Harrow propped open the door with a bony hand. The expression on her face was resolute. “Because Abigail Pent asked that faithless Eighth prig if he knew about access down to the lower floors,” she said, “and he said yes. Pent is not stupid, and that’s another confirmed competitor on our hands. For God’s sake hurry up, Griddle, I give us five hours before she’s in the chamber herself.”
16
GIDEON NAV HELD HER sword parallel to her body, the grease-black glass of her knuckle-knives close to her chest, and bit her tongue bloody. As most bitten tongues did, it hurt like an absolute bitch. Over the speakers, Harrow heaved. In front of her, still wet with the hot reek of powdered bone, the construct opened its mouth in a soundless shriek. They were back in Response, and they’d failed once already.
It wasn’t as though Harrow’s necromantic inability to chisel her skull open was from some reluctance of Gideon’s （which would have been completely fucking understandable）; she was trying as hard as she could. She was sleepy from the food and she was sore from earlier that morning, and being sleepy and sore meant there was so much more for Harrowhark to wade through. Gideon was forced to give her necromancer the first particle of credit in her life: Harrow did not yell at her. Harrow simply sank deeper and deeper into a morass of frustration and self-hatred, her fury at herself rising like bile.
The construct charged forward like a battering ram, and she leapt out the way and left half the skin of one knee on the ground for her pains. She still had a mouthful of blood as she began to holler, “Har—”
“Nearly,” crackled the speaker.
“—row, just let me take a whack at it—”
“Not yet. Nearly. The bitten tongue was good. Hold it off for a second, Nav! You could do this asleep!”
Not with a rapier. She might as well have chucked both knuckle and sword to the ground and started jogging for all the good her weapons were doing. Gideon wasn’t equipped for defence, and her head hurt. Her focus kept twitching in a migraine blur, dots and sparks coruscating in and out of her vision. A titanic blow from the construct bent her parry almost all the way back around to her head, and she moved with the blow rather than against as more of an afterthought.
“Three seconds. Two.” It almost sounded like begging.
Gideon was feeling more and more nauseous: there was an oily, warm feeling in the back of her throat and her tongue was running wet with spit. When she looked at the construct now it was through a hazy overlay, as though she were seeing double. There was a sharp pain between her eyes as it hauled back its centre of gravity, lurched—
“I can see it.”
Later on Gideon would think about how little triumph there was in Harrow’s voice: more awe. Her vision blurred, then spiked back abruptly into twenty-twenty colour. Everything was brighter and crisper and cleaner, the lights harder, the shadows colder. When she looked at the construct it smoked in the air like hot metal—pale, nearly transparent coronas wreathed its malformed body. They simmered in different colours, visible if you squinted this way or that, and in admiring them Gideon nearly got her leg broken.
“Nav,” hollered the speakers.
Gideon took a hard dive out of the way of a low stab, and then rolled away as the construct followed up by stomping hard where her foot had been. She hollered back: “Tell me what to do!”
“Hit these in order! Left lateral radius!”
Gideon focused on the nubbly, too-thick joint of the high left arm, and was surprised to find one of those mirage-like lights there: she sliced down and fell nearly off balance as her blade went through like a hot knife through fat. The long blade of the mutant arm clattered to the floor forlornly.
“Bottom-right tibia, lower quadrant, near the notch,” said Harrow. Now her triumph was barely held at bay. “Don’t make any other hits.”
Easier said than done. Gideon had to play grab-ass, snaking out of the construct’s remaining blades, before she disdained the rapier and slammed her booted foot down instead. It wasn’t hard: that part, just like the radius, was glowing like a flare. She got a square hit in and the construct’s leg shattered—it rocked to the side, trying to compensate, and the leg did not start regenerating.
The next was easy. Side of the mandible. The eighteenth rib. She peeled the construct apart, removing the unseen strut mechanisms that turned it from monster into pathetic, jaw-clattering fuckup, some kid’s first attempt at bone magic without ever having taken a look at an anatomy chart. When at last the Reverend Daughter said, “Sternum,” Gideon was already there—raising one gauntleted fist up where a slice of sternum glowed like a candleflame, and punching it into dust. The construct collapsed. Gideon felt dizzy for just a second, and then it left her. The whole world brightened and sharpened.