by Tamsyn Muir
She rested one delicate foot on Ianthe’s wrist, and Gideon rose to her feet. The sharp shank of bone extended from her knuckles, a long butcher’s blade with a wicked heft. Cytherea sliced down. Bright red blood sprayed in the sunshine as Ianthe’s right arm came off just above the elbow. Ianthe, too weak even to scream, made a keening sound.
By this point Gideon had already lurched forward two steps and regretted it. Her kneecap was absolutely not where it should have been. She tottered to the side, letting her sword drop one-handed, pressing her other over the knee and cursing the day she had been born with kneecaps. Cytherea was shifting to the other side, the other limb, judging the distance with her bloody spar—
“Duck,” called Camilla.
Camilla had somehow propped herself on the arm with the mangled shoulder wound, which was in no condition for propping. Her good arm was up behind her head, holding the blade of her knife. Gideon ducked. The knife whistled over the top of Gideon’s head in a flashing blur and buried itself in Cytherea’s upper back.
This time Cytherea screamed. She went stumbling away from Ianthe’s prone form, and Gideon saw what Camilla had been aiming at: a lump, a delicate swollen mass, right next to Cytherea’s shoulder blade. It bulged out only slightly, but once you saw it, it was impossible to unsee—especially with a long knife buried squarely in its centre. Cytherea fumbled one hand over her shoulder, bone appendage drifting into dust, groping for the knife. She found it—she pulled it out, drawing a spurt of appalling black-and-yellow liquid from the wound.
The Lyctor turned her head and coughed miserably into the crook of her elbow. Then she looked at the knife, wondering at it. She turned her head to look at Camilla and Harrow and Gideon. She sighed pensively and ran one hand through her curls again.
“Oh no,” she said, “heroics.”
She dropped the knife, fell gracefully to one knee beside Ianthe, and lifted a limp arm—the one that was still connected to her body—in a cruel mockery of hand holding. Gideon thought for a bad second she was going to pull the limb clean off, and wondered how far she could throw a longsword—except no, her longsword was never going to leave her hands again, thank you—but Cytherea was just siphoning. There was the deep-gut lurch as energy drained from the younger Lyctor to the older, knitting the gross knife wound back up again.
“An inadequate Lyctor,” said Cytherea, as though giving Gideon and Camilla a hot tip on stain removal, “still makes a perfect power source … an everlasting battery.”
She stood back up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Then she began walking toward Gideon: calm, almost insolent in her lack of aggression. This was somehow much scarier than if she’d stalked forward with a hateful glare and a rill of mad laughter.
Gideon planted herself before Camilla and the unconscious body of her adept and held her sword aloft. They were alone in a back area of the courtyard: a little area not yet buried in rubble or tilled up by the titanic fight between two immortal sorcerers. Dead trees bowed overhead. Gideon stood behind the iron fence that had once protected some herbaceous border, as though its bent, bowed spikes would be good for anything other than throwing herself down on as one last fuck-you salute.
Camilla was huddled in a corner, now standing upright—that was probably her own last fuck-you salute—but her wounded arm hung uselessly. She had lost a lot of blood. Her face was now pallid olive.
“Ninth,” said the Sixth impatiently. “Get out of here. Take your necromancer. Go.”
“Hell no,” said Gideon. “It’s time for round two.” She considered that. “Wait. Is this round three now? I keep losing count.”
Cytherea the First was brushing bloodstains off her makeshift dress, the blood leeching into her fingers as though it obeyed the merest touch of her fingertips. She vaulted daintily into their part of the courtyard and smiled Dulcinea’s smile at Gideon: dimpling, bright-eyed, as though they both knew something extra nice that nobody else did.
“There’s that two-hander,” she said admiringly.
“Want a closer look?” said Gideon.
The Lyctor arched her free hand languorously behind her back; she slid into position, weighting herself on her back foot, the sword in her hand luminous—tinted green like still water, or pearls. “You know you can’t do this, Gideon of the Ninth,” she said. “You’re very brave—a bit like another Gideon I used to know. But you’re prettier in the eyes.”
