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“My mother and my father and my grandmother together could not do what I do,” she said softly, not speaking to Gideon. “My mother and my father and my grandmother together … and I’ve advanced so far beyond them. One construct or fifty—and it simply slows it down … for all of half an hour.”
She shook away frustration like an animal with a wet pelt, shivering all over before fixing dead black eyes on Gideon. “Right,” she said. “Right. Again. Keep watching, Nav.”
She staggered back, door whipping shut behind her. Gideon Nav could only put up with so much. She took off her robe, folded it up, and put it on a hook in the foyer. She stood next to a skeleton whose arms were so full with bits of bone and lengths of tibia that it trailed chips like breadcrumbs. It was easy enough to stand beside it politely until the door opened, then to trip it up, then to step over it. She unsheathed her rapier with a silver whisper, slipping the knuckles of her left hand through the obsidian bands. The Response door breathed shut behind her.
“Harrow,” she said, “if you wanted a cavalier you could replace with skeletons, you should’ve kept Ortus.”
From whining speakers set in each corner, Harrow cried out. It wasn’t a noise of annoyance, or even really a noise of surprise—it was more like pain; Gideon found her legs buckling a little bit and she had to stagger, shift herself upright, shake her head to clear the brief bout of dizziness away. She held her rapier in a perfect line and waited.
“What?” The necromancer sounded dazed, almost. “What, seriously?”
The vents breathed out huge sighs of fog. Now that she was in the room, Gideon could see that they were blasting moisture and liquid into the air, stale-smelling stuff; from within this cloud the construct was rising—leg to horrifying leg, to broad plates of pelvis, to thick trunk of spine—to the green motes of light that swung around, searching, settling on Gideon. Her stance shifted. From Imaging Harrow grunted explosively, which nearly got her cavalier knocked ass-over-tits.
Air was displaced. The construct rushed her, and it was only just in time that she deflected two heavy overhand blows onto the naked black blade of her sword. Harrow let out a yelp as though she had touched her hand to a flame.
“Nonagesimus!”
Gideon considered the good news and the bad news. The good news: the blows that rained down on her were not as heavy as she had expected from something so enormous. They came down hard and fast, but no harder than the hand of Naberius Tern; lighter, for the lack of muscle. Osseous matter never weighed as much as blood and flesh, which was one of the problems with pure construct magic.
The bad news: she couldn’t do jack shit to it. Her light sword could barely deflect the blows. She had some small hope with her obsidian knuckle-knives—one good strong backhand bash and she had knocked out part of one arm, snapping the blade off near the tip—but then watched with a sickening weight in her gut as the blade reformed.
“Nonagesimus,” she hollered again between attacks, “this shit is regenerating!”
There was nothing from the speakers. Gideon wondered if Harrow could hear her. She leapt to the side as the construct fell forward, slashing heavily—it slammed into a pile of bone that had built up from Harrow’s previous failures, and a chip careered out like a bullet and nicked Gideon’s arm. From the speakers, the girl cried out again.
“Nonagesimus!” she said, alarmed now. The construct wallowed in its nest of victims, then reared up again. “Hey—Harrow!”
The speakers crackled. “Stop thinking!”
“What?”
“I can’t—it’s too—damn it!”
She was about to tell Harrow to take her hand off the damn pedestal, but she was charged again in a lurching flurry of blades. The construct bounded forward on its hands and feet like a lopsided predatory animal. Gideon charged too, and she sliced her sword straight through the interosseous membrane on the arm coming down to spear her. Arm and construct flailed independently, and with her offhand she punched it hard in the pelvis. Bone splintered out explosively as half the ilium came away. The monster fell and thrashed, trying to rise, as the pelvis and the top of one femur knit themselves back together with unsavoury speed. Gideon fell back in a hurry, pulling her sword free and wiping bone matter off her face.
The speakers sizzled with heavy breathing. “Nav. Close one eye.”
She would question later why she did it, but she did it. Depth perception fled as she squinted an eye shut, backing away from the construct as it slithered around in useless circles, crippled. For a moment her gaze drunkenly slid into place, and she could see—something—at the very corners of her vision: some kind of peripheral mirage, a susurrus of light that moved in a way she’d never seen before. It was like a gel overlay across real life. It balled around various bits of the construct as though attracted to it, like iron filings to a magnet. She blinked hard. There was fresh panting over the speakers.
“All right,” came Harrow’s voice, “all right, all right—”
The construct reared up, centre of gravity restored. Gideon’s heart hammered. The speakers hissed again. Harrow said, “What’s on top of it?”
“What—the arms?”
“I can’t see,” said Harrow, “blurry—”
Gideon had to open both eyes again. She couldn’t not. She parried the first uppercut thrust from the construct as it bounded toward her, but it cracked her in the shoulder with another. She got it with her knives on the backswing—the sharpened arm cracked, bounced away, and hit the wall—but she had to fall back into a crouch and seethe with pain, worrying that her shoulder had popped out entirely. The speakers bellowed. The construct reared up, other blades at the ready, and—disassembled.
It turned to liquid and trickled toward the grate in the centre of the room as Gideon stared. The Response door slid open, and after a moment’s testing of her shoulder, she pulled herself to stand. She was working the muscles as she went through the doorway—it locked shut, Imaging opened—and she found herself face-to-face with Harrow, who was taut as death and trembling.
“The hell,” said Gideon, “was that?”
“It’s the test.” Harrow’s lips were pink where she had bitten off the paint. She seemed to be having trouble swallowing, and she was staring right through her cavalier. She said unsteadily, “You’re the test.”
“Um—”
“Frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital, hippocampus—I fought with them all inside you,” she said. “I’m not equipped to deal with a living spirit still attached to a nervous system. You’re so noisy. It took me five minutes to peel away the volume just to see. And the pain is so much worse than skeleton feedback—your spirit rendered me deaf! Your whole body makes noise when you fight! Your temporal lobe—God—I have such a headache!”
This entire speech was incoherent, but the bottom-line realisation was humiliating. Heat rose rapidly up Gideon’s neck. “You can control my body,” she said. “You can read my thoughts.”
“No. Not remotely.” That was a relief, until it was followed up with: “If only I could. The moment I get a handle on even one of your senses, I’m overwhelmed by another.”
