It was cringing away from Isaac Tettares, who had planted his feet wide in line with his hips and was screaming soundlessly in fear and anger. He had thrown his arms out wide as though in embrace, and there was a sodium explosion in the air between him and the room-cramping construct. It left a suction, like he was trying to drag something out of the unwilling creature. Bright blue points of contact appeared on it, and the mass of bone and energy began to lose form, drifting instead toward Isaac, tiny bones plinking down to the grille like rain.
Gideon woke from her confusion, drew her sword and ran. With a gauntleted hand she picked up the nearest stinger and yanked it, then smashed the back of her heavy glove into another, finding a naked shank of legbone and punching it as hard as she could. One of the tendrils of teeth wrapped around her ankle, but she found purchase and stamped it into a corona of molars. Gideon looked behind her to see Jeannemary whipped off her feet by another tendril, lashing out wildly with her feet and her blades. Everywhere she looked was filled with construct: everywhere Isaac’s light touched there was a veritable cancer of bone and tooth.
Gideon bellowed, voice deadened by a thousand million frigging bones:
“Run! Don’t fight it, RUN—”
But the enormous thing slapped another couple dozen tendrils down on the grille, sinuous, and flexed into long sharp wires. Isaac’s blue-green fire fell upon a giant trunk of bone, a skull terrifically mangled into the thing’s only coherent core: a simulacrum of a face with closed eyes and closed lips, as though locked perpetually in prayer. This vast mask loomed down from the ceiling and strained beneath Isaac’s pull. One of the tendrils gave in and was sucked into the vortex that the Fourth House was so valiantly creating. The spirit pinned to it was dissolving, the limb pattering into individual bits, one among hundreds.
Isaac did not stop and he did not run. It was one of the bravest and stupidest things Gideon had ever fucking seen. The construct teetered, getting its footing, cocking its great head as though in contemplation. The long straight spars of teeth hovered above the necromancer, bobbing and warping occasionally as though about to be sucked into his fiery gyre. Then at least fifty of them speared him through.
Blue fire and blood sprayed the room. Gideon sheathed her sword, set her shoulders, put one arm up above her eyes, and charged through the field like a rocket. It was like running through a landslide. A thousand fragments of bone ripped her robes to shreds and tore at every inch of exposed skin. She didn’t pay them any mind, but crashed into Jeannemary Chatur like the vengeance of the Emperor. Jeannemary had no intention of stopping: she was tearing into her unbeatable foe as though running away had never been in question. She barely seemed to notice that Gideon had grabbed her, her limbs thrashing, her throat one long howl that Gideon only translated later: Fidelity! Fidelity! Fidelity!
How she scrambled through that hallway, the other girl clutched to her bosom, long tendrils of bone snaking after them from the central room, she did not know. The fact that she shinnied up the ladder with Jeannemary attached, kicking and screaming, was even more unlikely. She tossed the cavalier down—she would have been surprised if the girl had even felt it—slammed the hatch lid, and turned the key so frantically that it made gouges in the metal.
Jeannemary rolled over on the cold black tiles, and she threw up. She pulled herself up on her bone-whipped, cut-up, bashed-in arms and legs, wobbling, and she began to shake. She sank back to her knees and screamed like a whistle. Gideon caught her up again—the grief-stricken teenager thrashed and bit—and started off on a jog away from the hatch.
Jeannemary kept kicking in her arms. “Put me down,” she wept. “Let me go back. He needs me. He could still be alive.”
“He’s seriously not,” said Gideon.
Jeannemary the Fourth screamed again. “I want to die,” she said afterward.
“Tough luck.”
She did, at least, stop kicking. The myriad cuts over Gideon’s hands and face were starting to really sting, but she paid them no mind. It was still a deep black night outside and the wind was howling around the side of Canaan House; she carried Jeannemary inside and down the big rotting staircase, and then she absolutely blanked on what to do next. The Fourth House cavalier couldn’t even stand: she was reduced to the small, disbelieving sobs of someone whose heart had broken forever. It was the second time Gideon had listened to Jeannemary really cry, and the second time was a lot worse than the first.
She had to get her to safety. Gideon wanted her longsword and she wanted Harrow. There were the Ninth quarters—but bone wards could be broken, even Harrow’s. She could march straight to where the others were guarding Dulcinea—but that was a long way to go with her catatonic cargo. And if she met an avaricious Naberius, or an overobedient Colum—she’d still prefer them to whatever was down there, in the facility, in the dark. Gideon’s hand was still gripping the key ring with the facility key she had just now so frantically used, and the red key on it—and lightning struck.
Jeannemary did not ask where they were going. Gideon ran down the soggy Canaan House staircase, and across silent nighttime corridors, and down the sloping little passage that led to the foyer for the training rooms. She pushed aside the tapestry and sprinted down the hall to the great black door that Harrow had called X-203. The door and the lock were so black in the night, and she was so slippery with fear, that for an excruciating minute she couldn’t seem to find the keyhole. And then she found it, and slid the red key home, and opened the door to the long-abandoned study.
The rail of spotlights all lit up, illuminating the clean laminate countertops of the laboratory and the still-shining wooden stairs to the living room. She slammed the door shut behind them and locked it so quickly that it ought to have broken the sound barrier. Gideon half-heaved, half-carried Jeannemary up the staircase and put her down on the squashy armchair, which wheezed with the sudden use. The sorrowful teen curled into a foetal position, bleeding and hiccupping. Gideon barrelled away and started taking stock of the room, wondering if she could haul the big wooden bookcases down as barricades.
“Where are we?” the Fourth eventually said, drearily.
“One of the key rooms. We’re safe, here. I’m the only one with a key.”
“What if it breaks down the door?”
Gideon said bracingly, “Are you kidding? That thing’s three-inch-thick iron.”
This neither comforted nor satisfied Jeannemary, who had possibly seen a makeshift blockade in the other girl’s eyes, but her crying diminished—every five seconds another sob would rack her, but she had swapped weeping for hysterical sucked-in breaths. Until she said: “It’s not fair,” and started up again with the great lung-filling fits of tears.
Gideon had moved before the aged gun, frightened into wondering whether or not it worked. Who knew? The swords still all held edges. “No. It’s not.”
“You d-don’t understand.” The cavalier was fighting for control, fierce eyes wet with hate and despair. She was shivering so hard that she was vibrating. “Isaac’s cautious. Not reckless. He’s not—he didn’t— He was always so careful, he shouldn’t have— I hated him when we were little, he wasn’t at all what I wanted—”
She gave in to crying again. When she could, she said, “It’s not fair! Why did he get stupid now?”
There was absolutely nothing Gideon could say to this. She needed more firepower than bookcases and antiques. What she badly needed was Harrow Nonagesimus, for whom a gigantic construction of bones would be more fun opportunity than hellish monstrosity, and she needed her longsword. But she couldn’t leave Jeannemary, and right now Jeannemary was a liability.