“I may be from the Ninth House,” said Gideon, “but if you say any more cryptic shit at me, you’re going to see how well you can regenerate when you’re in eighteen pieces.”
“Cry mercy,” said Cytherea. The dimple was still there. “Please. You don’t even know what you are to me … You’re not going to die here, Gideon. And if you ask me to let you live you might not have to die at all. I’ve spared you before.”
Something ignited deep in her rib cage.
“Jeannemary Chatur didn’t ask for mercy. Magnus didn’t ask for mercy. Or Isaac. Or Abigail. I bet you Palamedes never even considered asking for mercy.”
“Of course he didn’t,” said the Lyctor. “He was too busy detonating.”
Gideon the Ninth charged. Cytherea went straight for her heart, no foreplay, but this was a Gideon who had trained with a double-handed sword since before she could even hold the damn thing. This was a Gideon who had lived her entire life behind the hilt of a two-hander. No more playing around with dodging and ducking and moving away—it was her, her sword, and all of the power and strength and speed that Aiglamene had been able to realise in her.
She met Cytherea’s water-smooth thrust to her heart with an upward cut that flung the Lyctor’s rapier’s point skyward, and ought to have knocked it clean out of her hand. She stopped thinking about the pain in her knee and went back to being the Gideon Nav who never left Drearburh, who fought like it was her only ticket off-world. The Lyctor danced out and in again, close quarters, trying to slide her sword under and around Gideon’s own. Gideon knocked the thing to the ground, the rapier scraping the flagstones with an awful screech. Cytherea retreated, prettily, and Gideon smashed her guard and followed through with a huge, perfect overhand cut.
It ought to have cleaved the Lyctor open from the shoulder to the gut. She’d wanted it to. But the edge of her sword sank into Cytherea’s collarbone and bounced off, like she was trying to cut steel. There was the faintest pink mark on the skin—and then nothing. Her two-hander had failed. Something in Gideon rolled over and gave up.
Cytherea moved in for the kill, her sword flashing like a snake, like a whip, as Gideon moved half a second behind where she needed to be. She saved herself a skewered lung by clumsily blocking with the flat of her sword. The Lyctor’s unholy strength made the longsword shudder on impact, and Gideon’s forearms shuddered with it. Undeterred, Cytherea went for her numbed arm—sank the tip deep into the soft flesh above the bicep, met the bone, splintered something deep in there. Gideon gave ground, sword held in guard, clawing for distance now. The blade was drooping in her hands despite every iota of determination coursing through her body. She tried to conjure up some of the old, cruel caution with which Aiglamene had so often sent her to the mat—watched Cytherea closely, stepped away from a feint, saw an opening—turned herself to iron, and thrust forward, straight to her opponent’s heart.
Cytherea raised her free hand and caught the blade before it carved through her sternum. She had to step back with the force of the blow, but her frail, worn hand wrapped around the breadth of the blade and held it as easily as Naberius’s shitty trick trident knife had her rapier, all those years ago in the training room. Gideon shoved. Her feet slipped for purchase on the ground, her knee screaming. Her arm squirted blood with the effort. Cytherea sighed.
“Oh, you were gorgeous,” said the Lyctor, “a thing apart.”
She batted Gideon’s sword away with her hand. Then she advanced.
“Step off, bitch,” said Harrowhark Nonagesimus, behind her.
Cytherea tu
rned to look. The black-robed, black-hooded figure had stumbled forward, step by staggering step, away from the shelter of the tower wall. She was bookended by skeletons—skeletons too huge to have ever lived inside the greasy meat sock of anyone real. Each was eight feet high with ulnar bones like tree trunks and wicked bone spikes spiralling over their arms.
“I wish the Ninth House would do something that was more interesting than skeletons,” said Cytherea pensively.
One of the monstrous constructs flung itself at Cytherea, like she was a bomb it was ending its life upon. The second came shambling after it. Cytherea contemptuously dashed away one skeleton’s enormous forearm spike—she shattered another with her rapier—and the spike, almost before it had finished crumbling, stretched and pushed itself back into shape. Harrow wasn’t stinting on the perpetual bone, and if she kept it up she was going to be a perpetual corpse.
