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 turned 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—”