“Please, sir,” Paul was saying patiently. He had crouched back down next to the old man, in the blood. “If you stop trying to hit me, I can at least do something for the pain.”
“The marshal loves pain,” said Kiriona. She was staring fixedly at the red bulb.
The old man gurgled, “Seneschal, you fool.”
“Oh, congrats, I forgot Nonagesimus left you in charge,” said Kiriona. “Where’s Aiglamene?”
“Dead,” the seneschal said.
Kiriona became very still. The seneschal wheezed with relish at her expression. Even in the darkness Nona could still tell, and surprised herself by saying to Kiriona, “He’s lying.”
“Dead—as far as I care,” he amended. “She went on ahead. To the monument.”
“Nav, talk to me,” said Pyrrha. “Antioch. You’ve been fighting these—things? How long?”
“Fuck knows,” said Kiriona, highly distracted. “Three, four months? Took us a while to work out what they even were. Thought they only had a weird disease.”
“And how long have they been on the Ninth?” This was addressed to the seneschal.
“A night. A day,” said the rasping old man. “You hold the Reverend Daughter, so I must answer. We shut them away … locked some of them inside their cells. They riot. Their touch consumes … they hunger for the youngest of us.”
“Boy, are they out of luck,” said the corpse prince, sotto voce.
“Their bodies twist—they do not know how to use their bodies,” Crux rasped, as though Kiriona had not spoken. “Some of them are dead walking. Those are the weaker kind … Sisters Lachrimorta and Aisamorta plied the art, to some effect. The constructs … the constructs were safe … fleshed corpses they took, but the bones they wanted none of…”
Paul said, “How many are like this?”
“Too many.”
“Can I get ‘too many’ in numbers?”
“Over two hundred. Full forty lie dead at the bottom of the tiers where they were pushed, in the first hour … it was all we could do to secure the tier. More have died … the marshal reckoned we lost a full hundred already. And,” added the old man sourly, “now those seven above are added to the bier, by my own blade and the stripling’s…”
“Those were dead already,” Kiriona interrupted. “The dead ones move differently. You realise the ones you shoved off the tier probably just got back up again?”
“Can the living ones be cured?” asked Paul.
“You can’t cure this,” said the Prince. “It’s spirit shit … possession. You can ward people so they don’t get grabbed—if you’re really good—but otherwise, chop them up and burn the bits. That’s the cure. Civilian or Edenite or House, it makes no difference.”
There was another great jolt that shook the metal box. The seneschal grunted. Nona realised they were no longer moving downward.
The cage doors opened to a floor of more cages, like the world’s strangest zoo: machines of a kind Nona had never seen—nothing like the nice normal machines back home—enormous edifices gated behind iron bars, as though someone were afraid they would get out. They all droned away. Their bars had been strung with long streamers of black cloth that seemed so old and tattered and frail that they might dissolve if you breathed on them. Pyrrha murmured, “God, this place has gone downhill,” but thankfully only Nona heard it.
The dying old man rasped: “We barricaded behind the Anastasian. Sister Canace and Deacon Davith were left here. Why have they abrogated their duty?”
“Holy shit, Sister Canace is still alive?” said Kiriona, startled. “She used to oversee me on oss duty. If you’re using Sister Canace as a last line of defence, how bad off are w—you?”
“Sister Canace, you cancerous gosling—you bloodied slime—has what you have always lacked,” burbled Crux wetly. “Faith, and loyalty.”
“Probably, but I have what Sister Canace always lacked, which is knees that work,” said Kiriona.
The old man ignored this. “Nobody down here was touched. Nobody down here was taken. Canace and Davith should remain. This is our place of safety—it has never been breached,” he added, with a look that said he thought the assembled and unlovely throng in front of him were in danger of counting as a breach.
Pyrrha said, “Well, the chambers down through the main artery ought to hold up—there’s that long tunnel with the blast doors on either side.”