This seemed to fox Crux.
“Who are you, foreigner, that you know the mysteries of the Anastasian?”
“I was here before it was the Anastasian,” said Pyrrha absently. “Painted a nursery. Mint green. Look, if your watchers aren’t here they’ve pulled back behind whatever bailey you’ve set up. Let’s keep moving. How are we going to move…？”
But Paul had already gone to the old man, lying bloodied on the bottom of the platform. The huge, horrible ancient dwarfed Camilla Hect’s lithe, solid form easily, but—much to Nona’s surprise—Paul heaved him up to standing as though he were Nona, or even smaller, like he was Kevin.
Crux howled out, “This shames the Ninth.”
“Not possible,” said the corpse prince.
But Paul said—
“We can move this way, but I can’t fight at the same time.”
“Nav, take point. I’ll take the rear,” said Pyrrha, to which the corpse prince said, “Nice,” and Nona laughed out loud. She felt a little drunk and strange.
At that laugh, the old man stared at her in frank dismay and reproof—then his face closed up somehow, left off its look of horror and awe, and he looked at her with a totally different expression. He really did look like a skeleton mask, with his age-spotted pate and his deeply shadowed, bitter eye. Nona looked away, and found that the corpse prince had looked at her briefly too, again with an expression even Nona couldn’t translate. Pyrrha held her close and said: “Can’t be doing that badly, if you’re going to laugh at an ass joke.”
Nona did not want to tell her that something terrible was going on in her body and had been ever since the period where her heart and her arm had hurt. She snuggled down into the halo of Pyrrha’s arms for warmth—she was starting to feel blue all over—and the zip fastener of Pyrrha’s jacket caught her arm and scratched her. She stared mildly at the rough red graze and the little square flaps of skin that had risen off her arm. The corpse prince held the lantern before her as they moved down that long, toe-curlingly cold tunnel—the strong white light glimmered off rough unfinished stone and the softer gleam of very old metal and paint—and Nona got the fright of her life, seeing shapes on the walls, until she realised that it was more bones that had been glued into the rock face. It was awful.
A yell echoed down the tunnel, and they all startled—but they reached the end of the tunnel, where what seemed to be huge white bars had been pressed into service over the doorway. As the light from the end of the tunnel and their light dazzled each other, Nona realised that what she had taken for painted white metal was fresh, slightly pink bone, redder at either end where it had planted itself into the doorframe. There were more huddled, black-wrappered old people peering between the bones, their anxious faces blurred with painted masks: white bone, black background.
“Halt,” quavered someone, but the corpse prince said, “It’s me. Where’s Aiglamene?”
The most asymmetrical person that Nona had ever seen in her short life stumped to life behind the bars. At her barked command, the bars parted—sort of twanged away and opened up in the exact way that bars shouldn’t, exposing the cortex of the bone. Now Nona could see her clearly. Most of her face had rippled in the way that Hot Sauce’s would someday ripple when she was eighty to two hundred years older, like a candle that had burned for hours before someone blew it out. A proud, keen-eyed face peered out behind that melt. One of her legs wasn’t her own （it went on funny at the hip, Nona noticed）， but she held herself as tall and as proud as Crown. In her hands was a huge black-metal pike about the same height as her, with an edge that gleamed in the light. Nona couldn’t stop herself looking at that edge: for some reason it made her palms sweat, and the back of her neck itch again.
The woman barked, “The seneschal needs help. Get Asya and Brother Clement, now…！”
“You’re a fool and a twit and your brains have turned, Aiglamene,” rasped the old man. “I would have kept the doors barred against me, in case I had been compromised.”
“Good point. Get someone with a spear—treat him at arm’s length. Spear him through if anything happens. Spear him through if anything doesn’t,” the woman added, beneath her breath.
“Yes, Marshal,” said one of the robed onlookers— “Yes, Captain Aiglamene,” said another, robed over rusting armour. Crux lashed out at them as he had lashed out at Paul, though at least he had left off lashing out at Paul.