The corpse prince said tightly, “They shouldn’t be here. We would have gotten word if they were back in the home system. They’re confined to Antioch—he said they’d only be on Antioch. God damn it, he said!”
Paul said, “Gideon, I’ve seen this before. My memory’s split. Where?”
“Silas Octakiseron’s poor bastard cavalier,” said Kiriona. “Colum Asht. I didn’t understand then … we call them devils. I mean, Dad calls them devils—this is what we’re facing on Antioch. Fuck me, I didn’t think … this is mental. They can’t be here. He said they couldn’t travel—he said…”
Paul said, “Gideon, cool it. Why can’t I heal this man?”
“Like this I am undesirable to them,” croaked the figure.
“They bit him,” said the corpse prince, as though nobody had spoken. “I mean, they hit him—they don’t have to bite. It’s revenant magic. They’re waiting for him to die so they don’t have to work so hard. Heal him up now, and they’ll still ride that wound all the way into his hideous old body and I’ll get to kill him myself.”
The ancient old man turned his single rheumy, hateful eye to the corpse prince.
“I would that you had been carried back here on a stretcher,” he said. “I would that you were stretched out before me, dead in the rudeness of you … your niche is ready, Gideon Nav, and now I cannot clasp the joy of laying you within it.” He coughed fretfully—batted another metal-fisted hand at Paul, who had instinctively surged forward—and he said, “Look at you, you cock-o’-the-walk, you filigree piglet, you scum. A whited sepulchre … Ninth blood on your foreign sword…”
Nona was distracted from her lazy enjoyment of the word piglet by a flicker in the dark archway, the one from which they’d just emerged. She felt again that strange sense of the familiar made awful—like coming back to your own bed and finding it covered in stains and slimes that hadn’t been there when you left it. She clutched feebly at Pyrrha’s forearm. “There’s more,” she said. “More outside.”
Pyrrha’s muscles tensed. Paul and Kiriona both looked back at the archway. Something moved, deep in the shadows.
“Thanks, kiddie,” said Pyrrha. “Nav—let’s get that cage open and head down. Sorry, Gramps, we’re on a clock.”
Paul crossed to the metal cage and started fiddling with a sort of heavy latch mechanism on the front. Kiriona hovered, sword still in her hand, staring at the archway.
“Nav, come on,” said Pyrrha sharply. “Any kid in the Cohort knows the mission comes first. Or did you get that uniform out of the dress-up box?”
Kiriona rounded on Pyrrha, her gold eyes cold and haughty, but instead of saying anything she shoved her sword back into its scabbard and moved to the cage as well. Paul had freed the latch and was hauling back the barred gate with an echoing clatter. Inside was a bare and empty metal box, a bit smaller than their old bathroom back in the apartment.
Once the gate was partly open, Paul and Kiriona set about dragging the dying old man into the box. This was a messy and difficult process: not only did he leave a great smeared slick of blood behind him, but he kept coughing, flailing his arms, and calling them both dunghill pups in need of a sound whipping and other things that were clearly not meant to be kind. Nona felt bad: not only could she not help, but she was keeping Pyrrha from helping. She risked a glance back at the archway. There was a figure there—dark robes topped by a pale face, not moving forward, but swaying slightly on the spot. It looked as if it were watching them. Its eyes writhed.
Paul positioned the old man against the back wall of the metal box, then snatched the lamp. Kiriona retrieved a sword that had been left lying in the blood nearby, brought it in, and dropped it unceremoniously in the man’s lap. Then Pyrrha carried Nona into the box, and Kiriona heaved the gate shut with a clash. Two more figures had appeared in the archway, flanking the first.
“Hope we’ve still got power,” Paul said.
“The breaker,” said Kiriona. “Big switch there on the wall. Ought to work, unless they’ve killed it from below.”
Paul yanked the handle she had pointed at. A small glass bump above the handle lit up with a sickly red glow. There was a heavy mechanical clonk, the floor jolted, and the stone floor started to rise up the side of the bars; blood trickled over its edge and dripped down, a few drops spattering on the metal tiles. The floor went higher and higher until it closed off the window of bright light from above, and they were all in darkness except for the faint redness from the indicator bulb. The old man’s breathing rasped and laboured, and machinery rumbled somewhere over their heads. There was a low, whirring moan, and a rush of freezing cold air. At first Nona thought she would never see again; then she found her eyes adjusting after all.