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“Gideon,” said Harrow, and again, more incoherently: “Gideon.”
“No time,” said Gideon. A hot wind blew over them both: it whipped Harrow’s hair into her face. “Incoming.”
The shield sighed, shuddered, and finally broke. The ancient Lyctoral construct surged forward, triumphant in its brainlessness. Harrow saw it for what it was: a spongy breadth of regenerating ash, and many lengths of teeth. For all its killing speed before, it now crested before them as though it were travelling through syrup. It shivered in the air, a hundred white lances ready.
Gideon said, “Take it down.”
And Harrow took it down. It was bafflingly simple. It was nothing more than a raised skeleton, and not one that had been formed with any particular grace. It was half gone already, having torn itself free like an animal from her trap. The head was just a chitinous plate. The trunk was a roll of bone. The remaining tentacles fell like rain, arrested in midswing. The bone responded to their call, and together they sailed the thing through the cracked glass panes of the terrace garden to fall—a huge white comet, with flailing tails of bone—into the rolling ocean.
“There’s my sword,” Gideon said. “Pick it up—pick it up and stop looking at me, dick. Don’t. Don’t you dare look at me.”
Harrow turned her head away from the iron railing and picked up the longsword, and cried out: it was far too heavy, far too awkward. Gideon reached her arm out to steady Harrow’s sword hand, shifting the other arm around her in a strange embrace. Her fingers wrapped around Harrow’s, scratchy with callouses. The sheer weight of the thing still stretched the muscles of Harrow’s forearms painfully, but Gideon clasped her wrist, and despite the pain they lifted the sword together.
“Your arms are like fucking noodles,” said Gideon disapprovingly.
“I’m a necromancer, Nav!”
“Yeah, well, hope you like lifting weights for the next myriad.”
They were cheek to cheek: Gideon’s arm and Harrow’s arm entwined, holding the sword aloft, letting the steel catch the light. The terrace stretched out before them, glass shards spraying in the wake of the construct, falling as slowly and as lightly as down. Harrow looked back at Gideon, and Gideon’s eyes, as they always did, startled her: their deep, chromatic amber, the startling hot gold of freshly-brewed tea. She winked.
Harrow said—
“I cannot do this.”
“You already did it,” said Gideon. “It’s done. You ate me and rebuilt me. We can’t go home again.”
“I can’t bear it.”
“Suck it down,” said Gideon. “You’re already two hundred dead daughters and sons of our House. What’s one more?”
Before them stood Cytherea the First, though they noticed her only as an afterthought. She stood with her sword down, just watching them, her eyes as wide and as blue as the death of light. The garden narrowed to her and her bloody green sword. Her lips were parted in a tiny o. She did not even seem particularly troubled: just amazed, as though they were an aurora, a mirage, an unreal trick of the sunshine.
“Now we kick her ass until candy comes out,” said Gideon. “Oh, damn, Nonagesimus, don’t cry, we can’t fight her if you’re crying.”
Harrow said, with some difficulty: “I cannot conceive of a universe without you in it.”
“Yes you can, it’s just less great and less hot,” said Gideon.
“Fuck you, Nav—”
“Harrowhark,” said Gideon the Ninth. “Someday you’ll die and get buried in the ground, and we can work this out then. For now—I can’t say you’ll be fine. I can’t say we did the right thing. I can’t tell you shit. I’m basically a hallucination produced by your brain chemistry while coping with the massive trauma of splicing in my brain chemistry. Even if I wasn’t, I don’t know jack, Harrow, I never did—except for one thing.”
She lifted Harrow’s arm with the hilt clutched in it. Her fingers, rough and strong and sure, moved Harrow’s other hand into place above the pommel.
“I know the sword,” she said. “And now, so do you.”
Gideon brought them into position: weight on the forward foot, knee bent a little, light on the right. She tilted the blade so that it was held with the blade pointed high before them, a perfect line. She moved Harrow’s head up and corrected her hips.
Time sped up, blurred, moved in bright lights before them. Now the old Lyctor Cytherea—wretchedly old, it seemed impossible that they could have ever taken her for anything else—stood there at the bottom of the stairs. Her radioactive blue eyes were quiet; her sword was held at the ready. She was smiling with colourless lips.
“How do you feel, little sister?” she said.
Harrowhark’s mouth said, “Ready for round three,” and, “or round four, I think I lost track.”
Their swords met. The noise of metal on metal screamed in that empty garden. Cytherea the First had been Cytherea the First for ten thousand years, and even ten thousand years ago her cavalier had been great. Time had made her more perfect than a mortal cavalier could understand. In a fair fight, they might even have fought to a standstill.
It was not a fair fight. As they fought—and fighting was like a dream, like falling asleep—they could see Cytherea was made up of different parts. Her eyes had been taken from somewhere else, two blue spots of someone else’s fire. Within her chest another conflagration burned, and this one was eating her alive: it smoked and smouldered where her lungs ought to have been, bulging, dark, and malignant. It had swollen to the bursting point inside her body, and most of Cytherea’s energy was being expended on holding it still. Harrow could touch what Palamedes had done; nudge it; knock it out of Cytherea’s grip.
“There,” said Gideon, in Harrow’s ear, her voice softer now. “Thanks, Palamedes.”
“Sextus was a marvel,” admitted Harrow.
“Too bad you didn’t marry him. You’re both into old dead chicks.”
“Gideon—”
“Focus, Nonagesimus. You know what to do.”
Cytherea the First vomited a long stream of black blood. There was no fear in her now. There was only anticipation verging on panicked excitement, like a girl waiting for her birthday party. The weight of Gideon’s arms on Harrow’s forearms was getting more ephemeral, harder to perceive; the brush of Gideon’s cheek was suddenly no more substantial than the remembrance of an old fever. Her voice was in her ear, but it was very far away.
Harrow placed the tip of her sword to the right of Cytherea’s breastbone. The world was slow and chilly.
“One flesh, one end,” said Gideon, and it was a murmur now, on the very edge of hearing.
Harrow said, “Don’t leave me.”
“The land that shall receive thee dying, in the same will I die: and there will I be buried. The Lord do so and so to me, and add more also, if aught but death part me and thee,” said Gideon. “See you on the flip side, sugarlips.”
* * *
Harrowhark drove the blade home, straight through the malignant thing in Cytherea’s chest: it bubbled and clawed out of her, a well of tumours, a cancer, and she seized up. It ran through her like a flame touched to oil, seething visibly beneath her skin, her veins, her bones. They bulged and buckled. Her skin tore; her heart strained, stretched, and, after ten thousand years’ poor service, gave out.