Gideon rolled away, seized her sword, and crawled. Her pierced arm left a snail’s trail of slippery red behind her. It was only years of training under Aiglamene that gave her the guts to wobble herself upright before her adept, blind with blood, blade leant flat on her good shoulder. Two more dead giants were already knitting themselves together. Harrow couldn’t afford this, she thought dimly; Harrow couldn’t afford this at all.
“You’re learning fast!” said the Lyctor, and she sounded honestly delighted. “But I’m afraid you’ve got a long way to go.”
Cytherea crooked her fingers toward the massive hole torn in the side of the tower. There was a cry from within, followed by an awful cracking, tearing, breaking sound. When the horrible many-legged construct exploded through the hole, it was not as great nor as leggy as it had been before. It had torn itself free from Harrow’s shackles, and in doing so had left most of itself behind. It was a miserable shadow of its previous bulk. Compared to anything normal, though, it was still a horror of waving stumps and tendrils, all lengthening and thickening, regrowing themselves even as she watched. It had been stuck and now it was halved, but it could still regenerate. The huge expressionless face gleamed whitely in the afternoon light—now teetering on a trunk too small for its mask—and broken glass pattered down its sides like drops of water as it crawled out. It sat its broken body on the terrace like a ball of white roots, swaying on two legs, a bitten spider.
It wasn’t fair. Cytherea had been right all along: there was nothing they could do. Even half-destroyed, the bristling tentacles and lappets were raised a hundred strong in the air. It staggered and aimed itself in their direction, and there was nowhere to run, no dodging, no escape.
The Lyctor said: “None of you have learned how to die gracefully … I learned over ten thousand years ago.”
“I’m not done,” said Gideon’s half-dead necromancer.
Harrow closed her hands. The last thing Gideon saw was the debris of her perpetual servants rattling toward them, bouncing through the air and over the flagstones, hardening in a shell over her and Camilla and Harrow as all those tendrils struck them at once. The noise was deafening: WHAM—WHAM—WHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAMWHAM—until it became a single hammer, a metered pounding: WHAM … WHAM … WHAM …
The world vibrated around them. Everything was suddenly very dark. A wavering yellow light flicked on, and Gideon realised that against all odds Camilla had somehow retained her pocket torch.
They were closed in with the bowing iron trellises and the wilting, anciently dead bushes. The sky, the sea, and the rest of the garden were cut off behind a smooth curved shell of what seemed to be solid, uninterrupted bone, like the hemisphere of a propped-up skull. Harrow swayed upright in the gloom as the beast tried to crack them open like a nut and looked at Camilla and Gideon through a face that was mostly blood. Not even blood sweat: just blood. Beneath her skin blood vessels had detonated like mines. It was coming through her pores. She’d figured out how to make perpetual bone, half-destroyed a giant dead spider from hell, and now she’d raised a solid wall six inches thick and was holding it up with sheer nerve.
The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House smiled, tiny and triumphant. Then she keeled into Gideon’s arms.
Gideon stumbled, sick with terror, kneeling them both down to the ground as Harrow lay like a broken rag doll. She forgot her sword, forgot everything as she cradled her used-up adept. She forgot the wrecked ligaments in her sword arm, her messed-up knee, the cups of blood she’d lost, everything but that tiny, smouldering, victorious smile.
“Harrow, come on, I’m here,” she told her, howling to be heard above the thunder of the construct’s assault. “Siphon, damn it.”
“After what happened to the Eighth?” Harrow’s voice was surprisingly strong, considering she appeared to be all black robes and wounds. “Not ever again.”
“You can’t hold this shit forever, Harrow! You couldn’t hold this shit ten minutes ago!”
“I don’t have to hold it forever,” said the necromancer. She contemplatively spat out a clot of blood, rolled her tongue around inside her mouth. “Listen. Take the Sixth, get into a brace position, and I’ll break you through the wall. Bones float. It’s a long drop to the sea—”
“Nope—”
Harrow ignored her. “—but all you have to do is survive the fall. We know that the ships have been called. Get off the planet as soon as you can. I’ll distract her as long as possible: all you have to do is live.”
