked and squealed, pupils gone, irises gone, as though Cytherea had somehow had the ability to suck them out of her skull.
“No,” cried Ianthe, “no, no, no—”
The great wound in Cytherea’s thigh was starting to weave itself back up: so too were the burn marks all over her arms and her neck. Her charred hair was growing back in—rippling out in pale brown waves from her skull—and she sighed with pleasure as she shook her head.
“Okay,” said Camilla in carefully neutral tones, “now she’s healing.”
The thigh wound closed up, leaving the skin smooth as alabaster. Cytherea dropped Ianthe dismissively to the ground in a crumpled-up heap.
“Now, little sister,” she told the grey-lipped Third princess, “don’t think this means I’m not impressed. You did become a Lyctor … and so you’ll get to live. For a while. But I don’t need your arms and your legs. So—”