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.
Half a dozen tendrils came after her. They would have given her an interesting array of new airholes for speed, but a skeleton staggered out of the darkness and took most of the blows, jawbone crushed into powder as a tendril lashed open its skull. Another skeleton lurched in where its comrade had died—but this one dashed past Gideon, over to the glimmering wound she had carved into the leg, and it thrust its arm into the gash.
Then it melted. Gideon had a few seconds to watch as it sludged into shining silvery-white bone matter. With a little sizzle of evil-smelling steam, it shrouded the wound and the bottom of the leg in a lahar of hot bone gunge.
She tore her gaze away to skid beneath the heaving torso of the beast, narrowly dodging another few desperate tendrils, cutting her way through a damp nest of them as they unfurled and regrew themselves like the coils of a razor-sharp plant. The leg closest to her had found purchase on the floor with its dainty, sharp-capped foot, so much like the leg of an arachnid, and seemed to be in the process of levering the whole thing upright.