“Harrow,” said Gideon. “This plan is stupid, and you’re stupid. No.”
The Reverend Daughter reached up to take a fistful of Gideon’s shirt. Her eyes were dark and glassy through the pain and nausea; she smelled like sweat and fear and about nine tonnes of bone. She swabbed at her face again with her sleeve and said: “Griddle, you made me a promise. You agreed to go back to the Ninth. You agreed to do your duty by the Locked Tomb—”
“Don’t do this to me.”
“I owe you your life,” said Harrowhark, “I owe you everything.”
Harrow let go of her shirt and subsided to the floor. Her paint had all come off. She kept choking and sniffling on the thick rivulets of blood coming out her nose. Gideon tilted the wet, dark head so that her necromancer did not die untimely from drowning in her bloodied mucus, and tried desperately to think of a plan.
WHAM. One of the tentacles battered a crack in the shield: daylight streamed in from outside. Harrow looked even worse in the light. Camilla said steadily: “Let me out. I can provide the distraction.”
“Cram it already, Hect,” said Gideon, not looking away from her necromancer, who was painfully serene as even her eyebrows bled. “I’m not getting haunted by Palamedes Sextus’s crappy-ass revenant all telling me doctor facts for the rest of my life, just because I let you get disintegrated.”
“The other plan isn’t going to work,” said Camilla evenly. “If we could hold her off and wait on the shore, yes. But we can’t.”
Harrow sighed, stretched out on the floor.
“Then we hold her off as long as we can,” she said.
The crack knitted itself back together with painful, guttering slowness. Harrow snarled from the effort. They were plunged into darkness again, and the sounds from outside stopped, as though the construct was considering its next move.
Camilla closed her eyes and relaxed. Her long dark fringe fell over her face. It was that—Camilla in motion now Camilla at rest—that made the tiny voice inside Gideon’s head say, amazed: We really are going to die.
Gideon looked down at her necromancer. She had the heavy-lidded expression of someone who was concentrating in the knowledge that when they stopped concentrating, they would fall abruptly asleep. Harrow had gone unconscious once before: Gideon knew that the second time she let Harrow go under, there would probably not be any awakening. Harrow reached up—her hand was trembling—and tapped Gideon on the cheek.
“Nav,” she said, “have you really forgiven me?”
Confirmed. They were all going to eat it.
“Of course I have, you bozo.”
�
��I don’t deserve it.”
“Maybe not,” said Gideon, “but that doesn’t stop me forgiving you. Harrow—”
“Yes?”
“You know I don’t give a damn about the Locked Tomb, right? You know I only care about you,” she said in a brokenhearted rush. She didn’t know what she was trying to say, only that she had to say it now. With a bad, juddering noise, a tentacle had started to pound their splintering shelter again: WHAM. “I’m no good at this duty thing. I’m just me. I can’t do this without you. And I’m not your real cavalier primary, I never could’ve been.”
WHAM. WHAM. WHAM. The crack reopened at this punishment. The sunlight got in, and fragments of bone dissolved in a shower of grey matter. It held, but Gideon didn’t care. The construct wasn’t there: the shelter wasn’t there. Even Camilla, who had turned away to politely investigate something on the opposite wall, wasn’t there. It was just her and Harrow and Harrow’s bitter, high-boned, stupid little face.
Harrow laughed. It was the first time she had ever heard Harrow really laugh. It was a rather weak and tired sound.
“Gideon the Ninth, first flower of my House,” she said hoarsely, “you are the greatest cavalier we have ever produced. You are our triumph. The best of all of us. It has been my privilege to be your necromancer.”
That was enough. Gideon the Ninth stood up so suddenly that she nearly bumped her head on the roof of the bone shield. Her arm complained loudly; she ignored it. She paced back and forth—Harrow watched her with only mild concern—studying the little space they were boxed into. The dead leaves. The cracked flagstones. Camilla—Camilla looked back at her, but she was already moving on. She couldn’t do this to Camilla. The powdery grey drifts of bone. The iron spikes of the railings.
“Yeah, fuck it,” she said. “I’m getting us out of here.”