Tamsyn Muir - Gideon the Ninth

Her adept said: “I’ll keep it off you. Nav, show them what the Ninth House does.”

Gideon lifted her sword. The construct worked itself free of its last confines of masonry and rotten wood and heaved before them, flexing itself like a butterfly.

“We do bones, motherfucker,” she said.

Her arms were whole again. Her most beloved and true companion—her plain two-hander, unadorned and perfect—smashed through tendrils and teeth like a jackhammer drill. Stinging flails of bone met her blade and exploded into grey foam as she stood her ground and pummelled them with great, swinging arcs of good cold Ninth House steel.

With Harrow there, suddenly it was easy, and her horror of the monster turned to the ferocious joy of vengeance. Long years of warfare meant that they each knew exactly where the other would stand—every arc of a sword, every jostling scapula. No hole in the other’s defences went unshielded. They had never fought together before, but they had always fought, and they could work in and around each other without a second’s thought.

Gideon pushed for space. She forced a path, step by careful step, toward the centre of the construct. A tentacle lashed out at her leg; she sliced it open on the downswing and danced away from a stiff whip of molars aimed straight at her heart. Behind her, Harrow took it: it trembled into its component parts, then became a dust of teeth, which settled into a glue that stuck wobbling tendrils together so they broke themselves into pieces trying to smash away. What Harrow did not take, Gideon struck down. She struck at spines with the mad fury and sudden belief that if she just hit and hit and hit—accurately enough and hard enough and well enough—she could rewrite time and save Isaac and Jeannemary; save Abigail, save Magnus.

But the size of the thing defied thought, and every strike created shrapnel. Harrow was doing something, shielding her somehow; the air was a hail of sharp particles that ought to have shredded her skin, and yet none of them seemed to reach her. Even so, the white-out of pinging, ricocheting chips made it hard to see her target. From the corner of her eye, she saw Camilla running through a blizzard of teeth and spines and swinging bone lappets with both knives crossed in front of her chest—then she was gone, lost to view.

Gideon ploughed through a veil of flimsy bone shafts. They were under the bulk of the construct now. Six more skeletons sprang to life and formed a perimeter—these were pillars without legs, thrust through the floor, with the big plated arms and bone-wadded shoulders of the construct in the Response room. They grappled great breadths of the construct’s tendrils to themselves, and in the clearing between their backs Harrow flexed her fingers together. She shook finger bones out of her sleeves and slapped the trembling phalanges between her hands like clay. Gideon was busy shearing off questing tentacles that snaked past the skeleton guard and went for her necromancer, catching only a confused glimpse of the slim rosary of knuckles that Harrow was looping around her arm. Then Harrow flung it upward like a whip, and it punched straight through the monster’s midsection, burying itself somewhere deep.

She barked at Gideon, “Get clear!”

Two of the skeleton-pillars, still hugging tangled bunches of bone, bowed apart to make a path. Gideon pulled her hood down over the exposed skin of her face as she squeezed through the gap and staggered clear, away from the nightmare of splintering fibulae and tibiae. But before she could find her footing, Cytherea the First leapt from her place of ambush.

She was utterly beautiful and entirely terrible: whole, unhurt, untouched by anything that had happened to her. The wounds from Palamedes’s last spell seemed to have vanished as if they’d never been made. It was like she wasn’t even made of flesh. A memory flashed up through the haze of adrenaline: Do I look like I’m in the queendom of my power?

The Lyctor’s rapier thrust whipped out like a fang, like a ribbon. Gideon knocked the stupid fucking thing aside with her two-hander, and turned the momentum into an overhead strike. Cytherea raised her free hand, grabbed the heavy blade, and held it still. A thin trickle of scarlet ran from the base of her thumb down the inside of her skinny wrist. Behind them the construct shook and swayed and thrashed with whatever the hell Harrow was doing to it, and Cytherea’s eyes locked on Gideon’s.

“I meant it,” she said earnestly. “You were wonderful. You would have made that little nun such a cavalier—I almost wish you’d been mine.”

“You couldn’t fucking afford me,” said Gideon.

She stepped away and wrenched her sword upward—pulling Cytherea’s arm up with it—closed the gap in a hurry, and kicked the Lyctor’s legs out beneath her. Cytherea lost her grip and collapsed into the bone-litter strewn across the atrium floor. She coughed and winked at Gideon, and the scattered bones rose up and closed around her like waves, hiding her from sight.

From above came a terrible muffled bellow—a lowing forced through pursed lips. The construct was howling. It tried to surge forward, but the movement kept getting arrested in midjerk, as though pinned to the floor. Its tendrils slapped and drove against the ground, tilling up billowing clouds of wood pulp and carpet fragments. The thing gave a frustrated final push and overbalanced, then came down hard on the floor right where her necromancer had been. There was an agonizing crash as the fountain shattered under its weight. Gideon’s heart was in her throat: but there was the dusty black figure emerging from the wreckage, ropes of teeth wrapped around her wrists where she had jerked the thing to ground, a vanguard of skeletons swatting tendrils away from her.

Gideon fought her way toward her blindly, clipping off strands and trailing chains of bone as she waded her way to Harrowhark. The construct still pursued her, its legs scrabbling to find purchase as the floor buckled and quaked beneath it, sharpened beaks of bone bearing down on her adept. Harrow was forced to split her focus between fending them off and keeping her hands on the reins holding the construct to earth, blood shining on her forehead with the strain. Gideon arrived just in time to plant herself in front of her necromancer and smash a drilling lappet to shards.

“I need to be inside you,” Harrow bellowed over the din.

“Okay, you’re not even trying,” said Gideon.

Her necromancer said: “It’s all I can do to pin it in place, so you need to finish it for me. Breach the legs—I will show you exactly where—and then I can keep it quiet for a while.”

“Seriously? How?”

“You’ll see,” said Harrow grimly. “I apologise, Nav. Get ready to move.”

The construct crooned in its chains. The central rod that Harrow had somehow awled through its trunk was bowing dangerously. Gideon dove back into the affray of joint and gristle with her sword scything before her and, just as in the Response room, felt another presence slide into her mind like a knife into a pool of water. Her vision blurred out and something said in the back of her mind:

On your right. Eye level.

It wasn’t a voice, precisely, but it was Harrowhark. Gideon pivoted right, longsword held high. The first leg of the construct loomed before her, a weighty breadth of impenetrable bone, but the back of her mind told her: Wrong. Inch higher. Pierce.

Gideon rehefted the weight of her sword in her hands, steadied the pommel with the butt of one palm, and thrust it home. The bone was thinner here. Across her softened sight a light fizzed in and out of vision, the exact same corona of light that had happened a thousand years ago—a hundred thousand, a myriad of myriads—inside the first trial chamber. She pulled her sword free and the leg buckled.