Silas slammed his fists on the ground. The air was choked from Ianthe’s lungs. Her mouth and skin puckered and withered: she stopped, awkward, stiff, eyes bulging in surprise. The remnants of blood rose from the floor as pale smoke, trailing heavenward all around them. For a moment everything was blanched clean and luminously white. In the middle of all this stood Ianthe, unnaturally still and bent. Blood dripped calmly out of Silas’s nose and ears in the blood sweat.
Gideon felt Harrow flinch—
Ianthe’s pallid purple irises had returned, and so had the pupils, though perhaps all a little paler than before. She was ageing before their eyes. Her skin sloughed off in papery threads. But she was not staring at Silas, who held her as firmly as though he had her clasped in his hands. She was staring, disbelieving, at Colum the Eighth.
“Well, now you’re fucked,” she announced.
Colum the Eighth’s eyes were as liquid black as, before, Ianthe’s had been liquid white. He had stopped moving as a human being did. The warrior’s economy of movement; the long and lovely lines of someone who had trained with the sword his whole life; the swift-footedness was gone. He now moved like there were six people inside him, and none of those six people had ever been inside a human being before. He sniffed. He craned his head around—and kept craning. With an awful crack, his head turned one hundred and eighty degrees to look impassively at the room behind him.
One of the lightbulbs screamed, exploded, died in a shower of sparks. The air was very cold. Gideon’s breath came as frosty white frills in the sudden darkness, and the remaining lights struggled to pierce the gloom. Colum licked his lips with a grey tongue.
Particles of bone bounced along the floor. Harrowhark had thrown them in a long, overhand arc, and they fell true at Colum’s feet. Spikes erupted from the ground, crowding Colum between them, locking him in tight. Colum raised his white-booted foot indifferently, and kicked through them. They exploded into dusty, tooth-coloured clouds of calcium.
Silas looked up, nearly foetal, from the floor. He still glowed like a pearl in a sunbeam, but he’d lost his focus. Ianthe stepped out of his spell disdainfully, flesh plumping, colour coming back to her face, and she itched herself. There were lights beneath Colum the Eighth’s skin: things pushed and slithered along his muscles as he walked, heavy-footed, rocking from side to side.
Silas wiped the blood away from his nose and mouth and said calmly: “Brother Asht, listen to the words of the head of your House.”
Colum advanced.
“Come back,” said Silas, unruffled. “I bid you return. I bid you return. Colum—I bid you return. I bid you return. I bid you return. I bid. I bid, I bid, I bid— Colum—”
The thing that lived in Colum raised Colum’s sword, and drove the point through Silas Octakiseron’s throat.
Gideon moved. She heard Harrow shout a warning, but she couldn’t help it. She drew her rapier from its scabbard, and she threw herself at the grey thing wearing a person skin. It was not a cavalier: it did not meet the arc of her sword with a parry. It just clouted her with Colum’s shield with a strength no human being ever had. Gideon staggered, very nearly fell, ducked out of the way of a sword gracelessly slammed downward. She took advantage of his movement, got up close, pinned his arm between her body and her sword and shattered his wrist with a meaty crack. The thing opened its mouth and opened its eyes, right up in her face. Its eyeballs were gone—Colum’s eyeballs were gone—and now the sockets were mouths ringed with teeth, with little tongues slithering out of them. The tongue in his original mouth extended out, down, wrapping itself around her neck—
“Enough,” said Ianthe.
She appeared behind the grey-thing-that-had-been-Colum. She took its twisted neck in her hands as calmly and easily as though it were an animal, and she tilted it. The neck snapped. Her fingertips dipped inside the skin; the eye-mouths shrilled, and the tongue around Gideon’s neck flopped away, and both those mouths dissolved into brackish fluid. The body dropped to the floor—
—and it was Colum again, face disfigured, neck on the wrong way, sprawled over the pierced shell of his young dead uncle. There was no solace in that big, beat-up body, clutched around his necromancer’s in morbid imitation of the whole of their lives. Neither of them wore white anymore: they were stained all the way through, yellow, red, pink.
The lights buzzed again dismally. The air cleared. Ianthe was left among the gore looking like a moth, fairylike. She picked up the hem of her skirts delicately and shook them. The blood and muck came off like it was powder.