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Abigail Pent blazed like a flare from a blue and alien sun. Long prominences of light trailed from her fingers: it seemed as though she held in her hands a book, with all the pages fleshed from that same azure radiation. Amid that frantic cold, Harrow saw that Abigail was soaking wet, wreathed in hot mistlike shimmers by spirit magic—she had thrust off her jackets and her mittens and stood there in just a dress, and her robe, and bare arms. A reek hit Harrow like a faceful of snow: water, brine, blood. A multitude of voices lifted up in Abigail’s, and screamed.
Glutinous time unglued. There was a crack as the Sleeper fired, and a sharp metal spang, and nothing hit Harrow in the head. A shadow rose before her, and it was all the shadows of the room. The candles were no longer columns of great blue light, but had sunk to billowing black flames. She was frozen by the sound of a great bell: BLA-BLANG … BLA-BLANG … BLA-BLANG.
The First Bell of Drearburh, of the House of the Ninth, sounded loudly in that laboratory atrium. And a figure stood between Harrow and the Sleeper.
The figure wore a cuirass of black laminate that had not been favoured by the Cohort for years and years. Fibre armour, matte and unpolished, shadowy, rather than shining obsidian, with small overlapping plates layered across its surface. The rest of the armour was more timeless: black canvas breeches tucked into black greaves of leather and plex, and the stiff, unpretentious frieze hood of Drearburh, not worn up, but loose on the neck. Worn-out black polymer mitts, no more sophisticated than Griddle’s.
In one of those gloved hands was a rapier of lightless black metal with a plain guard and hilt; though from that hilt clanked delicate rows of knucklebone prayer beads, terminating in what was unmistakably, even by candlelight, a carving of the Jawless Skull. In the other hand was a simple black metal dagger, its blade thrust out horizontally a few feet in front of Harrow’s face, where it had blocked the Sleeper’s bullet midflight.
The new arrival turned its head to look from the Sleeper to Harrow. In those black and spitting flames, what she could see of the face was—quite ordinary. Dark Drearburh hair, cut fairly short but not sacramentally shorn. The skull paint was cursory in the extreme: a few lines painted along the bottom jaw and chin, the merest suggestion of teeth and mandible.
The flames guttered around Abigail Pent. She looked terrified, uplifted, and openly astonished; she looked faraway, as though she were no longer even truly with them. Her spectacles had slipped off her nose, and in that blazing blue corona her eyes were dark and liquid and—feral. The House of the Fifth always skinned itself over with such airs of civilisation, with so many manners and niceties, but they were spirit-talkers, and speakers to the dead. And the dead were savage.
The Sleeper stepped away and lowered her gun.
“Ninth was my name,” said the new arrival. “Ninth was my hearth, and my homeland. Here have I come at your calling. None may return from the River unless he be bidden by blood-rite; tell me, why have I been drawn here?”
And Abigail said: “I speak your name, Matthias Nonius, cavalier of the Ninth House. I charge you to protect the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, and to slay her enemies.”
“Waste not your breath,” said the ghost of Matthias Nonius. “Such was my task when I lived; why now in my death would I need a reminder?”
Harrowhark said, mostly to herself: “Oh, God.”
As the newcomer spoke, he had circled very slightly to the right, away from Harrow. The Sleeper had kept her gun trained on him the whole time, cautiously, as though waiting to see what he would do. Now she fired, and Nonius moved. In one long liquid evolution, he seemed to flatten and extend himself; his whole body became a single smooth device for deploying his rapier’s blade, like a needle flicking out of a spring housing. The point bit into one orange flank, and the Sleeper stumbled backward. From this new tear, Harrow saw dark liquid trickle.
Nonius’s body folded back into place somehow, his rapier held with the hilt low and the tip pointing up at his opponent’s face. He resumed his slow circular drift.
“A tool for a killer of beasts,” he said. “What warrior wields such a weapon in honourable service of combat? Has dignity wholly de parted the Houses since I saw the starlight, or are you some raider or cutthroat?”
“You’re just a ghost like the rest of them,” said the Sleeper, but this time the flat voice that emanated from the haz mask carried a tinge of disbelief. “You don’t get special rules.”
“In life I was only a man,” the ghost agreed. “But the Ninth House granted me honour, and made me, unworthy, its servant. I speak with the voice of the Tomb, and my strength is the strength of the Black Gate—why am I talking in meter?”
The Sleeper fired twice, but the sword flicked up diagonally across Nonius’s body, hilt at his face, before Harrow had even heard the shots. One bullet ricocheted off into the darkness; the other seemed to hit the armour, and Nonius jerked slightly with the impact, but again the blade shot out so fast and sure that the movement hardly made sense to the eye. The Sleeper sounded a muffled curse through the face mask and dropped her weapon, which clattered on the tiles. Then she snatched back her hand and brought it out from behind her back holding a significantly longer and fatter gun. This one had a blunt, squat barrel that even to Harrow’s untrained eye looked like bad news. The Sleeper braced it in both hands against her shoulder, pointed at Nonius’s face.
“Go back to Hell,” she said, and pulled the trigger.
There was a flat metallic snap, and nothing happened. She pulled again: nothing. She threw the gun to the side, and before it had even hit the floor it had been replaced with a long, elegant rifle. This yielded a hollow clunk, and a distinct lack of anything else.
The Sleeper backed away a few more steps, her plex mask as impassive as ever. Nonius followed, not closing the distance but matching it, echoing her movements.
“You ought to look after them better,” he suggested.
“I killed wizard’s filth like you all my life,” snarled the Sleeper. This time the object that appeared in her hand was not a gun: it was some sort of fat cylinder. She flicked it downward and a slim black baton, perhaps three feet in length, telescoped suddenly outward with a noise like a bolt going home. “I killed them with guns, and bombs, and knives, and gas, and when I didn’t have any of those I just got in real close and put my thumbs through their fucking eyes. You can flick that little skewer around all you like, boy. I’ll choke you with it.”
“I certainly hope you’re a fighter,” said Nonius, and raised his dagger-hand. “God knows you’re not a debater.”
They both lunged forward at once. As the first crack of plex on metal sounded, Harrow dropped next to Ortus. She grasped him with her hands and with a pair of skeletal arms for good measure, and started to haul him to safety.
He did not help. He was too busy watching. Much like Abigail, he was transported; not to some kind of ancestral state of primaeval ghost worship, but to a wide-eyed heaven only he understood. She had never seen Ortus look triumphant. She had never seen Ortus in the eye of any storm of his own making.
She said urgently, “What did you do?”
“Oh, I did nothing,” he said breathlessly. “Pent … Pent is a marvel. I will write songs for Pent.”
“Write them later, and hurry up now—”
“If I die my final death here,” he said, “I will die knowing the only happiness that I have ever known.”
“Oh, shut up and move,” she said desperately. If all of her cavaliers were this excited for death, she was definitely the problem.
He did not move. He was smiling. “You were party to the miracle, Harrowhark. Your emphasis was almost perfect.”
“He smiles grimly at least twenty times in that act alone, Nigenad,” she snapped. “Find a new collocation.”
It turned out that a relatively small amount of thanergy was all she needed to stanch the blood from his wound. His major organ function was stable enough—whatever that meant, exactly, where a ghost was concerned—and she didn’t want to mess around with complex tissue repair in these circumstances. Harrow’s early training had taken place in freezing, poorly lit crypts, and still this particular crypt seemed unhelpfully dark and unmanageably cold. Having propped Ortus against a wall a safe distance from the action, she turned to see what had happened to the others.
