The back of her head said: It’s above you. Gideon slipped her grip down the handle of her sword, her forearm alarmed with the effort, tip wavering as the leg shifted and hesitated above her. The back of her head said: Now.
This one was harder. She didn’t have as much purchase. Gideon rammed her sword upward, getting a grip on the pommel and shoving into the limb again, as plates of bone splintered overhead and dried flakes of marrow spun down like confetti. The leg tumbled down like a cut tendon.
Yet another skeleton appeared next to her and, as she withdrew the sword, plunged into the shining gap. It too dissolved into the hot, foul muck that slid inside the construct’s body and enrobed the rest of the leg, dripping down into the floor, cooling rapidly. The hard shine of it and the suppressed agony of triumph in the back of Gideon’s head made her eyes water, and she was filled with a weird pride that was all her own. Holy shit. Perpetual bone. Harrow had actually cracked it.
She was too busy admiring her necromancer to catch the thick rope of vertebrae that looped around her waist and cinched tight.
The connection in her mind stuttered and disappeared, then her vision sharpened, rendering everything happening to her in bloody clarity. Before Gideon could say OH MY FUCKING WORD she was plucked off her feet, hoisted upward, and flung bodily into the air.
For one vertigo-inducing moment she was above the battlefield. She sailed past the huge, masklike face of the bone construct, a thick coating of regenerating bone seeping down its legs in rivulets—free-falling, with an aerial view as Camilla danced through the chaos toward the calm and fragile figure of Cytherea the First, who stood watching her approach. Gideon tried to twist in the air—if she could just contrive to hit a window, rather than the wall—
She was caught with a force that jangled her teeth in her mouth. A spindly pillar of skeletal arms had risen up from the maelstrom to stop her in midcareer, a hundred bone fingers scoring bloody ribbons over her back; but she was not splattered against the wall, which was the main thing.
The pillar of arms was destroyed by a long, sweeping blow from one of the construct’s innumerable bone whips, and she fell to earth again, gravity arrested by the hands helpfully piling themselves up to reduce her fall to terrible from obituary. She landed in a pile next to her necromancer, and her knee went crunch.
“I have bested my father,” said Harrow to nobody, staring upward at nothing, alight with fierce and untrammelled triumph. They were both lying supine on a pile of what felt like feet. “I have bested my father and my grandmother—every single necromancer ever taught by my House—every necromancer who has ever touched a skeleton. Did you see me? Did you behold me, Griddle?”
This was all said somewhat thickly, through pink and bloodied teeth, before Harrow smugly passed out.
* * *
The dust was clearing. The construct could not move. It was making low, plaintive grunts as it thrashed in its half coffin of regenerating ash: with its tentacles, it picked and smashed at the bone cocoons on its back legs, but as soon as it broke some off the stuff simply crumbled back into being. Now that it was concentrating so completely on itself, Gideon could find the cavalier of the Sixth.
Camilla, as she’d seen from above, had caught up with Cytherea the First. She had one hand in the Lyctor’s singed curls, dragging her head back. The other hand pressed a knife against the smaller woman’s throat. This would have been a commanding position, except that the knife blade was quivering in place. Its edge creased the pale skin, but it hadn’t drawn blood, even though Camilla seemed to be leaning on it as hard as she could. Whatever terrible force was holding the knife at bay was also slowly peeling the skin from the cavalier of the Sixth’s hand.
“You’re a nice girl,” the Lyctor said. “I had a nice girl as a cavalier too … once. She died for me. What can you do?”
Camilla said nothing. Her face was slick with sweat and blood. Her crop of dark, blunt-cut hair was powdered grey with bone. Cytherea looked faintly amused by the blade that was a finger’s breadth away from being buried in her jugular. She drawled, “Is this meant to kill me?”
“Give me time,” said Camilla, through gritted teeth.
Cytherea gave this due consideration. “I’d rather not,” she said.
Gideon saw, as Camilla could not, the tentacle of bone that wound silently upward from the mess behind the cavalier, tipped with a vicious point the length of a duellist’s dagger. Even if she’d had a pristine knee and no necro to haul, Gideon was too far away to save her. The barb drew back, like a poised stinger, and Gideon yelled, “Cam!”