Gideon fell to her knees in the atrium, before the dried-up fountain with its dried-up skeleton and his soggy towels. She put her forehead to the lip of the fountain’s marble and pressed a dent into herself, still listening to the muffled sounds of destruction behind her. She pressed as though sheer surface contact alone would allow her to get off the ride. How long she did that for—how hard she pressed, and how long she huddled—she did not know. Her mouth was tight with wanting to cry, but her eyes were dry as salt.
Years later—lifetimes later—there was movement at the entrance of the atrium she had flung herself through. Gideon turned her head.
White steam poured from the hole. Within the steam stood a woman: her fawn-coloured curls sadly sizzled to nothing, her deep blue eyes like electromagnetic radiation. Huge wounds exposed her bones and the bright pink meat inside her arms and her neck and her legs, and those wounds were sewing themselves up even as Gideon watched. She had wrapped herself in the bloodied white sheet that had covered her sickbed, and she was standing upright as though it was the easiest thing in the world. Her face was old—lineless and old, older than the rot of the whole of Canaan.
The woman Gideon had kind of had the hots for held a gleaming rapier. She was barefoot. She leaned in the smoking doorway and turned away, and she began to cough: she spasmed, retched, clung to the frame for support. With a great asphyxiating bellow, she vomited what looked like most of a lung—studded all over with malformed bronchi, with wobbling purple barbs and whole fingernails—onto the ground in front of them. It went splat.
She groaned, closed those terrible blue eyes and pushed herself to stand. Blood dripped down her chin. She opened her eyes again.
“My name is Cytherea the First,” she said. “Lyctor of the Great Resurrection, the seventh saint to serve the King Undying. I am a necromancer and I am a cavalier. I am the vengeance of the ten billion. I have come back home to kill the Emperor and burn his Houses. And Gideon the Ninth…”
She walked toward Gideon, and she raised her sword. She smiled.
“This begins with you.”
Chapter 36
Camilla hit the advancing Lyctor like the wrath of the Emperor.
She crashed into her from the side, her two knives flashing like signal lamps in the sunlit hall. Dulcinea—Cytherea—staggered, flung up a parry, gave ground. She needed distance to bring her rapier to bear, but Camilla denied it to her; every step she fell back, the cavalier pushed forward, attacking so fast and with such ferocity Gideon could hardly see the individual strikes. For a second or two she thought Cytherea was meeting the blows with a bare hand, until she saw that a shank of bone had sprouted from the backs of her knuckles.
Camilla Hect off the leash was like light moving across water. She punched her knives into the Lyctor’s guard over and over and over. Cytherea met them ably, but such was Camilla’s speed and perfect hate that she could only hope to block the thunderstorm of blows; she could not even begin to push back against them.
This gave Gideon time to stand, to ready her sword and slide her gauntlet home, biting the straps tight with her teeth. It was a relief to know she would never have to tell Camilla that her necromancer had died. She was already fighting as though her heart had exploded.
“Stop it,” said Cytherea. Camilla did not hear her. She drove past the Lyctor’s guard and found her blade trapped in a thicket of spines that had evolved from the offhand spur of bone. The spines, flexing like snakes, began to curl over the guard, past her hand, onto her wrist.
Scarcely missing a beat, she stepped in and headbutted Cytherea in the face. The Lyctor’s head snapped back, but no blood showed. She laughed, thickly, hoarse. Camilla’s body jerked, still pinned by the tangle of bones around her hand. Her other knife fell from slack fingers to clatter on the floor. Her skin seemed to ripple and take on a greyish tinge. She began to wither.
As Gideon sized up the best angle to join the fray, a bleached, skeletal hand emerged from behind Cytherea and grabbed her face. Another hand gripped her sword-arm at the wrist. Over Gideon’s shoulder, the skeleton in the fountain began to stir. Harrowhark stood at the top of the stairs, hands full of white particles, her skull-painted face as hard and merciless as morning: she flung them out before her like she was sowing a field. From each grain of bone a perfectly formed skeleton arose, a huge angular mass jostling and crowding on the stairs, and they poured out in single formation to rush the Lyctor one by one. She went under in a sea of bone.
Camilla hauled herself away from the rushing, grinding ocean of Harrow’s mindless dead, clutching her knives more firmly in her recovering hands—the muscles in her arms were visibly springing back into shape. Gideon advanced, heart in her throat, moving to take Camilla’s place.
“Leave it!” barked her necromancer. “Nav! Here!”
Six more skeletons sprang to her call. They were unstrapping something from Harrow’s back—it was Gideon’s longsword, shining and heavy and sharp. She unbuckled her scabbard and let the black rapier fall—shook her gauntlet off next to it, and gave them both a private prayer of thanksgiving for services rendered—and she caught her sword by the hilt as it fell toward her. She wrapped her hands around its grip and hefted its old familiar weight.
The squirming pile of skeletons exploded outward, and so did the floor. Bricks and tiles and splinters of wood scythed across the atrium like shrapnel. Gideon threw herself behind the fountain, Camilla dived behind an old sofa and Harrow wrapped herself in a hard white cocoon. Skeletons tumbled through the air like morbid rag dolls, bone shrapnel pinging off every surface. Cytherea the First emerged from the clusterfuck, coughing into the back of her hand, looking rumpled but entirely whole.
From the hole emerged one long, overjointed leg, then another. And another. A fretwork of bones, a net, a lace of them—long stingers of teeth, a nesting body, a construct so big that it turned one’s bowels into an icebox. The hulking construct that had killed Isaac Tettares filled the room behind its mistress, stretching itself out and expanding, pulverising a wall and a staircase as it emerged. Its great bone head lolled and loomed above them, masklike, with its hideous moulded lips and squinted-shut eyes.
But now this benighted vision stood before its natural predator, the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House. As yet more skeletons jerked and clambered upward from their fallen comrades, Gideon got up, dusted herself off, and found Harrow standing in a pool of osseous dust and facing the construct with a hot-eyed, half-delighted anticipation. Without even thinking about it, her body moved to take her rightful place: in front of her necromancer, sword held ready.
“This is the thing that killed Isaac,” said Gideon urgently. The enormous construct was still trying to wriggle one leg free from the floor, which would have been funny if it hadn’t been so terrible.
“Sextus—?”
“Dead.”
Harrow’s mouth briefly ruckled. “A necromancer alone can’t bring that down, Griddle. That’s regenerating bone.”
“I’m not running, Harrow!”
“Of course we’re not running,” said Harrowhark disdainfully. “I said a necromancer alone. I have you. We bring hell.”