Tamsyn Muir: Gideon the Ninth

Ianthe ran her free hand over the blood trickling down Cytherea’s hip. She flicked hot drops over her shoulder, where they hung in the air, sizzling. They ran together like quicksilver—spread out, widened and flattened into a shimmering, transparent pink sheet. Ianthe narrowed her watercolour eyes and pointed her free hand upward. The sheet tightened, a wide, watery disc of blood, separating the two Lyctors from the construct.

A barbed bone stinger drove straight at Ianthe’s head, hit the shimmering disc, and dissolved. Gideon bodychecked her way clear, hauling herself to a corner of the room as far away from the construct as possible. She wasn’t thrilled about approaching the embracing Lyctors, but if she played her cards right, she could still get Harrowhark and Camilla out of here. Another stinger, then another, hurtled into the blood disc and evaporated. Despite herself, she turned to watch: the construct stiffened a dozen of its tendrils, two dozen, aiming them like javelins at Ianthe’s tiny form, and Gideon remembered Isaac Tettares, impaled on fifty spines at once.

As Gideon passed it, Ianthe’s blood pool spun even wider, an aegis, a shield. The construct struck from its stuck position, with its whole gathered array of swift spears, enough of them to reduce Ianthe to a double handful of chopped meat. Every single one went up in a cloud of bad-smelling steam.

The remaining stumps drew back in confusion. The construct swayed, and bones dropped free from its superstructure here and there, rattling down to join the general debris around its trapped legs. There was suddenly a lot more space; injured as well as pinned, the construct seemed to be drawing back on itself, pulling in its remaining limbs as if trying to keep them away from Ianthe.

Gideon snuck past the foot of the dais in time to see Cytherea smile. “I’ve always wanted a little sister,” she said.

She walked away from Ianthe’s sword with a bad, liquid sound. Camilla was still wriggling in place, trying to tug herself free of the spike in her shoulder, and Cytherea stepped on her, treading on her collarbone as thoughtlessly as on a ridge in the carpet. Once she was a couple of paces clear, she turned and fell into a beautiful fluid ready stance. She kept running her fingers over the blood at her abdomen, apparently amazed by her capacity to bleed. Gideon wished she was less interested and more dying, but you had to take victories where you could get them.

The other, much newer Lyctor raised Naberius’s sword, kicking bones away for footing.

“I’ve tried the sister thing already,” said Ianthe, circling around to one side, “and I wasn’t any good at it.”

“But I have so much to teach you,” said Cytherea.

They both charged. Once upon a time it would have been pretty cool to watch the perfect showman’s sword of the Third House compete against an ancient and undiluted warrior of the Seventh, but Gideon was crouching down next to Camilla and trying to gauge whether or not her own kneecap was trying to slide off somewhere weird. She had laid down the unconscious Harrowhark behind a pillar on a pile of the softest-looking bones, with her longsword for company, and was wishing fervently that her necromancer was awake. She grabbed Camilla’s shoulder in one hand and the slick bone spur in the other, said, “Sorry,” and pulled.

Camilla screamed. Gideon flung the bloodied spike away, got her arms under Camilla’s armpits, and pulled. Camilla bit her tongue so hard that blood squirted out her mouth, but Gideon heartlessly dragged her away from the ongoing brawl and into cover next to Harrowhark.

Gideon started to look her over to see if her intestines were fountaining out, or something, but Camilla grabbed her sleeve. Gideon looked down into her solemn, obstinate face, and Camilla said—

“He say anything?”

Gideon wavered. “He said to tell you he loved you,” she said.

“What? No, he didn’t.”

“Okay, no, sorry. He said—he said you knew what to do?”

“I do,” said Camilla with grim satisfaction, and laid herself back down among the bones.

Gideon looked back at the fight. It was not like watching Ianthe and Silas go at it. Ianthe had wiped the floor with Silas while simultaneously skirmishing with Naberius’s soul. A fight between two Lyctors was a swordfight on a scale beyond mortal. They moved almost faster than the eye could see, each clash of their swords sending great shockwaves of ash and smoke and aerosolized bone billowing outward.

The spacious atrium of Canaan House had been built to last, but not through this. The floor splintered and bowed dangerously wherever the construct had dragged itself—the tentacles dug through the floorboards, burrowed out again in showers of rotten timber and bone—and as Ianthe and Cytherea fought, parts of the room exploded at their passing, ancient beams and pillars giving up with screams of falling rock and wood. Brackish water from the fountain had spattered the floor and trickled into the cracks—

Cracks. Shit. The floor was cracking. Everything was cracking. Huge fissures separated Gideon from the doors. Ianthe—a lock of her colourless hair in her mouth, chewing furiously—raised her hand, and a gushing column of black arterial blood burst upward, lifting Cytherea twenty feet into the air and dropping her. She hit the ground awkwardly, and as she staggered to her feet again Ianthe stepped up, hand sparking and flickering with harsh white light, and hit her with a tremendous right hook.

The punch would have spun Marshal Crux’s scabrous, plate-clad bulk around three times like a top and left him on the floor seeing little skeletal birdies. It knocked Cytherea clean through the wall. The wall was already feeling pretty sorry for itself, and at this last insult it gave up entirely and collapsed, with a terrific rumble and crash of rock and brick and bursting glass slumping outward onto the garden terrace. Daylight flooded through, and the smell of hot concrete and wood mould filled the air. The potholed floor groaned as if threatening to follow suit. Camilla, who had guts of steel and the pain tolerance of a brick, wobbled to stand; Gideon wove her arm beneath Camilla’s sword arm before the Sixth cavalier could protest, retrieved the bird-bone bundle of her necromancer, and staggered outside as fast as this crippled procession could manage. There was simply nowhere else to go.

The salt wind from the sea blew hot and hard through holes in the glass that sheltered the expanse where mouldering plants continued to dry out on their great trellises. Insensitive to the situation, Dominicus shone down on them, cradled in the unreal cerulean of the First’s sky. Gideon laid Harrowhark down in the shadow of a broken-ass wall that seemed as though it wouldn’t crumple down and squash her yet. Camilla slumped next to her, swords crossed over her knees. At least this place had significantly fewer bones.

Ianthe strode down a low flight of stairs, sword in hand, hair rippling white-yellow in the breeze. Dead leaves and plant matter drifted down around her, disturbed by the crumbling wall. Cytherea was picking herself up off the flagstones where she’d been hurled, and as Ianthe lunged at her again it was obvious she was on the defensive. She was not as quick as Ianthe; she was not as reactive. She would still have speared Gideon through in the first ten seconds of a fair fight, but against another Lyctor, things seemed to be going wrong. Ianthe grew more vicious with each hit. As Cytherea’s blood flew into the air, she was freezing it in place, manipulating it, stitching long red lines through the space around and between them. Every time Cytherea got hurt—and she was getting hurt now, bleeding like a normal person, with none of her earlier invulnerability—the web of blood grew in size and complexity, until it looked like she was duelling in a cage of taut red string.