Harrow worked each finger gently within its socket, and said, this time more brightly: “So, Griddle, this is where you are to be my shining star. You’re going out there to be my eyes.”
“What?”
“My skeletons don’t have photoreceptors, Nav,” the necromancer said calmly. “I know they’re being destroyed with blunt force. I have no idea what by, and I need to keep my hand on the thanergetic lock. You have perfectly functional eye jelly; you have a dubious but capable brain; you’re going to stand out there and look through the window. Got it?”
There was nothing objectionable to this role, which was why Gideon was automatically suspicious of it. But she said, “As you wish, my lamentable queen,” and ducked out the Imaging door. Her adept followed close behind her, rummaging in her pockets. She brought out a whole knuckle, which was telling. Harrow threw it down and, with an awful grinding sound, it sprang into a burly skeleton: she flicked her wrist at it impatiently and it lumbered toward Response, standing, waiting. Then Harrow ducked back inside Imaging.
This is dumb, thought Gideon. The Imaging door wheezed shut, presumably as Harrow placed her hand upon the pedestal, and the Response door ground open: the skeleton stepped forward, bone feet crunching on a carpet of other bones. As it stepped through, the door plunged shut behind it, and the little light next to Occupied turned red.
Whatever happened next happened pretty goddamn fast. The lights in Response flared as the vents started choking out cloudy puffs, obscuring the far walclass="underline" she pressed herself so close to the glass that her breath made it misty and wet. There was no sound from within, and there should have been (it must have all been soundproofed) which simply made it all the more absurd when something enormous and misshapen came raging out of the fog.
It was a bone construct, she could tell that much. Grey tendons strapped a dozen weirdly malformed humeri to horribly abbreviated forearms. The rib cage was banded straps of thick, knobbly bone, spurred all around with sharp points, the skull—was it a skull?—a huge knobble of brainpan. Two great green lights foamed within the darkness there, like eyes. It had way too many legs and a spine like a load-bearing pillar, and it had to crouch forward on two of its heavyset arms, fledged all over with tibial spines. The exterior arms were thrust back high, and she could see now that they did not have hands: just long slender blades, each formed from a sharpened radius, held at the ready like a scorpion’s tail. It rampaged forward; Harrow’s skeleton patiently waited; the construct fell on it like a hot meal, and it disintegrated under the second blow.
The construct turned its awful head toward the window, fixed its burning green gaze on Gideon, and got very still. It lumbered toward her, gaining speed, when the red light for Occupied turned green: there was a low and doleful parp from some klaxon, and then the construct dissolved. It became soup, not bones, and it moved as though sucked into some small grating toward the centre of the room. It was totally gone, along with all the fog, when Imaging sprang open and Harrow found her cavalier with her jaw dropped open.
It took a few moments of explanation. Harrow cross-questioned the measurements and looked disgusted with all her answers. Before Gideon had finished, Harrow was pacing back and forth, robes swishing around her ankles like black foam.
“Why can’t I see it?” she raged. “Is it testing the skeleton’s autonomy, or is it testing my control? How much multidexterity does it want?”
“Put me in there,” said Gideon.
That brought Harrow up short, and her eyebrows shot to the top of her hairline. She fretted at the veil around her neck, and she said slowly: “Why?”
Gideon knew at this point that some really intelligent answer was the way to go; something that would have impressed the Reverend Daughter with her mechanical insight and cunning. A necromantic answer, with some shadowy magical interpretation of what she had just seen. But her brain had only seen the one thing, and her palms were damp with the sweat that came when you were both scared and dying of anticipation. So she said, “The arms kind of looked like swords. I want to fight it.”
“You want to fight it.”
“Yep.”
“Because it looked … a little like swords.”
“Yop.”
Harrow massaged her temples with one hand and said, “I’m not yet so desperate for a new cavalier that I’m willing to recycle you. No. I’ll send in three this time, and you’re to tell me how it handles that—exactly how it responds; I’m not yet convinced that this isn’t testing my multidexterity…”
The next time she sent a skeleton in, it was clutching a crinkly bundle of phalanges in each bony fist. Gideon watched dutifully as the light turned green, and as Harrow sightlessly raised two identical skeletons next to her first. They were models of their kind: beautifully made, built to spec, animated and responsive. Harrow’s skeletons looked almost like First House servants now. When the construct flailed out of the mist, they moved with admirable poise and fluency, and got demolished in three moves. The last skeleton ran around in a sad little sprint before the monstrous construct raised one bladed arm and shattered it from sacrum to shoulder.
The second time Harrow emerged to get the blow-by-blow, one nostril was bleeding. The third time, both nostrils. The fifth time—the floor of Response carpeted with the remains of twenty skeletons—she was wiping blood off her eyelashes and her shoulders were drooping. She had listened to each playback with numb, blank-eyed thoughtfulness, too distracted even to needle Gideon, but this time she balled her hands into fists and pressed them into her skull.
“My mother and my father and my grandmother together could not do what I do,” she said softly, not speaking to Gideon. “My mother and my father and my grandmother together … and I’ve advanced so far beyond them. One construct or fifty—and it simply slows it down … for all of half an hour.”
She shook away frustration like an animal with a wet pelt, shivering all over before fixing dead black eyes on Gideon. “Right,” she said. “Right. Again. Keep watching, Nav.”
She staggered back, door whipping shut behind her. Gideon Nav could only put up with so much. She took off her robe, folded it up, and put it on a hook in the foyer. She stood next to a skeleton whose arms were so full with bits of bone and lengths of tibia that it trailed chips like breadcrumbs. It was easy enough to stand beside it politely until the door opened, then to trip it up, then to step over it. She unsheathed her rapier with a silver whisper, slipping the knuckles of her left hand through the obsidian bands. The Response door breathed shut behind her.
“Harrow,” she said, “if you wanted a cavalier you could replace with skeletons, you should’ve kept Ortus.”
From whining speakers set in each corner, Harrow cried out. It wasn’t a noise of annoyance, or even really a noise of surprise—it was more like pain; Gideon found her legs buckling a little bit and she had to stagger, shift herself upright, shake her head to clear the brief bout of dizziness away. She held her rapier in a perfect line and waited.
“What?” The necromancer sounded dazed, almost. “What, seriously?”
The vents breathed out huge sighs of fog. Now that she was in the room, Gideon could see that they were blasting moisture and liquid into the air, stale-smelling stuff; from within this cloud the construct was rising—leg to horrifying leg, to broad plates of pelvis, to thick trunk of spine—to the green motes of light that swung around, searching, settling on Gideon. Her stance shifted. From Imaging Harrow grunted explosively, which nearly got her cavalier knocked ass-over-tits.